disorder evidently stems from a deranged red man whose vicious streak lives on through me. More presently, I had never had a good encounter with a native. Wherever I went, I felt as if they could smell the curse I carried inside of me, almost as if they saw me in a way that no one else could, could observe the inhumanity lurking beneath my flesh, and they hated me for not only what I was but why I was as well. Or at least that’s how it felt.
In his halted way of speaking, the Indian responded, “What … does it look like?”
“Looks like you have a death wish,” I replied. “Stay off the road. Next time, I won’t swerve to miss you.”
He pointed his sawed-off broomstick with the nail hammered through one end at me like it was a baton and said, “You have more important things to worry about … than me, paleface.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean? I ain’t too tired to take you to town, old man.” I felt like getting out of the truck to clobber the sonofabitch. “You looking for trouble?”
“No, no,” he said. “Trouble … is yours to find. Not mine.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Arright, you cryptic bastard,” I mumbled. “You want to talk like that, fine. Just stay off the fucking road.” He smiled. I flipped him the bird and took off.
I drove north on Hamilton Road to this little newsstand just off Main Street. I said hi to Gus, the old fellow who owned the place, and picked up copies of Evelyn’s two daily papers—the
I stacked all the papers on the passenger seat and kept going east on Main till I got to the restaurant, which was almost at the edge of town. The restaurant was set far back on the sidewalk so cars could turn off the road and park up front of the place. Since the restaurant wasn’t open yet, all the spots should have been empty, but that wasn’t the case. There was a puke-green Toyota parked there, and I could recognize that puke-green car from a mile away.
I pulled up next to it, killed the engine, and got out. The burly man sitting in the Toyota got out too, followed by a wall of cheap cigar smoke. He was wearing a pair of khaki pants that accentuated his heavy ass and a golf shirt that was the same color as the car.
I shielded my eyes from the bright morning sun and said, “Howdy, Frank.”
“You’re late,” Frank said.
Frank owned the restaurant. It had been his father’s, and his father’s before that. I had never met Frank’s father, and to be honest I never wanted to because Frank was a prick. If I had to meet a second one just like him I would have lost my mind.
I looked at my watch. It was five past the hour.
“Hardly,” I responded. “Besides, it’s Sunday. The place is gonna be dead.”
“That’s not the point,” said Frank. “I pay you to be here at a certain time, and that’s when I expect you to be here.”
“C’mon, man, do you give anyone else a hard time when they’re late?”
“That’s not the point,” Frank grunted.
Frank and I never got along, if you couldn’t tell already.
“I think it is,” I said, as shock invaded his face. “I think this is sexual harassment.”
I had heard the expression once on the television. I thought it sounded cute.
“Shut up,” he said, disgusted. “Just open the fucking restaurant.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do.”
“Aren’t you even going to apologize for being late?”
I looked at him with pity for a second, like he was a street urchin, a latchkey kid, and then said, “Frank, I never volunteered to work the morning shift, okay? If you don’t like it, have me switch shifts with Carlos or something.”
Frank got back in the car and slammed the door. He rolled down the window and said, “The thought of you working here at night scares me, Marlowe. Just get here on time. And tell Abe that he’s a fucking asshole too.”
“Will do,” I said.
Frank pulled out of the spot, and I watched as he headed west on Main Street. Main ran from one end of town to the other, and right down the middle of the street was an old set of railroad tracks that carried about a half dozen freight trains through the town per day. Those trains, for all intents and purposes, were Evelyn’s sole connection to the outside world.
Main Street met up with Old Sherman Road at both ends of it. Farther east of Old Sherman, Main cut through several miles of deep woods as a country road. The tall trees bent over the road, forming a canopy, and in the fall, when the red-copper colors of autumn came out in startling abundance, it was beautiful. The road and the train tracks went on still and led to Campbell’s Bridge, which was an ancient thing of rusted metal and molded planks. The trains went over a separate bridge just to the south, and this one was just as old. Flowing underneath the bridges were the clear waters of the Ivy River.
Much farther south, the Ivy River connected to the St. Michael River, which ran in a southeastern direction along the western border of Evelyn, and made a hook along the southern end, thus encasing Evelyn on three sides with water. Many miles of dense forest served as a buffer between the rivers and this quaint little town, which rested, like a spider in a vast web, just outside the Tennessee border.
Up to the north beyond Old Sherman there were many, many miles of labyrinthine wilderness before you could come upon so much as a bottle half-buried in the dirt to remind you that you were still in the world.
I opened the passenger door of the truck, reached in, and pulled out my stack of papers. Then I climbed the three stairs to the front door, unlocked it, and entered the restaurant. A tiny, little bell jangled overhead as I entered. I flipped on all the lights, which, because of the sun, was hardly necessary. The restaurant had a fifties-era ambience, and the sun glinted off all the chrome along the tables and chairs. I took those hot, glowing chairs down from the tabletops and sat them all on the floor. After that, I turned the little radio behind the counter to KBTO. They were playing “Peace Frog” by The Doors.
I got the grill and the oven going in the kitchen, and just as I finished making that first precious pot of coffee, Abraham decided to show up.
Abraham Davis had worked at the restaurant about twice as long as me, about six years. He was a people person, very suave, which was why he worked the counter and dealt with the patrons, and why he never got fired for being consistently late. I, not even remotely being a people person, worked in the kitchen. Abraham wasn’t a young man anymore—he was nearing fifty—but he seemed to live to go out and drink and dip his wick in whatever was around.
While I was off in the war, he was back Stateside getting his ass gnawed off by police-trained German shepherds. He’d been married twice, divorced twice, and to hear him tell it, the time that he spent “shackled” to women who, after getting to know him, didn’t really care if he lived or died consumed about ten years of a precious life that would’ve been better spent chasing tail and having “experiences”—or getting into trouble, more like—that enriched the spirit and the mind.
Horseshit.
According to Abraham, he was making up for lost time by acting like a college boy on spring break, as if lost time could truly be returned to someone, like a deposit in a bank. As if anyone got a second chance to be happy in this world. It was foolish of him to think that way, and I think he knew it. But the hell of it was that it was hard to ever see the man without a smile on his face, which made it hard to vilify him for acting like a young man when he damn well knew he wasn’t.
When Abraham staggered into the restaurant, I could tell immediately that he was half in the bag from a Saturday night of drinking that turned into a Sunday morning of wondering not only where he’d woken up but where the hell his pants were.
“Sorry I’m late,” he whispered.
“Frank told me to tell you you’re a fucking asshole.”
