gently caressing or sharply probing fingers; the rounded smooth curve of her buttocks where they merge, then sharply intersect with her plump vaginal lips.
He’ll walk into the diner like an ordinary customer, he tells himself, order coffee and a sandwich, and when he catches Moira’s ear, cordially whisper to her that after the lunch crowd thins out, he’d like very much to speak to her. In the meantime, he’ll just sit there, drinking his coffee, hoping that just the sight of her will clear up the ambiguities in his head. She couldn’t, thinks John, driving by Puffy’s for the fourth time, get angry at that.
Puffy’s front door opens and two men emerge—one tall and blond; the other, who is vaguely familiar to John, dark-haired and stocky with a duck-billed cap pulled low over his eyes. They start to cross the street, then, at the same time that John, making the turn onto Broad Street, spots a police car approaching from downtown, change their minds and quickly walk off in the opposite direction.
Still trying to place the second man, John hears a short siren burst. He looks back and sees the police car, its bubble light flashing, follow him onto Broad Street. John turns into Puffy’s parking lot. The police car does the same thing. John feels his heart leap into his throat. He considers slapping the truck into reverse and heading as fast as he can out of town. Then the cruiser comes to a stop in the exit, blocking his retreat.
John sits in the middle of the lot, one foot on the clutch, glancing frantically around the cab, wondering if he should open the door and run for it. He hears laughter to his right and sees two kids, standing in the alley between Puffy’s and the barbershop next door, holding up their middle fingers at the police car. Another short blast of the siren, then a microphoned voice calls out, “I know you, you little hellraisers.”
The kids run off down the alley. Above the music in the cab, John hears someone yell, “Fuck you, chief!”
Then the microphoned voice says, “Park her, Moon, shut her the hell down and sit there with your hands on the wheel!”
John slowly pulls the pickup into a space between a flatbed truck and a minivan. He ejects the tape and shuts off the engine. If this is how it’s meant to be, he thinks, okay. He even feels a little relieved.
The cruiser’s driver door opens. Undersheriff Ralph Dolan steps out, yanks his belt and holster up over his melon-shaped gut, and, in his exaggerated hip roll, starts walking the fifty feet to John’s truck. John thinks, “Of all the cops in the world, goddamn Ralph Dolan.” He tells himself not to mouth off, though knows that around Ralph Dolan he sometimes can’t help it. Dolan pokes his big head through the window.
“What’s in the cooler, John?”
“Popsicles,” says John.
“Wouldn’t be beer, would it?”
“Might be one or two in there, Undersheriff. I can’t remember.”
“How many of ’em you already drunk?”
“None so far. Wouldn’t take much to start, though.”
“You puffing me, John?”
“No, sir, Undersheriff.” John emphasizes the “Under,” though he knows better. “I ain’t puffing you.” Grimacing, he waves his hand at Dolan’s breath, which smells like a taco burger. “I’m inhaling you.”
Dolan backs out of the truck and glares at him. “Take off those fucking sunglasses, Moon.”
John takes off the glasses, blinking in the sudden glare.
“You look shit-faced, Moon.”
“I been workin’ too hard. Ain’t had enough sleep.”
“Maybe you been working on jackin’ deer and that’s why you ain’t slept. That right, jacker? You the one was heard blasting away in the preserve early yesterday morning?”
“Weren’t me, Undersheriff, on account of you scared me so bad last time I sold all my guns. I don’t even eat meat no more.”
“How ’bout I take a look in that cooler, John?”
“I don’t guess today. Less’n of course you got a warrant.”
Dolan leans back on his heels and surveys John’s truck. By now John figures it’s just one of Dolan’s pull- over-and-harass stops, though he’s not sure if there’s any substance to the comment about the preserve or if Dolan was just fishing. As he watches himself being written up, John curses himself for not holding his tongue. “Got you a bad muffler, John,” says Dolan, ripping off the ticket and handing it to him. “Heard ya clear to the other end of town.”
John bites his tongue. He folds the ticket, then puts it in his wallet. “Can I get out now?” he asks, reaching for the door. “Go about my business?”
“Maybe I ought to see if you can walk a straight line.”
“I’ll piss one if you want me to.”
Dolan closes his ticket book, then slips it into his back pocket. “Just don’t cause no trouble at Puffy’s, John.”
“I’m gonna eat lunch.”
“Way I hear it,” says Dolan, adjusting his wide-brimmed hat, “she don’t want to be bothered.” John steps out of the truck. “Not by you, anyway.”
John smiles, though it’s the last thing he feels like doing. “You oughta run for sheriff again next time around, Ralph,” he says. “I’ll bet the same two people voted for ya before would again.”
“Fix that goddamn muffler, Moon,” says Dolan, waddling back to the cruiser.
His three hundred twenty pounds engulfed in a cloud of blue-white smoke, Jerry Puffer bobs the burning cigarette between his lips at John, who answers with a curt nod. In response to a few other greetings, he barely grunts.
He sits in Moira’s station, at the end of the counter opposite Puffer, and next to a thin, toothless man eating soup.
He grabs a menu, pretends to read it, then puts it back on the counter. He drinks some water, then picks up a napkin and coughs into it. He puts his fingers onto his temples where his head still hurts, and pushes. The smoke is stifling around the counter. He wonders how Moira, who wouldn’t allow smoking in the trailer, stands it.
Carrying a tray of sandwiches and french fries on one shoulder, she abruptly bursts through the swinging kitchen doors. Spotting John, she raises her eyes, gives a tiny side-to-side shake of her head, then charges right past him, twenty feet or so down the aisle, where she starts distributing food to patrons in three or four different booths.
Seeing her, John feels his spirits raised and lowered at the same time. He remembers her once saying that she loved in him what the world couldn’t see—a gentle soul and a kind heart that injured easily and took forever to heal. She was good with words and could easily have gone to college, yet had married John, who didn’t even graduate from high school. John thinks now that he had always believed she would one day tire of him and leave and that this became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Watching her going about her job, he imagines that her movements now contain a self-assuredness that says, louder than words, “I am going forward into the world and not looking back.”
She comes around the counter again, passes the tray she’s carrying to a set of hands behind the swinging doors, then walks over to where John sits, pulls from the front pocket of her wrap-around green smock a pencil and paper pad, and as if John is just another customer, asks him what he would like.
“A cheeseburger,” says John. “Medium rare. Fries. Coffee.”
“What kind of cheese.”
“You know what kind.”
“And a side of slaw, right?”
“I don’t want slaw.”
“No slaw?”
“Tossed salad.”
“Tossed salad? You hate tossed salad.”
“I’m going to give it another shot. Doctor says it’s good for me. Make it a large tossed salad.”
She smiles, barely, and writes down tossed salad. John sees Puffer owlishly peering through the smoke at them. “I just come from my lawyer’s.”
She blows at a strand of hair that’s fallen from the bun atop her head into her eyes. “Who’d you get?”
“Daggard Pitt.” John studies her face for signs of inward laughter, but doesn’t see any. “I told him to tell your
