Practical Demonkeeping pc-1 Page 6

  “Excuse me,” the man said.

  Jenny turned in midstep. “Yes?”

  “You have incredible eyes.”

  “Thanks.” She felt herself blush as she headed off to get his coffee. She wasn’t ready for this. She needed some sort of break between being married and being divorced. Divorce leave? They had pregnancy leave, didn’t they?

  When she returned with his coffee, she looked at him for the first time as a single woman might. He was handsome, in a sharp, dark sort of way. He looked younger than she was, twenty-three, maybe twenty-four. She was studying his clothes and trying to get a feel for what he did for a living when she ran into the chair he had pushed out from the table and spilled most of the coffee into the saucer.

  “God, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Are you having a bad day?”

  “Getting worse by the minute. I’ll get you another cup.”

  “No,” he raised a hand in protest. “Its fine.” He took the cup and saucer from her, separated them, and poured the coffee back into the cup. “See, good as new. I don’t want to add to your bad day.”

  He was staring again.

  “No, you’re fine. I mean, I’m fine. Thanks.” She felt like a geek. She cursed Robert for causing all this. If he hadn’t… No, it wasn’t Robert’s fault. She’d made the decision to end the marriage.

  “I’m Travis.” The man extended his hand. She took it, tentatively.

  “Jennifer-” She was about to tell him that she was married and that he was nice and all. “I’m not married,” she said. She immediately wanted to disappear into the kitchen and never come back.

  “Me either,” Travis said. “I’m new in town.” He didn’t seem to notice how awkward she was. “Look, Jennifer, I’m looking for an address and I wonder if you could tell me how to find it? Do you know how to get to Cheshire Street?”

  Jenny was relieved to be talking about anything but herself. She rattled off a series of streets and turns, landmarks and signs, that would lead Travis to Cheshire Street. When she finished, he just looked at her quizzically.

  “I’ll draw you a map,” she said. She took a pen from her apron, bent over the table, and began drawing on a napkin.

  Their faces were inches apart. “You’re very beautiful,” he said.

  She looked at him. She didn’t know whether to smile or scream. Not yet, she thought. I’m not ready.

  He didn’t wait for her to respond. “You remind me of someone I used to know.”

  “Thank you…” She tried to remember his name. “…Travis.”

  “Have dinner with me tonight?”

  She searched for an excuse. None came. She couldn’t use the one she had used for a decade — it wasn’t true anymore. And she hadn’t been alone long enough to brush up on some new lies. In fact, she felt that she was somehow being unfaithful to Robert just by talking to this guy. But she was a single woman. Finally she wrote her phone number under the map on the napkin and handed it to him.

  “My number’s on the bottom. Why don’t you call me tonight, around five, and we’ll take it from there, okay?”

  Travis folded the napkin and put it in his shirt pocket. “Until tonight,” he said.

  “Oh, spare me!” a gravely voice said. Jenny turned toward the voice, but there was only the empty chair.

  To Travis she said, “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?” Travis glared at the empty chair.

  “Nothing,” Jenny said, “I’m starting to go over the edge, I think.”

  “Relax,” Travis said. “I won’t bite you.” He shot a glance at the chair.

  “Your order is up. I’ll be right back.”

  She retrieved the food from the window and delivered it to Travis. While he ate, she stood behind the counter separating coffee filters for the lunch shift, occasionally looking up and smiling at the dark, young man, who paused between bites and smiled back.

  She was fine, just fine. She was a single woman and could do any damned thing she wanted to. She could go out with anyone she wanted to. She was young and attractive and she had just made her first date in ten years — sort of.

  Over all of her affirmations her fears flew up and perched like a murder of crows. It occurred to her that she didn’t have the slightest idea what she was going to wear. The freedom of single life had suddenly become a burden, a mixed blessing, herpes on the pope’s ring. Maybe she wouldn’t answer the phone when he called.

  Travis finished eating and paid his bill, leaving her far too large a tip.

  “See you tonight,” he said.

  “You bet.” She smiled.

  She watched him walk across the parking lot. He seemed to be talking to someone as he walked. Probably just singing. Guys did that right after they made a date, didn’t they? Maybe he was just a whacko?

  For the hundredth time that morning she resisted the urge to call Robert and tell him to come home.

  8

  ROBERT

  Robert loaded the last of the laundry baskets full of dishes into the bed of the pickup. The sight of a truckload of clean dishes did not raise his spirits nearly as much as he thought it would. He was still depressed. He was still heartbroken. And he was still hung over.

  For a moment he thought that washing the dishes might have been a mistake. Having created a single bright spot, no matter how small, seemed to make the rest of his life look even more dismal by contrast. Maybe he should have just gone with the downward flow, like the pilot who pushes down the stick to pull out of an uncontrolled spin.

  Secretly, Robert believed that if things got so bad that he couldn’t see his way out, something would come along and not only save him from disaster but improve his life overall. It was a skewed brand of faith that he had developed through years of watching television — where no problem was so great that it could not be surmounted by the last commercial break — and through two events in his own life.

  As a boy in Ohio he had taken his first summer job at the local county fair, picking up trash on the midways. The job had been great fun for the first two weeks. He and the other boys on the cleanup crew spent their days wandering the midways using long sticks, with nails extending from one end, to spear paper cups and hot dog wrappers as if they were hunting lions on the Serengeti. They were paid in cash at the end of each day. The next day they spent their pay on games of chance and repeated rides on the Zipper, which was the beginning of Robert’s lifelong habit of exchanging money for dizziness and nausea.

  The day after the fair ended, Robert and the boys were told to report to the livestock area of the fairgrounds. They arrived before dawn, wondering what they would do now that the colorful carny trailers and rides were gone and the midways were as barren as airport runways.

  The man from the county met them outside the big exhibition barns with a dump truck, a pile of pitchforks, and some wheelbarrows. “Clean out those pens, boys. Load the manure on the truck,” he had said. Then he went away, leaving the boys unsupervised.

  Robert had loaded only three forkfuls when he and the boys ran out of the barn gasping for breath, the odor of ammonia burning in their noses and lungs.

  Again and again they tried to clean the stables only to be overcome by the stench. As they stood outside the barn, swearing and complaining, Robert noticed something sticking up out of the morning fog on the adjacent show ground. It looked like the head of a dragon.

  It was beginning to get light, and the boys could hear banging and clanging and strange animal noises coming from the show ground. They stared into the fog, trying to make out the shapes moving there, glad for the distraction from their miserable task.

  When the sun broke over the trees to the east of the fairgrounds, a scraggly man in blue work clothes walked out of the mist toward the barn. “Hey, you kids,” he shouted, and they all prepared to be admonished for standing around instead of working. “You want to work for the circus?”

  The boys dropped their pitchforks as if they were re
d-hot rods of steel and ran to the man. The dragon had been a camel. The strange noises were the trumpeting of elephants. Under the mist a crew of men were unrolling the big top of the Clyde Beatty Circus.

  Robert and the boys worked all morning beside the circus people, lacing together the bright-yellow canvas panels of the tent and fitting together giant sections of aluminum poles that would support the big top.

  It was hot, sweaty, heavy work, and it was wonderful and exciting. When the poles lay out across the canvas, cables were hitched to a team of elephants and the poles were hoisted skyward. Robert thought his heart would burst with excitement. The canvas was connected by cables to a winch. The boys watched in awe as the big top rose up the poles like a great yellow dream.

  It was only one day. But it was glorious, and Robert thought of it often — of the roustabouts who sipped from their hip flasks and called each other by the names of their home states or towns. “Kansas, bring that strut over here. New York, we need a sledge over here.” Robert thought of the thick-thighed women who walked the wire and flew on the trapeze. Their heavy makeup was grotesque up close but beautiful at a distance when they were flying through the air above the crowd.

  That day was an adventure and a dream. It was one of the finest in Robert’s life. But what had impressed him was that it had come right when things seemed the most bleak, when everything had gone, literally, to shit.

  The next time Robert’s life took a nosedive he was in Santa Barbara, and his salvation arrived in the form of a woman.

  He had come to California with everything he owned packed into a Volkswagen Beetle, determined to pursue a dream that he thought would begin at the California border with music by the Beach Boys and a long, white beach full of shapely blondes dying for the company of a young photographer from Ohio. What he found was alienation and poverty.

  Robert had chosen the prestigious photography school in Santa Barbara because it was reputed to be the best. As photographer for the high school yearbook he had gained a reputation as one of the best photographers in town, but in Santa Barbara he was just another teenager among hundreds of students who were, if anything, more skilled than he.

  He took a job in a grocery store, stocking shelves from midnight to eight in the morning. He had to work full-time to pay his exorbitant tuition and rent, and soon he fell behind in his assignments. After two months he had to leave school to avoid flunking out.

  He found himself in a strange town with no friends and barely enough money to survive. He started drinking beer every morning with the night crew in the parking lot. He drove home in a stupor and slept through the day until his next shift. With the added expense of alcohol, Robert had to hock his cameras to pay rent, and with them went his last hope for a future beyond stocking shelves.

  One morning after his shift the manager called him into the office.

  “Do you know anything about this?” The manager pointed to four jars of peanut butter that lay open on his desk. “These were returned by customers yesterday.” On the smooth surface of the peanut butter in each jar was etched, “Help, I’m trapped in Supermarket Hell!”

  Robert stocked the glass aisle. There was no denying it. He had written the messages one night during his shift after drinking several bottles of cough medicine he had stolen from the shelves.

  “Pick up your check on Friday,” the manager said.

  He shuffled away, broke, unemployed, two thousand miles from home, a failure at nineteen. As he left the store, one of the cashiers, a pretty redhead about his age, who was coming in to open the store, stopped him.

  “Your name is Robert, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You’re the photographer, aren’t you?”

  “I was.” Robert was in no mood to chat.

  “Well, I hope you don’t mind,” she said, “but I saw your portfolio sitting in the break room one morning and I looked at it. You’re very good.”

  “I don’t do it anymore.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad. I have a friend who’s getting married on Saturday, and she needs a photographer.”

  “Look,” Robert said, “I appreciate the thought, but I just got fired and I’m going home to get hammered. Besides, I hocked my cameras.”

  The girl smiled, she had incredible blue eyes. “You were wasting your talent here. How much would it cost to get your cameras out of hock?”

  Her name was Jennifer. She paid to get his cameras out of hock and showered him with praise and encouragement. Robert began to make money picking up weddings and Bar Mitzvahs, but it wasn’t enough to make rent. There were too many good photographers competing in Santa Barbara.

  He moved into her tiny studio apartment.

  After a few months of living together they were married and they moved north to Pine Cove, where Robert would find less competition for photography jobs.

  Once again, Robert had sunk to a lifetime low, and once again Dame Fate had provided him with a miraculous rescue. The sharp edges of Robert’s world were rounded by Jennifer’s love and dedication. Life had been good, until now.

  Robert’s world was dropping out from under him like a trapdoor and he found himself in a disoriented free-fall. Trying to control things by design would only delay his inevitable rescue. The sooner he hit bottom, he reasoned, the sooner his life would improve.

  Each time this had happened before, things had gotten a little worse only to get a little better. One day the good times had to keep on rolling, and all of life’s horseshit would turn to circuses. Robert had faith that it would happen. But to rise from the ashes you had to crash and burn first. With that in mind, he took his last ten dollars and headed down the street to the Head of the Slug Saloon.

  9

  THE HEAD OF THE SLUG

  Mavis Sand, the owner of the Head of the Slug Saloon, had lived so long with the Specter of Death hanging over her shoulders that she had started to think of him as one might regard a comfortable old sweater. She had made her peace with Death a long time ago, and Death, in return, had agreed to whittle away at Mavis rather than take her all at once.

  In her seventy years, Death had taken her right lung, her gall bladder, her appendix, and the lenses of both eyes, complete with cataracts. Death had her aortic heart valve, and Mavis had in its place a steel and plastic gizmo that opened and closed like the automatic doors at the Thrifty Mart. Death had most of Mavis’s hair, and Mavis had a polyester wig that irritated her scalp.

  She had also lost most of her hearing, all of her teeth, and her complete collection of Liberty dimes. (Although she suspected a ne’er-do-well nephew rather than Death in the disappearance of the dimes.)

  Thirty years ago she had lost her uterus, but that was at a time when doctors were yanking them so frequently that it seemed as if they were competing for a prize, so she didn’t blame Death for that.

  With the loss of her uterus Mavis grew a mustache that she shaved every morning before leaving to open the saloon. At the Slug she ambled around behind the bar on a pair of stainless steel ball and sockets, as Death had taken her hips, but not before she had offered them up to a legion of cowboys and construction workers.

  Over the years Death had taken so much of Mavis that when her time finally came to pass into the next world, she felt it would be like slipping slowly into a steaming-hot bath. She was afraid of nothing.

  When Robert walked into the Head of the Slug, Mavis was perched on her stool behind the bar smoking a Taryton extra-long, lording over the saloon like the quintessential queen of the lipstick lizards. After each few drags on her cigarette she applied a thick paste of fire-engine-red lipstick, actually getting a large percentage of it where it was supposed to go. Each time she butted a Taryton she sprayed her abysmal cleavage and behind her ears with a shot of Midnight Seduction from an atomizer she kept by her ashtray. On occasion, when she had rendered herself wobbly by too many shots of Bushmill’s, she would shoot perfume directly into one of her hearing aids, causing a short circuit and m
aking the act of ordering drinks a screaming ordeal. To avoid the problem, someone had once given her a pair of earrings fashioned from cardboard air fresheners shaped like Christmas trees, guaranteed to give Mavis that new car smell. But Mavis insisted that it was Midnight Seduction or nothing, so the earrings hung on the wall in a place of honor next to the plaque listing the winners of the annual Head of the Slug eight-ball tournament and chili cook-off, known locally as “The Slugfest.”

  Robert stood by the bar trying to get his eyes to adjust to the smoky darkness of the Slug.

  “What can I get for you, sweet cheeks?” Mavis asked, batting her false eyelashes behind pop-bottle-thick, rhinestone-rimmed glasses. They put Robert in mind of spiders trying to escape a jar.

  He fingered the ten-dollar bill in his pocket and climbed onto the bar stool. “A draft, please.”

  “Hair of the dog?”

  “Does it show?” Robert asked in earnest.

  “Not much. I was just going to ask you to close your eyes before you bled to death.” Mavis giggled like a coquettish gargoyle, then burst into a coughing fit. She drew a mug of beer and set it in front of Robert, taking his ten and replacing it with nine ones.

  Robert took a long pull from the beer as he turned on the stool and looked around the bar.

  Mavis kept the bar dimly lit except for the lights over the pool tables, and Robert’s eyes were still adjusting to the darkness. It occurred to him that he had never seen the floor of the saloon, which stuck to his shoes when he walked. Except for the occasional crunch underfoot identifying a piece of popcorn or a peanut shell, the floor of The Slug was a murky mystery. Whatever was down there should be left alone to evolve, white and eyeless, in peace. He promised himself to make it to the door before he passed out.

  He squinted into the lights over the pool tables. There was a heated eight-ball match going on at the back table. A half dozen locals had gathered at the end of the bar to watch. Society called them the hard-core unemployed; Mavis called them the daytime regulars. On the table Slick McCall was playing a dark young man Robert did not recognize. The man seemed familiar, though, and for some reason, Robert found that he did not like him.