Wood has got his sign bolted to the brick facing outside Grace’s restaurant. All that’s left is for Jim, the maintenance guy from Maritime Merrytime, to run a line from the electric box and generator down in the basement, in exchange for which Wood has promised to make an appearance in his lobster costume at the birthday party of one of Jim’s kids.
The sign itself is draped in sheets and bungee cords—Wood’s version of “under wraps”—but there’s no longer any mistaking it for something else. It’s mounted/bracketed into the brick at precisely the spot for a significant sign, occupying precisely the area a restaurant sign is meant to occupy. It’s the right shape. It is, very clearly, what it is, and there’s no fooling Grace at this point. She’s stepped out of the restaurant every couple hours, at first under some pretense or other, but by now she’s got it figured. “Not a record album?” she asked, last time out.
Wood nodded. “Not a record album.”
“Good, then,” she said, turning back for the door. “Good we cleared that up.”
He wanted her to ask what it said, the sign, but he didn’t want to tell her. He liked what was left of surprising her. He liked that she knew, but that she didn’t push it on him, her knowing.
Gracie’s regulars haven’t been showing the same consideration, but Wood guesses he doesn’t really mind. As the work drags, their constant steppings-out to imagine the sign’s message are a tonic, a distraction. Plus, he likes the attention, that this is a big deal, that something he’s doing is once again something to talk about. Been a while. He hadn’t realized, fully, how strongly his being at the center of things had informed his perspective. He teeters atop his ladder getting the wires ready for Jim, wondering what’s keeping him, collecting the speculation of Grace’s chowderheads, and relishing in the small thought that what he’s doing seems to matter to all these people, that the stuff of their days seems at last to hinge on the stuff of his.
“Over ninety-nine served,” Chester jokes, hollering up to Wood. “Get it? Like the McDonald’s sign?”
Wood gets it.
“You know, like, business is good, but it’s not all that good.”
He still gets it.
The rest of them have their own ideas.
Lem: “Free winter tune-ups.”
Acky: “Fine antiques.”
The guy who fixes the snowblowers and leafblowers down at Best Hardware (Wood can never remember his name): “Griswold’s Emporium and Shake Shack.” Smitty. Smith. Smithy. Something generic.
Joe Scapsi, who claims credit for the place’s sanctioned nickname: “I should get a royalty, you put Two Stools up there. Free coffee. Something.”
“Tourists go home!” suggests Jimmy Salamander, behind a giant laugh.
“Yeah, but not before you give us all your money!” offers Lem, back outside for another look-see, with a giant laugh of his own.
“Fuckin’ tourists,” Salamander says.
This is turning out to be great sport to Grace’s regulars, this guessing at the sign, and with each entry Wood is reminded of the forces that had driven him from his past life into this one right here. These new friends of his are something, he thinks. That he even has friends to consider is something. His entire fucking life is something—brand new!—but he’s never had friends like these. He’s never known people who can find something to get excited about in a storefront sign; people who measure themselves by what they’ve built, or hauled, or caught, or sold; people who keep to yellowing the presentimented Hallmark cards they hand out to each other on birthdays and holidays. He still thinks he can get used to these people. Hopefully. He can get to appreciating people who don’t wake up early Monday mornings to consider the weekend box office or think any less of him because he dresses in a synthetic lobster costume to earn his meager living.
Yes, these are his people, he convinces himself, now, definitely, and he’s nearly right in the middle of being the same way. In convincing himself of this, it occurs to him he’s put about as much of the continental United States between himself and the life he used to live as geographically possible. He hardly recognizes the man he was, the people he once knew, the choices he made. Out there, in L.A., it was like he was being pulled along by a giant momentum, and there was never any thought to where he was going or where he might have to go next or what the fuck he was doing when he got there. He was just pulled along, and kept moving, and pulled along, and just like everyone else and everything had to be up and up and up and bigger and bigger and bigger. He was either up or out, and the people around him were either up or out, and everyone was too busy grabbing at the same prize to even think what they’d become. Here, though, in Maine, he’s filled with thoughts of what will happen next, where his decisions will take him. Here, there’s no such thing as momentum. There’s nothing but time: to think, to argue a small point, to act on a crazy whim like putting up a new sign outside Grace’s restaurant. To take up with someone like Grace in the first place.
But then it turns on him, his thinking, and not because his thinking of Grace gets him started on what he’s missing, but because after Grace, he runs out of argument. He’s still with the here and there, still with the weighing of Maine against L.A., but now the scales tip the other way. Here, he starts to think, the only prize is making the rent, making it through the long, cold winter. Here, he’s had about all he can take on the weather; on the merits, in deep winter, of dry heat versus moist; on this new kind of outboard motor meant to start sure and steady—first time, every time, or your money back.
Shit.
“What’ya waitin’ on, Harlan?” It’s Mike, another one of Grace’s chowderheads, on his way in. He hasn’t quite got the situation figured. “She finally gettin’ ’round to tarrin’ that roof?”
“Just a sign,” Wood shouts down. “Go on inside. Gracie’ll fill you in.”
Mike steps to the door and then pulls back. He looks up at his friend Trask. “I’m pretty handy with the tools,” he says.
Wood waves him off. “I’m good, Mikey-boy,” he says. And he is. Good and charged and almost like new. He’s also about as far removed from any kind of life anyone would even recognize.
It’s not like Norman to be caught dead driving a Buick, but it’s not like he has any choice. Guy at the rental counter, a buzz-cutted pain in his ass with a septum retainer showing through his too-large nostrils, said it was a Buick or dick, and Norman wondered whatever happened to trying harder. Then he wondered if he was even at the trying-harder counter, and just who the trying-harder people were, anymore, and if they were even still in business. Then he wondered how it was they were still making these cars—LeSabres, Park Avenues—without his fully realizing it, which went to show him the Buick people didn’t exactly have him in their sights, demographically speaking. You know, if they wanted a fuckwad film student to really rather have a Buick, they’d find a way to get him the message. They’d buy a page in Details, sponsor a film festival, something.
Car’s got like two miles on it, smells like a showroom, and it drives, he’s come to realize, like it’s out at sea. Like a fucking cabin cruiser! A sloop! He wonders if they even call them sloops anymore. (What the fuck’s a sloop, anyway?) He pulls out in this boat of a car and takes the small hills in the now-winding road like swells in the open sea, and this is what he has time to think. The only reason he even knows the word “sloop” is from some fucking Beach Boys song. I wanna go home. He grows up on the ocean, pretty much, and the Beach Boys are the extent of his sea-faring knowledge. This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on. Repeat and fade.
Wheretogo? Wheretogo? Wheretogo? Where the fuck to go? Somewhere, is all. Anywhere. Just go. Move. Do. Be. Do-Bee. The fucking Romper Room Do-Bee. Christ, when was the last time he thought of that? When was the last time he thought of any of this shit?
Norman’s mind, racing, reaches back over every emotion he ever had, every impulse, every thought, the whole of his experience, all at once, and he pulls with it a joke from his growing up, an inside joke he was too fucking plugged in to not get, even back in Kindergarten:
What did Sinatra sing on Romper Room?
Do-be-do-be-do.
Kid who told it to him lived in a house once owned (or maybe rented, but at least lived in) by Dean Martin’s kid, Dino, so it came with its own Rat Pack lineage. It wasn’t just a joke, it was an inside joke, and young Norman knew to laugh at the connection as much as the punchline. That’s how it was, how he grew up—on the inside, looking out. His father knew the people who did the voices on his favorite cartoons. Adam West, in a bad career patch, showed at one of Norman’s birthday parties and let his friends try on his cowl. The Starland Vocal Band (shit, remember the Starland Vocal Band!) came to his friend Bradley’s bar mitzvah and played a memorably painful version of “Sunrise, Sunset.” (People still talk about it.) It left him thinking the whole world was crammed into the same front row.
North, he decides. He’ll head north, maybe unspool for a couple days in New Hampshire. Pet keeps saying to come on up, any time, don’t even bother to call. If she’s not there, she leaves the key inside a faux rock she ordered from a garden catalog and now keeps by a post near a side door, with the word “serendipity” boiler-plated into the stone. When she told Norman this, he wondered just who it was she expected to fool, advertising her hiding places like that. Might as well get one with the word “key” on it. “Help Yourself.” “Back at Noon.” But then he thought, you know, it’s not like she’s in New York or anything. It’s fucking New Hampshire. Folks are a little slower, a little more trusting.
Serendipity, he thinks, driving. Serendipity-do-dah. Do-be-do-be-do.
Pimletz is moving now. At last. At least. He’s pointed toward the Bar Harbor Public Library, determined to source his dried-up flow of e-mailings, certain he is onto something. He hasn’t thought things enough of the way through even to guess what he’s on to, but he figures this is enough of a first step, this going forward. No sense tilting the machinery with theories.
Pet said to take the cell phone with him in case she thought of something she needed. She was thinking, maybe one of them lobster roll things they do up there, but then Axel would have to pick up one of those cooler-thingies so the mayonnaise didn’t go bad on the drive home, so that would be, like, two things she needed: the sandwich and the cooler. Two things, one call, no biggie. Anyway, Pimletz has got the phone set to Roam now that he’s left its home area. He’s also got a map and a hardly used reporter’s notebook with the Record-Transcript banner stamped on the cover all stuffed haphazardly into a black leather shoulder bag he’d taken to carrying back and forth to the paper. He never had any work to take home with him (or, resultingly, to bring back to his desk the next morning), but he liked the way the bag made him look, that the other guys all carried them too.
The sun, setting behind him, seems to light Pimletz’s way like what’s left of a fire. It’s too bright for headlights and too soon for streetlamps, and yet the road is bathed in the kind of dulled orange you might get if you left a handful of candy corns to soak in hot water for a couple hours and then spilled the residue out in the sink. Jesus, this book has got him thinking in descriptive terms. Trying, anyway. He’s thinking, burnt sienna. He remembers the name from those super-sized Crayola boxes as a kid, but he can’t recall the color. It’s not a color he normally encounters, and yet he’s guessing maybe this was what they had in mind. This color here, this muted orange in the graying sky. If it doesn’t already have a name, this is something that should be called burnt sienna. Or ember. Even better. He’s wondering if this is a good name for a crayon color, if anyone’s ever thought of it, if there’s any money in marketing new names for new colors to the Crayola people.
Ember.
Ah, here it is, easy enough to find. The public library. Not one of those strange-to-fathom, mostly concrete structures he’s used to seeing in the new-monied suburbs of Boston, in the city itself. No new money here, judging from the library, just a basic clapboard building with a couple not-quite-thought-out extensions grafted to each end. Basic. Looks like it was once somebody’s house; there’s probably a tub in the bathroom. He leans into the latch-bar on the heavy front door and wonders how it is such a simple-looking library in such a simple-looking town is even wired to send out the kind of e-mailings he’s been getting.
Leave it to technology to root itself in the unlikeliest places; but then, leave it to convention to hold fast. Library has still got a card catalog file along the side wall, he notices, stepping inside. Pimletz can’t remember the last time he saw one of these. Shit, even the Roxbury branch back home has had its catalog on computer since forever. He wonders what all those libraries did with their files when they switched to computers. As furniture, you know, it’s a pretty interesting piece. Lot you can do with it, all those tiny, deep drawers, those hook-down brass pulls. Make for a kick-ass sewing kit. (An elaborate utensil drawer?) He wonders if maybe there’s some kind of after-market for such a thing, but then he thinks probably the antique dealers have already picked up on this. Probably all the good card catalog files are already gone, and out there, and refinished, and occupying space in some of the finer homes in North America. The conversation piece to end all conversation pieces or, if restored to their intended use, to end all conversation.
He steps in the direction of a slender, plain-looking woman at the desk facing the front door. She’s sitting where he expects to find a librarian, in the manner he expects to find on one, except she’s wearing a Patagonia fleece pullover and sipping from a bottle of manufactured water—altogether, not librarian material. Plus, she looks like she’s twenty. Pimletz runs a reckless inventory of all the librarians he’s ever seen, in all the libraries he’s ever been, and he can’t come up with another this young, this casual. Oh, there are the students manning the desks at the university libraries he is sometimes made to visit, but those shouldn’t count. This one’s even got on black nail polish, he sees now, stepping closer, and this strikes him as another first.
He wishes he had a card to give her to help explain himself. He must’ve asked Volpe about a million times for a box of business cards, but the conversation never went the way Pimletz planned. “What,” Volpe usually railed, “you’re expecting to hear back from the dead?”
“Excuse me,” he says, attempting eye contact and conversation at roughly the same time, a combustible bit of social interaction for which he has never demonstrated tremendous facility. “This the public library?” As soon as he says it, he wants it back. Of course this is the public library. Says so right out front. There are, like, a shitload of books piled high and all around. That card catalog thing. Jesus.
“Last I checked.”
Pimletz all but sighs. At least she has the courtesy not to rip into him for being such an ass. “Good,” he says. “Thought so.”
She smiles. “Something I can help you with?”
He doesn’t know where to start, so he finds a spot in the middle of what he has to say. “There’s probably a log or something,” he says. “Right? The people who use your computer. They sign in?”
She’s not sure what he means, but she means to help. “There’s a sign-up sheet,” she explains, “if there’s a wait or something. We only have two terminals. I don’t know if that helps.”
Pimletz doesn’t know either. “And if there’s no wait?” he tries. “If there’s no wait, what happens, you just sit down and start typing?”
“Basically. We’re pretty loose about it.”
He considers this, wonders what good it does him, flits back to the beginning. “So if I wanted to go back a couple weeks, see who was using the computers at a given time, you know, six o’clock on a Thursday night, there wouldn’t necessarily be any record?”
She shakes her head no. “Even if there was,” she says, “I’m not sure I could give that out. I’d have to check.”
“Could you?” he asks.
“Check?”
“Or see if there’s a record. Whichever you have to do first.”
“Six o’clock which Thursday night?”
“No,” he says, reaching into his bag for his reporter’s notebook and flipping it open to one of the few blemished pages. “That was just an example. These are the times and dates I’m looking for.” He shows her.
“You a cop?” she says, taking the notebook.
Pimletz wants to laugh, but catches himself. “Nothing like that.”
“A reporter?”
Nothing like that, either, is what he should say, but what comes out is, “You might say that.” You know, she might. She did. What the hell.
Her eyes take on another shade. “Well,” she says, conspiratorially, “let’s see what we can dig up for our friend, Mr. Woodward.”
Pimletz doesn’t catch the reference. “Pimletz,” he corrects.
“No, I meant, as in Bob. Woodward and Bernstein.” Beat. “Watergate.” Beat. “Hello?”
“Oh,” he says. “Right.” Jesusfuckingchristalmighty. “Them.”
“We’re studying them in school,” she explains. “Journalism class I’m taking. “All the President’s Men. The right to know versus the right to privacy.” She shrugs. “Pretty basic stuff.”
“I guess,” he says, wanting to enlighten this black-nailed student librarian or, at least, to move her along.
She disappears for an adjacent room without any help from Pimletz, presumably to look for the computer log, although, just as likely, he suspects, to get away from this would-be journalist who can’t organize his thoughts for shit. She returns a couple beats later with one of those marble-covered notebooks he remembers from grade school, open to one of the first few pages. “How far back we going?” she asks.
“It’s not even dark,” observes Nils Veerhoven, home from two cleanings and an installation, expecting dinner. He twists open a shut window blind. “Who watches television, middle of the day?”
Anita Tollander Wood Veerhoven, for one, and if this comes as a surprise to Nils then perhaps the man is still a few hints short of a fucking clue, as Norman so neatly put it last time he called. Who doesn’t watch television in the middle of the day? This is America. This is what people do in America. Plus, the day’s all but shot, and it’s not like Anita’s twiddling her thumbs over some talk show or rehashed sitcom or Jeopardy! It’s not like she tapes the soaps to watch later. No, she’s got a movie going. One of Wood’s, one she hasn’t seen in who knows how long.
Elemenopee, with Judy Garland as a small-town teacher to his superintendent of schools. Alongside the predictable love story, there’s a bit of racial tension regarding a black janitor wanting to send his son to Judy Garland’s class, believing he’ll find a better education there than the one that’s finding him at the mostly black school across town. The picture sank when it came out and since has fallen into disfavor among African-American groups for its outdated depiction of white middle-class values concerning blacks. Even the title—meant, simply, to indicate the middle letters of the alphabet, singsong—was a source of controversy. It stood, for a time, as a pejorative phrase for blacks wanting to pass in white schools, all of which goes to explain why Elemenopee is one of the few Terence Wood movies not available on video. None of the cable movie channels will touch it, still, but it turns up here and there, edited for broadcast. Here it is on TV38 out of Boston, shot through with commercials, in the late afternoon, as if no one will notice. Or, more likely, as if no one has. Probably, the guy they’ve got programming this day part has no idea of the original friction surrounding the picture; probably, he just saw Wood and Judy Garland in the credits and figured, hey, this is something we can put on.
The picture came and went on its first run before Anita even met Terence Wood, and, for years, she’s known it only as a regrettable footnote to an otherwise not-regrettable career. Wood himself didn’t even own a print, and he kept a copy of almost every picture he made. She did see it once, however, back when it first came out, at the old Trylon movie house in Rego Park on Queens Boulevard with some girlfriends. That’s how it is with Anita and the movies. She remembers where she saw them, and with whom, and what was going on in her life at the time. Some Like It Hot. The Half Shell. Suddenly, Last Summer. They came with her own story attached and everything else, but that’s not how it is anymore. How it is—now, after Wood—is completely different, and it’s not just because she was married to all that picture-making and it became a part of her. It’s mostly because of the disease of multiplexes and the killing off of great old movie houses like the Trylon. Who could remember they saw Klute at the downtown Cineplex Odeon on screen number six? Who could care?
And so, coming across the listing in the newspaper, Anita was too happy to drop what she was supposed to be doing (bills, answering the business phone, dinner). She let the picture take her back: to a time of poodle skirts and unvarnished dreams, to holding hands with Lester Tankoos in the balcony and thinking about kissing, to walking with her friends across the parkway overpass to watch the installation of the great globe on the World’s Fair grounds, to when movie stars like Terence Wood soared bigger than life and the holes in her heart were small enough to fill.
Nils takes one look at the small screen and knows enough to wait for a commercial before saying anything more. He doesn’t have to wait long. “Any calls?” he says.
“On the machine.” She doesn’t turn from the screen when she says this. She’s working to keep the illusion of what’s happening in the picture, to push her reality from her mind, to remember her Wood as he was before, to be astonished all over again just how much Norman looks like his father, to lose herself in what she’s already lost.
“Dinner?” Nils says. He doesn’t know the rest of what’s going on in his wife’s head, not even a small piece of it, but the picture comes back on before Anita can say anything. She shushes at him and waves him away, and he is left thinking, how about that? The great Wood, he is here even when he is not.
Sound system fucking kills. For a full-size sedan. (Shit, for a rental!) Norman has got the radio cranked full, heavy bass, classic rock, and he makes room to wonder what kind of middle-aged Riviera-driving gnome would even need such a killer car stereo. It’s overkill. What, Simon and Garfunkel sound better cranked? Bread? “Baby, I’m a Want You.” Baby I’m-a little hard of hearing, so could you just turn up the volume, thank you very much?
There is something incongruous, he thinks, about tooling around in a barge built for tedious old people with Eddie Veder howling through the speakers at full decibel. He makes himself a camera, pulls back from the scene, frames it just right, imagines how it must look to someone else. This last is key, how it looks. Always, last couple months, he’s pulling back from whatever he’s doing, panning, taking it in from some other perspective. He’s outside himself, beside himself. Anywhere but inside. He moves about like he’s being watched, only it’s Norman doing his own watching, and now he gets to thinking this Buick wouldn’t be so much for shit if the top came down. There’s a sun roof, but he can’t figure the controls, and anyway a sliver of wind curling down from up top just wouldn’t do it for him like a full gust of speed-limit air. That’s what this scene needs. He wants to listen to his Pearl Jam and have his face and hair slapped around in the significant breeze and have it look like a shot from some road movie. It’s a transition scene underneath some frenetic road music. He’s on the run. He’s happening. He’s the young generation, and he’s got something to say.
He fishes on the seat next to him for another bottle, but he’s sipped through the peach, the black cherry, the citrus. He doesn’t get why they even bother with the flavors, these Smirnoff people. They all taste the same, like medicine he can just barely tolerate, sugar-coated as if for a child, and he takes his pulls thinking they must be good for him. The vodka goes down like something he needs, and, with each swallow, he’s thinking he needs another.
White. He’s thinking, maybe if this Buick were white with chrome runners, top down, it wouldn’t be so bad. Or maybe white is too pimp-ish, too overdone. Okay, not white. Red. Cherry red. Or a deep blue. Anything but the mucus green he’s driving, and, anyway, the chrome is what’s central to the shot. There’s no chrome, but he’s thinking chrome. He’s thinking he could set up the shot so the fading sun bounces off the chrome in such a way that it reflects the landscape going by. He’s tight on the car, but there’s enough light and shine to pick up all the trees and foothills and crap. There, in the chrome, he’d get the reflected scenery, hard to make out until the eyes adjust and pick up on it, maybe slow the scene down a bit to help the audience focus, but it’s distinctly there. Man against nature. Progress over permanence. Like that.
You know, with the right music—hard-driving, no real melody, loud—the shot could do a lot of exposition for him. It could sell what he’s about, where he’s going, what he’s been. It’s all right here, the whole of his experience, enlarged for the screen. Or, reduced is more like it. He’d have to leave a few things out to fit it all in.
’Course, there’s always the problem with how to move off a connecting shot like this without leaving the audience feeling taken. You can’t be too transparent. Norman’s always hated those movies where the passage of time is montaged together. The easy cliché is the pages flipping on a calendar; that’s the textbook DON’T from his advanced storytelling class. But it’s more than that. It’s romance blooming. People drifting apart. Seasons changing. They always seem a cheat, a perversion of the way things usually go, so, in his own work, he looks for less conventional paths to the same idea, to move his story without putting his characters through any false paces. Like here, with this driving shot, the thing to do is take the story with it, set it up so the driving goes to state of mind—confusion, loss, disorientation, whatever—and to set it up that the guy’s been drinking. You establish it before that he drinks, and you reinforce it here. He’s just driving, is all, doesn’t care or even think much where he’s headed, and then you show him drinking, lost in thought. But then you layer in some unexpected turn. Maybe he pulls up in a supermarket parking lot and climbs out and starts dancing to no music. Maybe he’s nailed for speeding and winds up facing drunk driving charges. Maybe he turns around and starts heading back in the other direction. Something. Some kind of kicker to turn the scene around.
He closes his eyes to picture the scene. He has to see it first before he can write it, but what he can’t see, with his eyes momentarily closed, is that he’s all over the road. He can feel the swerve in the big car, the loss of control, but he’s too caught up in his own movie to do anything about it. He feels it, but he can’t react to it. Or won’t. He wants to see how the scene plays out, but what he can’t see is the flatbed truck coming toward him from around the bend, carrying two treated-wood playground sets and leaning into its own blind curve just up ahead. He hears it—the scrapescreach of tires going the wrong way, the loud blare of horn, the stillness in the air all around—but he can’t open his eyes to it, not for the longest time.
Well, this just isn’t happening. Not in this epoch. It’s been a while, and Pimletz has turned up nothing. The computer logs the too-young librarian made available held no leads and no hope that he was even close. Turns out, they weren’t even logs, just a couple dozen sign-in sheets, and Pimletz could make no sense of the names. Turns out her name was Evelyn, the librarian, although she went by Evie, telling Pimletz that when you name a child Evelyn, you pretty much consign her to a career in library services. “And you?” she asked, wanting to put this professional association on a first-name basis.
Pimletz doesn’t make the leap with her. “And me, what?” he says.
“Your name. What’d your parents pin on you?”
“Axel. Axel Pimletz.” He wants to throw in how it wasn’t his parents, just his mother, but it seems like more information than she needs.
“Axel’s wide open,” she says. “You could be anything you want.”
“Yeah, well, tell that to Volpe,” he says, “my boss at the paper,” but then he catches himself, thinking this is more information than he wants her to have. He hahems this throat, turns back to the marble notebook. “So, then, this is it?” he says. “This is the extent of your records?”
“Pretty much.”
He considers this a moment. He drives all this way, and there’s nothing to go on but a couple dozen names he can’t place, some he can’t even read, and he looks over the entries again to see if there’s anything he missed. He wonders what he was thinking in the first place, what he was hoping to find, why he didn’t think to call ahead, save himself the trip. It’s not like he didn’t have a phone, like the roaming charges would have killed him. Then he notices the clock on the wall—6:45—and thinks back to the time stamps on most of his e-mail transmissions. Most of them were sent around eight, nine o’clock at night, and most of them seemed long enough to have taken at least an hour or so to write (longer, for him!), so he’s got time of day working for him. Okay, so if there’s a pattern here, a routine, maybe whoever he’s looking for is about to walk in the library door and head for one of the computer terminals. Could happen. Could be this person is a creature of habit. That’s how you solve a puzzle, right? You look for patterns, routines, and it absolutely could be that this is somebody’s window for electronic blustering.
“Be okay to wait for a while?” he asks Evie. “See who comes in?”
“We close at seven on Tuesdays.”
Pimletz figures this means it’s a Tuesday. He’s given up on the days of the week at the cabin. Each day is just another one beyond deadline.
Evie sees he looks confused and offers an explanation. “I know,” she says, “like, why Tuesday? What’s so special about Tuesday?”
He nods. He’s not really listening. He’s thinking his next move.
“Well, see, no one was really coming in Tuesday nights, back when they were showing Roseanne at eight. Remember, she was on at eight for a while? And the folks up here were big into that show, and the place kept clearing out around seven, and, you know, a lot of the staff wanted to get home to watch it too, maybe have a chance to make dinner beforehand, so we voted to make it an early night.” She pauses, to see how this is registering, doesn’t notice that it’s not. “A regular little democracy we’ve got going. Now Roseanne’s not on anymore, but we’ve kept it. Breaks up the week, saves some money in the budget. Heat, in the winter. You know.”
Pimletz smiles like he was paying attention. “Even just the fifteen minutes,” he says. “I’ll just sit over there by the door, see if anyone comes in.”
She shrugs, puts her hands up palms out as in surrender, as if she’s all but helpless in the face of such illogic. She’s thinking, we close in fifteen minutes. Who’s gonna come in to use the computer when we close in fifteen minutes? It makes no sense, the way this Axel person goes about his business. And with his name, everything should be so wide open.
Pimletz, waiting, wonders at the trip he’s made, the extra effort. It’s good that he’s out, he thinks, that he’s taken a proactive approach to his predicament, but then he’s back on how it hasn’t helped, how he’s no further along than when he started out. He could have spent the time sitting down and actually writing, but to do that he’d have to come up with something to say, and to do that he’d have to call on reserves of ability he is not certain he has. It appears, suddenly, a fool’s errand, his going out and looking for some phantom e-mailer like this. It seemed like a plan, but, really, it was no plan at all, just a putting off of a plan, and yet he won’t move himself off the bench by the library door until seven o’clock. It was a bad idea, but he won’t give up on it. True, it was no more foolish than agreeing to do the book in the first place, but he’s not backing down on that one just yet either.
“Ding, ding, ding,” Evie finally says, like an alarm clock. She’s waiting on him just so she can close up and get home.
Pimletz looks up and sees he still has six or seven minutes until closing. “Clock slow?” he asks.
“Something like that.”
He gets it. “So that’s it?”
“Pretty much. You can watch me shut the lights and lock the door, but the show’s basically over.”
He is resigned, at last, to his own muddle, and underneath his resignation, he feels hungry. “There a place to get something to eat?” he asks. He hasn’t had any nourishment since breakfast. “Something quick?”
“There’s a coffee shop down the street, shouldn’t kill you.”
“You on the payroll?” he says. “High praise like that, should be tough to get a table.” He amuses himself with his ability to sally. He’s a regular Hamlin.
“You asking me out?” Evie wonders.
He hadn’t thought of it, hadn’t meant to, but it doesn’t seem such a bad idea. Why not? He doesn’t mind the black nail polish, the difference in their ages. “This is something you’d consider, having dinner with me?” he asks. He wonders if this counts as her asking him out or him making the first move, in case anyone’s keeping score.
“Not really,” Evie says. “It’s just, I couldn’t get a good read. You know, you asking about dinner. I didn’t want you to think I was rude.”
Oh.
In truth, Pimletz would have thought no such thing, but now that this Evie has put it out there, he’s brooding over his inadequacies. He smiles nervously, plays with his hair, worries what he smells like. Must be his breath, done him in. His out-of-shapedness. His uncertainty. The general loserly air around him. He’s bottom-heavy with despair, certain he’ll never get his shit together in this department. He can’t even get it together for a one-shot deal. Last time he went on a date, he wore a new pair of pants and left the apartment with a clear length of tape running down his leg advertising his inseam. The thing he’s got going with Pet is something else. He knows enough to realize it’s got nothing to do with him. He’s just there for her. A distraction. On his own, for real, he’s had about no luck.
Down the street is which way? Pimletz thinks, there’s left and there’s right, but which way is down? South, presumably, but he’s too turned around to even guess at south. He starts out anyway, thinking he’ll double back if he doesn’t find it quickly, but then his eyes are sucked in the direction of an odd-colored light a couple blocks away, a soft green. Actually, it’s more of a coolwet, minty green, brightening its section of street like a cigarette commercial. He’s not sure his powers of description are at full strength on this one, but he remembers a series of cigarette ads a couple years back using roughly the same color. Newports, he thinks. Anyway, he’s never seen colors like this glowing from a storefront sign, and, as he approaches, he sees it’s some kind of wet neon. The letters are fairly flowing with this odd shade of green, and soon he is on top of it enough to make out the message: Grace.
The name doesn’t tell you what it is—restaurant, New Age clothing store, palm reader—but the storefront itself, with its big picture windows, Good Food awning, and generic Menu dipped into the sill, gives it away just fine. Pimletz is guessing this must be the coffee shop his librarian friend had in mind. He can’t see another possibility.
Grace.
Pimletz steps in and finds a run-down coffee shop with missing counter stools and mismatched tables and chairs, and his first thought is the place has almost nothing to do with the hot sign out front. A sign like that, you’d expect less-than-florescent lighting, an espresso machine, fresh flowers on the tables. And then there’s this giant piece of astonishment: he steps across the threshold and is met by cheers and applause. Genuine full-throated cheers and full-bodied applause. The people inside are strangely delighted to see him. There are about a dozen customers, most of them crowding around the biggest table (actually, three small tables pushed together), most of them with at least one swatch of red-and-black plaid on at least one item of clothing, and it’s as if they were waiting for him. He thinks maybe he’s stumbled onto a surprise party meant for someone else. It’s a peculiar recurring dream, played out for real. No, no, no, he wants to say. It’s not who you think it is. It’s just me. No one special. He doesn’t know how to respond except to half-smile queerly and move tentatively for an open table and hope these people stop looking at him.
Then, from a back door, there emerges a man dressed in a lobster suit attempting to sing a song Pimletz can’t recognize and the lobster himself can’t remember. “Be our guest,” the suit sings, in a deep, cartoony voice. “Be our guest, be our guest, and I don’t know the goddamn words. Da-da-dum, da-da-dum, da-da-da-da-da-da-dum.” The applause from the moment before turns into a kind of rhythmic accompaniment, but these people can’t keep the beat beyond a couple measures. It all falls away beneath great, rolling laughter and affinity and the clapping of hands against tables.
“You’ll have to excuse my friends,” he hears, sweetly. The voice, also strangely, comes from the perfect mouth of an overweight waitress who has somehow managed to arrive at Pimletz’s table without his knowing. “They had a bet going, how long it would take someone new to come in. On account of the sign.”
Pimletz doesn’t have any idea what she’s talking about, and his face gives him away.
“The sign,” she explains. “They just put it up today. Flipped the switch ’bout a half-hour ago, just after dark.” Then, as if it follows: “We don’t do much business here beyond our regulars.”
When she talks, Pimletz is fixed on the perfect way her lips fit together, on the just-enough wetness she’s got going on, the way she pauses her teeth at the edge of her tongue between thoughts. “It’s some sign,” he allows. It’s all he can manage. “What color is that, exactly?”
“You’re asking me?” she laughs. “Ask lobster boy over there. Harlan. He’s the one made the arrangements.” She calls over to him, “Hey, Harlan, tell him what color that is you picked for out front.”
Terence Wood winds through the small gathering, struggling out of his lobster head on the way, thinking he might have called his old friend Angela Lansbury for some help with those lyrics. “Some kinda lime green,” he says, taking off his mask to reveal a thinning head of long gray hair and a full gray beard; his face, from the costume, is red with overheating. “They had a name for it in the catalog.”
“That’s okay,” Pimletz says. “It’s just it’s not exactly a color you find in nature.”
“Well, Gracie here,” Wood says, “she’s not someone you’re likely to find anywhere else either.” He puts his big, red-suited arm around the too-large waitress, and Pimletz gets she’s the Grace from the sign and that there’s something going on between her and this lobster fellow. (The easy puzzles he has no trouble solving.) So much for him and those perfect lips.
Wood: “The deal is, you’re the first one we pulled in off the street, so dinner’s on us.” He hands Pimletz a menu with his left claw and sticks out his right in introduction. “Harlan Trask.”
Pimletz reaches for the cloth pincer and feels ridiculous. “Axel Pimletz,” he says, shaking, wondering if the detail that he was sent down the street looking for the coffee shop should be factored in to the situation.
“Think I’ll join you,” Wood says, not quite asking. He throws his head in the direction of the large table. “Those assholes back there, they ran out of interesting conversation a couple months back.”
“Hey, I heard that,” Lem hollers over. Then, to Pimletz: “Don’t let Harlan fool you. It’s him run out of things to say.”
The others laugh.
“Watch he don’t get started on General Hospital,” Jimmy Salamander contributes. “You’ll be here all night.”
Another laugh. Wood thinks, they’ll laugh at anything, these guys. Be nice to have to work for it once in a while. “Don’t mind them,” he says to Pimletz.
Pimletz nods to indicate he doesn’t.
“Coffee?”
It’s the big waitress, Grace, with a ready cup, and these people have all been so oddly agreeable, Pimletz doesn’t have it in him to decline. In truth, he can’t drink coffee. It gives him the shits, fierce, but he can nurse at it until the food comes.
“So, Axel Pimletz,” Wood starts in, pulling up a chair, “what brings you into town?”
This is conversation, Pimletz tells himself. Guy’s just being friendly. He doesn’t really want to know, not the whole story. No one ever wants the whole story. He takes a sip of Grace’s coffee. “Just some research,” he says. “For a book.” He says it like it’s nothing to be working on a book, sipping coffee, talking to strangers.
“You a writer?” Wood asks.
“You might say that.” (There’s that line again.)
“Anything I’ve read?”
Shit, in just a few seconds, Pimletz has left himself exposed, and he wants to rewrite his way from the hole he’s now in. “Technical stuff,” he tries. “Highway commission. Road usage. Traffic patterns.” There, he thinks. That should buy him some time, redirect the discussion. Then he thinks, road usage? He looks over at this Harlan person to measure the man’s hoped-for disinterest, but what he gets back is an eery connection. Something in his eyes, his voice. Something familiar. He studies Harlan’s face, but he can’t get past the beard and the long hair. The eyes, though, they’re what bring him in. They’re a deep blue, and certain, and locked onto Pimletz like they don’t want to miss a move. And the voice, if he could just hear a bit more of it, uninterrupted, he’s guessing maybe he’ll pick up on something there too.
“There a story goes with that lobster outfit?” he asks, hoping to get Trask talking.
“Is there a story?” Wood bellows, a little too largely. He leans back on his chair, turns his head for Grace. “He wants to know what the deal is with me and this lobster suit.”
“Tell him how I caught you in one of my traps and now we just let you out for feedings,” Chester suggests, with unusual wit. “Tell him how we’re just fattenin’ you up for the tourists.”
“That’s basically it,” Wood says.
“What can I get for you, Axel Pimletz?” Ah, here’s that Grace again with those lips. She seems to want to sneak up on him.
Wood reaches for the menu with his exposed hand and sets it down on the table. “Just fix us up with something special,” he says. Then, turning to Pimletz: “That okay with you? You’re not on any kind of restrictive diet?”
Pimletz wonders what the appropriate head movements are to indicate yes and then no, sequentially, but the surprising Grace is off to the kitchen before he can comment either way. He is flustered, briefly, by the exchange, and, in a more sustained way, by the exchanges of the past several minutes. He fills his uncertainty with a sip of coffee. He doesn’t know what to do with himself, what’s expected, and the coffee is something to bridge the spaces between. Been forever since he last had coffee, he thinks, sipping. He’d forgotten what it tastes like, how it always seemed more satisfying in the smell than in the swallow. He’d forgotten, also, what the caffeine can do to him, and how quickly. Jesus, it cuts right through him. Or maybe it’s not the caffeine as much as the thought of the caffeine. Maybe it’s all in his head, but now that it’s in his head it’s also everywhere else. “There a bathroom?” he asks this Harlan Trask person across the table, not wanting to let on any urgency in his voice.
“In the back,” Wood says, pointing.
“I’ll just be a minute,” Pimletz says, standing, reaching for his shoulder bag. “I can leave this here?” he says.
“You don’t trust a man dressed like a lobster?”
“It’s never come up.”
Wood smiles and removes his other claw. Then he unzips the top of his costume and lets it fall to his waist. “There,” he says, himself again, just about. He means to be accommodating. “Now it’s just a man who was recently dressed as a lobster.”
Wood has had about enough of his geek chorus. “Thank you, Chet,” he says, “for clearing that up.”
Pimletz grimaces urgently and hopes it looks like a smile. He hangs his bag on his seat-back and moves swiftly for the rest room, and as soon as he closes the door behind him, his bag starts ringing, like it was waiting for him to leave. Two Stools doesn’t pull much in the way of cell phone activity, so the sound is, at first, hard to source. The ringing is faint, muffled, and it takes several peals for Grace and her regulars to figure where it’s coming from.
“That guy sittin’ with Mr. Trask,” one of the Lennys finally says, from behind the counter, pointing. “His bag.”
Wood hears this and wonders if maybe his transformation is complete. Used to be, he’d hear a cell phone and everyone’d reach for their belts or their vest pockets, see if it was them. Him too. Now he hears this ringing, and he doesn’t think to move. It’s not as if it occurs to him and he has to stifle the impulse. He doesn’t think of it. He finally leans in for a better listen, only by this time, the ringing has stopped. Six or seven rings, then nothing. “You sure?” he says, back at Lenny.
Lenny nods. This Lenny doesn’t say much; the other one, he’s another story.
Mike: “You think someone should go in there, tell him he’s got a call? Could be important.”
“It’s important, they’ll call back,” Acky offers. “That call return feature the phone company’s got out now? I don’t understand it. There’s answering machines. There’s trying again. It’s not likely you’ll be missin’ too many important calls.”
Lem tells how he dialed a wrong number once, couple weeks back, hung up after realizing, and a couple minutes later got a call back from an irate invalid who said he had some goddamn nerve making him fight his way across the room to answer the phone and then to hang up. “If you’re askin’ me,” he says, “that call return is for beans. I get a wrong number, all of a sudden I’m an asshole.”
Just then, the bag starts ringing again, and before the chowderheads can debate what to do about it, Wood reaches in for the phone. He’s not about to hear it discussed into the ground. “Axel’s line,” he answers, large enough for the others to hear. “Highway commissioner to the stars.”
Pet, at the other end, is thrown to her chair by the voice. She’s standing, and then she’s forced to sit, that’s how hard it hits her. She’s thinking, after what she just heard on the local news about Norman, maybe she has cut cellularly into some other dimension, maybe what’s happened has somehow obliterated the lines between the here and gone. Shit, she doesn’t know what to think. “Wood?” she says.