Mourning Wood

by Daniel Paisner

  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.