by Jeff Johnson
“I’m telling you this because I expect you to behave like someone is following you.”
“Ah!” Chase’s face lit up, like the idea was exciting, then darkened. “The feds again? Ones who got Nigel?”
“Nope.” I began pacing. “Feds don’t stare through your bedroom window at night. I mean, they do, but by then you know what they’re up to. This is different.”
“Why would your—stalker, I guess—why would he follow any of us?” Chase scrubbed his short blond hair, his tell for confusion. He did that a lot.
“I don’t know,” I confessed. “But if you start thinking that way, you’ll begin to notice details you might normally miss.”
Delia couldn’t hold it. “That has to be the—”
“If,” I interrupted, “and this is one of the worst-case scenarios, because there are many, but if—”
“Enough!” Delia took my arm and started pulling at me, headed into the back.
“I was just about to—”
“Chase, get the boys some coffee!” Then she lowered her voice. “You were just about to make everyone quit? Is that what you were about to do? You idiot.”
I stopped talking and let her pull me into the employee lounge. It too had changed, from a rest stop with Salvation Army couches and a battered desk I called my office into the best IKEA had in upscale whorehouse. She closed the door behind us and pointed at one of the plush imitation suede sofas. I sat. She stood in front of me, arms folded, tiny booted feet planted wide, and while her fury mounted I mutely looked at the walls. I’d gone with an off white, which contrasted nicely with the collection of horror B movie posters Delia snuck in. It was like we were in a museum, maybe in Barstow or Bakersfield, someplace too crappy to afford a real one, but ashamed enough to spring for fresh paint and matching picture frames.
“Darby,” she said softly, the gentleness of it startling me, “what the hell, man?”
I rubbed my face. “This last month . . .” I trailed off.
“Has been a bummer. I know. You’ve gone from fearless leader to absentee owner. Your spark is gone.” She sat down next to me and patted my knee. “Hard thing, knowing you’re a sack of shit. Being called out on it. How you feel now?”
“Delia. If you could just close your mouth. Your breath smells like kale—”
“Don’t you tell me what to do,” she hissed. Delia quit drinking when she announced her new career plans, no doubt to help her more serious drinker of a fiancé, and now she went to yoga and drank blueberry smoothies. Sharper than ever and way, way meaner. I held up one hand in surrender and closed my eyes. She took an even breath.
“I believe you,” she said calmly. “I believe everything you said. Of course I do. But listen to me, sweetheart. A year ago . . .” She stopped and I opened my eyes and looked at her. She was staring at the ceiling.
“A year ago, I was doing the daily grind,” I finished for her. “Tattooing five or six days a week, fuckin’ with the radiator or fixing the toilet the rest of the time. Dialed in. Battened down. Sewed up.”
“Right.” She leaned in close to me, a prelude to saying the really bad stuff. “And then your world changed and you changed with it. A crazy Korean gangster tried to kill you.” Her voice grew quiet. “You came out of that sadder. With money, too.” She reached out and curled her hand over mine. I realized how dirty I was. “Then the fucking developer blew up the shop and our lives with it. You, ah—” She still had trouble saying it out loud. “You became a l-landlord. You own half the street. You own your own bistro, for chrissake.” She was whispering now. “So tell me why this is freaking you out so bad. You’re the king of landing standing.” She put her head on my shoulder. “It’s like with nothing gnarly to do, you’ve turned into a pussy.”
I patted the side of her head and got up and went to the new file cabinet, opened the bottom drawer and got out the emergency whiskey. It was expensive enough to merit a cork, which I pulled out with my teeth. Delia frowned while I looked around for a coffee cup. In the end I took a swig straight from the bottle.
“True.” I wiped my mouth. “I’ve even taken to the cooking shows. In the afternoon.”
“Those dudes out there don’t need to know anything,” she said, folding her arms again. “They don’t need to know that your success in life disgusts you because of how it happened. They don’t need to know about your professor-bimbo-sports-bra issue, I mean girl trouble. They don’t need to know about Emeril, either.” She leaned back. “Body count is super high, dude. We’re lucky to have anyone here at all. Mikey jumps to become a school janitor with dental and a 401(k)? Nige in the pokey? I’m sure they think my leaving isn’t so much a career change as the latest rat to jump ship. We’ve had so many new guys I can’t even remember their names anymore.”
“You had a better memory when you weren’t so—like you are now.”
“Maybe so.”
“But I am being followed.” I took another sip. “Spied on. Fucked with. It isn’t my imagination.”
“So you’re not crazy yet. Good for you.” She sat up. “Think it’s one of the strippers?”
Part of getting rid of the Russian real estate developer and stealing his main henchman entailed making a deal with the Armenian. He owned a business triplex that had been critically mismanaged, and that became a joint problem as part of our deal, then quickly just my problem. Now it had a laundromat with a Vegas theme, a strip club, and a convenience store. The strip club was partly mine and was run by my business manager, Santiago. Even he didn’t like it. I shook my head.
“If it was a stripper she had a size 12 men’s boot and a couple hundred pounds on top of it. How likely is that?”
Delia thought. I lit a cigarette. Finally, she frowned. “That isn’t much. You say you’ve been feeling eyes on you for about a month?”
“Round about, yeah.” I watched the smoke rise. “I guess I was bummed about Suzanne leaving and—I dunno. Once she was gone, I spent more and more time wandering around. Stupid, I guess, but it seems like maybe I kept seeing the same face in a crowd without really nailing anyone, just—more like a feeling. I dunno. It was after she left and I started to ramble that I began to feel like I was being watched. Like maybe I’d drawn someone out into the open when I changed my routine.” I reached up and rubbed the scar on my face. “So it might have been longer. Someone could have been looking through my bedroom window at night for months.”
“Jesus. How fucked up.” She made a pained face. “What made you think of the mud trick?”
“Probably goes back to something I read in a comic book, but the idea came to me when I was looking at the junk in my neighbor’s backyard.” I sat down next to her again. “Now my brain is on auto replay. Did I smell men’s cologne drifting around on the porch the other night? Has someone actually been in my house, while I was out wandering around? How many times? Did they look at my sketchbooks? The sentimental junk I keep around?”
“You feel violated.”
We thought. Or at least Delia did. She no doubt considered several things all at once, then stacked variables and cross-indexed them in complex architectures I could only dream of. I thought she smelled like Play-Doh and yogurt, and contented myself with that.
“What now?” she asked eventually.
“Pancakes,” I replied. “You hungry?”
“Nah. Guts are bubbly. Kombucha.”
Then we watched each other, a little too much like two old gunfighters for my taste.
“I’ll still call you every day,” she said finally. “They have cell phone reception in Austin.”
“I’ll still answer every fuckin’ time, too. Not like recently.” I put my smoke out and rose. “Even if you turn into an arrogant little art snob, which is incidentally happening right before my eyes. Art is just like syphilis, I guess, in that in the final stage, when it consumes the mind above the rod or the beave, or”—I wiggled my fingers at her—“clam in this case, and results in a wicked crazy Republican.”
&
nbsp; Delia kissed the tip of her middle finger and blew it at me. “Leave by the back door. I’ll put the word out to the remaining street life and tell Flaco. Darby Holland has a new ghost.”
An hour later I was on one of Portland’s cute new trolley cars, rolling over the Broadway Bridge for a second time. As we passed Union Station, I wondered in a flash what would happen if I went down there and hopped a train. Just walked into the switch yards and scrambled into a vacant boxcar headed wherever it was headed. My boots were in good shape. My bomber jacket had a big hole in one pocket, but it would keep me warm enough if I stayed out of the wind. My ATM card linked to a bank account with an unknown amount of money in it. It seemed to fluctuate—Santiago’s doing—and even he had to check his computer to find out the running total. The number was stupid big. Greedy wrong. I could get off in the first city and throw my wallet away. Throw my phone away. Change my name to Dan Smathers and push a mop, get a little single-wide out in the sticks. Raise chickens and dream. Watch TV. Celebrate Christmas once a year. Find a bland woman and knock her up. Lie about my scar and say I got all the tattoos from my neighbor when I was a dishwasher in San Diego. I’d be free of all this shit, and my sketchy little empire could careen along on autopilot until the next big fire, and I wouldn’t give half a shit, because I’d just be a guy with no plan at all except tomorrow. Because the cosmos has so much in common with the hammer part of a piano, that’s right when my girlfriend Suzanne called.
“Suze.”
“Tried to call you last night.” She sounded distracted. Multitasking again. I could hear the chatter of fast fingers on a keyboard.
“Eh, well.”
“Where are you?” Clack. The send button.
“On a mostly empty streetcar. You?”
“The office.” Suzanne worked for Outdoors Up, a pretentious hiker/climber magazine headquartered three and a half hours north. They ran articles on the delights of Victorian campaign kits and NASA Gore-Tex gloves, bullshit about Yosemite and whatnot across from L.L.Bean ads. Every issue had at least one full page glossy of prosperous beardo hipster dipshits and their tit-job fake nature gals laughing and drinking champagne in a steaming wooden hot tub in Murkwood.
“The office,” I echoed.
Ten heartbeats of silence.
“Where’s this trolley headed?” Not very curious. Waiting to spring on my answer.
“I’ve been going in circles, actually. Got a little drunk at ‘the office’ this morning and I can’t make up my mind. Thought I’d get off in the Pearl and bum around.”
“Goddamn it.” I heard something thump in her background. “What the hell are going to do in the Pearl? Get arrested for, for . . .”
“That’s actually part of my plan, yes.”
She hung up.
Suzanne was a tall, tall woman and she’d had a lonely life because of it. We’d hit it off in a special way in the beginning, in spite of all the problems I was having at the time, or maybe because of them, but as the newness faded and we began to see clearly into the strange landscape of each other’s personalities, it took a downward turn. Suzanne was extremely career oriented, with ambitious but attainable goals. I’d been that way myself at one point, but the similarity in drive was all we had in common in that respect. My “career,” as it were, had carried me down a dark road and I’d survived the journey long enough to reach a very curious low point, which was where I presently was.
Suzanne believed that articles and pictures and stories about people finding a new path in life was important work. Maybe it was. Sadly, even tragically, I was the closest thing to being one of those people that she actually knew. I took a different path every day, though, and that couldn’t be looked on with approval from any angle. Today, for instance, I was about to pick a fight with my two least favorite feds so they’d start following me around the clock again. So they could trip up the phantom looking through my bedroom window.
This was not the bicycling-with-helmet, microbrew, artisan bacon, deep-understanding-of-foreign-movies path Suzanne had in mind for me. For us. For her, mostly.
I stared out the window, cell phone still in hand. Lovejoy Boulevard. The transformation there was complete. Once the Pearl was warehouses, big brick ones left over from a time when people put currency into the construction of things like warehouses. They grew old, and like people, they grew in character. In my first years in Portland there’d been a giant all-ages nightclub in there somewhere. Fun place. I left an ancient, smoking 400-dollar Cadillac somewhere on the street to my right years ago when it got a flat tire. People used to live all over in the area, the people who worked at grocery stores and Jiffy Lubes. Young working people. They drank at the bars that catered to their breed, and somehow, it seemed like there had been more flowers in those days. Now it was bistros, expensive cafés, boutiques, and software outfits. Upper-middle-crust San Francisco had roosted here and replicated their environs perfectly. They didn’t even have to venture out into the rest of the city.
The only café in the Pearl that served bad coffee was naturally where you could find the feds and PPD detectives, sniffing their fingers and picking at themselves. It had taken me two loops on the trolley to devise a properly savage motivator for agents Pressman and Dessel, and the conversation with Suzanne had given me the kind of confusing, unfocused anger I needed to pull it off.
I got out on 10th, ducked under the first awning, and lit a smoke. Pressman and Dessel’s trashed Prius was right down the street, so the first part of my plan was working. They were in there, looking at their laptops, getting foamed up right on schedule. Their odd branch of fed-state hybrid was headquartered in the Federal Building, but several months ago some political turmoil there had compelled them to spend all their time roaming the city, moving from café to donut shop to bust in a routine I’d already mapped out. I took off in the direction of the café and stubbed my cigarette out on the wet hood of their car as I passed. Time to spice up their routine.
Twenty-plus heads with matching frowns pointed my way when I walked through the door. Dessel stood out, beaming fluorescently, his curiously pubescent face lit up like a kid who’d found a unicorn at an Easter egg hunt. His partner Pressman glanced from me to him and rolled his eyes.
“Dipshits,” I said by way of greeting, pulling up a free chair.
“Darby,” Dessel gushed. We were on a first name basis. “Just looking at you makes my day. My week!” He dusted imaginary crumbs off his crappy suit. “Don’t tell me. You were drinking under the bridge and you thought you’d pop in and dazzle us with an update on your love life. Suzanne is in Seattle, we assume to consort with men who graduated from junior high school, but we still don’t know what happened.” Dessel narrowed his eyes and the smile dropped.
“I’m guessing herpes,” Pressman said proudly.
“Bob here started a pool,” Dessel explained. “Herpes is up to, what, fifteen bucks? Right next to—”
I silenced him by reaching out and sticking my index finger in his coffee. They watched, puzzled, as I stirred, momentarily mesmerized by the swirling motion.
“Long time ago,” I began, still stirring, watching the cup, “there was this pond. Thick, still water. Reeds. Old shopping cart sticking up through the algae. Mosquitoes.” I let that hang.
“Your hometown grocery store,” Dessel said breathlessly. “Please, go on.”
“There were catfish in there,” I continued. “Carp. Huge warts on ’em, looked like they had cancer. Big-mouth bass. Summertime there’d be snapping turtles. Eating the frogs, mostly. Fast for turtles, like nothing you ever seen.” I clacked my teeth together.
“Slaughter.” Dessel patted his chest like a scandalized courtesan.
“No shit, slaughter. But way back in the beginning, when some retired old burnout finished digging the bed for that pond and it started filling with rain, he put in this one kind of bottom feeder. To hoover up all the shit at the bottom so the other fish could breathe.”
Pressman and Dessel l
ooked at each other, quiet now.
“It was tiny when the guy dropped it in,” I continued. I held up my free hand, showing them tiny. “But over the years, the decades, it grew into a kind of blind albino monster.”
Pressman’s monobrow pretzeled in the center. Dessel’s face was blank, his eyes wide.
“One day, I see this old man out there.” I lowered my voice. They both leaned in a little. “Kind of like a tree stump in dirty denim. Glassy eyes, oily whiskers. But he was focused, like how really slow people focus on TV. He had a trash bag in one hand and a beat-up plastic Big Gulp cup in the other. And then . . .” I leaned in myself. “Then, he uses the cup to scoop dry generic dog food out of the trash bag, and he slings it out over the water. The surface exploded. The catfish, you see. Size of children after all those years.”
I stopped stirring and stared at my wet finger.
“The old man fed that pond, he told me, in his dead papery voice, to keep the monster at the bottom alive. He had a plan, see.” I flicked. “He was gonna catch that thing someday. I asked him how and he just looked at me. It was a story with a secret at the end. The best kind.”
“So-so-so . . .” Dessel studied my face, trying to read my mind. “You’re feeding us dog food.” He said the last like the kid in The Sixth Sense.
“No.”
“Ahh.” Dessel slumped back, suddenly drained from his efforts at telepathy.
Law enforcement in tow, I headed home. It was hard to say what Pressman and Dessel thought had just happened. The trick had been to use what I had. Red eyes. Dirty and wet. Half drunk before noon. Way morose. Toss out a story with a giant bottom feeder and dog food and I had a good hook in them. Brightened by the whole thing, I ducked into a Pearl deli and bought a chunk of artisan Tasso pork, then hailed the first cab I saw and gave him directions, sat back, and looked out at the rain.
“Got any Doobie Brothers?”
