I stacked all the papers on the passenger seat and kept going east on Main till I got to the restaurant, which was almost at the edge of town. The restaurant was set far back on the sidewalk so cars could turn off the road and park up front of the place. Since the restaurant wasn’t open yet, all the spots should have been empty, but that wasn’t the case. There was a puke-green Toyota parked there, and I could recognize that puke-green car from a mile away.
I pulled up next to it, killed the engine, and got out. The burly man sitting in the Toyota got out too, followed by a wall of cheap cigar smoke. He was wearing a pair of khaki pants that accentuated his heavy ass and a golf shirt that was the same color as the car.
I shielded my eyes from the bright morning sun and said, “Howdy, Frank.”
“You’re late,” Frank said.
Frank owned the restaurant. It had been his father’s, and his father’s before that. I had never met Frank’s father, and to be honest I never wanted to because Frank was a prick. If I had to meet a second one just like him I would have lost my mind.
I looked at my watch. It was five past the hour.
“Hardly,” I responded. “Besides, it’s Sunday. The place is gonna be dead.”
“That’s not the point,” said Frank. “I pay you to be here at a certain time, and that’s when I expect you to be here.”
“C’mon, man, do you give anyone else a hard time when they’re late?”
“That’s not the point,” Frank grunted.
Frank and I never got along, if you couldn’t tell already.
“I think it is,” I said, as shock invaded his face. “I think this is sexual harassment.”
I had heard the expression once on the television. I thought it sounded cute.
“Shut up,” he said, disgusted. “Just open the fucking restaurant.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do.”
“Aren’t you even going to apologize for being late?”
I looked at him with pity for a second, like he was a street urchin, a latchkey kid, and then said, “Frank, I never volunteered to work the morning shift, okay? If you don’t like it, have me switch shifts with Carlos or something.”
Frank got back in the car and slammed the door. He rolled down the window and said, “The thought of you working here at night scares me, Marlowe. Just get here on time. And tell Abe that he’s a fucking asshole too.”
“Will do,” I said.
Frank pulled out of the spot, and I watched as he headed west on Main Street. Main ran from one end of town to the other, and right down the middle of the street was an old set of railroad tracks that carried about a half dozen freight trains through the town per day. Those trains, for all intents and purposes, were Evelyn’s sole connection to the outside world.
Main Street met up with Old Sherman Road at both ends of it. Farther east of Old Sherman, Main cut through several miles of deep woods as a country road. The tall trees bent over the road, forming a canopy, and in the fall, when the red-copper colors of autumn came out in startling abundance, it was beautiful. The road and the train tracks went on still and led to Campbell’s Bridge, which was an ancient thing of rusted metal and molded planks. The trains went over a separate bridge just to the south, and this one was just as old. Flowing underneath the bridges were the clear waters of the Ivy River.
Much farther south, the Ivy River connected to the St. Michael River, which ran in a southeastern direction along the western border of Evelyn, and made a hook along the southern end, thus encasing Evelyn on three sides with water. Many miles of dense forest served as a buffer between the rivers and this quaint little town, which rested, like a spider in a vast web, just outside the Tennessee border.
Up to the north beyond Old Sherman there were many, many miles of labyrinthine wilderness before you could come upon so much as a bottle half-buried in the dirt to remind you that you were still in the world.
I opened the passenger door of the truck, reached in, and pulled out my stack of papers. Then I climbed the three stairs to the front door, unlocked it, and entered the restaurant. A tiny, little bell jangled overhead as I entered. I flipped on all the lights, which, because of the sun, was hardly necessary. The restaurant had a fifties-era ambience, and the sun glinted off all the chrome along the tables and chairs. I took those hot, glowing chairs down from the tabletops and sat them all on the floor. After that, I turned the little radio behind the counter to KBTO. They were playing “Peace Frog” by The Doors.
I got the grill and the oven going in the kitchen, and just as I finished making that first precious pot of coffee, Abraham decided to show up.
Abraham Davis had worked at the restaurant about twice as long as me, about six years. He was a people person, very suave, which was why he worked the counter and dealt with the patrons, and why he never got fired for being consistently late. I, not even remotely being a people person, worked in the kitchen. Abraham wasn’t a young man anymore—he was nearing fifty—but he seemed to live to go out and drink and dip his wick in whatever was around.
While I was off in the war, he was back Stateside getting his ass gnawed off by police-trained German shepherds. He’d been married twice, divorced twice, and to hear him tell it, the time that he spent “shackled” to women who, after getting to know him, didn’t really care if he lived or died consumed about ten years of a precious life that would’ve been better spent chasing tail and having “experiences”—or getting into trouble, more like—that enriched the spirit and the mind.
Horseshit.
According to Abraham, he was making up for lost time by acting like a college boy on spring break, as if lost time could truly be returned to someone, like a deposit in a bank. As if anyone got a second chance to be happy in this world. It was foolish of him to think that way, and I think he knew it. But the hell of it was that it was hard to ever see the man without a smile on his face, which made it hard to vilify him for acting like a young man when he damn well knew he wasn’t.
When Abraham staggered into the restaurant, I could tell immediately that he was half in the bag from a Saturday night of drinking that turned into a Sunday morning of wondering not only where he’d woken up but where the hell his pants were.
“Sorry I’m late,” he whispered.
“Frank told me to tell you you’re a fucking asshole.”
“Great,” he said. “I’m an asshole.”
“A fucking asshole.”
I put my apron on as Abraham seemed to slither past the counter and into the bathroom. A moment later, I heard him through the door losing what sounded like a hundred dollars’ worth of used booze the hard way.
When he came out of the bathroom, he wiped his eyes with his fists and said, “Jesus Christ, man, I’m making up for sins from a past life this morning, you know what I mean?”
“Me too,” I said. “I’m working with you.”
“Cold motherfucker,” he groaned. “That’s what you are. You mind if I crash in the kitchen awhile? Just to rest my eyes. I can barely see.”
“Moonshine does that.”
“C’mon, man …”
“There’s no fucking way I’m working that counter, Abe. I did it once and nearly killed a man. I’m not doing it again. I don’t care how bad you feel.”
“It’s Sunday morning, man. I’ll be golden before anyone comes in, I swear.”
I thought for a second, then nodded. I was too nice sometimes. “In light of the mercy I’m showing, you still think I’m a cold motherfucker?”
“Man, you’re like a turd in the snow.”
Abraham took a chair from one of the tables and dragged it back into the kitchen through the double doors. He made some noises one would expect to hear coming from a circus tent, and then he fell asleep. I poured him a cup of coffee and set it down by his foot. I then went and made a cup for myself as well.
It might have been unwise to leave the restaurant unattended, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t paid to stand behind that counter. If a
nyone came in I’d know it because there was a long window looking out into the restaurant, and I’d wake Abe up by any means necessary. Until then, I took my stack of newspapers into the kitchen and got to reading. Behind me, Abraham didn’t so much snore as labor for each inflammable breath.
Reading the papers was a daily ritual of mine. Information was a crucial thing for me. There was a very specific kind of article I was looking for in all those different papers. Big-city politics didn’t mean a whole hell of a lot to me, nor did world affairs. I realized back in ‘Nam that nothing was ever going to change, that the same mistakes were going to be made over and over and over again for the rest of time because that’s just how people are made, I guess. You can have all the revolutions and protests you want, I don’t care. They say history repeats itself, and I suppose that’s just as true as anything else ever said, so I paid these articles no mind. I read the same ones when I was young, and I’d read them again when I was old and silver-haired.
What interested me were the smaller atrocities, the everyday miseries. Who was it—Lenin, I think—who said a million deaths is a statistic, but a single death is a tragedy? It’s true, man. The murders are what I read the papers for. The deaths. More specifically, I always kept an eye out for unsolved murders.
I didn’t get off on the stuff—I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles to that fact—but it was more like I had made misery my business. After all, I was the wrath of God. Wrath of God. Pleased to meet you.
I had begun reading as many daily papers as I could get my hands on around the time my mother died in 1981. I inherited this slightly creepy habit from one of my victims. You see, the wolf doesn’t just kill, it claims. It’s not just that the memories of the deceased become my memories; their traits become mine as well. I guess it’s like when people get some kind of organ transplant and they develop a taste for a certain kind of food they never liked before. All of a sudden they’re addicted to fish or chocolate because the person whose liver or kidney or heart they had couldn’t get enough of the stuff.
There was a time in my life when this was very hard for me, inheriting other people’s wants, their needs. This was back when I used to feel guilty about being what I am, when I felt as if I was losing my own identity every time someone got killed. One of the wolf’s many victims had been a paranoid, reading all the papers every fucking day, but unlike so many other idiosyncrasies, I’ve allowed myself to keep the newspaper routine up all these years because all I have to do is find one unsolved crime in the paper, and then I have someone to send the beast after when it comes around to that time of the month. You see, I can’t ever stop it from killing, but I can at least keep it from killing people who don’t have it coming. That right there is turning two negatives into a positive.
I always started off the paper sessions with the Harbinger and the Post. After that, I went through the different newspapers for all the different towns based on how far they were from Evelyn. On this day the front pages of the two local papers were dedicated to what was dubbed “the Horror at the Mill.” Some poor slob got his hand taken off by a saw over at the lumber mill all the way out west of town. That’s what headlines consisted of in a town like Evelyn, and I could live with that, too.
Out in the restaurant, I heard the bell above the door jangle.
I kicked Abraham’s foot, and he stirred.
“There’s a guy out there,” I said. “Get to it.”
“Take care of him, man. Please.”
“Fuck you,” I whispered.
“Howdy, Marlowe,” called the man in the restaurant.
I turned and recognized the tall, lanky blond man in the suit and tie as one of the regulars, a guy named Brian. He worked over at the life insurance place around the corner.
“Howdy, Brian,” I said.
“You’re open, right?”
“Yeah, pretty much. What do you need?”
“Just a coffee to go.”
“Would you mind getting it yourself?”
“Are you serious?”
I nodded.
Brian went behind the counter with baby steps, as if he were a cat burglar. I hated the interruption, but he was at least funny to watch through the long window in the wall. He poured himself a cup of coffee without getting burned, and then he dropped a pair of quarters on the counter.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said.
“Sure I do,” said Brian. He held up the cup of coffee in a salute, then went back out the door.
“He’s a good guy,” said Abraham.
I lit a cigarette and blew smoke in his face.
“If I have to talk to one more person today because of you, I’m going to burn you with this cigarette.”
Buried in the back pages of the Harbinger was a short article about Crazy Bob. Crazy Bob was a trucker who lived not far from me. He must have been a big fan of getting arrested, because he did, a lot. When I first came to town he had just stolen an eighteen-wheeler and driven it into the river. He figured if he stole enough trucks, he’d be able to make a dam and flood the town. I guess that was around the time he lost one of his jobs. The article in front of me stated that he’d gotten picked up again, for breaking all the windows at a hardware store. He apparently had angermanagement issues. What sparked this latest incident off was the fact that they had given him a Canadian penny.
When I finished the two local papers, I placed them in a new pile on the floor. I picked up the Edenburgh Gazette—the major paper for our closest neighboring town—and dropped it on the counter in front of me. At this point, Abraham got up off the chair, but instead of going to work, he went to the bathroom and didn’t come back.
I put my hair back in a ponytail with a rubberband, ran my fingers through my handlebar, and got myself good and hunched over the pale counter.
Edenburgh was the kind of town where they wrote about the cats stuck in the trees, and if the cat happened to have some unusual talent, or if it had one good eye or something, then it was front page news over there, but on this day there was something just a touch more interesting: A local church had been broken into. The poor box was stuffed and intact. Nothing had been taken, and nothing had been vandalized.
A few pages after that, there was an even more interesting article. A seventeen-year-old girl had disappeared.
That, I thought, could be something.
A flash of light from outside the restaurant caught my eyes. I craned my neck through the space in the wall and saw a dusty black 1973 Mach 1 drive slowly past the restaurant, heading west. It then made an illegal U-turn and pulled up into one of the parking spots outside. The black car could have kept on going, but it didn’t. The engine revved up once, and then was shut down. I didn’t know it at the time, but things would never be the same again.
TWO
The black car rested in a space between my truck and Abraham’s gold-colored Buick. I’d never seen the Mach 1 before. Evelyn was the kind of place where if you stuck around long enough you got to notice these kinds of things. I knew right then that this guy wasn’t a local. He’d probably even want to see a fucking menu.
The driver got out, alone. He was a youngish kid, late twenties. He was of average height, and maybe a little more wiry than the typical underwear model. He was wearing Italian boots with squared-off tips and a pair of those jeans they sell at the high-end places that are a little fucked up and worn out already. An Italian corno hung from his neck, dangling from a thin gold chain. He had on a white T-shirt that looked slept-in, with one greasy fingerprint smeared across its front, and over that was a light leather jacket, the kind with lapels and such. It was the kind of jacket that cost just about as much as a month’s rent in a nice neighborhood, but it looked like it would disintegrate in the rain. The leather jacket I had back at the house was the real kind, with zippers and studs all over the fucking thing, the kind that would still look good if you fell off a motorcycle and slid down the road on it.
The kid had on aviator shades, and five-o’cl
ock shadow framed his chiseled, prettyboy face. His dark hair was neatly trimmed and slicked back across his head with oil. Hanging down over his forehead like a vine was a single lock from his bangs. He was wearing a ring on his left pinky. It flashed in the light, and then I saw what it was: a birthstone. Opal. I couldn’t even smell the guy yet, but I already wanted to hit him. He reached into the car and took out a fancy camera, which he slung around his neck by the strap. He raised the camera to his eye and snapped off a pair of shots of the outside of the restaurant. Up along the top of the building was an old neon sign that read LONG JOHN’S.
He slammed the car door, looked into the backseat through the dusty window, then climbed the three stairs outside the restaurant. The door opened. The little bell jangled. He stepped in.
If Abe wasn’t in the bathroom, I would have thrown his drunken ass through those double doors to avoid dealing with this prettyboy.
The kid stood near the door, the sun beaming in behind him, and he was perhaps a little hesitant to venture any farther. After all, there wasn’t anyone in the place as far as he could tell. After a long minute he turned his eyes my way and saw me staring at him through the long window in the wall. He seemed to let out a sigh of relief. I breathed deep, made no motion to draw shut the paper, made no attempt at disguising the fact that I was trying to read his life with my eyes—a nervous habit of mine ever since I came back from overseas. I think I might have even given him the evil eye.
He got the hint and took off his shades, folded them up, and stuck them in the collar of his shirt.
The Wolfman Page 3
