Roy Orbison’s “Mean Woman Blues” was playing on the radio.
“Are you open?” he asked in an even voice.
With that smirk on his face, I felt like throwing the pot of hot coffee at him, but I never did like the sound of a man crying.
“Yup,” I replied.
He stepped across the black-and-white tiled floor and took a seat at one of the stools in front of the counter. Once there, he took the camera from around his neck, sat it next to his elbow, and gave the restaurant a good looking-over. There was a clock above the counter similar to the large, bland industrial-type ones that some might remember from grade school. Along the walls were a handful of framed pictures of horses.
After another long minute of silence, he became fidgety, seeing as how no one was coming to help him. He began to pick at a hangnail, and once he discovered that doing that didn’t exactly get his goat going, he reached into the pocket of his fancy leather jacket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches. He wedged a cigarette in between his puckered lips and then looked at me again with raised eyebrows.
My nonfriendly expression had not changed, nor would it until Abraham decided to get out the bathroom and do his fucking job.
“Can I smoke in here?” the kid asked.
My reply: “I don’t know. Can you?”
He looked down at his own hands, his wiggling fingers, as if trying to solve an equation. “Can you?”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out another smoke. Lit it. “I can smoke wherever the hell I want,” I said.
“I see,” he said. “May I smoke in here?”
“You can smoke wherever the hell you want, kid.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Sometimes, you go into a little place like this and the smoking or no smoking depends entirely on the, uh, the proprietor of the place. On personal tastes, you know? I mean, I’ve been in little diners like this …”
“This ain’t a diner,” I said loudly. “This here’s an honest-to-God restaurant, arright? The kitchen is second to none.”
“Sure,” he said, looking away again and lighting up. “It’s just that back where I come from there aren’t a whole lot of honest-to-God restaurants called Long John’s.”
“Yeah? And where would that be?”
“What’s that?”
“Where are you from?” He said, “New Jersey.”
“Well, in that case, mind your own business.”
This was not turning out to be a good day for me.
“Jesus, guy, whatever happened to Southern hospitality?”
“I don’t know. It died with the Duke, I guess.”
He laughed. “What about you? Where are you from?”
“Nowhere,” I said.
“Why’s this place called Long John’s?”
“Does it matter?”
“No.”
“What’s your story, kid?”
“No story. Just making conversation.”
“The guy that opened this place up back in the thirties was named John. Used to be called just John’s, but back when this place opened it was the warmest place to be when the cold months set in. Because of the big oven back here. Because of that, he changed the name, like an inside joke. Being in here was like having on an extra pair of thermals. Simple as that.”
“That’s nice,” said the kid. “The outside is very retro. Very nice.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “It makes my fucking heart melt.”
“So with that kind of long-term rep, with this place being reputable, seeing as how it’s been here so long, where is everybody?”
“Where else?” I said. “Church.”
“That’s nice too.”
“Yeah, that really makes my heart melt.”
“Mine too,” he said, chuckling. “Whatever, kid. Listen, what’s the story?” Something about the kid—him being so friendly—rubbed me the wrong way. Like sand in a condom, maybe. Or steel wool. “What? No story, just …”
“You trying to pick me up or something?”
“God, no.”
“You ask an awful lot of questions for someone who just wants a coffee and a scrambled egg, or am I just presuming? You here to use the commode?”
“What? No, I’m parched, actually. I’d love a cup of coffee. And an ashtray.”
I stood silently for a spell to see if I could hear Abraham in the bathroom, but I heard nothing. I angrily barged through the double doors, reached under the counter, and grabbed an ashtray for the kid from the stack on a low shelf. I slammed it in front of him.
I poured him a cup of coffee and slammed that in front of him too.
He said, “Thanks.”
I said, “Thank me by telling me the story.”
“What makes you think there’s a story?” he replied.
“Are you saying there isn’t?”
“No.”
“Then let’s hear it,” I said. “Why? Why the curiosity?”
“You’re the curious one, pal. Asking about one thing, then the other. Besides, everyone’s got a story.”
“I don’t know. It’s not that interesting.”
“Try me. You’d be surprised what passes for interesting in a small town like this.”
“Okay, well …”
“You a nancy?”
“What? No, I, I, I …” he stuttered. “I’m a photographer.”
“What kind? Flowers and shit?”
“Models. As in people. Women, mostly. And I’m kind of driving cross-country, all around and about and so on, and, you know, going from coast to coast. I started in New York, and, uh, I got the idea on a flight a couple years ago. Do you fly often?”
“No.”
I had not been on a plane in many years. Last time I was it was with a fake name.
“Well,” he continued, “when you fly over this country, you see these huge gaps of land between cities, and hidden in all the nature down there are all these little towns in the middle of nowhere, so I got the idea to go through all this nature, all these little roads, and see what’s down there. Down here, in what they call ‘the flyover states.’ So that’s what I’m doing.”
“I have no idea what you just said.”
He sighed. “I’m driving to the Pacific Ocean. I’m photographing my road trip. I’m taking pictures. Writing essays. I hope to make a book of it. A coffee table book. Big color prints.”
“Is that right.”
“Yes it is.”
“Well, isn’t that nice.”
“Yes it is,” he said, glowing. “Anthony Mannuzza.” He held out his hand for me to shake.
I gave it a look like it had his love juice on it. “Whatever. This ain’t a fucking AA meeting over here.” He put his hand back on the counter. “Okay, Mr. Happy, what’s your name?”
“My name’s none of your business,” I said. “You from around here?” I said, “No.”
“Here long?”
“Long enough,” I said.
He took his cup of coffee and took a seat at one of the tables by the window.
I saw the unmarked police car pull up outside the restaurant through the window. It was a beige Ford that was already a handful of years old, but the way they built those cop engines, they could practically travel through space if you put the right gas in them.
The engine purred itself to sleep, and out the driver’s-side door came my old buddy Pearce. Danny Pearce was a cop, a detective, actually, and if you want to know what irony is, he was the closest thing I’d had to a friend since I went off to war. He was a good man, a barrel-chested man with a good heart and a desire to do good deeds.
When I blew into Evelyn one night a few years earlier, I was still hitting the sauce pretty hard. I initially drank because it made it easier to deal with being what I had become, but there came a point when I kind of accepted that part of myself, or at least became very stoic in a Marcus Aurelius kind of way. Still, I drank heavily when the mood struck me, and that mood usually urged me to go into a wa
tering hole and pick a fight with somebody. I had a very wild hair growing in a very itchy place, and, to me, bars were made for two very distinct purposes: for fisticuffs and to pick up broads.
My first night in Evelyn, I had wandered into some dive called the Cowboy’s Cabin. I’d seen a million places just like it sprinkled across the world. The jukebox played either Hank Williams or Willie Nelson, and the women were either too young or too old. There was sawdust on the floor, and a pull handle on the crapper in the back. There were the serious drunks minding their own business in the corners, and making all the noise around the bar and the pool tables were the college boys and weekend partiers who wanted to hit somebody almost as much as they wanted to get laid.
I sauntered up to this one particular group of clowns who had claimed one of the pool tables and started staring at them really hard with this big, shit-eating grin on my face. They began to get uncomfortable and whisper among themselves. Finally, one of them summoned up the courage to ask me what in the blue hell I was looking at.
I said, “I’ve never seen anyone as ugly as you before.”
It was on.
In hindsight I guess it wasn’t so much a fight as it was a small-scale riot. The ordeal began with me and those three men at the pool table, a trio whom I will refer to as Larry, Curly, and Moe, because that’s what they looked like. As they came at me and I knocked them back, the other patrons became embroiled one by one. The fight kept getting bigger and bigger, like a plant (albeit a very violent plant), until the whole place was swinging, even the staff.
Shit was flying all around the place—tables, bottles, and chairs. It might have been the alcohol I’d consumed, but I think I even saw a guy hit another guy with a fake leg. That was a hell of a thing, let me tell you.
By the time the responding officers showed up, the mirror behind the bar had been replaced with an unconscious male, and a small fire was burning in the corner of the room.
One cop came in and was immediately confronted by one of the drunks. The drunk suffered a kick to the sac and crumpled up in a fetal position on the bloody floor. The cop doing the kicking was Danny Pearce. He didn’t bat an eye about what he’d done. He just moved on to the next fellow who needed some calming down.
The other cop, Danny’s partner, started blinding people with pepper spray the second he walked in. Bodies fell, caught in the pain and the seizure-like grip of freaking out because you think you’re never going to be able to see again. Everyone started screaming.
The screaming distracted me, and in that one instant, the guy I was duking it out with picked up a bottle and smashed it over the handsome side of my face. Some would say that’s the side of my face that doesn’t actually exist, but they would be wrong. I could feel the cold beer sink into my clothes, and the hot rush of salty blood running along the line of my jaw. I went down, merely because I could feel a piece of glass in my eye, and it made me a little weak in the knees. I couldn’t see. Pearce ran over to defend me as this fucking guy started dropping kicks into my ribs, with cowboy boots, no less.
Pearce clocked him good, brought him down with one punch.
“You okay?” Pearce shouted over the commotion.
“Good enough,” I said.
He helped me to my feet.
With my one good eye, I saw this other guy running up behind Pearce with a pool stick. I hollered something foul, grabbed Pearce by the shoulder, and pushed him out of the way. The stick hit me square on top of the head and broke, but there was no stopping me. I tackled the guy and went crazy on his face with a flurry of short punches.
Pearce pulled me off, but the poor bastard was already sleeping the sleep of the lost and swollen.
Afterward, I didn’t want medical treatment. I only wanted them to get the piece of glass out of my eye, but they wouldn’t listen.
They put me in the back of the ambulance, and just before it took off, Pearce got in and thanked me for saving his ass back there.
“Don’t mention it,” I said. “You’d have done the same for me.”
“I did,” he said. “You should be thanking me too.”
“I know, but I won’t.”
He laughed.
The friendship grew from there.
Considering the magnitude of that fight, he urged me not to go out drinking anymore. Up until that point, I hadn’t considered staying any longer than I already had. Before moving into that house on King Street, I had lived in a trailer that I carried around on the back of my truck. There was an army cot back there, and a hot plate. Previous to having come upon that trailer, I had lived in motel rooms and train stations for the better part of a dozen years.
It surprised me that my short reign of mayhem hadn’t caused this cop to run me out of town like a dozen other lawmen had done before him. Pearce was a deeply religious man, and I guess it was the inherent kindness that can come from that that allowed him to view me as an actual human being as opposed to a burnt-out vet with an ugly truck. That kind of kindness had never been my experience in all the towns I’d ever been.
I liked Evelyn. I liked the way the wind smelled. It carried on it a dozen different natural perfumes—earth smells. I liked that it was quiet (except for me), and I guess it was because of this kind of camaraderie that had blossomed almost out of nowhere that I promised him I wouldn’t raise hell anymore.
What amazed me then was that the promise actually meant something. I stopped going out, and before long, I stopped drinking altogether. I wouldn’t have done that if I hadn’t earned that man’s camaraderie.
Once I cleaned myself up, he vouched for me and helped me get my job at Long John’s. It wasn’t just that I was a good cook—no one makes a burger the way I do—it’s just that without his personal okay, Frank wouldn’t have hired a bum like me.
I hadn’t had a real job since high school, but when I was taken on at Long John’s I had to use my true name. It had been a very long time since I had last used it, but since I had flown under the radar for so many years with many an alias, my record was virtually spotless. That’s why the people in town knew who I actually was.
I’m sure my gleaming record surprised Pearce. To look at me, you’d have to presume there was a slew of felonies behind me, but on paper, there wasn’t. Pearce knew I wasn’t a stranger to the wrong side of the tracks, but I seemed to be reformed. That, coupled with my inherited urge to read every single newspaper I could get my hands on, eventually made him feel comfortable talking over his cases with me, figuring I’d have some genius insight into the minds of criminals. For him, he got a hooligan’s perspective on crime and an excuse to check up on me every so often. For me, I got information I would not have otherwise had, and any cases it seemed the Evelyn PD couldn’t solve became my problem—though neither he nor anyone else would ever know that.
Danny Pearce slammed the door to the cop car. He was wearing a pair of jeans, a button-down shirt, and a sports jacket. His shield hung on his belt. He was clean-shaven, but his blond hair was getting longer than you would think would be appropriate for a guy with his kind of job. But he had a kid on the way, and I guess his hair was the last thing on his mind.
He hopped up the stairs outside and entered the restaurant. The bell jangled. I could make out the silhouette of another human being back in the unmarked car. It was his partner, Clancy Van Buren. Van Buren and I didn’t get along. I guess you could say he hated my guts for some reason.
Danny was smiling, exposing a perfect row of glowing white teeth. He was excited about something, I didn’t know what. We exchanged nods as he came up to the counter and took a seat. I poured Pearce a cup of coffee, put the mandatory two packets of Equal in there, and set it in front of him.
“Mr. Trouble,” he said softly.
“How are you this lovely morning?” I asked.
“Why did he call you Mr. Trouble?” Anthony asked from across the room.
“Shut up,” I said.
“I got news,” Danny said, then shot a curious glance a
t the kid.
“He’s a photographer,” I said. “I thought he was a fruit too, but he takes pictures instead.”
Pearce snorted. The kid turned red in the cheeks.
“Yeah,” I continued, “I think he said his name was Ansel Adams.”
“Anthony,” he said to Pearce’s back as he lit another cigarette. “The name’s Anthony.”
Pearce grimaced at the sound of the match being struck, fished around in his jacket pocket, and came up with a piece of nicotine gum. He tore at the wrapping with a knife he picked up off the counter and popped the tan-colored lump into his mouth. He chewed on the gum like it was a tough piece of steak, or a rubber band wrapped tight around a human testicle.
“How’s that going?” I asked, pointing at his mouth.
“Jesus Christ, Marley, I’m dying over here,” said Pearce as he banged his fist on the counter three times.
“It’s for the best, man. You got a kid now.”
“I know, but Jesus,” said Pearce, and he shot the kid another look.
I shot the kid a look too, and to this he put out the cigarette and put the pack back in his pocket.
Pearce said, “Thanks. Sorry about that.”
“Don’t be,” said the kid, going back to work on the hangnail.
“So what’s the word? You look wound up, Danny.”
“We found Bill Parker,” he said. “At least what was left of him. Out in the woods.”
“What does that mean? Like, he was all chopped up, or animals got to him?”
“I don’t know,” said Pearce. “I mean, yeah, the animals had to have gotten to him. He’s been missing for two fucking weeks. Of course they got to him. But this is all … very interesting.”
“What’s interesting?” I asked. “I mean, obviously the circumstances of his disappearance were very peculiar, you know, considering the abandoned car out on Old Sherman and all …”
“See, that’s the thing right there,” Pearce said. “ ‘Abandoned’ ain’t a good word. That car was full of blood, Marley, and not just one kind. Our lab guy can’t figure out where the blood came from, though he thinks it might be from a dog. But the lab has no clue, and we don’t have the kind of resources to send a sample out …”
The Wolfman Page 4
