Johnny Chesthair (The He-Man Women Haters Club Book 1)
Page 10
I was close to wishing it already.
“You’re just trying to scare me, Steven,” I said.
“Correct. And it’s working, isn’t it?”
“Mmmm … maybe,” I answered. “But it doesn’t matter, because I’m the leader and you’re not.”
“Okay, Jerome,” Steven whispered. “This is going to be one long weekend for you … fearless leader.”
Oh my.
“Have I told you about the black bears yet?”
I cranked down the rear window to get some air. Sometimes thirty degrees isn’t as cold as you’d think.
“Blllllack bearrrrrrs,” he said as I hung out the window.
“Mmmmmmonicaaaa,” I said right back.
By the time I turned to see him, he was sitting politely, quietly, looking almost as whipped as I felt.
“When do I get to drive?” Wolf asked.
The brothers Lundquist—in the front seat, sharing their coffee out of a silver flask—ignored him.
“Nobody listens to me,” Wolf said, nudging Ling in the ribs. Ling didn’t look up, just continued reading The Sportsman’s Guide with his hatchet in his lap.
Real men eat in diners.
We stopped somewhere off of U.S. Route 1, halfway to where we were going, and only seven or eight twists off the main road. Gunnar drove it like it was where he stopped for breakfast on his way to work every day. It was actually almost beautiful, in its own Li’l Abner kind of way. Bright shiny polished stainless steel, the whole place was no bigger than a tractor trailer, and shaped like a hot dog. There were small neon signs in the windows and on the roof that just said EAT, as if we were going to pull in, sit down, and then not know what to do with ourselves once we got there.
There were eight men in there already, all of them hunched over at the counter, and all of them wearing hats. The ones with the plaid, ear-flap hunter hats were obviously the local brainy guys. You could tell that right off because the others, with the baseball caps, had their brims all covered in ketchup from swooping too low into the luncheon specials.
But who could blame them?
“Venison croquettes for me,” Wolfgang crowed. “And a cup of moose-face chowder.”
Ling looked to the brothers. “What is their water source here?”
“Artesian well,” Lars answered.
“I’ll have an apple and a glass of water. No ice.”
“Party on, Ling-Ling,” Steven said. “Myself, I’m having the bison balls. Care to join me, Jerome?”
I could not respond. I mean, physically, I couldn’t speak, even if a response had been necessary. Which it certainly shouldn’t have been. I pointed to the spot on the menu where the safe-looking haddock special was.
“Jerk chicken,” Gunnar blurted.
“Huh?” his son asked.
“Jerk chicken,” Gunnar repeated, as if that said it all.
“Jerk chicken,” Lars chimed in. “There’s a man’s dish for ya.”
And so it went. But that was all beside the point anyway. The point was not the entree, but the side dish.
Beans.
That’s right. Beans. The musical fruit and good for your heart and all the other crudities that describe what happens to a person who overindulges in them. That’s what we all had for lunch. The haddock luncheon special? A piece of spongy yellow flesh the size of a deck of cards, a piece of corn bread the same size, and an ocean of oozy brown and sludgy baked beans. Jerk chicken? Little chicken boat, corn bread, floating on bean tide. Bison balls? Use your imagination.
But we all ate without incident, and without words. We were men on a quest here, fueling up for the deep-woods expedition, no time for chitchat. Like tiny midget sword fights going on in a church, the place was spooky with the sound of cutlery and nothing else.
Until, that is, Gunnar sounded the horn. He announced the official end of the gathering with a belch that exploded the calm, tipped over a water glass, and brought the waitress with the check.
I saw, briefly, the wince of embarrassment on Steven’s face as the brothers Lundquist laughed their way into the parking lot. It occurred to me that Gunnar treated his son no differently than the rest of us, except maybe he ignored him a little more.
“Can I ask you something, Steven?” I asked cautiously.
“You want to know what bison balls taste like, right? Well, actually they’re made out of moose burger, but bison balls just sounds cooler.”
“Oh, for sure,” I said. “But no, I wanted to ask about you and your dad.” As I said it, I was thinking of my own father, who I admired from afar. Afar, far, far, but never quite far enough, to tell the truth. “How do you feel about—”
“Jerk chicken,” Steven said, as if that covered it. Which, I guess, it did.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1997 by Chris Lynch
cover design by Elizabeth Connor
978-1-4804-0479-3
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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THE HE-MAN WOMEN HATERS CLUB
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