The Wide Night Sky

by Matt Dean

  Chapter 11

  A hazy Indian summer funk hung over Market Street. Tourists filled the pavement, walking heedlessly in pairs and trios. John Carter avoided them as best he could, lumbering right, left, forward, and back in a clumsy box step that encompassed a whole concrete square of the sidewalk. He waved a handbill in the air and called out, mostly ignored, to the passersby: “Graveyard tours, ghost tours, darkside tours. Chucktown Tours. Best tours in Charleston, right here.” Thanks to the unexpected afternoon warmth, he sounded as limp as he felt. If Ms. Treat were here, he thought, even she would say he wasn’t shouting half loudly enough.

  One leg of his box step took him toward a plate-glass window and narrow door beneath a red awning. Blocky gilt letters filled the window—Chucktown Tours and Best In Charleston. Partly hidden behind the glass and glare and glitzy lettering, his boss, Jo Barber, moved from one end of the office to the other. She looked harmless enough, like a certain kind of young grandmother—eyeglasses that were too large, heels that were too high, stretch pants that were too tight. His dad, who’d known her for years and years, thought she was rather silly. But John Carter found her utterly terrifying. The sight of her invariably made him think of triremes and galley slaves churning gigantic oars.

  Dipping his head, he wiped his forehead on his sleeve. The handbills had been printed on glossy card stock, as slick as soft butter, and they were difficult to handle, especially with sweaty hands. They started to slip from John Carter’s grasp, and just as he began to straighten the stack, someone brushed by him and jostled his elbow. Every card but one went flying across the sidewalk. When he hunkered down to gather them, a man stepped on his hand, stumbled, and hollered back that he should watch himself.

  “Damn Yankees.”

  A woman had spoken. John Carter glanced up—he saw straight brown hair and little else—and went back to recovering the handbills. She crouched down beside him, and with her long pink fingernails began prying up the loose cards.

  “Thank you,” he said in a murmur. “You’re very—”

  Even with the sourness of his own sweat-damp T-shirt so much in his nose, John Carter suddenly caught a whiff of her perfume or shampoo. Something floral, but sweet, too, like sugar-cookie dough. His head snapped up, and he looked at her more closely. What color were her eyes, exactly? Hazel? Brown? No, definitely not brown. Brown was by far too dull a word.

  They stood. She handed back almost all of the leaflets she’d collected, keeping one with a dusty footprint across the corner. She pored over it, as if it contained volumes of information.

  “Openings for tonight,” he told her. “All tours.”

  “Thanks, handsome.” She put the card in her purse.

  “Thank you,” he said, his voice sticking in his throat, his penis stiffening in his jeans. He fanned out the handbills. “Thank you for—” For these, he meant—thank you for helping with these—but he couldn’t get the words out.

  When at last she turned and strode away, her plump calves clenched like fists. The back of each knee bore a pair of curved dimples, like parentheses. Her cutoffs hugged her round hips, and her purse slapped against her left buttock, rippling the flesh of her thigh. She rounded the corner and passed out of view, and John Carter could breathe again. His erection subsided.

  He held up a leaflet. Left, right, back, forward. “Revolutionary War,” he called. “War Between the States.” Left, right, back, forward. “Walk where Washington walked. See where Beauregard slept.”

  At the curb, he spun on the ball of his foot—just another corner of the box—but for once he didn’t think to turn his head first and make sure the path was clear.

  “Revolutionary—”

  Instead of War, he blurted out wah or whoa or something in between. The strange-eyed woman had returned, and he had to stop short to avoid stepping on her toes. He stumbled back.

  She was carrying a bottle of Evian. A haze of condensation covered the plastic of the bottle. Fat droplets of water dripped from its base. She held it out to him. “You looked thirsty.”

  “I—I can pay you back.”

  Some dark strands of her hair clung to her neck and cheek. With a grin, she said, “It cost a dollar. I didn’t have to take out a title loan.”

  Her smile discomfited him. Whenever anyone seemed to be enjoying a joke, he assumed he must be the butt of it. Old habit, impossible to break. He thought of things he might say to make her leave. But when he spoke, he said, “Umber.”

  She cocked her head.

  “Your eyes are raw umber. The color of your eyes. Like the crayons, you know?”

  Shaking the Evian, she said, “You don’t want it?”

  He took it from her. Water dripped from it and splashed the toes of his shoes. He turned the bottle sideways and pressed it against his forehead.

  “I’m Doris.” She wiped her hand on her cutoffs. “And you?”

  John Carter stammered, but he managed eventually to speak his name.

  “Pleased to meet you, John.”

  “John Carter,” he said.

  “I heard you. I’m Doris Park.”

  “No, what I mean is—”

  “You don’t remember me.”

  “Oh.” He paused. It was true. He didn’t remember her.

  “I work for Truluck.”

  Doris who worked for Truluck. Now he remembered. “You fired me,” he said.

  “Denny Truluck fired you. I just conveyed the message.”

  Bad enough to consort with the enemy. He was not, in addition, going to consort with the girl who’d given him the axe. He handed back the bottle of Evian. Taking a step back, he wiggled the stack of handbills. “I’m still on the clock.”

  “I’ll be on my way, too. But—” Taking him by the wrist, she pulled him across the sidewalk and into the doorway of a neighboring shop. For the first time, she seemed unsure of herself. “Do you ever plan something in your head—something you want to say—and then you can’t force yourself to say it that way at all?”

  John Carter made an involuntary noise, half laugh, half sigh. “Only about twenty or thirty times a day,” he said.

  Doris giggled so artlessly that for once John Carter felt he was in on the joke. Brushing her hair back, pulling free the strays that had clung to her skin, she said, “Even though I work for the opposing camp, so to speak—”

  “And you fired me.”

  She went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “Do you think you’d be willing to—?”

  She stopped and made a face. She was staring at a point beyond John Carter’s shoulder. With a wince, he followed her gaze. He fully expected to find Jo Barber standing behind him, glowering through the lenses of her extraordinarily large, astonishingly scarlet eyeglasses. But there was no one there—or rather, no one but the usual parade of tourists.

  “Do you have a cell phone?” Doris asked him.

  “What? Of course,” he said, and pulled his phone from his pocket.

  Doris grabbed it away from him and replaced it with the water bottle. The wet plastic slapped against his palm. To keep from dropping the thing, he clapped his other hand around it. The handbills fell to the ground all over again, and this time he let them go.

  “What are you—?”

  Twiddling her fingers in the air, she shushed him. She tapped the screen of his phone. She tapped and tapped and tapped. John Carter opened the Evian and drank. The water was, after all, so beautifully cold that, once he’d started gulping it down, he couldn’t stop. He swallowed about three-quarters of it in one long chug.

  Doris held up his phone, showing him what she’d done. She’d added herself to his contacts—name, phone number, e-mail. And somehow, without his noticing, she’d even snapped a photo of herself. “It means you can call me.” He must have looked confused. Speaking very slowly, she said, “For a date.”

  John Carter stiffened again in his jeans. His face went hot. He considered pouring the rest of the Evian over his head.

  “Unless,�
�� she said, “that’s something you wouldn’t ever do?”

  “It’s something I would do,” he said, his voice high and hoarse.

  She began backing away. She looked, above all, relieved, and that surprised him. Had she needed courage to approach him? That was completely backward, wasn’t it? A girl this beautiful and a boy this ordinary—and she’d needed courage? He couldn’t get his mind around it.

  “All right, John, before I get you in a heap of trouble, I’ll—”

  “John Carter.” He said it as gently as he could. “My name is John Carter.”

  “I know. John Carter, like the guy on ER.”

  “No. Yes. I guess so. But no.”

  She frowned.

  “John Carter Littlefield. That’s my whole name, and I go by John Carter.”

  “Why?”

  Mouth open, he stared at her.

  “You have to admit,” she said, “John Carter is a lot of syllables.”

  “It’s only one more syllable than Doris.”

  “What about J.C.?”

  “I already tried that. Nobody would switch. Besides, it’s only one less syllable.”

  “Jo Co? Jay Car? Jacky? Jay Kay? Jakey?”

  John Carter wrinkled his nose.

  “Something with panache. Jean-Cartier.” She affected a comic French accent: Zhahn caught-ee-YAY.

  “That adds a syllable.”

  Doris shrugged. “I’ll think it over and get back to you.”

  After a moment, as if by wordless agreement, they emerged from the doorway into the open air. The foot traffic had dwindled. A block or so west, a modest crowd had gathered in front of Bubba Gump’s. John Carter fought back a surge of raw panic. He’d let Doris distract him through much of the pre-dinner rush, and he was probably—okay, definitely—in a whole lot of trouble.

  “I forgive you for not remembering me,” she said.

  “Me too,” he said, and then, “That answer made no sense.”

  “Not at all.”

  Waving toward the handbills that had fallen, he said, “I guess I should—”

  “Okay,” she said. “Call me.” And she turned away.

  He bent to retrieve the leaflets. Any that hadn’t already been wrecked were certainly ruined now. He’d wasted about a dozen of them. He’d be fortunate, he thought, if Jo let him finish out the night.

  “Hey. John Carter.”

  He looked up and looked around. Doris had called to him from half a block away.

  “Doris Park,” he called back.

  “You’re kind of adorable.”

  “I have no idea what to do with that information,” he said.

  “Say ‘thank you.’ Duh.”

  Leaflets in hand, he walked toward her. “What were you planning to say? You know—what was it you were practicing in your head?”

  “Oh, that.” She blushed. “It was a Romeo and Juliet thing. Chucktown and Truluck, Capulet and—and—”

  “Montague?”

  Long-faced and rabbity, she glanced at something beyond his right shoulder. She caught his chin in her hand to keep him from turning his head. “If it turns out—hypothetically, you understand—that I got you in big trouble with Jo, then I hope—”

  “John Carter?” And that was Jo. Although she’d called his name from a hundred or more yards away, her voice was piercingly clear. “John Carter Littlefield.”

  “I’ll call you later,” he told Doris. “I promise.”

  “Good luck,” Doris said.

  With a nod, he turned and hurried toward Jo and her big red glasses.