by Ann Angel
She grabs the phone and hurriedly starts pressing buttons on it. “I’ll give you my number. And I’ll put yours in my phone as well, in case you forget about me.” That was already ridiculously unlikely even before she withdrew her own phone and amazingly began programming both of them at the same time with her two flying thumbs.
“Hi,” Charlie says.
She keeps her head down and focuses on the phones and the task at hand. “Hi, Charlie.”
“I came to apologize,” he says.
“It’s okay,” she says.
“You know, Warren here has been trying to tell me that I can be a little inappropriate sometimes.”
She finishes, flips my phone closed, and looks up at him. She smiles sympathetically as she hands the phone to me and slides out of the seat.
“That’s good,” she says, patting him on the chest.
She turns back to me and says, “Please, if you can arrange to get me the rest of them, that would be great. Just give me a call.” Then she puts money on the table to pay for the drinks. We watch her leave.
“Don’t even bother,” the waitress says just as Charlie begins to bend his knees on his way to sitting. “You know better than that, Charlie Tuna.”
Charlie straightens back up without a word of protest.
“It’s okay,” I say. “He’s with me.”
“That’s right, he is,” she says, gesturing with her thumb for me to scram, too. “Now that your mother’s gone, you can’t be in here, either.” She scoops up the money.
Charlie splutters a laugh as I say, “That was my date, not my mother, if you must know.”
“I don’t think she must know,” Charlie says, pulling me up, “since she must already be in the bathroom.”
I follow him out, collect my bike, and start walking in the direction of Bread & Waters.
“Can I see your phone for a second?” he says.
I sigh loudly as I pass it to him. We both know it’s not really my phone.
“You’re doing it again,” I say as he scrolls.
“Doing what?”
“Being inappropriate.”
“I am not. And anyway, I’ll give you another one as soon as we reach the shop. I must have something like seven of them just now. Nicer ones than this, too.”
I’m behind him as he’s unlocking the shop and hear his low brumble of excited laughter.
“You honestly believe something good is going to come out of you having that phone, don’t you?” I say. He pushes open the door and we are in.
“Of course I do,” he says. “This was like an act of God or something, me getting a second chance like this. She’d never get to know the real me if I didn’t have some way to sneak up on her first.”
He is rummaging around in a couple of the lower drawers in the great wall of dark wood drawers that run right up the wall behind the counter. “Here,” he says cheerily, spilling a half-dozen phones out for me to pick from.
“Honestly, Charlie, I don’t think there is a second chance for you. I don’t think there was a first chance, really. And also, talking like that, about sneaking up on her, that’s another one of those things that might put people off.”
“Oh, you know I don’t mean it like that.”
“Yeah, but I’m not sure my knowing that is much good to you.”
I have my head down, examining the phones, when I feel his big paw on my neck. I look up to see his earnest mug right close to mine. “Of course it is,” he says, and nods it into me like hammering a spike in deep. “You knowing that I’m all right is a whole lot of good to me. Some days it’s everything.”
I nod back at him, a little sad, a little proud, a little uneasy. I look back down at the counter while he still holds on to my neck. I’ve narrowed my selection down to two phones that are both, as promised, a couple of grades above the one I had. “Can’t decide,” I say, holding the two of them.
He lets go of me and sweeps the rest of the phones away. “Ah, what the hell,” he says. “Have ’em both. They’re all charged up, got working sims with at least a few bucks in ’em.”
I laugh as he digs around in another drawer and pulls out a dark sea monster of tangled phone chargers. “But you’ll have to sort this out for yourself,” he says.
The door snaps open, and a tall surfer type with his hair in long black braids says a loud “Yo” to Charlie as he heads straight for the counter. I’ve seen the guy a few times before. He smells of dope and has some kind of arrangement with Bread & Waters that I enjoy not knowing anything about.
“I was just going anyway,” I say, catching the door before it closes.
I get on my bike and start riding. I’m not sure where I’m going because I have three distinct destinations in my head at the same time with no clear winner yet. My room, just because it’s my room. The rotting old dock close to the official ferry berth, because it’s the very spot that puts together the whole of Lundy Lee — the sea and the ship engine aroma and the spores of whatever history wafting right up out of the ancient pier wood — and vaporizes it for me to inhale. Crabbit Café, because I can.
I reach the intersection where a decision must be made, and so I make one. I hop off the bike and start walking it, left. That eliminates just the café and so doesn’t quite make it a decision. Until I slow down to a sluggish shuffle just as I pass the North Star Bar. I squint and strain to see inside. The afternoon crowd is changing over to the evening shift, which means more motion inside and a little louder but nothing that seems like it would be anything of interest to me as I continue on and continue minding my own business.
Until another twenty yards along, I pass the Compass Inn and slow down again. There is cranky music coming from inside, which I think is the same song I always hear coming out of the place. The ferry blows a long horn blast as I swing my leg over the bike.
“Hey,” she calls, and in one motion I throw the other leg over so that all of me stands on the opposite side of the bike like I hurdled it. I couldn’t explain that move even to myself, so I put my hand casually on my hip instead and hope we can just let it pass.
“Nice,” she says. “Now, if you could do it while spinning a lasso at the same time, you’ll have a real act.”
“Thanks. I wasn’t looking for you; I just happened to be going past.”
She has her phone out. “Okay, fine, Warren. But can you explain what this is about?” She turns the screen and its message to face me: I have not been able to stop picturing what our children will look like.
The freak couldn’t even manage to say would look like instead of will.
“Oh, Christ. Okay, that is not my fault.”
“Of course not. This is Lundy Lee, after all. Go on, blame it on your father and his penis — I dare you.”
I do nothing of the kind. I do no thing of any kind. That same music plays, and the Lucky Buoy grinds its way out into the harbor.
“Warren?” Celeste says. “Warren? Warren?”
Suddenly she is on me, squeezing my face the way you would if you thought a baby was choking on something.
“Stop it,” I say, wrestling her hands off me and backing away a little.
“What was that? Warren, that is not funny. Don’t ever do that again. It was like some kind of seizure. Not funny at all. What is with you guys? Honestly.” She lights up a cigarette and paces the width of the sidewalk, too big a cat for too small and filthy a cage.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Fine,” she says. “You want a smoke?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“I meant no, thank you.”
“Even better. And we will not be having children, Warren, so stop picturing them.”
“I wasn’t. That was Charlie. I’m sorry.”
“I’m going to strangle that guy before I leave this place, I swear.”
“Don’t, please!” I snap. “Either of those. Please don’t.”
She stops the pacing, takes a long draw on her cigarette, t
hen tilts her head back to let the smoke get away, totally Hollywood about it, and I bet she’s not even trying.
“Fine,” she says. “I won’t strangle him. As for —”
“Will we ride out and get some more of your pictures?” I blurt.
“What, now?”
It’s not near dark yet, but the day is done with being light.
“Now, later, whenever you say,” I say.
She looks as if she’s thinking, and I never like my chances with that kind of thing, so I intervene.
“There’s no telling when they’re going to come and empty the place for good. Looked like things were all lined up for exactly that, as a matter of fact.”
She does some more of that hot smoky thing with the cigarette until the blue cloud floats off above her.
“Okay, now it is, handsome,” she says, the finest sentence there will ever, ever be.
“This isn’t working, Celeste,” I say as I struggle to get us even halfway up the Tidal Road. Struggle doesn’t even cover it, because I’ve been weaving and wobbling the handlebars like I have some kind of neurological disorder and practically throwing her right off into the rough grass.
“Haven’t you ever seen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?” she asks, sliding off the handlebars and facing me.
“Of course I’ve seen it. So what? The Kid rides the lady around on the handlebars, yes, but there is also a song playing for them at the same time. We don’t have a song playing. And another thing: Those guys jumped into a river from like a million-foot-high cliff and they survived. I don’t think you’re being fair.”
She has her arms folded and is shaking her head. “And I thought you were a romantic.”
I wonder if she knows how much she’s killing me.
“You have impossibly high standards for this sort of thing!”
“Ha!” She barks out a laugh and slaps me on the forearm. “Okay, switch.”
“Excuse me?”
Growing impatient, Celeste manhandles me around to where she is in driving position and I am backed up to the handlebars.
“You have to be kidding,” I say.
“On the count of three,” she says, and starts guiding me with her surprisingly strong hands. “One, two, three . . . !”
Magic. I cannot believe I even hear that song coming from somewhere.
“Fun, huh,” she says as we glide smoothly up the road toward our destination.
“The most fun I have ever had in my entire life,” I say.
“I forget; how much farther is it?” she asks.
“About a quarter mile. Not getting tired, are you?”
“You offering to take over?”
I shake my head vigorously. Then I do something even I find unexpected. For the first time I can think of, I start singing “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.”
In my state of delirium, I imagine her joining in.
“Don’t do that,” she says instead.
I am up and just about through the pantry window. Then I am through, lowering myself backward down to the floor.
“Hey,” she calls, “wait for me.”
I didn’t think she would be doing any of the dirty work, and worry she might fall on her head on this side or something. I grab the windowsill and pull myself up, to find her right there, her nose to my nose. “Excuse me, sir, you’re blocking my way.”
I drop back to the floor and finally feel a little bit useful when she does in fact come through the more difficult headfirst way. There is more than a little thrill involved when I get to reach up and take her hands and practically carry her down to me. She has her arms around my shoulders as her feet touch down.
“Thank you,” one of us says, and I’m almost certain it’s me.
“Warren?” she says, looking past me through the pantry opening to the café.
I turn to see what she sees and see that she sees nothingness.
“No,” I say, and the two of us walk into the main room.
Everything is gone.
“Celeste,” I say, “I’m so . . . It was all here this afternoon, I swear. This is impossible.”
“It’s very possible,” she says wearily. “Trust me, I know. Repo men are like special forces commandos, only a lot less nice.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say, because I am so sorry. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Stop that,” she says, taking me by the hand and walking across the space that is suddenly spacious, to the big windows overlooking the marshes beyond the long porch. “It’s actually a beautiful spot.”
“It’s nice, yeah,” I say, feeling even sorrier. Celeste is looking up and down the marshlands, bobbing her head repeatedly at the little glints of moonlight now sparkling between the rough reeds, and she seems to be forgetting about her losses already. And they were hers. So why do I feel sorry for myself?
“This could still be a wonderful place,” she says. “If it was run the right way, and times got better around here.”
“I suppose,” I say like a mopey kid.
“Maybe we can run it together, then,” she says brightly, still looking off.
My heart jumps. “We could. We so seriously could.”
“Yeah, I could see loving this.”
“I did,” I say, “when I lived here. It wasn’t long, and the work was lousy, and Dom and Bobbi were kind of awful . . . but I really did love living here.”
She finally turns from the view. “Here?” she says, pointing to the floor beneath us. “You lived right here?”
I nod, and still holding on for life, I lead her to my former lodging. It’s on the opposite side of the kitchen from the pantry and was probably intended as storage or maybe a small office. There is no electricity and so no light, but the moon is oozing its way through the metal mesh they used to secure all the windows. From what I can tell, the repo men found nothing worth taking here.
“It’s lovely,” she says.
“Small,” I say, “but yeah.” There is a single bed with a short pine headboard, and a flimsy pine bookshelf that served as dresser and night table and everything else. Full of surprises today, I decide to launch one more. No, that’s incorrect, since I don’t decide at all. “Would you like to stay over?”
The silence there in the sparkly dark is probably only three or four seconds, but I feel like I could grow a beard during the interval. Then she squeezes my hand a couple of pulses.
“You know we won’t be doing anything,” she says, hushed.
“No,” I say, rushed, borderline panting. “No. I mean, yes, of course not. How come?”
She rolls out a giggle that almost brings her down to my age range and reach. “Train’s about to leave the station now, Warren. You going to behave or not?”
One hand is not enough, so I clamp on with the other one, holding tightly to her hand. “Don’t leave, train. I will behave.”
What does a sleeping person usually sound like? I’m not sure because I don’t think I have ever been up close like this to a sleeping someone.
Celeste, naturally, sounds beautiful, even and swooshy like a mini version of waves rolling into a beach and brought right here into my room. I don’t feel anywhere near sleep, and I don’t care because I could just listen all night.
Then her phone goes off: a text, dammit.
She sighs, only slightly louder than her sleep breathing but a lot different. She checks the phone. She reads it and passes it over her shoulder to me. “It’s for you. I hope so, anyway.”
I read. Where are you I am lonesome.
I text back immediately. You are being inappropriate now cut it out.
“Could be for either of us,” I say, returning the phone to her. When it beeps again, she just pushes it back in my direction.
That hurts my feelings, it says.
When I sigh loudly, Celeste reaches back, takes the phone from me, and switches it off.
“Problem solved,” she says.
“I think he knows I’m with you.”
“I just don’t want to make him feel bad.”
She rolls over crisply. From the slight shadows, she looks totally exotic to me as she looks up at me propped on my elbow.
“What is the deal with you two?”
“He’s my friend,” I say. “He’s my best friend. Best friend I ever had.”
“Is he?” And in just those two words, she sounds like she’s eased up on him considerably. “And you said you’ve only known him since you got here . . . what, two months ago?”
“Well, yeah,” I say, and allow myself to flop down sideways, half burying my face in the pillow. “That’s nothing. You’re already the second-best friend I ever had.”
“Oh,” she gasps, “oh, sweetheart.” She reaches over and strokes my face, making all things better with her touch and highlighting my freakishness at the same time. Okay, fair deal.
“And I work for him,” I say, a sudden desperate rush to tell everything there is about myself to this one person and then be done with it. “He takes care of me. People come into Bread & Waters all the time. And they ask for stuff, goods and services, as Charlie likes to say. And Charlie provides. If he has it. And if he doesn’t, he likes to get it for them. Charlie provides.”
“Goods, sure, I can see that, a place like Bread & Waters, makes sense. Services?”
“You know, anything, really. Normal stuff, worker stuff. Odd jobs. And really odd jobs. And he’s like a broker, and somebody will ask and I’ll get a call, ’cause I’m on call, basically, phones provided by him. So like I’ll get a call to go on the ferry over to the Big Island, where an elderly lady with some dough just lost her husband. Very sad, she’s closing up their old vacation cottage and just needs help getting it all cleaned out because she’s got nobody. Only it turns out she’s not really old and not really a lady and there is no cleaning involved after all.”
Celeste is breathing all over my face now, and I hear my own breathing get quick.
“Oh, sweetheart,” she says again the same way as before. I would have thought I could never get tired of that, but I’m starting to believe I could.
