He sighed and looked at his watch. It was twenty past noon. He settled back into his seat, dropping his hand out the window. Letting it rise and dip in the wind, he felt like a fighter pilot controlling the flaps of a plane every time the air caught his fingers and changed their direction. In the serenity of that moment, the thought returned to him: Gilchrist. What the hell is in Gilchrist?
And wasn’t that a good question? Probably it was nothing more than a coincidence that he’d heard the name in his dream and then seen the sign the very next day. Those weren’t exactly two obscure or unreasonable things to connect. The sign was a sign. That was all. He’d more than likely just seen it after repeated trips by it, and for some reason, the information had finally bubbled up to the surface and combined with whatever other nonsense was floating around in the mixing bowl where dreams were made.
Another sign passed overhead: MA-2 WEST – CONCORD. Then below that: WALDEN POND NEXT LEFT.
Nothing about him wanted to go home. He’d already exhausted his agenda for the day, and he was starting to get hungry, not to mention thirsty. The idea of a cold beer and some food didn’t sound half bad at all. A little hair of the dog would take care of that last little edge of hangover that the aspirin hadn’t killed. What did he have to lose?
Several minutes later, when the Concord exit approached, Peter did not turn off. Instead, he continued on. Forty-one miles to go.
2
Gilchrist seemed to emit a strange, almost nostalgic energy that Peter felt the moment he turned onto the downtown strip. Nothing looked familiar, but damned if he didn’t feel like he had been there before.
He drove slowly up what he could only imagine was Main Street, eyes searching for a place that offered food and drink. It didn’t take long for him to spot what he was looking for. A modest corner building at the first intersection he came to had a neon Pabst sign in the window. The establishment was called Dale’s Tavern, according to the lettering above the door.
Peter went through the intersection and parked in front of a place called Tedford’s. It looked like a hardware store. He got out and crossed the street to Dale’s.
As Peter was approaching the bar, hand about to reach for the door, it burst open. A man sort of stumbled out, head down, as his finger dug around inside a pack of cigarettes. Peter stalled and stepped back. The man looked up, gracelessly pushing a comma of greasy brown hair off his forehead. His nose was reddish-purple and fat with broken blood vessels.
“Wuhcha fuggin want here, pal?” the man slurred, one eye half shut. He hitched up his pants slowly with one hand and took another step out the door, letting it slam behind him. “Ain’t nothin here for ya. G’home b’fore this place swallas you up.”
“All right, if you say so,” Peter said dismissively, giving the man space to walk by. He had dealt with enough drunks in his time to know it was best not to engage someone in the throes of a blackout. Things could easily go from friendly to aggressive in a matter of seconds, the simplest things interpreted as a call to battle. He had been that way more times than he cared to remember.
“I sed wuhcha fuggin doin? You come here, gonna stay here.” The man lunged at Peter, grabbed him by the shoulders, and licked the side of his face. He reeked of booze, body odor, and a lifetime of cigarette smoke.
“Get off me.” Peter tore himself away.
The man broke away and started laughing, cramming a bent cigarette into his mouth. He stumbled past Peter, who was standing there, shocked, and started weaving up the sidewalk, searching his pockets, presumably for a lighter to fire up his crooked Pall Mall.
The door opened again, and another man came out, this one tall, middle-aged, and wearing an apron. “He give you trouble? I just gave him the boot.”
Peter wiped his cheek on the sleeve of his shirt. “Huh? No. No, not really. Just…”
“He lick you?”
Peter smiled. “Is that what that was?”
The man laughed. “That’s Benny. He does that from time to time. He’s mostly harmless. Doesn’t bite, is what I mean. Were you trying to come in?”
“I was thinking about it. Anyone else going to mistake my face for an ice cream cone?”
“I can’t promise you that.” The man smirked. “But I can promise you that our beer’s cold and that Benny won’t be back to bother you.”
“You serve food?” Peter asked. “I wanted grab some lunch.”
The man straightened and folded his arms, straddling the doorway. It was a look of pride. “Best burgers in town. The Dale’s Delight, it’ll blow your damn hair back. Guar-own-teed. Some might tell you Diane’s up the road is better, but they’d be lying… or plain wrong. She uses that lean beef.”
“Sounds good to me,” Peter said.
“Come on in. I’ll fry you up a couple. First beer’s on the house to make up for Benny’s bad first impression.”
He followed the man inside.
Dale’s was a classic dimly lit local bar, and it was just the kind of place Peter had been looking for. It was the type of joint where the burgers were greasy and the beer was cheap and cold. A couple of lone patrons were at the bar when he came in. They both turned around, regarded Peter for a second, then went back to gazing down into their beer glasses, perhaps searching for whatever it was they felt but could never describe had passed them by. The air smelled of long nights and pool chalk. A jukebox was pumping out Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.”
He grabbed a seat at the bar, exactly halfway between the two old beer-gazers sitting at opposite ends. The man in the apron walked around a large wooden column and went behind the bar. He pulled a beer from a tap into a tall glass and cut off the head with a butter knife. “Who should I make this out to?” he asked, setting it in front of Peter.
Peter took a long sip, then reached over the bar. “Peter.”
They shook hands.
“Good to meet you. Name’s George. Don’t think I’ve seen you around here before. I’m usually pretty good with faces.”
“As good as Benny?” Peter offered a smirk that said his comment was all in good fun.
George leaned back against the bar and laughed. “Good one. All right, not bad.”
“I’m just passing through,” Peter said. “I don’t live too far from here.”
“Where’re you from?” George picked up a dish towel and started folding it.
“Concord.” Peter took another sip, baring his teeth as the cold carbonation stung his mouth. “Thanks for the beer, by the way. Cold as promised.”
“Oh sure, I’ve been to Concord before. It’s nice,” George said. “You want me to grab you a menu, or should I set you up with a couple of Delights?”
“Depends. What comes on a Delight besides full-fat beef?”
“The works, which includes my wife’s homemade sweet pickles—best you’ll ever have—plus bacon, cheese, and barbecue sauce. You won’t leave hungry… or disappointed. I can assure you of that.” He flicked a thumb over his shoulder, pointing to a small cardboard cutout on the wall that read SATISFACTION GUARANTEED, and once more, he said, “Guar-own-teed.”
Peter thought for a moment, and decided he could indeed take down two burgers. “I’ll take two… make sure no onion, though. It’ll be repeating on me all night if I eat any onions.”
“No onions, no problem. So two Delights, sans cebollas, coming right up. That’s Spanish for onion, in case you flunked high school.” George winked at Peter. “Want another beer while you wait? I fly solo until about four o’clock, so things can go a little slow this early.”
“Yeah, I’ll take another. Thanks.”
George pulled another beer from the tap and set it in front of Peter. He disappeared through a swinging door behind the bar. For the brief moment it was open, Peter could see into the small kitchen, the engine room of the bar. When the door closed, he took down the rest of his first beer, slid the empty glass to the edge of the bar, and brought the fresh one in close to his chest. Then, with no one to t
alk to, he let his eyes drift down into his glass.
“I know you,” a voice said from down the bar. It sounded accusatory in tone, but also mixed with gentle interest. “Yeah, yup, I sure do recognize you.”
Peter glanced in the direction of the voice. The old man’s eyes lit up when Peter looked at him. Peter smiled politely back.
The bar relic slid down two stools, eyes narrowing as if switching to some kind of investigatory focal strength. “Yeah, yeah, I thought I placed you when you come in. You were on the back of my wife’s book. She read that damn thing every night for a week. Cried at the end and wouldn’t shut up about a fella named Boone for the next month.” He slapped his hand on the counter. “Author!” he said, with the deciding finality of a judge. “That’s you. You’re the author.” He screeched with a wheezy laughter that broke up into a cough.
“I think you might mean Boothe,” Peter said, trying not to come off as self-righteous.
“What’s that?” the man asked, wiping his sleeve over his mouth.
“The character’s name in the book… it’s Boothe, not Boone. Was she reading Jupiter Place?” Peter suddenly felt arrogant for correcting the man, and even more so for saying the name of his book out loud like it should mean something.
“Yeah, that was it. Sorry. I’m no reader myself. But my wife is.” The old man moved down another stool. “So did you write that?”
“I did,” Peter said.
“I knew it. Oh man. We got someone famous sittin right here.” He perked up and looked over Peter’s head to the man sitting at the other end. “Hey, Alton, get this… this fella is a writer, and a famous one.”
Alton didn’t seem to care. “Is that right?” he said, drinking his beer and never looking in their direction.
“Not a fan, I guess,” Peter said softly, but not without humor.
“Forget him. Hey, let me buy you a beer.” The old man dropped a wrinkled five-dollar bill on the table.
“No, that’s okay, really.”
The door behind the bar swung open, and George came out, spinning a bag of hamburger buns closed with a twist tie. He dropped them on the table beside him. “What’s all the commotion out here, Walt? What’re you shouting about? It’s too damn early for shouting.”
The old man patted Peter on the shoulder as if staking a claim. “You know who this is, Georgie? This ain’t no ordinary customer.”
“Don’t call me that, Walt. Nobody’s called me Georgie since I was a kid. I didn’t like it then, and I don’t like it now,” George said calmly, but with an underlying toughness in his voice that suggested a person might do well to heed his warning. Then he looked curiously at Peter. “I know his name’s Peter. And he’s hungry and likes cold beer. That’s about the long and short of it.”
“The man’s an author. Peter…” Walt started snapping his fingers, searching for a last name.
“Martell,” Peter said, when it became clear Walt was going to be snapping all night.
“A writer, huh?” George gave a slight frowning nod that looked something like approval. “We had another writer in town once. It was a few years back. The horror guy. Declan Wade was his name. He rented a place up at the lake. You ever heard of him?”
“Sure I have. He’s good,” Peter said. “I’ve only read one of his novels, Gray Dawn—I don’t really read that kind of stuff anymore—but I know he sells roughly a gazillion books a year. He’s a hell of a lot bigger than I am, that’s for sure.”
“He seemed like a nice enough fella. Pretty much kept to himself.” George took the empty glass from in front of Peter, dipped it in a sink full of sudsy water, and placed it on a rack. “So if horror isn’t your thing, what’re your books about?”
Peter sniffed. It wasn’t a derisive gesture; it was one of lived frustration. He hated that question, and yet it always seemed to be the first one people asked him when they discovered he was a writer. “I wish I knew,” he said.
That was the answer—or some variation of it—he always gave. And that was because it was the truth. There were only so many ways to bend the truth when one wanted to keep the heart of it intact. That was why lies were easier. A person can go at them, shape and reshape them with a jackhammer, and they still come off the line pretty much as good as the next one and the next one after that.
“Tell me, how does a person write a book if they don’t know what it’s about?” George asked.
Walt followed up: “Yeah, that don’t make no sense to me, neither.” His face was cramped into a raisin of confusion.
Peter felt the beer starting to kick in. His nerves took their claws, one by one, out of the meat of his brain. His neck warmed. “Writing a book is a strange thing. It can mean so many different things to so many different people at so many different times. I guess after a while, I kind of lost track of what the stories were ever even about to begin with. But that’s assuming I ever really knew in the first place…” Peter gulped his beer. “Which I didn’t.”
“So you do know, or you don’t?” George asked.
“I do…” Peter paused for dramatic effect again. “And I don’t.”
“So which is it?” Walt inched even closer, and Peter could smell the body odor coming off the man. Not as bad as Benny’s had been, but close.
“Both and neither,” Peter said.
George laughed. “I think you’re full of shit. That’s what I think.”
“I am…” Peter downed the rest of his beer in one sip and pushed the glass out in front of him when he was done. “And I am not. I’ll do another, if you’d be so kind.”
This time, it was Walt who laughed. “He is, and he ain’t. I like that. Yeah, me too. We’re all full of shit in here… and we also ain’t. I’ll drink to that.” He took a deep drink, finishing the beer, and ran his tongue around his lips. Then he stood. “I should probably head back to work. Good to meet you, Peter. My wife’s never gonna believe I met you. George, I’ll see you later.” Still shaking his head, he turned and walked out of the bar.
George took the empty glass from Peter, filled it, and set it back down. “You’re all right, writer. Your burgers should be about done. I’ll go check.”
“Thanks. I was just fooling around, though. Truth is, I really don’t know. The books I wrote were just stories I wanted to tell, so I told them. I know they’re about something, but the answer never seems to be the same when I try to explain it, so I honestly just figure I don’t know. Does that make sense?”
“I get what you’re saying…” George said, turning away. “And I don’t.”
Peter laughed. “Fair enough.”
George picked up the bag of hamburger buns he’d put on the table a few minutes before, then went back through the swinging door. For a brief second, the sound of sizzling meat escaped, but it was abruptly cut off as the door settled into place on its double-action spring hinges.
Peter sat back in the bar stool, crossing his arms. Unfed, the jukebox had shut off, but the silence of the bar was peaceful. Dim, warm, closed-in, and strangely—if not eerily—familiar, Dale’s Tavern reminded Peter of a giant pregnant belly, Big Mother’s womb gestating drunken offspring and birthing them out onto the streets of Gilchrist. He smirked at the absurdity of the picture conjured by that comparison. Then he glanced into his glass and watched the bubbles slowly rise to the surface and pop. It was almost hypnotic to watch.
A few minutes later, George returned with a basket of burgers, and damn it if he hadn’t been telling the absolute truth. Each was roughly as big around as a tea saucer, and they really were the best burgers Peter had ever tasted—and probably the largest, too. Both went down far too easily, and onions or no, he suspected he would be tasting those burgers right up through midnight as he lay in bed, one hand tucked behind his head, stomach acid nipping at the back of his throat.
When he was finished, Peter leaned back and rested his hands atop his swollen stomach, patting it contently. “I think you’re going to have to borrow a wheelbarrow from someo
ne to get me out of here. I’m stuffed. I honestly don’t think I can move.”
George was topping off a saltshaker, holding it at eye-level for precision. “They’re good, aren’t they?” he said in a measured voice, eyes watching the salt closely as it streamed out of the container and into the shaker, careful not to spill any.
“Dangerously so. My compliments to the chef.” Peter pretended to tip a hat.
“Well, I don’t know that I’d call myself a chef, but a good burger, I can do.”
“No argument there,” Peter said. “Whatever you’re doing, I’d keep doing it.”
“That’s the plan. Except on holidays.” George screwed on the top of the saltshaker and put it next to the three others he had filled.
“You said there’s a lake around here? Is that right?” Peter asked. An idea had come to him; slowly at first, but over the course of an hour or so, it had grown to something he was starting to seriously consider.
“That’s right. Lake Argilla. Locals call it Big Bath, though. Beautiful place.”
Peter leaned forward, elbows on the bar. “I was hoping maybe you could help me with something. Maybe point me in the right direction. It’d be a lot easier than me having to search it out for myself.”
“Sure,” George said. “I’d be happy to help. What is it?”
Peter told him.
3
Leo Saltzman, owner of Saltzman Real Estate, stared down at the freshly shined tips of his Weejuns. The dress pants bunched around his ankles pooled over most of them, but the tips, he watched tap up and down as he sat in the dense heat of the small bathroom in the back of the office. He checked his watch and sighed. It’d been twenty minutes and still no movement. That was the longest he was supposed to sit there. Doc Barrett had told him any longer than that, and he would end up giving himself hemorrhoids, or piles, as his wife liked to refer to them. And making things worse, the castor oil the doctor had given him had failed to get his plumbing flowing properly again. The day was shaping up to be a bust. If nothing was moving yet, it likely wasn’t going to budge. Not today, anyway. Leo picked up the bottle of castor oil on the radiator, unscrewed the cap, and finished it off for good measure. He’d been advised to take two to three tablespoons on an empty stomach, but Leo Saltzman was a man who believed in doing things right or not doing them at all. Why take two tablespoons with no food when he could take five times that amount with a hearty breakfast of bacon, eggs, coffee, and home fries?
Gilchrist Page 3
