Crossing the walk, kicking open a gate that wind had shut, Hoover surrendered his burden into the lawn. Ten steps away he looked back and saw that the dog’s body was hidden in deep grass, secret as any Easter egg.
* * * *
Three hundred and some-odd steps. Two turns. Five places where cement has split its seams, heaved up, and grass is growing in the cracks. Pacing this map . . .
(The sea grew tired one day of swinging in harness, ticking in its box of beach. One spark in the flannel sea, possessed of fury, gathering slime like a seeded pearl, thinks of legs and comes onto a rock, lies there in the sun drying. It seeps, it slushes, it creeps, it crawls; it bakes to hardness and walks ... All to the end: that I am walking on two feet down this corridor of black steel and my hand is turning like a key at this found door . . .)
The door collapse-returned. He looked around. A single light cut into the cafe through a porthole of glass in the kitchen door; powdery twilight caught in the mirror. In the dim alley before him, neon signs circled and fell, rose and blinked across their boxes like tiny traffic signals. Profound, ponderous grayness, like the very stuff of thought. . .
Decision failed him; he had turned to go when he heard the door and saw light swell.
“Dr. Hoover . . .”
He turned back.
“Didn’t know for sure you were still around.” Nervously. “About the last ones, I guess.”
Hoover nodded. “Any food, Doug?”
“Just coffee, sorry. Coffee’s on, though. Made a pot for myself, plenty left.” He stepped behind the counter and knocked the corner off a cube of stacked cups, burn scars on his hands rippling in mirror-bemused light.
“Sugar, cream?” Sliding the cup onto crisp pink formica.
Hoover waved them both off. “Black’s the best way.”
“Yeah ... No one been in here for a week or more. I ain’t bothered to keep the stuff out like I ought to.”
Hoover sat down by the cup, noticing that Doug had moved back away from the counter. “Like you say, I guess. Last ones.”
Doug scratched at his stomach where it depended out over the apron. Large hands going into pockets, rumpling the starched white.
“Reckon I could get you a sandwich. Or some toast—-then it don’t matter if the bread’s a little stale.”
“Coffee’s fine. Don’t bother.”
“You sure? Wouldn’t be any trouble.”
Hoover smiled and shook his head. “Forget it, just coffee. But thanks anyway.”
Doug looked down at the cup. “Don’t mind, I’ll have one with you.” His penciled monobrow flexed at the middle, pointed down. It was like the one-stroke bird that children are taught to draw; the upper part of a stylized heart. “Get my cup.” Over his shoulder: “Be right back.”
Light rose as the kitchen door opened; died back down, leaving Hoover alone. He turned his eyes to buff-flecked white tiles; let them carry his interest across the floor, swiveling his chair to keep up. Light picked out tiny blades of gleam on the gold bands that edged formica-and-naugahyde. A few pygmy neons hopscotched high on the walls. The booths were empty as shells, humming with shadow; above them (showing against homogenized paint, rich yellow, creamy tan; sprinkled among windows) were small dark shapes he knew as free-painted anchors.
(All this shut in a small cafe, sculpt in shades of gray. Change one letter, you have cave again . . .)
Doug came back (light reached, retreated), poured steaming coffee. He squeezed around the end of the counter and sat two seats away.
“Neil left today.”
“Yeah, I saw him up the street on the way here.”
“So that’s whose car it was. Wasn’t sure, heard it going by. Going like a bat out of hell from the sound.” He drank, made a face. “Too hot. Wonder what kept him? Said he was going to take off this morning.” He blew across the mouth of his cup, as though he might be trying to whistle, instead breathing vapor. He tried another taste. “Will came through, you know . . .”
Hoover’s own cup was sweating, oils were sliding over the surface. It was a tan cup; the lip was chipped. They weren’t looking at each other.
“That big cabin up on the cape. His grandfather built it for a place to get away and do his writing, way the hell away from everything. Now it’s his.”
“I know. My sister called me up last week to say goodbye, told me about it, they thought it was coming through. Wonder when she’s leaving?”
Doug looked up sharply, then dropped his head. “Thought you knew. She left about three, four days ago.” Doug belched, lightly.
“Oh. I guess she went up early to get things ready, he’ll meet her there. You know women.”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s probably it.” He went for more coffee, poured for them both. “Coffee’s the last thing I need.”
“You too.”
“Yeah—lot worse for some, though. Been over a week for me, lost about twenty pounds. Catnap some . . . Thing you wonder about is, where’d they find a lawyer? For the papers and all. Didn’t, maybe, guess it don’t make much difference anymore, stuff like that. Anyhow, they’re gone.”
(And the wall’s a wedge. Shove it between two people and they come apart, like all the rest. . .)
Hoover shrugged his shoulders, putting an elbow on the counter and steepling fingers against his forehead.
“Almost brought a friend, Doug . . .”
The big man straightened in his chair. His mouth made “Friend?” sit on his lips unspoken.
“But he was indisposed, disposed, at the last minute.”
Doug was staring at him strangely.
“A dog. Neil hit it. I was going to see if I could talk you out of some food for it.”
“Oh! Yeah, there’s some stuff, meat and all I’m just gonna have to throw out anyway. What isn’t spoiled already’s getting that way fast. Didn’t know there were dogs still around, though? Whose is it?”
“There aren’t now. I hadn’t seen it before. Was it: it’s dead.” Extinct.
“Oh. Yeah, Neil was going pretty fast. Dog probably wandered in from someplace else anyway, looking for food after they left him.” Gazing into the bottom of his cup Doug swirled what coffee was left against the grounds, making new patterns, like tiny cinders after a rain. “Always been a cat man myself. Couldn’t keep one, though, haven’t since I was a kid. Sarah’s asthma, you know.”
“You do have to be careful. Used to have hay fever myself, fall come around I couldn’t breathe. Took an allergy test and they cleared it up.”
“Yeah, we tried that. Tried about everything. You oughta see our income tax for the last few years, reads like a medical directory. Sarah got so many holes poked in her, the asthma should have leaked right out. Wasn’t any of it seemed to help, though.”
“How’s Sarah doing? Haven’t seen her for quite a while. She’s usually running around in here helping you, shooing you back to the kitchen, making you change your apron, talking to customers. Brightens the place up a lot.”
Doug tilted the cup to drain an extra ounce of cold coffee off the grounds.
“Not much business lately,” he said. “Boy I had working for me just kind of up and left three-four months ago and I never got around to looking for help, no need of it, specially now.”
“She’s well, though? Doing okay.”
Doug put his cup down, rattling it against the saucer.
“Yeah, she’s okay. She—” He stood and made his way around the counter. “She went away awhile. To get some rest.” He dipped under the counter and came up with a huge stainless steel bowl. “Think I’ll make another pot. This one’s getting stale. Better anyhow if you use the stuff regularly, easier on it, works better—like getting a car out on the road to clean her out.”
He started working at the urn, opening valves, sloshing dark coffee down into the bowl. Hoover watched Doug’s reflection in the shady mirror and a dimmer image of himself lying out across the smooth formica.
So Doug’s wife had gone aw
ay too; Sarah had gone to get some rest . . . Hoover remembered a song he’d heard at one of the faculty parties: Went to see my Sally Gray, Went to see my Sally Gray, Went to see my Sally Gray, Said my Sally’s gone away—only this time Sally Gray had taken everybody else with her . . .
Doug was chuckling at the urn.
“You know I gotta make twenty cups just to get two for us, I mean that’s the least this monster here’ll handle. Ask him for forty-fifty cups, he’ll give it to you in a minute. But you ask him for two, just two little cups of coffee, and he’ll blow his stack, or a gasket or something.” He went back to clanging at the urn. “Reckon you can handle ten of ‘em?” He started fixing the filter, folding it in half twice, tearing off a tiny piece at one corner. “Hell, there ain’t enough people left in town to drink twenty cups of coffee if I was giving it away and they was dying of thirst. Or anywhere around here.”
He bowed the filter into a cone between his hands, climbed a chair to install it, then came down and drew a glass of water, putting it in front of Hoover.
“That’s for while you wait.”
“I need to be going anyway, Doug. Have to get some sleep sooner or later.”
Doug reached and retrieved Hoover’s cup, staring at the sludge settling against the bottom. “One last cup.”
“All right. One more.”
One for the road . . .
Doug bent and rinsed the cup, then got another from the stack and put it on the counter. He stood looking at the clean, empty cup, wiping his hands against the apron. He lit a cigarette, nodding to himself, and the glowing red tip echoed one of the skipping neon signs on the wall behind him. He put the package on the counter and smiled, softly.
“You know, you could’ve sat right here and watched the whole thing happening. I mean, at first there’d be the usual group, but they were . . . nervous. You know: jumpy. They’d sort of scatter themselves out and every now and then the talk would die down and there’d be this quiet, like everybody was listening for something, waiting for something. Then a lot of them stopped coming, and the rest would sit all around the room, talking across to each other, then just sitting there quiet for a long time by themselves. Wasn’t long before the regulars didn’t come anymore—and you knew what was going on, you knew they were draining out of town like someone had pulled the plug.
“That was when the others started showing up. They’d come in with funny looks on their faces, all anxious to talk. And when you tried to talk to ‘em, they’d be looking behind you and around the room and every once in a while they’d get up and go look out the window. And then they’d leave and you’d never see them again.”
Hoover sat with his legs locked back, toes on the floor, regarding the glass of water (the bubbles had nearly vanished). He nodded: he knew, he understood.
“For a while I got some of the ones that were coming through. I’d be in the back and I’d hear the door and come out, and there’d be this guy standing there, shuffling his feet, looking at the floor. He’d pay and take his coffee over in the corner, then the next time I looked around, he’d be gone—lot of them would just take it with them, to go. Then even that stopped.”
(The people: they drip, trickle, run, pour, flood from the cities. They don’t look back. And the ones who stay, try to fight it—they feel it growing in them worse than before. Turning in them, touching them, and they care they love they can’t let go. But the harder they fight, the worse it is, like going down in quicksand, and the wall’s a wedge: shove it between two people and they come apart, like all the rest, like all the rest of the world . . .)
Doug found something on the counter to watch.
“One time during the War, the ship I was on went down on the other side and a sub picked us up. I still remember how it felt, being in that sub, all the people packed in like sardines, stuffed into spaces between controls and motors. You’d think it would be full of noise, movement. But there was something about being under all that water, being closed in, something about the light —anyway, something that made you feel alone, made you want to whisper. I’d just sit in it and listen. Feel. And pretty soon I’d start wanting them all to really go away, to leave me alone . . .”
Doug stood looking for a moment out one of the small round windows past Hoover’s shoulder.
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s the way it is all right.” Then his eyes switched back to Hoover’s cup. “I better go get that coffee, just take it a minute to perk.”
He picked up his cup and walked down the counter toward the kitchen, running his hand along the formica. The door swung back in, wobbled, stopped (light had reached, retreated).
Hoover felt suddenly hollow; empty; squeezed. He looked around. The room was a cave again.
Out in the kitchen, Doug moved among his stainless steel and aluminum. Hoover heard him banging pots on pans, opening doors, sliding things on shelves out of his way. Then the texture of sound changed, sank to quiet, became a silence that stretched and stretched. And seconds later broke: the back door creaked open and shut with a hiss of air along its spring, clicking shut.
(So now the quicksand’s got Doug too, for all his fighting. Now he’s gone with the rest, gone with Sally Gray . . .)
Outside in the alley angling along and behind the cafe, Doug’s Harley-Davidson pumped and caught, coughed a couple of times and whined away, one cylinder banging.
Hoover sat looking at the abandoned cup as silence came in to fill his ears. Then he heard the buzzing of electric wires.
The last grasping and. their fingers had slipped.
The wedge was driven in, and they’d come apart . . .
He stood, digging for a dime and finding he’d forgotten to fill his pockets, then walked to the register and punched a key. “No Sale” came up under the glass. There were two nickels and some pennies.
He fed the coins in (ping! ping!), dialed, and waited. The phone rang twice and something came on, breathing into the wires.
“Cass?”
Breathing.
Again: “Cass?” Louder.
Breathing.
“Cass, is that you?”
Silence.
“Who is this? Please. Cass?”
A small, quiet voice. “I’m afraid you have the wrong number.”
A click and buzzing . . .
After a while, he reached up and flipped out the change tray. As the lid slid away, a tarnished gray eye showed there: someone had left a dime behind.
Nine rings. Cass’ voice in the lifted phone. Sleepy; low and smooth; pate, ready for spreading.
“Cass?”
“Is that you, Bob? Where are you?”
“Doug’s place. Be right home.” The space of a breath. “Honey. . .”
“Yes?”
“Get your bags packed, we’re leaving tonight.”
“Leaving?” She was coming awake. “Where—”
“I don’t know. South maybe, climate’s better. But maybe that’s what everyone will think—anyway, we’ll decide. Just get your things ready, just what you absolutely have to have. We can always pick up things we need in towns. There’s a big box in the bottom of the utility closet, some of my stuff, some tools and so on I got together awhile back. Put that with the rest—there’s some room left in it you can use. I’ll be right home. Everything else we’ll need is already in the car.”
“Bob. . .”
“Just do it Cass. Please. I’ll be right back, to help.”
“Bob, are you sure—”
“Yes.”
She paused. “I’ll be ready.”
He hung up and walked into the kitchen, came out again with a ten-pound sack of coffee under one arm. He started over the tiles toward the door, then turned back and picked up the cigarettes lying on the counter. He stood by the door, looking back down the dim alley: stood at the mouth of the cave, looking into distances (he’d seen a stereopticon once; it was much the same effect).
The tiny neons skipped and blinked dumbly in their boxes; the kitchen light
glared against the window, fell softly along the mirror. Shadows came in to fill the cafe; sat at tables, slumped in booths, stood awry on the floor; watching, waiting. At the end of the counter, the blank tan cup silently surrendered.
He turned and switched the knob. Went through the door. Shut it behind him. The click of the lock ran. away into the still air and died; he was locked into silence . . .
Cautiously he assaulted the street’s independence, heels ticking parameters for the darkness, the motive, the town. The sky hung low above his head.
Orbit 4 - Anthology Page 26
