Further Joy

by John Brandon

  “I don’t want to be in a gray area. I feel like I’ve been in a gray area for too long.”

  “Whoa, see, that’s a line. I could use that. That’s sharp dialogue.”

  Pauline took a hard gulp of her beer. It was still ice cold. She didn’t look over at Herbie but instead kept her gaze vaguely ahead—on the bottles, on the string of plastic peppers hanging from the shelves, on the blue and gold macaw perched up among the tequilas.

  “Why do you get to judge who’s boring or interesting?” she said. “I think you’re kind of boring. I think writing magazine articles is boring. I wish you’d just come out and ask for what you want. I’ve already decided the answer, so you might as well ask.”

  Herbie laughed through his nose, his straight white teeth lined up in a showy smile, but Pauline had cracked his cool veneer. He tried to think of what to say, fooling with a stack of coasters on the bar. “Hey, take it easy with the insults,” he told her. “Maybe I’m just in need of a pal. I been on the road a long time. It gets lonesome. I need characters, but I need a pal too.”

  The lights in the restaurant dimmed a little and Herbie traded out his glasses for a pair he pulled from a pocket in his shorts. The new ones had less tint in the lenses. Pauline’s heart was beating fast and she could feel that she was holding her shoulders tense.

  “We don’t even got to talk if you don’t want,” Herbie said. “I can learn plenty about a person without talking to her. Just by observing with the five senses.”

  Pauline kept looking ahead into the bottles, thankful there wasn’t a mirror behind them. She liked being able to look away from Herbie and know he was looking at her. Men were certainly cunning. He had smelled the recklessness on Pauline. They did have their senses, men, and not just the five. Now he was doing something with his hands, sign language or something. He kept tapping the side of his head, then tracing his jawline with his finger. Pauline didn’t believe he was really a writer. She didn’t believe a word he said. She felt disoriented by him—his accent seemed to thicken and thin, and his grin had something sinister in it.

  “What’s the first line of the story you’re writing? What’s the first sentence?”

  “I’ve done South Carolina and Georgia. Now I’m on Florida, obviously. The Georgia part’s about this guy from Australia who opened a Civil War restaurant. It’s called The Hardtack. They serve legal moonshine. Let’s see, the first line. It’s something about how in the South fun and trouble have something in common: you can’t plan when you’re going to have either. I can’t remember exactly how I put it.”

  Pauline adjusted her sleeve and her bra strap. “So basically you’re getting paid to mess around in bars for weeks on end? They pay people to do that? In this economy?”

  “They do if your grandfather founded the magazine. He passed last year and I inherited his big old Cadillac. I was his favorite. Everybody wanted somebody from the Crontcow family to be associated with the magazine, so I quit science and became a writer.”

  “Science?”

  “Herpetology, to be precise. I studied enzymes in snake venom. I always had a thing for snakes. That’s a misunderstood, maligned creature right there. You work up compassion for snakes, you really did something. That compassion’s hard-earned.”

  They were looking at each other and Herbie reached over very calmly and touched Pauline’s wrist. His fingers were callused, but his touch was gentle. She waited a moment before she took his hand and moved it back to his beer.

  “Your name isn’t Herbie Crontcow. There’s just no way that’s somebody’s name.”

  “What difference is it what my name is? A lot of people have a few separate names. In Georgia I was Sonny Martin. If anybody goes looking for me they’ll be looking for Sonny Martin. I have a pen name too.”

  The bartender had brought Herbie another beer without his asking for it, and he was already more than half done with it. He raised it to Pauline, like he was happy she was coming around to his viewpoints, whatever those viewpoints were.

  “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” Pauline asked him. “What’s the worst single act in your history?”

  He looked at her deliberately, not ready for the question, filling his chest with a breath. He finished the rest of his beer with an easy swallow and then held his hand up to stop the bartender, who was getting ready to get him another. He rested his hands on the black wood of the bar. There was a ring on his left hand featuring a silver scorpion. His arms were wiry. The sleeves of his T-shirt were short enough that Pauline could see his hard, oval-shaped biceps.

  Looking at Pauline with an overly mild expression, he said, “Oh, I’ve always been pretty sweet.” His eyes behind his glasses were meek. “I wouldn’t have much to report in the way of evil acts. I never been too wieldy in a fight. And I don’t believe in revenge. Somebody gets the best of me, I tip my hat to them. I have my interests and I pretty much just stick to those.” He stroked his cheek, which hadn’t been shaved in a few days. “Not that I’m self-righteous. I know people got their problems. Sometimes things get out of hand. I’m fully aware about that phenomenon. Sometimes you think you’re heading for a good time and then you realize you got on some other road, and it’s too late.”

  Pauline wondered where this guy was from. He could be from Virginia or Texas or from a mile down the road. She felt the familiar alarm she’d always depended on droning in the back of her mind, but it wasn’t difficult to ignore.

  “You want another light beer?” he asked. “Or you want a margarita or something, like when in Rome? What’s a gal like you drink? We could get a bottle of wine. I don’t reckon they have an extensive cellar, but they’ll have something made out of grapes.”

  “Not wine,” Pauline said. “I’ll order something, though. Let me think about it.”

  “I’m going to pee and you think about it, but if you get anything, put it on my tab.”

  “It’s all right,” Pauline said. “I have a tab of my own.”

  “No, I’m serious. Whatever you get, it’s on me. Well, it’s actually on the magazine.”

  “Gotcha,” said Pauline.

  “I’m not messing around now.”

  “Message received. Not messing around.”

  “Look here, if you get something else to drink and don’t let me pay for it, I’ll make a scene. I’ll embarrass us both.”

  “You’re pretty much doing that now.”

  Herbie chuckled. He arose from his stool, patted a couple of his shorts pockets, then disappeared down a hallway that led to the bathrooms.

  Pauline set her empty beer bottle down on the bar, and the bartender approached her immediately. She asked him for a shot of whiskey. The bartender asked her what kind and she said whatever was the most expensive. He nodded and pulled down an ornate round bottle with a cork in it, filled a shot glass, and set it in front of Pauline. “Put it on his tab,” she said, motioning toward the empty stool beside her. “Put my beer on there too.” She hadn’t done a shot in a long time but she remembered that the wrong approach was thinking about the shot or smelling it or staring at it. She threw the whiskey back with her eyes closed, swallowing through the burn, and managed to get it down and keep it down.

  She’d performed well in her encounter with Herbie and she thought the thing to do now was make a striking exit, to preserve some mystery. She asked for a pen and wrote her phone number on a drink napkin, then instructed the bartender to give the napkin to Herbie. “Tell him I had something better to do, but if he wants to call me sometime he can feel free.”

  The bartender bowed toward Pauline, his face hinting at a smile. Pauline gathered herself and began moving toward the front doors of the restaurant, wanting to slip out before Herbie returned from the bathroom. She sidestepped a waitress carrying a tray of full plates and then went around a huge party that had pushed some tables together, a celebration of some kind. She was steps from the door when she glanced down toward a little alcove of the waiting area and saw Herbie jabbi
ng his finger huffily at an old man. They were standing in front of a cigarette machine. Herbie was doing the talking, the old man’s posture recalcitrant but resigned. The old man, about half the size of Herbie, had on worn-out sneakers and a corduroy shirt. He was shaking his head stubbornly and Herbie was hissing at him, his left hand clenched in a fist by his side. Pauline found the handle of the door and pushed on outside before one of them could turn and notice her. She had no idea what there was to yell at an old man in a Mexican restaurant about, not the first inkling. She hurried down the front walk, eyes searching out her car in the lot.

  Pauline had logged a few more fruitless phone calls, but eventually she returned to the police station in person. Bulletins had gone out. The car had been impounded, she was told, but she already knew that. The case file had been activated, but wasn’t being investigated currently, whatever that meant. The police force was understaffed and underpaid, Pauline was told. A cop with the rank of sergeant who looked fresh out of high school told Pauline that in cases like this the missing person was usually missing on purpose.

  “Everybody keeps telling me that,” Pauline said. “I’ve heard that one roughly a dozen times.”

  “She’ll turn up. Trust me. Sometimes people don’t call because they’re embarrassed, or they don’t want to be judged or whatever. They don’t want to have to apologize. But she’ll turn up.”

  “She’ll turn up?” Pauline said. “She’ll turn up? That’s the plan when a bottle opener is lost. Or tweezers or something. You just wait for them to turn up.”

  The sergeant gripped her gently by the arm for a moment, forbearing and sympathetic, and then left her in the lobby. He was wearing sneakers instead of boots and Pauline heard the squeak of the soles against the floor until a door closed behind him.

  She sat down. On the wall was a board full of wanted men—some sneering, some blank-faced, some genuinely concerned about the course their lives had taken. Pauline had no idea what else she was supposed to do about Mal. She was sitting in a dingy, one-story police station, staring at the walls. Next to all the wanted men was another corkboard, this one crowded with articles confirming Palatka’s status as a famous speed trap. Beyond that was a gumball machine covered in dust.

  By now the balcony was entirely off-limits, as if it didn’t exist. Pauline kept the back blinds closed tight at all times—the ones over the regular windows and the ones over the small window in the door. She didn’t want to see the wind chimes out there—though she often heard them—or the spot on the banister where Mal always used to sit. She didn’t want to contemplate the still undone deadbolt. Sometimes Pauline heard birds pecking around out there, looting what was left in the feeder, and sometimes the birds’ noises suggested something more alarming, fracases and fighting, cries of surrender. When this happened, she had no recourse except to turn on music and move to the front room.

  It had been a few days since she’d talked to Herbie. Their conversation already seemed unreal, like it might not have happened at all. She might not have seen him harassing that old man. She might not have done that whiskey shot.

  She wanted to exercise, or at least she thought it would be good for her. There was no decent health club in Palatka, of course. She owned no weights or workout mats. She spread a blanket on the floor and dropped to her stomach. She did three pushups and then a pain shot from her wrist to her elbow. She flipped and stretched her hamstrings. She could hear the tapping of raindrops starting on the roof. She did some yoga poses she remembered, difficult ones that were hard to hold for very long.

  When she needed a break she got up and checked her email, knowing there would be something from the company she was freelancing for, and sure enough. The subject heading was DEADLINE 2??? Pauline stared at the computer screen for a long minute, wondering whether she wanted to open the email. She had wanted to be chastised, but now she was thinking better of it. She heard a sound, a small gust of wind finding its way in from outside, a hinge creaking, and when she looked up Herbie was standing in the front doorway grasping a single hibiscus. He was standing right there, clean-shaven now, looking bigger in her doorway than he’d looked in the bar, holding the flower by its long woody stem. He’d somehow found out where she lived. He hadn’t even knocked. Pauline had made an exit, and now he was making an entrance.

  She didn’t feel particularly startled. Not like she should’ve. He had the flower in one hand and the other hand he’d placed on his hip, like he was modeling his clothes—those same shorts with all the pockets, his wireframe glasses. She felt equal to the idea of this strange man showing up in her living room. She’d been forcing herself to act like someone she wasn’t, but now she didn’t feel like she was playing a part. This moment felt real. She’d been invaded and she could deal with it.

  “Are you taking guests?” he asked.

  “I thought of something I should’ve said to you,” said Pauline. “In the bar, when you said you could observe me with your five senses, I should’ve said, ‘You’ll be lucky to use two or three.’”

  “That would’ve been clever,” Herbie agreed. “But anybody can think of that stuff after they get home.”

  “I want you to take me jogging. That’s how you can be of use.”

  He looked behind him, at the rain, and pursed his lips. “Yeah, let’s go jogging. I can’t think of any reason why not.”

  He stayed where he was but reached the hibiscus out toward Pauline, and she stepped over and took it from him. She found a tall, thin water glass in the kitchen to put it in. Herbie told her he’d stolen it from an old lady’s sun porch. He said if there was one thing he couldn’t tolerate, it was old ladies.

  Pauline knew she didn’t have the upper hand in here. She wanted to get them outside. She yanked on running shoes and led Herbie out the door and down the stairs. She told him to run in front so she could keep an eye on him, and he winked at her and set a pace, leading them out onto the road. There were no sidewalks, so when cars came they ran in the weeds, their shins whipped red. Pauline heaved and spat for a time and then she settled in. They weren’t getting all that wet because of the oak branches that wound overhead. Only their shoes got soaked, pounding into the clay-colored puddles. Herbie was bowlegged. He maintained his pace faultlessly. Pauline focused on the back of his bobbing head. He was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, and Pauline could see marks on his neck that could’ve been scratches from a person or could’ve been made by running through prickly foliage. Pauline wasn’t going to ask about the scratches. She wasn’t going to ask about the old guy at the Mexican restaurant because she’d never get a straight answer anyway. She wasn’t even going to ask how Herbie’s magazine story was coming. It would somehow be a display of weakness at this point, would somehow cost her leverage, to forsake spontaneity and put her focus on the mining of facts.

  They loped past a parked cop car and the cop stared at them from inside, his expression both intense and vague. She had no idea how long they’d been running, but it was going to be night soon. Her hamstrings were itching with use; her calves were tight as balls of twine. They passed a pecan grove, then a hill of smoldering tires, the sky lightening and darkening. Pauline hadn’t paid attention to the turns they’d made and was surprised when the back of her apartment building came into view. They cut through the swamp on a berm of dry ground and bounded up the stairs. Herbie went in and collapsed on the blanket that was still spread on the floor. He slipped a couple soft glasses cases out of his pockets and chose a pair. They’d been in his pockets the whole jog, however many pairs of glasses and a case for each. Then he peeled his shirt off over his head, pried off his shoes. There was something bullying and presumptuous about how comfortable he was acting in her place, but now she enjoyed it. The smell of him. The space he occupied. His body without a shirt looked good. The muscles of his torso all showed but he didn’t seem like somebody who went to a gym.

  She hung his shirt and socks over the back of a chair and set his shoes on a mat in the kitchen. “Hey,
I have something for you,” she said. “I have something to give you.”

  She hurried to the closet in her bedroom, plucked the boots from the outlet mall off the floor, and carried them out to Herbie. She felt lucky, competent even. Herbie rubbed the leather on his cheek and sniffed it, just as she had in the store, then he set the boots gingerly aside without trying them on.

  “Who’d those things belong to?”

  “No one. I bought them as an investment and it paid off.”

  “They’ll lose a lot of resale value the second I put them on. That’s the bitch of it.”

  Pauline laughed. It sounded strange to her.

  “Kind of a forward gift, don’t you think?” Herbie said. “A fellow could get the wrong idea.”

  He was flat on his back. He started emptying more stuff out of his pockets—a shiny little fold-up knife, a book of matches, a fifty-dollar bill. He stuck one arm up in the air and started signing what looked like the alphabet.

  “I just quit my job,” she said. “Well, I’m in the process of forcing them to fire me. Same difference.”

  “Sometimes I wish I had a normal job. It seems like it would help you stay grounded, having a boss and rules. Help a person master their vices. Also sometimes when I’m writing, I need to tell how my character hates their crappy job. I got no concept how that feels. You know, firsthand.”

  “Why do you know sign language?”

  “People don’t classify it as a foreign language because you don’t produce it in your throat. They don’t consider me bilingual. You believe that shit?”

  “There’s no region for it,” Pauline said.

  “There’s a people.”

  Herbie took off the glasses he was wearing and didn’t put on another pair. He looked more calculating with his face bare. He looked less happy-go-lucky.