The Lipless Gods

by Brian Stillman

  Chapter 5

  Despite fevered campaigning by the hastily assembled Little Creek Economic Committee, GreenBlo had ultimately based its central operations in Pendleton. The wind tower project had whipped up a presumption of prolonged economic glory, but boon proved nothing but bust. The cold, hard reality settled in most resoundingly for those needing the most dramatic boost.

  Little Creek's Lazy Bear Inn didn't run full capacity months on end. The Outpost restaurant didn't seat capacity night after night. They had a normal. They’d survive, famine or feast. Auntie’s saw a little lift - icing on an already plentifully frosted cake - but not only was Pleshette's located on the far east side of town, it stocked little different than Auntie’s and in most instances less of that same.

  Further hampering Pleshette's was the lack of eye candy. Maybe Mrs. Dobbs wasn't beautiful, but she had a rack on her, and neither she or her husband were oblivious to the fact that their eldest, Brandi, at 15 was ripe with all sorts of unspoken procreative possibility bubbling at the genetic level, increasing heart rates, thickening blood vessels, not only in strangers but in repeat customers, a role most GreenBlo employees had quickly assumed.

  When Norm wasn't clerking his store, it was Sutton Welter or Tiff. Sutton somewhere in his 40s only he looked 60ish. Both upper and lower dentures to replace what he'd lost, and his skin permanently clay colored from a stretch first on the now defunct Welter farm then as a member of the County Road crew. There were old comic book ads for shrunken heads that spit water at your unsuspecting family and friends. Tiffany couldn't suffocate the notion that Sutton's resemblance to the novelty item was dead on.

  About the only thing Uncle Norm came to enjoy from the installation of the cadre of 'European noisemakers' (the common refrain from any white, conservative, local male 30 or older when the wind towers percolated into conversation) was the blooming of the prostitution trade. And now even that fair flower of capitalism was endangered.

  GreenBlo was done. The workforce plopped down in eastern Washington now. Probably by the end of summer many a local Little Creek man come to expect a lay of convenience would be left bereft. Back to the common solaces of the palm, the Internet, even their spouse.

  Uncle Norm waited outside the trailer home on Sheff Street, dressed like a man with places to go, and people to impress, though opting for it in casual a strain as possible. Sunglasses. Unbuttoned, striped short sleeved shirt over a dark blue tank top tucked into khaki knee-length shorts, revealing darkly haired calves, the feet fit into tan-colored open toed sandals. The way the oxygen tank gleamed it didn't seem out of the realm of possibility he didn't spit shine it before his usual Wednesday visit to the 'massage parlor’.

  When Tiffany pulled up in front of the house, and killed the Toyota truck engine, she moved her lips in time with the anticipated exasperation.

  "Jesus Christ and applesauce," said Uncle Norm. "It's a miracle I guess. I should drop to my knees, thank the heavens that you actually remembered I got an appointment."

  "Huh."

  "'Huh', what?"

  "I thought you'd be so antsy I'd get a 'Jesus effing Christ and applesauce'."

  Norm's head quivered. "Whatever. Sometimes I disappoint. Get used to it." He shrugged. "The fuck am I saying? You should be used to it."

  A trail of dust dissipated behind the Toyota. Tiffany knew Norm would be agitated, waiting for her to get back. She'd turned left off Main Street just past Auntie’s, rolling towards the hill and the school and then made a right onto Sheff, unpaved, running parallel to Main. She'd brought the truck to a full-stop with the nose even pointed a convenient direction - a simple right onto New School Road, a left onto Main, and like that, you were out at Butcher’s Camp and Norm's appointment, scheduled inside a pine-shingled structure once operating as a hunting lodge before Butcher's Camp suffered population wipeout during the 1917 flu epidemic, a horror that seemed to all but sidestep Little Creek.

  Butcher's Camp was only occupied at anything close to full capacity during the summer months. The rest of the year the vacation homes were dark, shuttered, the hot springs and swimming pool shut down to the public.

  The operation the Ruchert’s had opened up inside the former hunting lodge was as quiet and low-key as possible. A row of antlers remained bolted above the front entrance as if conveniently planned to give a pre-session boost of masculinity to the purely male clientele.

  Before the Ruchert trio went the entrepreneurial route, Tiffany's uncle was in as peachy of health as a man with emphysema could expect. About the only physical ding outside the daily struggle for oxygen was slight conjunctivitis and pain in his toes, remnants from several incidents of sloppily dead-lifting then carrying his oxygen tank around the house rather than rolling it around on its wheeled cart. Norm refused to invest in the strap on packs. Nothing but old biddies in the ads, looking far too delighted with their lot in life.

  Pluto hopped out the truck and Tiffany followed, leaving the driver side door open for Norm. He hoisted up the oxygen tank and set it down on the seat then rolled it and set it down into the passenger foot-well before settling in behind the steering wheel. Pluto waited until the driver side door was shut, and then he skittered forward and propelled himself up into the air and through the open window and off of his owner's thigh onto the seat. After a cursory sniff of the oxygen tank, Pluto called on the gifts given by the dog gods and fixed Uncle Norm with eyes big and soft and wet.

  "No. Goddamn, dog. Out. Now. Hey!"

  Norm slid back against the seat, arms raised, offering the dog room enough to bounce off his lap and back on out of the cab. Back to earth, Pluto snuffled the sun burnt lawn like the last ten seconds hadn't happened.

  "Every time. Jesus."

  "Maybe Pluto knows something you don't. Maybe the therapist likes dogs," said Tiff. "You should ask her."

  "No."

  He turned the engine over.

  "What's her name again? Bambi? Candy? Sunshine? I still think you're crazy, trusting the health of your back to an adult with a name like that."

  "Yeah? You hang out with a guy named Bug."

  "No. I know a guy named Bug. More like I know 'of' a guy named Bug. I hang out with Henry."

  "Not what I hear."

  "Rumors?"

  "'Rumors'. The common currency of Little Creek. You know it."

  "Rumor has it," said Tiffany, "at least the flavor I got wind of, rumor has it our good buddy Bug, he's already got me preggers. Oh yeah. Bent me over out there at the railcars, just one, two, three good thumps, and then just went right back to running his metal detector over the ground." She swatted her stomach, the swell of girth beneath her orange shirt. "Yup. This isn't just fat. Oh-ho-no. This isn't just teenage sloth. Got a bunch of sea monkeys percolating in there. You ready to be taking care of the whole wiggly squiggly batch once they're good and hatched? Great Uncle Norm, you bet. Probably come September? Couple months since me and Bug hooked up, I think. Couple months, isn't that the regular gestation period for sea monkeys?"

  “And they say your mom’s the crazy one.”

  The kid knew the bigger her smile the more eerie the resemblance to her uncle’s absent sibling.

  “Yup,” said Tiffany. “They say.”

  Shaking his head, Norm put the truck into drive and peeled off, out of view just as quick as you please.

  Inside the house, Tiffany opened her dresser drawer. Sipe's gun pointed towards the back of the dresser. She left it. She didn't even want to look at it. She took out Sipe's wallet, slid the drawer closed, and knelt down on the floor. Muzzle dripping from a dip into his kitchen water bowl, Pluto hopped up on her bed, snuffled pillows, and then turned in a circle several times before plopping down between several stacks of comic books.

  Prior to leaving the house this morning, she'd been sorting, wondering if it wasn't time to shitcan Aquaman, concentrate on some other hero, compl
ete with a mimicking of their threads.

  Most of Tiffany's comic books were coverless, nabbed from boxes two layers deep in the delivery drive at the Pendleton Goodwill.

  Last-last February, near 18 months ago. The normal end to the going-to-town routine. Norm was at Staci's, his Pendleton dive of choice, just up the street from Goodwill, having a quick one for the road before they headed back to Little Creek. Tiff usually haunted the interior of the Goodwill, but as luck had it, some convincing little voice directed her outback to the unsorted bonanza of cast-offs.

  Almost soon as she stopped goggling at the sheer spread, and could focus in, she'd spotted one of the Goodwill sorters holding up a handful of comic books.

  Rain was falling in late winter drizzle. The sorters working through what looked the colossal drop off of crap of all time.

  "How much are those going to go out at?"

  The sorter, comics still in hand, turned and looked at her. Back then, Tiffany was still dyeing her hair blue and pink. She wore a Weezer t-shirt and a pony backpack, not that the sorter could see anything of the horse. Tiff had waved, grinning the grin she knew left most people with the impression they faced a human-sized cartoon squirrel in human-disguise.

  The sorter shrugged. Poured a dismissive glance upon the pulp in hand.

  "No covers. Probably trash 'em." To put a fine point on their worthlessness, he dropped the handfuls like they were small frogs or some other vertebrate, hand-sized, harmless, but capable of pooping on you for no apparent reason.

  Tiffany pushed and slid through twenty feet of cast offs, stools, TVs, boom boxes, etc., and felt her jaw go numb. She felt her jaw get wet - it hit the pavement - that's how far it unrolled and eventually plopped down at sight of the sheer amount of comic book-goodness.

  She texted and finally called Norm, bothering him to the point he abandoned the bar and brought the truck around.

  Tiff insisted on paying the sorters something for the six very wide and deep boxes of comic books, but her main contact refused. By loading up the boxes into Norm's truck and taking them away, they were saving the sorters several trips to the recycling bin through the rain now graduated to downpour.

  Comic books. Aquaman. Color coordination. The concerns of the early morning. Now, mid-morning, it was time to mature. Lock back onto the problem that'd been gnawing into her weeks now.

  Hope. The absence of Hope.

  At least a half-dozen times a day she tried to call Hope. She already knew it would happen, but a finger cold and hollow poked into her marrow when the call immediately clicked her over to leaving a message.

  "Guess who? Your pal that lives in a zoo. Seriously though. It's me. Hey. Just doing the daily jab. Wondering where you are. Who you're with. Something weird happened this morning. I need to ask you if maybe you know a guy, or, have seen some guy out at Butcher's Camp, at you-know-where…Where Norm is headed right now. His regular appointment and all. That's it. Call me. Please. Bye."

  She checked the time on her phone. Plenty of time to kill before she covered Sutton's lunch break. Not that it mattered if someone watched over Pleshette's. The old-timers that hated the Dobbs for one invented reason or another had already cycled through, buying their East Oregonian or The Oregonian, jawing for a little while then dissipating by car or by foot, back to command central, a sofa or armchair aimed at their flat screen and the persistent dribble of information, provided courtesy of reality TV or unreality TV news. When the bleakness really took hold of Norm, he postulated never locking up the store, just leaving the doors open 24/7, let the market decide how clean to pluck the store shelves.

  There were only two photos in Sipe's wallet.

  The driver's license, and then one Polaroid displaying a little girl in a man's lap at a kitchen table. Both faces bearded in the pink frosting coating a bunny rabbit-in-profile shaped birthday cake resting flat on the table top. More of a cheek-smear on Sipe's face, like the little girl first went facedown in the cake and then bestowed a kiss on the man, both her hands still resting on Sipe's chest like the kiss had happened seconds ago. The little girl's face crinkled by her mirth. The left side of Sipe's mouth rose, close to a smile as he managed.

  Mostly, the wallet contained cash. New, fresh smelling bills. Kind of sticky to the touch. All $100 bills.

  One of the rumors circling the Ruchert’s success in the sex-trade centered on their securing a loan from big-timers. Out-of-towners. The mob. The mafia. There weren't too many women around Little Creek that would willingly take on prostitution as a career choice. The supply had to come from somewhere. Plus neither Ty or Bret struck most people as the successful business owner type. Bret more like a bouncer or some guy that could drain pitcher after pitcher of beer and maintain consciousness (if not clarity) while their peers dropped off one by one. According to Hope, the brains behind the day-to-day operations belonged to the sister, Bonnie. A real bitch, too.

  "Why didn't he have a phone? Unless it fell out. Unless I clean missed it. Did I miss it, Pluto?"

  The dog's sleepy eyes barely widened from slits. No help in this instance.

  Tiffany looked at her door. She'd shut it. Silly. She tucked the wallet guts back in, and stood, ran her fingers through Pluto's scalp. He looked at her adoringly.

  She opened the drawer and put the wallet in next to the gun.

  She imagined Norm's reaction if he knew about the gun, the man with the bruised head. Call the cops, he'd urge, even with all evidence to the contrary that local law enforcement was a joke, at least when it came to certain trades.

  They were honest when it came to domestic violence or DUIs, but anything GreenBlo related, or where illicit drugs or prostitution were thrown into the fray, things got hazy. Some of it was just hearsay, some of it clear and clean confabulation, jokes made at the expense of a deputy's waistband-size that drew oxygen and grew until even little kids knew the unflattering nicknames, but then there were dribs of evidence, cold hard facts.

  In late spring, during one of Hope's sustained school absences, she'd sent Tiffany selfies snapped out at Butcher's Camp Massage. Close shots, Hope from the bare shoulders up, clutching a Sheriff's badge, then a baton, then wearing the man of the hour's big old cowboy hat and winking at the camera. The set delivered to Tiff's phone under the tag line 'I f*kd th law & th law cum'.

  Come late July, Tiff would turn 17. She was 2 weeks older than Hope. Hope said the way Tiff treated her, looked out for her, worried about her, bothered the shit out of her it was more like she was Hope's mother.

  "I don't need you." The gun didn't say anything back to Tiffany. "I might need you. We might need you. But not yet."

  She shut the drawer. Left the bedroom.

  There was a soft spot in the living room floor, invisible lines extending to it out from the coffee table, the sofa and Norm's easy chair, it creaked at this one pressure point, whenever Norm or Tiffany might be headed outside. Pluto could sense even the barest beginning of weight being administered to that point. He was off the bed, shedding the thin wrap of dozing, before Tiffany's hand even met the front door knob.

  Usually she told him to stay here. Inside. She’d be back. Not today. Without a word to Pluto, the door shut. He whined, started to bark, not knowing Tiff’s brain was overcome, focused on the potential uses of the man with pink cake frosting smeared on his face.