“Tornado season,” Marianne says, and nods toward the sky, the patch where my eyes are facing. And true, this is partially what I’m thinking – well, not the part about tornadoes, but I am viewing the sudden gloom above us with suspicion and sadness. While wondering how it is we’re not yet past noon on a Sunday and standing in some random front yard in a teensy town I’ve never heard of, as Benny has cracked open a can of beer and somehow talked me into doing the same.
Marianne Landis, as she’s introduced to me, is rocking away on a wooden porch swing hanging from thick chains, and Brad sits looking apprehensive on the top concrete step. Tom cuts a fidgety swath of his own with nothing but restlessness to explain his improvised route, up and down the sidewalk, loops through the lawn, occasionally nearing us, conversing with the lady of the house and rubbing his goatee throughout, as he peers outward at the minimal expanse of Greenlee in hopes of divining its action. Following her comment, cigarette blazing away in the triangle formed between thumb and first two fingers of her right hand, Marianne lifts a drink glass of some sort with what space remains in this same palm and returns her gaze to me, awaiting a reaction. I chuckle and mumble an agreement about this being so.
“Is there a library here?” Brad asks no one in particular, and removes his glasses yet again to give them another good rubdown with the tail of his shirt. “I need to get started on this paper.”
“You need…what? A computer? Or you’re doing, like, research? Oh, hey, by the way, Tom,” Marianne says, shifting her focus back to the meandering figure stomping through her flowerbed at the moment, “Alicia’s back. I’m not sure if anyone told you.”
And as our hero’s mouth forms in a counterintuitive symbol our collective society has mysteriously evolved across millennia – a downturned mouth, yet favorable, the expression one would ordinarily interpret as something like hmm, not bad – he nods just once, though it’s unclear what this response might indicate. My journalistic rabbit ears sense a narrative forming, either way, and I whisper to Benny while the others are distracted.
“Who’s Alicia?”
The question catches him midstride, however, which I only notice in half turning his direction. He’s in the process of lifting beer can to mouth, though manages to mutter still, “Tom and Alicia…” and then makes the index finger of his drinking hand dance, pointing outward from his friend to some unforeseen figure in the distance, back and forth, as he takes a swig. “So…yeah,” he concludes, upon swallowing this, followed by the sort of lip smacking noise one would normally interpret as something like ah, tasty beverage.
“Well, I mean, um…I was hoping to break away – no offense – and was thinking the college might have a library. Unless…do you have computer? Sorry, I don’t mean to…it’s just I don’t have a laptop or anything like that.”
“You’ve got a car but don’t own a laptop?” Benny cackles in genuine bewildered, amused amazement. Bemusemazement. “Wow. That’s messed up.”
“Bradley!” Tom barks with jagged, unexpected force, causing his target, who is peering upward at the swinging female on the porch, to flinch and stare out at him with a slack jawed, hangdog expression, “come on! Yes, of course, go inside and I’m sure she’s got a laptop or something you can use. But we need you to stick around. Now I’m certain our writer friend here wouldn’t mind driving some of the time,” and at this, he flashes a sly smile in my direction, one I return by reflex, “and probably will. Considering he rented the car and everything. For the most part he’s gonna be preoccupied, however.”
“Writer friend?” Says Marianne, perking up to the degree that she seems to sit taller in the swing, “what do you do?”
People want to tell their stories. There’s nothing particularly new about this phenomenon. And once you really dig in, if told well, virtually everyone has a fascinating tale to expound upon, the vagaries and dead ends, successes and disappointments, the sum total of their days – though it is precisely this fact sitting like a lead weight of dread in my chest. And by lately, I guess I really mean right now. When every living person has a convoluted epic to offer, in some strange fashion this means none of them really stand out. Professionally, it also strains the need to develop constant twists on the profile article. And I have to admit there’s a further layer contributing to the gloom, too, feeling that I am one of those few souls on the planet who doesn’t have a fascinating legacy trailing in his wake.
Only now does this impasse dawn on me, however, this crossroads which should have been obvious for weeks. Why else would I not only agree to this excursion, but actively seek it out? I’m no stranger to the occasional meltdown – once about every seven or eight years seems the going rate – and that would almost prove a welcome development, an improvement over the muted torpor victimizing my days for who knows how long, both physically and mentally. Nor is the pointless road trip, alone or with others, exactly a newfound spectacle. And yet maybe it’s only the early buzz of these couple morning beers talking, but I’m suddenly feeling optimistic about every bit of this venture. Maybe I can craft something sellable out of this mess after all.
These are the thoughts roaming through my suddenly airy skull, left alone with Marianne on the porch. Following a vigorous debate on the finer points of Ohio alcohol law on the Sabbath, Tom and Benny eventually leave to wander the few blocks to that 24 hour university bookstore we’d passed driving here. Brad repairs inside with his clutch of texts and papers, leaving me little choice but to pull up a white plastic chair next to this doe eyed young lady who says she’s exactly three decades younger than my 53 years.
I’m not under any illusions, as she surely entertains one if not many suitors. Possessing as she does a taut body, beneath these faded jeans and tight fitting green and black striped shirt. Pretty in that manner specific to small towns, somehow, whereby resembling a tramp is not at all an insult – kind of foxy, in fact, for reasons that have nothing to do with any theoretical loose morals. Hair dyed sort-of blonde and bound off at the sides in a pair of short, wiry pigtails, fading to dark brown at the scalp, skin pale, with bags the color of cigarette ash beneath each of those aforementioned wide brown irises. A decent conversationalist, to boot, meaning that I can think of much worse ways to spend a Sunday.
Her house, which she is purchasing from parents who’ve retired to Florida, is a miniscule, boxy affair – not her childhood home, she explains – with pea green vinyl siding. The entirety of this short, sleepy street appears to hew in an elderly direction, actually, a small enclave in an otherwise university-ruled village. A village, I am told, weighing in at no more than 2000 residents if dripping wet with college staff. As for Marianne’s yard, glaciers must have hit it with a force greater than or equal to the remainder of Greenlee, for the thin strip of grass separating her from the nearest neighbor – to the left if standing in the street, uphill toward the center of town – is flat, but the front lawn tilts a good forty five degrees, the other side and backyard reclining at angles even sharper.
“Doesn’t this yard suck to mow?” I ask, during an uncommon break where the only sound is the squeaking of her swing chain.
“Depends if I’m seeing anyone or not,” she fires back with a mischievous grin and throaty chuckle.
An hour ago I didn’t know this girl, and don’t press for details. But the others are already becoming familiar enough that I am fine with expanding my reach. So yes, from Marianne I gather the juicy dirt on Tom Bowman and this Alicia figure, Alicia Stallard. An ex of two years’ standing but whom he has not dated since his tumultuous exit from Greenlee College, a breakup which may have in fact precipitated his exit from Greenlee College. Apparently there was a curve to the power dynamic which may have looked incredibly dramatic up close, but which sounds common and predictable to anyone not involved, such as yours truly. One whereby this consummate hound met his match, or at least a notable challenge, and had to persuade her to give him a shot, leading to a middle period where she was the more infatuated of the two, and then finally the inevitable cooling, her return to a less impressed state, and his increasingly frustrated efforts to keep it together. Or at least this is Marianne Landis’s take on the events, although I must admit my gut feeling does peg her as a reliable source.
“Her family has money, too, and lots of it,” Marianne notes.
“Really?”
“Oh yeah, big time,” she nods, turns my direction just long enough to make eye contact for emphasis before facing the silent road again, “and see, that was the one thing. Tom might be – wow, I mean, really smart, right? – and he’s a smooth talker, he can pull off just about anything et cetera et cetera, but that part always royally burned his ass. Not that he gave one shit about her money or anything that. It had more to do with his own background. He comes from nothing, like the rest of us, you know, and there’s just not much you can do about that. So…he would never admit it, but there is, totally, yes, he’s got a major chip on his shoulder. If you ask me.”
Speech delivered with aplomb, Marianne reaches for the pack of cigarettes keeping company on the swing beside her, and lights a fresh smoke. Holds it straight up in the air, following that first drag, an exhalation plume she leans back to blow nearly parallel. She apparently thinks I know Tom better than I do, that we are old acquaintances or something. Or is the general impression that everyone knows Tom, that his arrivals and departures, his schemes and obsessions and stunts are paid the attention due a foreign dignitary? I’m beginning to feel that everyone believes this true, which in a way eventually makes it true. As for me, curiosity temporarily sated about the theoretical protagonist of this narrative, I begin to wonder more about its bit players. In particular the one bunkered inside now, toiling away on some paper. And so under the auspices of taking a leak and grabbing another can of beer for both of us – legitimately true details, sure, but a cover story nonetheless – I duck inside to grill Brad Davis for a moment.
Brad Davis. I only flesh in this final identifier, his last name, upon confronting this frazzled character with his mind clearly gnawing at the bit elsewhere, as he continually removes his round, gold rimmed glasses and polishes them with the tail of his shirt. Five occasions, by my count, in roughly as many minutes standing there beside him. While his mouth forms a bewildered expression to virtually every question and eyes struggle to meet mine.
“You do this for a living?!” Brad marvels, incredulous, as he indicates the sprawl of papers covering a round wooden table straddling Marianne’s kitchen and the back end of her tiny living room. Typed word processor pages, handwritten pages, research pages. “I can’t imagine. It seems really difficult.”
“Well,” I laugh, “it wasn’t exactly what I set out to do, either. Trust me, I just sort of fell into this. If you could’ve seen how I started out. All over the map and writing was about the least of my interests during college…I’m basically living proof that you never really know where you’re heading in life.”
Still possessing only the murkiest awareness of how these individuals are connected, specifically his place in his hierarchy, I press Brad for details. An exercise that proves only slightly less laborious than what I imagine a homicide detective faces when grilling suspects. He and Tom grew up in the same hometown, about an hour north of here, in a wonderful sounding hamlet named Grimwood. So they were close friends, classmates? Not exactly. The two of them were “a few years apart, you know, something like that,” but lived in the same neighborhood with the parents of each on friendly terms themselves.
In the case of Benny Fordham, meanwhile, he only entered Tom’s sphere of influence while enrolled here at Greenlee. When Tom eventually transferred to EDU, Benny soon drifted down that way himself, to split the rent on that apartment and maybe possibly kind of sort of begin to think about taking some more classes again himself. Though at present he’s only gotten as far as working in the kitchen at the student union’s cafeteria. Brad, while continuing to live at home with his parents, enrolled at some community college in Grimwood, travels down often to visit his old neighbor. And I’m about to ask what Brad’s pursuing as a major, except that little passage about Benny working in a cafeteria dings a bell just barely loud enough to distract me, with a hunch I might have solved one nagging piece to the puzzle. Instead, then, I question the origins of this so-called Taco Townhouse enterprise.
“I…I…you would really have to…Benny,” he stammers, then careens to a stumped pause while breathing heavily through his nose. “I know there’s something going on with that, but I forget the specifics, so yeah, you’d have to ask Benny about that.”
After a trip down the hall to her restroom and a cursory peek at the two bedrooms, once it’s apparent that Brad isn’t paying the least bit of attention to my perambulations – I feel like I know the difference between craving a well-rounded journalistic picture, and plain nosiness, and that it was definitely the former of these – I grab our third round of cheap canned brews, from the sunflower yellow refrigerator, which you’d label garish if not matching her countertops and cabinets. The entirety of this small place, actually, while cheerful, does feature the celery greens and potting soil browns and yes the yellows that a spinster might favor, leading me to believe her parents are older than one would expect, and that Marianne hasn’t changed much since becoming a homeowner.
And then I’m outside again just as Benny and Tom happen to be drifting into sight, cresting the hill to the east as they stroll down the center of Marianne’s street. Each has an 18 pack of cans clasped to one shoulder like a 1980s break-dancer would his boombox, and Benny’s shouting something at us, with a wide grin, though we can’t discern a word of it. Perhaps because these squawks ping-pong off of every building within earshot.
“What’s that?” Marianne asks, peering backwards at them with a perplexed grin, as they draw to the edge of her lawn. She’s in the process of reclaiming her seat on the swing, after I hand her that beer and she meanders over to retrieve some shades from the wooden porch rail, one painted and peeling a chipped white, for the sun hath returned.
“I said you’re the sexiest thing on this block. At this moment. Hands down. Like, for real,” Benny mumbles, accompanied by the expected goofy off-kilter smile.
“Wow,” she sighs, and begins the machinations of lighting another cigarette, “are you guys planning on having a weeklong blowout right here or something? I think that should just about cover it.”
As if unwittingly inspired by her body language, Tom smirks and nods, sets his 18 can burden onto her curved little walkway and fumbles for a pack of smokes himself. “Actually, we ran into Cleveland Shane up there at the bookstore…”
“Heh heh. Really. What interest could that dude possibly have in…hey, wait a second…” Marianne says, shifting her focus now to a pointed one aimed directly at Tom.
“Same as us,” Benny retorts, cracking open either the fourth or fifth can that I have personally witnessed since touching down in Greenlee, “brushing up on his Blue Law knowledge.”
“…Fordham here’s keeping up his usual pace, but I just realized you haven’t touched a thing. What gives?”
Tom offers only a slyer variation on the knowing smirk he’s been wearing and says, “yeah, well, let’s just say I’m refraining at the moment but can’t really discuss the particulars.”
Marianne exhales and nods repeatedly, all the while fidgeting with her sunglasses – moving them up and down, to compare and contrast the difference they are making against the sunlight. “Ah, say no more, I hear ya loud and clear. Mistakes were made. Things got a little out of hand. There were possible full system breakdowns involved and now you are detoxing. It’s cool. We’ve all been there.”
“Yeah but so anyway Cleveland says they’re possibly throwing down at his dad’s place later.”
“Wow, that’s a pretty remarkable change of pace for him,” Marianne replies, “subject-wise. I’m impressed. I ran into that whole crew a couple of nights ago over at Breakers and they kept going on and on about his mastery of the fucking dirt track. I had to get outta there.”
“He still messing around with that bullshit?” Tom marvels, with a wry squint. Then he shrugs and concludes, “eh, so anyway, but yeah, I think they’re mostly up at Bofe’s right now.”
“Dirt track?” I inquire, feeling strangely about half lit – though if this were a weekday happy hour, I’d barely be getting started – and also out of my depth with the topics at hand. These are the first words I’ve spoken since those other two returned. “What are they running, old school street stock?”
Marianne flicks her brown eyes over at me again, which was probably the actual point of my remark, and it produces a sensation not unlike that overhead sun parting the clouds, a warmth and a brightness shining at and for exclusively me, at least in this instant. “Yeah, I think so,” she says, “and, I mean, don’t get me wrong, he’s pretty good. And it’s actually really cool to watch. Really cool to watch. Just not, like, to hear them talk about non-stop.”
One unexpected offshoot of these comments occurs when I happen to glance in Tom’s direction, and believe that I catch, in a brief unguarded window, a tiny glimpse into some of the machinery making him tick. It’s like taking apart your computer and figuring out what a single wire controls inside what had previously been a strange, unmapped landscape. And such an insight, however small, puts you in a triumphant spirit. As far as I know, Tom doesn’t race cars and was moments earlier dismissing this trifle as “bullshit,” but for a split second there, a dark cloud crossed his features and I could swear that Marianne’s praise for this Cleveland character rankled Tom. All but confirmed when he’s suddenly impatient to split this scene and hustle us into my car, bound for this Bofe’s he had mentioned.
So, okay, maybe I’m piecing a little bit together on my own. I take it he has a clinical competitive streak, and ask him about such once we’ve climbed back inside the rental. Not that I phrase it in so many words. He admits to liking a good challenge, though, and further addresses my curiosity as to whether he’d gone out for any teams in college, high school, Little League, what have you, to which he shakes his head and replies, “I could never get into a consistently organized thing like that, with a regular schedule and what have you. But yeah, anytime I pick up a ball or a bat or whatever, sure, man, I’m out for blood. Brad here can attest to that.”
Behind the wheel, Brad nods, although he is only at this seat by virtue of last minute decree. The four of us situated on or around Marianne’s porch drifted to the rental without a single mention of his name, and it’s upon patting my pockets do I recall that Brad has the keys, which then leads to Marianne questioning whether we should or shouldn’t leave him to his work. I have to confess he had slipped my mind entirely. Benny cackles madly and climbs in through his own rear door. But Tom is adamant, and though the question had only just now jogged his memory of Brad as well, he is having none of it.
“No, fuck that! Honk the horn until he comes out! Paper. Pssh. We didn’t come all the way up here for this miserable crap.”
The basic lay of this land beyond Greenlee’s imperious point is a sharp descent into flat prairie but then, about three miles up a vaguely north-northeast winding country highway which is apparently known as Chippewa Mountain Road, there’s a not insignificant manmade reservoir, Lake Waccamol, which is nevertheless an unfamiliar name for me, around whose central star spin a number of tiny satellite towns. Some sit directly on the water and some do not; Rossville is the first such village one encounters traveling in this direction, though it falls in the latter camp, flung off to the right at a distance sufficient to prevent its view of, and also apparently to prevent being viewed from, the lake.
This whole modern movement to revitalize ye tiny old downtowns is mostly lost on me. Sure, it sounds swell and all – where else can you go to find cops hassling you over driving 27 in a 25, pointless red lights and stop signs at every deserted intersection, power tripping ticket happy meter maids, and businesses that close at five? Sign me up! The downtown movement’s lack of self-awareness is precisely what dooms it. Or at least in part. Because despite all the aforementioned hassles, and the lack of parking, and the likelihood of paying higher prices, none of this truly matters when you are clocking out at the end of a busy day, and there’s a strip mall sports bar along some outerbelt on your way home, and all you want is a burger and a beer. It’s just easier. And closer. And faster. And cheaper. Probably better, too, but that’s a completely different topic.
And yet, this isn’t to say that should one find himself thrust into such an environment, that it isn’t without its charms. To enter Rossville, which Mt. Chester Road separates from the lake, slicing between the two, means a sharp veer to the right and over the obligatory, seldom used train tracks onto some bumpy asphalt approximating a major thoroughfare. You skip any quaint little residential section arriving from this angle, and are absorbed directly into the weak, irregular beats of its ancient heart. Apart from a small, sleek, refurbished-to-no-apparent-purpose depot, and across from it a sagging old pink house which had been converted into the town’s library, most storefronts along what I can see of this main drag – and I’m pretty sure the three or four blocks ahead represent all of it – are but slices of one large redbrick unit, divided only by the occasional side road.
Most have done little to spruce up their facades, aside from the occasional former fast food restaurant which still bears the unmistakable exterior of its previous tenant but now houses an auto parts store or carpet wholesaler. There’s a video rental place which is getting crushed at this hour, amazingly enough, and a few delivery or walk-up only national pizza chains which can always count on thriving pretty much wherever they land. But the sight which interests me most is one straight out of Jack the Ripper’s 1880s London or something, even as, I swear, you see this curiosity in just about every town: the overgrown courtyard between two buildings, connected to both via its own redbrick front wall, crumbling unevenly to its current state of a jagged approximate floor and a half height, with an open doorway carved in the middle. Although in this instance, not that I would expect any less, our destination happens to be one of its next door neighbors.
Diagonal yellow parking spaces slash the extra wide boulevard in front of Bofe’s, or should I say Bofe’s Bar/Grill, as the large black banner above its front door officially declares. A cluster of motorcycles parked approximately two per slot numbers higher than the scattered automobiles at this hour, although our addition narrows the gap a smidgen. The presence of this banner in lieu of a permanent sign suggests that Bofe’s has perhaps not existed all that long, an impression confirmed when I eventually ask my tour guides – two or three years is the consensus – but also by the concrete floor and relatively unadorned interior. Nobody can remember what occupied this location prior, but I’m guessing it was either a martial arts studio or paint store, nothing else.
To the left, outside a permanently propped open side door, smokers congeal in the otherwise overgrown courtyard. As the opposite side houses a piano instructor, they don’t seem to suffer much company. My eyes instantly gravitate to one of those giant red digital machines just slightly offset from the center of the room, having all but replaced the traditional jukebox everywhere and currently boasting, by last count, proudly displayed in an endless message scrolling across the top, a carefully curated song library featuring only the 36 trillion most popular tunes in existence. But before I have a chance to ponder what this glut truly means, the sound of Tom cackling madly pulls my attention to the rectangular bar occupying, were this room a giant tac-tac-toe board, the middle square. And I glance over to see him exacting one of those curled finger handshakes, like the Boys And Girls Club logo, with some middle aged guy who sports a salt and pepper mustache underneath this green plastic banker’s visor.
“Ha ha ha! Professor Faraday! Nice! Cleveland told me you would probably be here.”
And this professor, if that’s in fact what he is, nods with pursed lips before declaring, “yes, well, let’s just say you wouldn’t be speculating too wildly to nail that one.”
Moving forward to the next seat in line, which would make it about the sixth one in, along the western flank of this rectangle, Tom now shakes hands in a much more subdued and respectful manner with a middle-aged black gentleman in beige sport jacket and dark brown pork pie hat, the faint traces of an overcast sky colored beard. “And Professor Winslow.”
“Young master Bowman,” the older gent nods, polite but not necessarily impressed.
As Marianne cuts an immediate beeline toward the smoker’s escape hatch, Brad plonks down in an empty seat dead center of the bar’s front – not that there is any other kind of chair available at the moment, possibly due to lingering Old West dread haunting even these modern saloons, a fear of sitting with one’s back to the door. The barkeep, a stocky, rather wolfish looking squat fellow with black leather vest, inquires as to his beverage preferences, and Brad selects a water. Our drink slinger does not appear amused. Faced with these options, of which burying my face in the jukebox barely loses out in a photo finish, I elect the most exciting, by coincidence also the closest and requiring the least effort, and continue to stand right where I am, just behind Benny and Tom as they converse with these noble educators.
At the moment this Faraday is slightly leaned forward in his round leather chair, arguing some arcane point in a friendly yet animated fashion with this lone beleaguered bartender, his voice the rough, possibly cigar ravaged variety which all but screams crotchety old man. By contrast, his colleague in the dapper attire holds forth with Tom and Benny in a smooth, melodic lilt.
“Care for a spot of Everclear, Professor Winslow?” says Bowman.
“Naw, naw.”
“How about a bomb of some sort?” Fordham suggests, in his characteristic deep throated mumble, “I need a bomb. Any kind of bomb. I’m about to get carpet bombed.”
“Naw, you don’t want none of that,” he waves them off again, the dismissive trifle of what they are proposing.
“What is that shit you drink, anyway?”
“Well, I’ll tell ya, what it is, see, it’s called a Blood and Sand.”
“So does this mean you want a beer, then?” And at this, even these two yukmeisters I’m saddled with cave under the force of their own hilarity, can’t resist sharing a glance and a quick cackle. And yet it’s interesting to note that Tom continues to stand empty handed, though Benny at least has already acquired a cheap domestic from this roving barmaid.
“Look, I’m tellin you, you don’t want any of that,” Winslow insists, “this is it.”
“That’s all you drink?” Benny asks.
“This is it.”
“Cool, cool, but see where you really make your move is with this concoction we were tossing back the other night,” Tom explains, “a little 151 and Jager with a touch of ouzo and then a dash of tequila thrown in for good measure, which would of course be what’s known as a Pit Bull On Crack. Don’t know if you’ve tried that one.”
“I see,” Winslow offers levelly, blinks at him.
“Yep,” Benny says, appraising the situation as he savors his latest sip with a smack of the lips, “either that or the Redneck Nightmare. Absolut, Jack, SoCo, some kind of coffee flavored bullshit. Taaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy-steeeeeeeeeee!”
“I see.”
“Yeah, Professor Winslow. Either that or, well, you could go with this hybrid of the two, which would be…”
“Listen,” this teacher of unknown discipline, though patience is clearly a subject he’s studied extensively, interrupts at last, “here’s what you do. Take three-fourths an ounce of some really fine, top shelf Scotch whiskey, okay, three-fourths an ounce of sweet vermouth. Okay and you add to this, right, one half an ounce of orange juice, one half an ounce of cherry brandy. Throw in two or three ices cubes, shake and strain. This is what you do.”
“That’s a Blood and Sand?”
“That’s a Blood and Sand,” he says, lifting his glass from the bar to toast them and drink.
Some skittering but apparently wordless dance track, with tinny programmed cymbals and occasional synthesizer squiggles, continues overhead by virtue of that central command post, the giant red music machine. But nobody seems to be paying it much mind until the soundtrack does an abrupt 360, whereby all that’s missing is the proverbial scratching needle. Country throwdown staple My Kinda Party by Jason Aldean now erupts from the speakers, and when I spin around to lay eyes upon the culprit, I find Marianne standing at the machine. Her eyes are scanning the room to see if anyone noticed, with tongue ever so slightly extended from her parted lips, and when she’s at least confirmed that I did, she shrugs and smiles at me, before turning her gaze once more to the matter at hand.
The same barmaid making the rounds earlier with a tray full of beer is now suddenly upon us again, except this time she’s carrying a plastic bucket with some girl’s face on the side, in black in white, and as she draws closer I can see it’s filled about three quarters to the brim with cash. This woman – the employee, that is, not the photo on the bucket – is one of those, with her shoulder length, curly black hair, wet as though possibly shampooed and conditioned right before arriving here, who appears mighty fine from a distance, but then as she draws nearer you observe she’s sort of busted up and weary looking, except then you soon conclude she’s kind of sexier in a sense, because of this, than you ever originally thought.
Whatever the case, though I might attempt a last minute shuck and jive to dodge her approach, she’s too nimble, too close, for me to pull this off without looking like an ass, and so I remain rooted in place with a goofy grin plastered on my features, having not even gotten around to ordering a beer yet myself.
“Care to contribute to the Brittney Dobbins medical fund?”
“Brittney Dobbins?” I question, while diverting my eyes from her long enough to read the facts listed on the bucket. Namely, that this poor seven year old is the daughter of a beloved local fireman and apparently suffering from West Nile virus.
“Yeah, you know, the same girl from the poker run, uh, the proceeds…”
“Poker run?”
“Yup. You in?” she asks, and in her oil slick eyes I detect a weird, eager glint, a surprising level of interest when one considers that I am a complete stranger. Right on the heels of this, though, Marianne materializes above my left shoulder, and holds her hand over the bucket to deposit some loose change left over from her song playing spree.
“Don’t you need, like, a motorcycle or something?” I ask.
Our waitress of the hour, slightly gap-toothed, slouching, with the under eye bags of the perpetually overworked, sizes Marianne up from head to toe and back again, her scrutiny unwavering as she nonetheless nods and responds in offhand fashion to me.
“Nah, they don’t give a frog about that.”
The rotation of my slowly turning head must draw Marianne’s attention, meanwhile, for she mirrors this motion herself, swiveling to face me, and I’m certain that our awkward smiles appear mighty similar as well. At least I’m feeling awkward, still unsure of what’s really going on around here, unable to get my bearings, clueless as to the vibe. Fumbling for words as I ask Marianne if she’s thinking about signing up for this, except her response is a shrug and a murmur that she already has.
And then her eyes are rerouted past me, over my shoulder and beyond, to some commotion at the front door. “Jesus Christ, of course,” she groans, rolling those eyes, though glued to the scene behind me, a chorus of yelps and high fives that finds me spinning to examine the vanishing point of her sight line. “The day just wouldn’t be complete…”
“Cleveland Shane?” I speculate, with a self-amused harrumph – having not, to my knowledge, yet laid eyes on that character, having only heard the name.
“No…,” she offers, distracted by and riveted to that scene, “it’s fucking Wade Grimes…and Dogwell…and a couple of their other assnut friends. Well, pretty much all of them, actually…”
“Dogwell!” one of a trio seated at the far end of the bar shouts, I can’t tell which, as they’re all three either hunters or fishermen or both, middle aged men with goatees trending toward white, faded ballcaps, and either camouflage or beige vests, tossing back cold ones in a row.
“What’r you doin here?”
“Rainout,” this fairly athletic, somewhat tall figure with a confident, ball-of-foot forward stride announces, offering a wolfish grin. Above a white cotton shirt with three quarters red sleeves, he wears a shaggy almost Beatles-esque brown moptop, except it’s parted in violent fashion down the middle.
“Already? We ain’t seen a drop yet!”
“Up there it is. Pouring. Came out of nowhere. The ground’s already fucked,” this Dogwell character states, drawing up to where those gents are seated as he extracts a can of dip from his back pocket, while also simultaneously somehow holding up one finger to catch the bartender’s attention, then nodding when this distant signal is quickly confirmed.
“Tornado season,” one of the three murmurs, a comment greeted by the low hum of concurrence from his companions.
With no real means of gauging what’s important and what isn’t, who I need to know versus those whom I’ll never see again, I turn my attention away from this scene soon enough. I’m already about fifteen steps behind on wrapping my head around various subjects introduced, loose threads dangling unaddressed, to the extent the questions I wanted to ask are already lost to me. What I really need to do is hole up somewhere for a number of hours and hash out some sort of cohesive plan of attack – and who knows, that might happen by night’s end, I could conceivably find myself separating from the pack and bunkering down in some random highway motel. Maybe Brad has the right idea after all about disconnecting from this madness. Maybe they would forget about me completely, even, and tear off into the wilderness without a word said. But for now, all I have is the source material at hand, so I turn to a still within earshot Marianne.
“Wait a second…what do you mean you already signed up? How does this work?”
“Huh?” she blurts, her focus jolted by my question away from other developments. Peering over at me now, as I also draw a couple of steps closer, she explains, “oh, yeah, they’re doing this seven day thing this year. One card a night at, like, these different bars around the lake. But yeah. You should totally sign up!”
“Really? You think so?” I chuckle, then mull the matter over for a few beats, “hmm, yeah, maybe I can somehow talk the bosses into footing the bill on this. Write it off as a…”
Marianne is nodding vigorously as she cuts me off, and further explains. “Yeah, I mean, they’re giving away like a convertible and a…projector type home theater setup dealio or whatever you call it, and I forget what else. But yeah, some really sweet stuff. Plus I mean it’s for a good cause too of course. Although…well, actually, yeah, it did start yesterday. So you might be kinda fucked.”
Sounds great, and yet the alleged subject of this entire odyssey, assuming I am able to craft something from a tangled mess of observations, is Tom Bowman. And I’ve gotten almost nothing on the guy thus far. I do have that mini digital recorder in my front pants pocket, but haven’t the nerve to turn it on just yet, and really can’t picture trailing these people with a pen and notebook in hand. In my defense, I hadn’t quite counted on his being this popular. For example at this moment he’s surrounded by three guys who showed up with this most recent mob, in addition to Benny and the still seated professors, is relating some tale that involves a lot of hand gestures and apparently has everyone in stitches, or at least glued to his every utterance. But maybe interviewing his peers is not without merit, maybe an oblique approach would paint a more vibrant, accurate picture anyway.
I yawn for effect, a sound to disrupt the silence, and declare, “I need a beer. How about you?”
“Oh yes. Totally. They’re killing me here with this service,” Marianne says, although I’m fairly certain she somehow managed to snag one drink already and knock it back with a haste reminiscent of Olympic time trials.
“So what’s your story, anyway, and do you care to tell it?” I ask with a chuckle, “I’m buying.”
The corners of her mouth turn up and her eyes assume a devilish glint, as she at least gives this prospect momentary consideration. “Mmm, you don’t know me well enough for that. But yeah, we can talk, sure.” And with this, she sidles over to the nearest tall, round, faux wooden table, with uncomfortable looking seats for two.
“Cool. What are you having?” I ask, making a motion in the opposite direction, toward the bar.
“Anything, really. Anything at all. Just none of that weird crap.”
As I’m standing at the bar, during a lull in the conversation – a discussion that suddenly finds two young but rather remarkable looking ladies occupying spots now in the crescent shaped space around those still seated, middle aged instructors – Tom does chuckle in glancing over at me, asks a curious question about how I’m holding up. Otherwise we experience no interaction, although my eyes are soon riveted to the same television screen, above and behind the rows of backlit liquor bottles, which has attracted the attentions of both Faraday and Winslow, their necks craned as they squint up at some kind of just breaking news report. The legend at the bottom, in white block all caps letters scrolling across a band of red, simply states GAS STATION SHOOTING.
“What the hell is that?” I ask.
And the professor to my immediate left, he of the white skinned, golf visor sporting, mustachioed variety, swivels his neck ever so slowly until our eyes meet, remarking at last with a wry smirk. “Some crazy shit, isn’t it?”
“Well I’m not sure. That’s what I was wondering about.”
He nods his green plastic visor once in an upward tilt directed at the screen and offers, “this is the second one. Some deranged asshole goes into a gas station, blows away the clerk without provocation. Then he cleans out the cash register and makes himself a cappuccino before leaving the scene.”
“Nothing ever happens around here,” one of the girls behind me says, though I, and judging by his flinch, Professor Faraday, had been unaware we had an audience. We both twist as if coiled, to inspect this sound’s source, and find ourselves looking at one of the females clustered within Tom and Benny’s half circle, a natural, wavy hair blonde blinking giant guileless brown eyes at us. “And then when it does, it’s something messed up like this.”
“What are they calling this guy, the Cappuccino Killer?” I ask, laughing in what I like to imagine is a dark, demented manner.
Faraday glances over at me with a level, heart attack serious expression beneath his green plastic visor and states, “that is exactly what they are calling this guy.” And then with another glance and a nod at the mounted television, though they’ve since moved on to covering the conclusion of this weekend’s major golf tournament, further explains, “this latest one was up in Boston Mills.”
When finally served by our overwhelmed but never hurried, possibly half werewolf of a bartender, I have opted as instructed for something safe, in this instance a Jack and Coke for the both of us. In joining Marianne at the table, to judge by her wide albeit closemouthed smile and high pitched mmm! I’m guessing I did alright with these. Our timing could not have been finer, either, for while my parched mouth wait felt an eternity, it was in actuality only long enough for her to slip outside and burn another cigarette. I know this by having witnessed her return just as I was heading over with the drinks.
The tiny blue screen of a cell phone commands her attention as I slide into my seat. Strange, but I’ve failed to notice what I’ve failed to notice up until this point, which would be that thus far, whether a small sample size anomaly or a genuine trend, thus far my companions have hovered over digital devices a lot less than expected of their age bracket – or any age bracket, for that matter. And yet the words, “so, how do you know Tom Bowman?” are no sooner leaving my lips, before our attention is diverted anyway, by a real world distraction across the bar.
“Christine, goddammit, what did I tell you!?” we hear a deep, somewhat hoarse voice command.
Some would call it nosiness, or rubbernecking to stare at a car accident, but it’s more of a hardwired reaction – you have to manually will yourself not to look, a conscious process in the split second before reflexes command you in that direction. So naturally our heads turn toward this bark, a motion further propelled by the influence of whichever among us acted first. And what we glimpse is a tall, gangly figure, a kid also either in his late teens or early twenties, with beady, dark eyes, and curly brown hair tucked under a red baseball hat of indistinguishable affiliation, bearing a symbol I don’t recognize. There’s also the matter of a prominent, splotchy purple birthmark on one cheek, which might be more sympathy inducing if not for the present situation: he has hand wrapped around the elbow of this short, even skinnier girl with curly blonde tassels streaming from her head, a sunburnt looking face compounded further by blushing. She’s wearing a white tee shirt and jean shorts, nearly matching his outfit, although that would seem the extent of their similarities outside of whatever relationship they currently maintain, for she is attempting to wiggle away from his grip. Prior to his arrival, this girl was standing with a pair of other females, by this central support pillar in the back of the room, attracting no attention, though now most eyes are at least half focused on this scene.
“Now come on!” the male barks at his trapped prey.
“Grimes, what the hell are you doing?” Tom doesn’t so much shout as sigh, with enough weary volume to carry across the room.
“Stay out of it, Bowman,” the red hatted kid growls, without looking over, through clenched teeth, “this doesn’t concern you.”
“Not yet anyway,” Tom calmly states, with a slight though confident smirk, as he meets my eyes and those of a few other sympathetic souls.
And yet this Grimes creature storms off in rapid fashion, the long way around the other side of the bar, and the blonde trails a few steps behind him, of her own apparent volition. As a result, I’m really not sure what to make of this scene. Furthermore, a smattering of stunned girls scattered within earshot, are by turns both smitten and enthralled. I hear a couple close to me speculate aloud, in what sure sounds like a lovestruck coo.
Ooh, I wonder what Wade’s gonna do?
I don’t know (heh heh). He looked kinda pissed!
Jerking my thumb back toward the just exited door, I look over at Marianne and ask, “who the hell was that?”
“That was Wade Grimes,” she says, with a roll of the eyes.
“Yeah but what’s his story?”
Picking up her drink glass to sip the bourbon and cola through a slender green straw, Marianne shakes her head – a reassuring sight, that she at least isn’t impressed by such juvenile, borderline abusive antics – and emphasizes, “I wish I could tell you.”
“Eh, screw it,” I say, when the pause threatens to become a longer, awkward one. “Who cares. What’s your story? How do you know Tom Bowman and company?”
“Shit like this,” she declares, holding up the free index finger and swirling it in the air, “you know, around.”
“You went to Greenlee?”
“Believe it or not, no. I might be one of five people in that town with no connection to the college whatsoever. Tom just wound up meeting some of the people I already knew. Benny, Crystal, um, the Shane crew, that whole gang. Well, and Alicia too, of course, but…”
“He met Alicia at Greenlee?”
Marianne had been staring off into a vague near distance when recounting all this, but makes eye contact now as if surprised by the question. “No, she’s why he came here.”
Conversation comes easy, I have discovered through years of doing this, when you treat everything like an interview. Even personal details can be snuck in as the introduction to a question, just as a veteran reporter conducting a televised one-on-one might: now, as someone who has been married once himself, I have found that it’s best to ________. What are your views on _______? And so on. The point is to maybe interject a smidgen of personal detail while keeping the conversation moving, because they really just want to tell their stories anyway. At least most folks do.
“And you never went? Any college, I mean?”
I notice she has begun shaking at least one of her legs under the table but seems eager enough to chat. “Eh, you know, I took a couple of vague little business classes…”
“Heh heh,” I chuckle, “right, who hasn’t?”
“…but that was at this community college in Moonville. That was about it, though.”
“And the house? You said…”
“Yeah,” she nods, “I’m actually buying that off my parents. They’re semi-retired, you know, did the whole moving to Florida thing a few years back. I make regular payments to them in, like, an owner finance thing or whatever you call it, but yeah, we actually drew up the paperwork so it’s all very legal and everything. That’s my house.” She smiles proudly to drill home the point.
“Doing it alone, eh? That’s pretty impressive,” I say, and it’s only with the hollow, slurping sound trailing my current sip of drink that I realize mine’s drained, and I instantly regret finishing it off in such hurried fashion, with Marianne’s still half full.
“Well, you know, Nate and I – that’s my ex – we were still together at the time, but yeah, I was working full time, both of us were working, so…well so then I wound up pregnant somehow, even though we were trying to be careful. We were sort of doomed at that point, I think, even though we both agreed it was best to – oops! Oh my god!” she half bleats, half giggles, as a hand flies up to cover her mouth, “See now? I wasn’t gonna mention any of this!”
“What?” I ask, sheepishly, perhaps dulled by a few alcoholic drinks as I don’t immediately grasp what she’s talking about.
“Whew!” she laughs, empties the remainder of her beverage and holds the empty glass aloft, “either I need a few more of these, or I need to put on the brakes, I can’t tell which! But definitely nothing in between…”
I don’t feel comfortable addressing any aspect of her inadvertent soul pouring, or whatever you could call it. Nor am I of a mind to let her hustle me for a series of drinks, if that’s even what this is. A real interviewer would keep the pedal down, of course, and if it meant lubing the gears a little, that wouldn’t present a problem for such a professional. But who are we kidding? I am not of that caliber. At any rate, her focus has shifted up and away, over my right shoulder, and she’s blinking rapidly as if drawn back to this era for the first time in the presumably couple of years since it ended. Either that or she’s searching for the most artful way to tiptoe out of this discussion.
“Okay, so, yeah,” Marianne sighs, adopting a breezy tone now, “we decided to have an abortion. It was a mutual thing, you know, he was cool about it. But everything kind of went cool after that, I’m not sure why. Maybe it would have happened anyway. And so yeah, to answer your question, since then I’ve just been working.”
“Alright,” I nod, in what I hope is an encouraging tone, “where at, if you don’t mind me asking? Is it something you’re into, like, a career?”
And maybe I’m imagining this, but I believe she begins to blush – or it could be she just assumes a facial expression one associates with blushing. “Well, don’t hold this against me or anything, but I…,” she starts, with her eyes on the table, before flashing them upward at me, and in that split second, images of strip club marquees and dancers sliding down poles scroll through my mind, “…I work at a gas station.”
An unruly, startled cackle escapes me and I ask, “why would I hold that against you? And why would you care what I think, anyway?’
Just then, when I’m feeling we have reached a wall and can’t imagine where to go from here, a pair of hands smack the top of our table, sailing into sight from out of nowhere, and we recoil before taking in the grinning visage of Tom Bowman.
“She’s not spilling all my secrets, now, is she?” he asks.
“For that we would need to close the place down. And then some,” she retorts.
“Eh, we’re not talking about much of anything,” I shrug, feeling curiously protective, as I risk a glance over at an unreadable Marianne.
“So your boring life, then?” Tom beams, rubbing the closest of her upper arms, the right one, in so doing. Then, to me, throws out, “hey, listen, we’re about to dip out. Think you might be interested in something like that?”
“Sure,” I chuckle and shrug, “I might be interested in something like that. Where to?”
“TBD,” Tom says, smirking as if at the absurdity of some situation I have yet to grasp, “definitely TBD.”
I’m wondering why the invite wasn’t tossed Marianne’s way, but then consider that maybe she knew about it already. Or maybe I’m crucial only by virtue of possessing the transportation. Then again, this feeling of being completely out of my depth persists, that I’m only catching small, fleeting snatches of a larger picture, like picking little embers of burning paper as they float skyward from a massive, blazing bonfire.
And yet, curiously, I don’t believe I’m coming off as a fraud or a misfit, or anything along these lines. To my knowledge, I’m doing a credible job of riding along with the wave. This confidence could be alcohol induced, sure, but I really feel I’m getting a handle on their speech patterns and dialect. And this requires as always a tricky balance, in that you want to fit in, without standing out as the old guy or the square peg, yet by the same turn don’t want to come off as copying their patois, or that you are the old square peg trying to fit in.
“Okay, time for another smoky treat,” Marianne announces, pushing off from the table, as her wooden chair scrapes against the concrete with a screech, “but you want another? I’m picking up this round.”
Joining Marianne out in the dilapidated courtyard seems pretty standard, both as a common human courtesy but also some small parcel of this fitting in process. Truth is, it certainly helps that she is easy on the eyes as well, and an entertaining speaker – I would be tempted to say conversationalist, except that would imply a two-way flow of information which is mostly lacking. Partly this is my own design, to keep her talking as a proper interviewer would, but mostly it’s that once Marianne gets on roll, her tongue leaves a vapor trail in its wake.
“I was working part time at that video store up the street, too, actually, until about a year ago, which – believe it or not – is still insanely busy for some reason, to this day.”
“So I noticed. That’s wild,” I note, shaking my head.
“Yeah…well I think people get into that nostalgia of, you know, walking the aisles and looking for something, they don’t know what, maybe stumbling onto something they wouldn’t find otherwise,” she rattles off in between huffs on the cigarette, “but see, and yeah, taking something physical home, a physical object and yeah so anyway it just go to be too much with the two jobs, and not really having much of social life at that point, so I decided…”
She continues to sketch in any vagueness around the edges, and this is just as it should be. What am I going to contribute of substance, anyway? I know nothing about the religions of the world, fashionable trends, current events beyond the realm of sports. I vote third party because it gives the appearance of thoughtfulness, or maybe even a social conscience, hinting that I’m the rugged individualistic type dedicated to toppling those in power. Without having to invest any time into actually brushing up on the candidates. I could perhaps bore her with tales about boxing champs and quarterbacks profiled for Sports Unbound, although in my experience most athletes are either colossal bores or major dickheads, with virtually nothing in between. The best you can hope for there, really, is the occasional amusing dumbass who was born into some natural talent, was extremely lucky to cash in at the right time, and he knows it. But whatever the case, holding up a mirror to those diversions is often an exercise in depression, as it forces us to examine – or it does me, anyway – how truly useless any of this information is in our lives, that sports don’t even offer us a narrative to engage our minds, or music we can dance to. These games just exist, and in their wake leave an endless well of facts and statistics to eat up our lonely hours.
Meanwhile, the facts and statistics of this courtyard: I spy at least three different plain wooden pallets leaning up against the brick exterior, between here and the piano store and that crumbling front wall, with another stack of them in the back left corner of a similar rear wall. A slightly puffy pair of cornhole receptacles, bearing a faded Pittsburgh Steelers motif, sit disused at the moment in the back half of this overgrown plot, land which features dirt and gravel pebbles somehow, the makings of some accidental paths, amid the tall grass. Well, that and a pair of hipsters, in the form of this burly white guy with shaved head and a runaway curly brown beard, this taller character in black tee shirt and jeans, matching tousled hair, speaking a pronounced British accent through his chipped teeth as the both of them smoke and discuss modern music.
“So how did Tom even meet Alicia, anyway? This was before Greenlee? But then how did he wind up here” I throw out, unable to think of a smoother transition. Not only that, but the wait for breaks in action and conversation has proven a vain one.
“You mean you don’t know?” Marianne asks, glancing up at me, as she also swirls her drink glass around and leans in for some reason to peer intently at its contents. When I shake my head, she affords me another quick look, then leans back against the wall again, one knee bent with her shoe sole resting against the brick. “Definitely before. Well, before for him, anyway. She’s a year older, actually, which if you ask me was another checkmark against. Tom, that is. But her folks also happen to own this huge ass ranch out past Kingsfield, you know, the western part of the state. Apparently her dad made a lot of money with the rodeo, some rodeo, you know, he was some kind of bigwig running this rodeo…”
“The rodeo?” I throw out, incredulous, though also barely treading water in an effort to stay afloat.
“Mmm hmm,” she nods, “and see, the thing is, rumor has it Tom had a full ride to either Yale or Harvard or Princeton, I forget which, Ivy League somewhere” – a clink of ice cubes as the tilts back her glass, knocking back the remainder – “not that he would admit this, you know, everything is one big joke, but I’ve heard that from, like, multiple sources. Reputable ones. They got off to a good start but he went a little cuckoo and I think she lost interest pretty quick. Basically as soon as he chucked everything to drop in on her here. But, I mean,” Marianne raises her eyebrows for emphasis, though staring straight ahead to a random section of the piano store wall, “she and I were already pretty close friends by that point, at first she was just as infatuated, actually. Maybe even more so.”
So in other words, I don’t learn a whole hell of a lot out here. And now that her cocktail is empty, I’ve no choice but to follow suit, killing mine, which in turn leads to an expectant expression shading her features, as she lights another cigarette, deliberately, as if stalling, waiting for me, perhaps, to make the next move. With Tom’s comment about possibly leaving in the back of my mind, I mention drifting inside to help rustle up the troops, and ask if she’s coming along.
“I’m good,” she says, again staring resolutely forward, waving me off with her smoking hand, “some of my chicas are meeting me here, actually.”
Slinking my way through the dim interior, as my eyes adjust to the meager light, I’m initially struggling to locate Tom and the others. In fact, after my eyes are well adjusted to the light, I am still struggling to locate Tom and the others. At first I’m playing it off by being casual man, creeping around the edges and risking furtive peeks about the room, hands on hips as if unconcerned as I lean against that central post, by the 36 trillion song bank. But no. There are three figures I’m absolutely certain are not in this room, which would be Tom Bowman, Benny Fordham, and Brad Davis. Am I going blind? To settle matters conclusively, I drift out the front door, feeling as if, however foolishly, that every eye in the room burns holes in my back, that this is all one massive prank at my expense. When confronted by the empty parking space where that rental used to be, however, there’s not much denying their absence, and a sad, shocked laugh escapes me.
Well, this was certainly one of the nerviest stunts in memory, especially for one targeting me. Sure, in retrospect it was foolish to hand a near total stranger the keys, even if, in my defense, Brad represented our DD, however reluctantly, and is without question a more capable driver right now. I’m also ruing a somewhat sarcastic response when Tom asked if I was interested in joining them, for though it had been obvious to me that my shrugging was in jest, he must have misinterpreted it as indifference.
Storming back indoors, indignant as I ever am, I’m not exactly blasted but just drunk enough to feel awkward, and that I’d rather get in one place, without attracting much attention to myself, and remain there. This more than any other reason is what weighs against my bothering to rejoin Marianne, wherever she is at the moment. I do begin wondering about the potential of hotel rooms in the area, though it’s not quite 4pm. But as the cards are played what I actually do is wander into the nearest stool, which by chance is the corner opposite a still seated Professor Faraday, and raise my arm to signal the bartender for a downgrade to Rolling Rock. Unsure as to whether I wish to make myself cozy in one of these chairs, I continue to stand, and ask Faraday if he knows where Tom Bowman went, if he has any clue why they would have taken off with my car.
The professor, who is crunching on a plate of nachos whilst continuing to squint upward at the golf tournament, nods a few times before facing me. While wiping one hand on his jeans, he hoists a giant mug of draft with the other, betrays the distinctive interior motion of prying food loose with this tongue, from unseen corridors of the mouth.
“He said you were riding with me,” Faraday declares.
