by Joe Derkacht
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“Boss, you okay?”
I opened my eyes, and possibly thrashed about a little. A golden-haired angel loomed over me, his face filled with concern. It took me a few moments to find my bearings. I was in bed and the angel was the young man Zell had called Tryg. The halo was merely backlighting from the ceiling fixture.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
He glanced at his watch before answering. “C’mon, we’ll be late getting to Portland.”
I kept staring at him. After the initial shock of waking to find someone standing over me, my first impulse was to yell at him to get out. I probably would have, too, except that accompanied by flashes of light, my brain seemed to be shifting through several different memories of this same face—bearded and beardless, flesh and incorporeal. Was I losing my mind? With every flash, I heard a chunk-chunking sound, as if from the carousel of a slide projector.
“You okay?” He asked again. “Zell said you maybe wouldn’t feel up to going today.”
“You better go without me,” I said, shaking my head. Yelling was out. Stuttered shouts never impressed anybody.
“You sure? You have an appointment with some kind of Doc.”
A Doc? A shrink? The last person I wanted to see was some psycho shrink. He probably wanted to put me back in the nuthouse or to give me some new drug.
“Later,” I said. “You go.”
“You sure? If you get up right now, we can still just make it.”
I was sure. It finally came back to me that he’d picked me up once when I’d been hitchhiking on Highway 101. He was a skinny kid headed to his own personal patch of weed. He drove a rusty old Datsun 510 like he thought he was a race car driver. A drug dealer was working for me!
I shook my head vigorously. He finally got the point.
“I’ll say hi to Bro Ruben for you.”
“Fine,” I said, waving him out. I didn’t remember any Bro Ruben and didn’t really care who he did or didn’t say hello to. I just wanted him to leave.
Hours later, Zell found me digging through my desk drawers, searching for my check books. Too many people came and went through my house as if it were their own. Either I needed to write a note to myself to keep my doors locked, or I needed to install new locks—I didn’t know which.
“I need the cashbox for the store,” she said without preamble.
Cashbox? For the store? I looked at her blankly.
“What are you searching for?” She asked.
“My checkbooks.”
She went to a cabinet and opened the door. From where I was sitting, I could see a combination wall safe. I didn’t remember the safe, so how could I remember the combination? She must have read my expression perfectly, because she immediately spun the dial. In a couple of moments, the door swung open for her.
I think my face was burning when she placed both my personal and business checkbooks on the desk.
“How many people know about—?”
“The three of us,” she said, answering me before I could finish. As if I couldn’t put two and two together, she added, “You, Tryg, and I.”
“Funny way to do business,” I said, thinking I might have gaps in my memory but I certainly did recall someone named Kit stealing my checkbooks. If my wife could steal from me, why not my neighbor or someone like Tryg the drug dealer? Didn’t I ever learn from my mistakes?
As if to confirm my suspicions, she slid out a metal box from the safe and headed for the door. I followed her. For someone thirty years older than I, she was still quicker. She disappeared inside the shop before I was through the back door of my house.
I went charging in, probably looking like a madman. Thankfully, my stammer prevented me from yelling like one, too. The sign on the door was finally registering, along with the carved Indians, the dolls, the chairs.
Zell looked up from counting out money from the cashbox. A dark-haired young woman, obviously startled, took a step back from me, protectively grasping a doll to her breast. You would’ve thought she held a newborn infant instead of something made of ceramic.
“I’ll wrap her for you, Miss,” Zell said, speaking in a soothing tone of voice, as if it were a common occurrence for people like me to burst into the shop unannounced.
Under the woman’s suspicious stare, I beat a hasty retreat, nearly bowling over a young girl as I went out the door. A family of four was behind her on the walkway. Zell had a busy day ahead of her.
I was sitting at my desk, reading through one of my journals when she finally found time for a break.
“I put up the ‘Out to Lunch’ sign,” she announced. She stared at me, as I studiously ignored her. Eventually, when I looked up, she had vanished. I continued reading, my conscience arguing with me about my behavior. Maybe Zell had grown accustomed over the years to my outbursts, to my suspicions, to my dark moments. I hoped she didn’t feel as badly about them as I did.
“If you feel up to it, I’ll drive us over to Newaulakem for you to see the shed.”
Zell was back. A ride to Newaulakem would be a welcome break. Despite the neatness of my journal entries, my head seemed to be swirling. I’d included everything in my journals—how I transitioned from clocks to Indians, how Tryg came to me as an apprentice after a five year stint in jail for possession and intent to distribute marijuana, how I was still wondering about Judith and pestering Blackie and everyone else I could think of for information. Made in my dense, microscopic hand, the entries, along with my usual detailed sketches, seemed to strike me from several different directions, like torrents of water threatening to capsize an inflatable rubber dinghy. I was on information overload.
Or maybe I just needed glasses, after squinting at the fine print for so long? Dizzy, I rubbed my eyes. Zell hadn’t gone anywhere.
“Sure, love to see the shed.”