by Brian Hodge
He saw her clearly now, twenty-thirty pounds overweight, not too bad though, bleached hair, cheeks that looked like they held an acorn in each for the winter. And the bar: old wood and black leather, a couple of working men covering beers in the corner, a fish tank, one of those long, slim ones with green crystal paint on the back and a purple light that made the fish shine.
"Here you are, sir."
He swiveled on the stool, almost knocking over the beer at his elbow.
"This here is Harlan," said the woman, "the best barkeep we ever had." At that she laughed again.
"Harlan Shiply," said the small, thin man as he dried a glass. His voice was thin, too, and precise, and one would more likely order a pair of eyeglasses from him, say, or a book on theosophy, than a drink. The thin man put down the glass and extended his hand.
It was the kind of handshake he expected. At the same time the woman placed one of her dimpled hands on his knee.
"My name's Eleanor. This here's my place, you could say. For the time being, anyway."
"Uh," he said, "my name's…" He couldn't think what to say. Frantically he scanned the walls, trying to spot a word, a name. All he could see were beer advertisements. "Miller," he said finally, without much conviction.
"Oh?" inquired the bartender politely. "What line of business are you in, Mr. Miller?"
The woman frowned at him. "Harlan," she said sharply.
"S-sorry," said Shiply, "I forgot." He returned sheepishly to his sparkling glasses.
"To tell you the truth," he blurted, "I'm not in anything at the moment. I'm looking around for a new line, actually. I was in, uh, the retail market before." He caught a glimpse of a sign for Danish beer. "Imported. Importing, I mean."
"No, you weren't, hon," said Eleanor, moving her hand around in a circle on his knee, "but that's all right. It'll worry you at first, but before long—Look at that." She looked at his knee.
"I don't know how it got torn," he said. He put his hand over hers, stopping it. "Well, actually, I was trying to fix my car. Broke down back there on the highway, and—
"See? It moves around like that, just like it wasn't even attached. That's why they call it a floating kneecap. Ha ha!''
"I guess I should clean up." He lifted his hand from hers but she drew it back, pressing it warmly. "It's been quite a day. Matter of fact, I'm feeling a little disoriented."
"Mm-hm."
"Is there someplace, a motel? It's too late to do anything now. About my car."
"Mm-hm. Boland's is right down a block. Don't you worry about a thing."
"Thanks." He stood. He glanced between the two of them, smiled tautly, tipped his head. "I appreciate—"
"Don't you go off just yet, hon."
One of the men in khakis started the juke box-again. The same record boomed out.
green, green, promenade in green
She pushed the wet glass against his knuckles. "Here, now, you need it."
Oh no, he thought. He reached for his back pocket, hoping. It was empty.
"You're not going to believe this," he began.
They were both looking at him.
"Cheers," said the woman.
He smiled and shrugged. He drank the glass halfway down. It was cold and thick and it tasted like gold.
They were both looking at him.
He reached inside his coat.
She held his hand against his chest. "Don't worry," she said.
"My pleasure, sir," said the man behind the bar.
He felt something firm, drew it out. It was a shiny black breast-pocket wallet. He turned it over. No initials. Inside were several crisp, unfolded bills, fives, tens and twenties. He drew out a five absently, searching for a driver's license, a credit card, anything. But there was nothing else. Just two words printed in gold in the leather. He looked closer. Pinseal Goathide.
"You just put that away," she insisted. "You have that money for a purpose, now."
"Thanks," he said. "Thank you very much." He smiled at the bartender. "Mr.—what was it?"
"Shiply. You're quite welcome, Mr., I beg your pardon?"
He put the wallet away. "Forget it," he said. "I'm having a hell of a time remembering my own name right now. Tired, I guess. But what is it they say? 'Sufficient to the day is the, something, thereof?'
"That's all right," said Eleanor. "You're just like everybody else."
He thought it was a joke, and forced a laugh, and finished his beer.
He walked over to the hotel as the crickets came out. He reversed the ledger and signed "Mr. Jack Miller," though the desk man—the owner, judging by the size of the place—did not bother to ask. He made up an excuse about luggage, but that didn't seem to make any difference to Boland, if that was his name, one way or another.
"Is there a" (hospital, he started to say) "doctor in town?"
"Thought you'd be asking," said the hotel man.
He got directions, found the office in an unmarked storefront. Doctor Leveland put down the phone and leaned against the doorjamb, drawing on a cigar. He seemed to be expecting someone.
Inside, the office was surprisingly well-equipped with what appeared to be very new, miniaturized instruments, most of them so new, in fact, that Miller had never seen their like.
At least he thought he hadn't.
"Cigar, Jack?"
He accepted it and a wooden match and stood in the office, shifting his weight and hearing the sounds of what he took to be a television program on the other side of the wall. After a while he had to say something.
"This is a Marsh Wheeling, isn' it? Uh, Dr. Leveland?"
"Make it Roland. Indeed it is. Bite a wee bit more off the tip, why don't you. A real Pittsburgh Stogy is what that is, all right. They'll stop making them pretty soon, I hear. But I've got—" He puffed forward proudly and conspiratorially. "—Quite A Few Cases put away, in there with the refrigerated supplies."
He rocked on his heels.
Just then a series of gunshots cracked loudly. Miller jumped. It was no television set. A backfire? He gazed out the open door but there were no cars in sight. "Alcazar Theater," said the doctor. "The ass-end of it's flush with my wall, there. Showing another one this week about all those poor cops dying for our sins."
"Look," said Miller irritably. "Aren't you supposed to ask what's wrong with me?"
"What's wrong with you?" asked Dr. Leveland.
That stopped him. He held cut his hands, feeling like a damn fool. "I was jacking up my car," he tried. "Do you have anything for a cut?"
The doctor threw back his head and roared. He slapped a hand around the back of Miller's head and led him into the other room. Miller realized that he hadn't been touched like that by a man since he had been a small boy. Wait a minute, he thought, that's something. He tried, but it was no use. He couldn't remember. He howled loudly with the doctor. By the time they got to the examination room his face had twisted up and he was no longer laughing.
The doctor sat him down.
"Listen, now. I know why you came to see me." He was aware of his coat coming off, his sleeves rolling up. "You think you're the only one, don't you." The doctor, if that was what he was, spoke in statements, authoritatively, not patronizingly, and the effect was oddly reassuring. He felt a coolness on his arm, then a needle slipping in. "You think, 'Why did this have to happen to me?' You think, 'What did happen to me?' You don't know yet, do you? Of course not. You feel like you want to cry, but you're man enough not to. It'll come to you, though, what to do, how to live, in time. It always does. You understand me? Always."
"Look. Doctor." He opened his eyes. "I'm tired, beat, and—
"I know."
"And I'm a mess."
"That's right."
"And, God help me, I don't know what the hell's going on!"
"Of course not."
He felt his head tipping back. His eyes closing.
"And you don't remember how you got here, what your name is. They did a real job on you. That's right. They always do.
Take it easy for a minute, now. It'll pass. It's just working its way through your bloodstream." He chuckled. "It's sleeping medicine. I'll help you back over to the hotel. They always need to sleep first off, and the longer the better, I say."
He felt a warmth spreading up through his legs to his groin, where it burned, a big, hot balloon, and on up his chest to his head. "…I must have been fixing my car. It fell on me. Or an accident. Or I was robbed. On the road. You know, hit on the head." If that was true, though, why was he still carrying money? But the ID, that was gone, all of it. "Was that it? You think that's why…?" His head swelled up like an inflating dirigible and he tumbled backward through open sky, no land in sight. He started counting down his altitude in thousands. "Where am I now?" he asked.
Far away, the doctor chuckled. "Drop City, I call it. That's as good a name as any."
"Doctor," he said, sinking fast. "I…I feel more like I do now…than when I came in."
"That's all right. Tomorrow's a whole new ball game. Or the day after. You'll do just fine here. Glad to have you with us, Mr.—"
He tried to stay up long enough to hear his name.
"—Miller," said the doctor.
He slept for two days. He started out of bed lost; then enough—the town, the bar, the hotel, the doctor—came back to make him pound his forehead in anger, but the drug hangover brought him right back down, suspended in a limbo between righteousness and terror. Feeling like an inmate in a nudist camp of the soul, he took a shower, went downstairs for breakfast.
He bought a razor and a toothbrush.
Days passed. Whenever he found himself explaining his predicament, in the coffee shop, at the general store, he was eased away from the subject with understanding cluckings and almost cheerful misdirection. For some reason he did not understand, he did not return to the doctor's office; all he knew was that he did not want to. He stopped questioning.
At first he did not believe that there was no police department. "Leveland's takes care of everything," he was told more than once. But when he searched the streets, covering the entirety of the small, self-contained town to its perimeters several times, it was true, all right. Neither was there a bus station. He wondered about that, standing on the ridge overlooking the highway where he had been let out; there was not even a sign to suggest that a bus should stop there. Soon he gave that up, too. If no one else seemed to find anything remarkable about his condition, well, why should he? In a real sense he felt free. After all, how many men are granted a new lease?
The feeling deepened as easily as the taking of a breath, and the days passed just as easily one into another.
First he spent a lot of time in the park lying under trees marked on their trunks with strange eye-like knots. He would wink at them, first one eye, then the other, when the sun fell too low behind the branches, the leaves like burning black coins, their shadows washing over his hands and face. He moved out of Boland's Hotel, found a quiet rooming house on an unmarked lane. He walked and walked, nodding his head and learning to smile again, luxuriating in his new anonymity.
Soon he came to feel that things had always been this way.
One afternoon he found himself at the town's only gas station, drinking a soda and watching the pump ring a dollar's worth of regular into a '47 Studebaker. It was the old glass style pump, like a model of a lighthouse, with the gasoline visible through the sides. There were few cars in use on the streets and he didn't miss them. He felt at ease here, leaning against the soft drink cooler, smelling the sweet dangerous smell from the pump after each slow sale.
"Hi, Earl," he called to the station man. "How's it going?"
"Howyadoing, Jack? Come on out back. I'm workin' on a real crazy one today."
He followed past the tire tub and the collection of old brake linings to a Volkswagen, its dingy red paint long oxidized to the color of a mass of tubifex worms. It was a model from the early fifties, with the small round backseat windows and pinched, slant-eyed rear panes.
"Crazy looking, ain't they? I don't get many."
"You don't? How long you been here, Earl?"
"Long as I can remember. Losing power, he says."
Miller stooped under the bonnet. The plugs were laid out on a dirty cloth the same color as the automobile, and a caged light bulb hung over the exposed carburetor. "What's the compression like?"
"Hell, number three valve's down to ninety-five. Looks like she's in for a ring job. Yeah," he mused tiredly, "I'm gonna have to pull the engine on this baby."
"Hmm," said Miller. "You got any diesel fuel around here?"
He took a two-pound coffee can full and poured it slowly through the carburetor with the motor running. Steaming gouts of white smoke billowed up around him. Halfway down the can, he cupped his hand over the intake, felt it suck hungrily for air and die.
"Cut the ignition," he told Earl.
They shared a leisurely break over two more bottles of soda, and then he started her up again, gunned her real good and emptied the can through the bowl.
After that, the compression was up to 120 in number three, and within ten pounds all around.
"Where'd you learn a trick like that?"
"I don't know, Earl. I really don't."
"Well, you must've been a mechanic, sometime or other. Jack, my boy? How would you like yourself a job?"
His money would run out soon, anyway. Besides, he felt at home in the station. The pay wasn't much, but it kept him in the rooming house, and kept his hands busy so that he didn't have time to think. Nights he ambled back through the quiet streets, smelling the roasts for dinner and the figs on the trees and dodging sprinklers that spilled over the cracked sidewalk. He wound up at Eleanor's more often than not. She kept at him, pushing up against his arm in that teasing way of hers, but he held back. There was something, something. Though he couldn't remember what. Though he didn't especially try.
And one night he bought a ticket to the Alcazar, because he liked the slow, downcast smile on the girl in the glass booth and the way she looked in her uniform. The same the next weekend, and the next, and after a while he didn't think about what picture was showing, just stepped up and bought his ticket, then waited to talk with her in the lobby when the last show went on and she had to empty the butter machine and lock the candy counter anyway. After a time he guessed she was in love with him or thought she was, and then one particular Saturday, after seeing the show for two nights running, as they walked back to her house as usual, she held his hand very tightly until they got to her corner, when she suddenly drew into herself and tried to make believe she was watching the cracks in the cement.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
She wouldn't answer at first. Then, "Oh, Jack." It sounded like all the breath went out of her when she said his name this time. "Before I met you, I didn't know anything—and now I'm confused. Are you happy here?"
He stuffed his hands away and counted the cracks with her. "Why shouldn't I be?"
"I don't know. There's something about you."
He tried to sling his arm around her neck.
"No, really. I knew it the first moment I saw you. The way you used to dress, that suit."
"What about it?"
"It was handmade, for you. And your shoes, and the, I don't know, the way you carried yourself. You're part of something else, something that can't figure here. Oh, don't say anything, I can tell. And if that's true…" She tilted her head from side to side, reasoning. "Then, someday you're going to want to get back to some of the parts, at least, of that other kind of life. It's just too far removed. You can't forget everything. That kind of thing is in your bones."
He pulled her over by one of the eye trees. "That's not necessarily true," he said.
"It's not that I care what you were running away from before you came here. How could I? I don't even want to know about it. I promised myself never to try to find out. Of course I couldn't, nobody can, anyway, but that's not the point…"
"What do you mean,
nobody can?"
"You know. The way it is for all of us."
"No, as a matter of fact, I don't know."
"Dr. Leveland's supposed to explain it to you." She sounded suspicious. "Don't you even know that?"
"I'll ask him," he said, an unnerving feeling taking hold. "I will." Maybe there is something wrong with me, he thought, just going about my business here as if I really do belong, not wanting to know. Maybe I am running away.
They came to her house. They passed the tall hedge but, instead of sitting down in the lawn swing, she continued straight to the porch and took her key out of the pocket of her purple and gold uniform. She fumbled long enough for him to catch up with her.
He lifted her chin. "Come and sit with me, for God's sake."
She looked at him painfully. She was pretty, he thought, even like this, her straight, brown, pageboy hair. The light from the yellow porch bulb made her skin look like—
He kissed her. Her mouth was warm at first, then unyielding. When he pulled away her eyes were still open.
"Do you love me, Jackie?" she asked.
"Butter," he said. That was it.
"I always smell like butter," she said flatly. "It's my job. I'm sorry I asked."
He stepped off the porch. He touched her elbow gently and she followed in spite of herself, as he knew she would. They sat apart on the swing.
She was right. The sense behind her words reached him. He had lulled himself into ignoring a key question of his existence; he really didn't belong here, and sooner or later his life outside would impinge. He could not hide forever. He had no right to pretend to allow this girl to go on building a fantasy future for the two of them, one which by all odds had no right to exist. A ringing began in his ears and he suddenly had the overwhelming idea that he had seen all this a dozen times at that movie theater of hers, or on the late show.
"Irene," he said. "How long have you lived here?"
"Why do you ask that?" Her eyes grew steely. "A few years, I guess. Ever since. What difference does it make?"
"Since what?"
"Look at you. Your face," she said dolefully. "I'm beginning to lose you already, isn't that true?"