The Methuselah Gene Page 5

  My order came out to me, and as Edie placed it in front of me, I realized why the name of the place was the Slow Poke Cafe. “You ever get busy?” I asked.

  She bobbed her head, made a surprised face. “Well, sure, you just wait and see. Early bird gets the worm round here, since there’s jus’ Paul and me. Come lunchtime we do the most business, though, with to-go orders.”

  “Rush hour?” I chuckled at the idea. “So the name keeps folks from complaining?”

  “You got it, hon. And some of the old timers? They’d linger round ‘til two or three o’clock, if they could. Have ta shoo’em out, make room. We don’t do as well evenings, like I said. Jus’ get some regulars who got no wife cookin’ for ‘em. Like you, maybe?”

  She was looking at my bare ring finger. I said, “If the food’s as good as it looks, I may be back, even from Richmond.”

  “Virginia? Got an uncle there. Bill Polk, in Newport News.”

  I nodded, then forked a tender bite of steak into my mouth. It was more delicious than I’d hoped. “Ummmm.”

  “The secret’s in the gravy,” Edie confided. “You jus’ need to find you a woman there in Richmond, make a wife of one knows how to cook.”

  I smiled as I chewed, took a swig of Coke from the bottle, then said, “Maybe you’re right. But then most of the women I’ve met who know how to cook are already cooking for their own families.”

  Edie opened her mouth, about to share her wisdom on relationships, but she seemed to decide it would be lost on me because she shut her mouth instead, made a polite smile, and left me to enjoy my dinner. I looked out the front window toward the post office across the street. An old man entered over there, wearing shiny overalls held up with suspenders. The overalls were slick with muck. I imagined the old guy had just finished slopping his hogs, and now wanted to check on what those swine known as his creditors were demanding today, after discarding whatever hogwash his junk mail touted. With my limited view of the postal boxes, I was positioned to see everyone who came and went over there, but I didn’t bother to lift my binoculars or ready my camera yet. It was more likely to see Edie or Wally checking Box 16 than that old timer.

  Fifteen minutes later a middle aged dark-haired woman arrived with her teenage son. They drove up in a Jeep, and the kid ran in, holding his mother’s keys, to check a box higher than I knew 16 to be. Five minutes later a bearded yokel in his mid-fifties pulled into the spot vacated by the Jeep. He drove the same blue Chevy pickup I’d seen in the bay at Wally’s Shell station. As he entered, his burnt orange Bulldog sighted me from the truck’s bed twenty yards away. The thing looked like its last bath had been in acid. It barked, hoarsely. I noted the Iowa plate below the dented fender, and then went back to my own plate. I finished off the steak and then sopped up the remains of my gravy with a final flaky biscuit that was so tasty I doubted Betty Crocker herself had ever made better.

  “Another Coke there?” Edie called to me from the register where she kept boxes of mints, beef jerky, and pickled eggs floating in a jar of vinegar.

  I must have been looking at the eggs as if staring at cue balls basting in urine, because Edie appeared perplexed until I shook my head and asked, “How about a cup of coffee and a slice of pie?”

  “Cherry, apple, rhubarb, or lemon?”

  I considered the possibility of visiting every tiny café in every tiny town in America during my retirement, and writing a book about it. “Apple, with a scoop of vanilla ice cream if you got it,” I replied.

  Edie scribbled on her pad, then called my request back to Paul somewhere behind the swinging doors. Suddenly the front door binged, and I turned my head to see a man my own age push his way inside. He was alone, a few inches under six feet, and had a beer gut filling out his green flannel shirt like he had a blue ribbon watermelon hidden under there. His dark eyes were set narrow, and seemed guilty somehow, or wary. He acknowledged me mistakenly, it seemed. But I nodded back anyway, like a stranger to the big city who is forced to share his first subway car with a potential nut case.

  “Hi there, Earl,” Edie greeted him. “How’s Karen?”

  “Doin’ just fine,” Earl announced broadly. “How’s Paul these days?”

  “Howdy Earl,” a scratchy nicotine voice croaked from the kitchen. “Can’t stay away from my pork chops, can ya?”

  “No can do,” Earl confessed loudly, then looked at me as if trying to place a face in a detective’s mugshot book. “And who might you be?”

  “He’s from Virginia,” Edie informed him. “Richmond, Virginia.”

  “That right.” Earl’s brassy voice sounded mildly skeptical. His thin set blueberry eyes studied me with a secret animosity I couldn’t place, as if the memory of a past cowardice with another stranger still ate at him like an ulcer. “Looking for somebody, are ya, pal?”

  “Now, Earl,” Edie said, and looked over at me as though to explain a rabid dog. “Earl’s a bit suspicious of strangers. Always has been. Isn’t that right, Earl?”

  Earl ignored her, dropping his level gaze to my binocular and camera cases. “You a birder, or what?” he asked, not careful enough to keep the tin from his intonation.

  From where I sat at the window I could feel his natural, underlying bent toward confrontation, his covert inclination toward domination. I guessed him to be competitive, but shallow. He had sixty pounds on me at least, but I knew he’d fold in the end. I’d seen his type before. The sports freak who’d never played the game, only watched it on ESPN. The ugly kid who’d never been picked, and made up for it later by seeing who he might intimidate. Strangers were easy targets, since he’d never see them again. But there was a sense that he’d once picked the wrong man to practice his self-therapy on, too. Maybe that man hadn’t seemed much of a threat, either. So I looked away, and didn’t answer.

  “What’s that?” Earl asked, as if I’d spoken. “Eh?”

  “Earl,” Edie warned, her usually sweet voice stern.

  I smiled at the window, wondering what other voices he heard in his own head. Edie gave Earl an iced tea, then brought me my coffee. Homemade pie a la mode was coming right up, she assured me. Earl gulped his tea, his eyes continuing to assess me, but I never met his gaze. After a moment, he laughed, dismissing me. Then he made small talk with Edie about Zion’s Pastor Felsen, and someone named June Applegate.

  I stared out the window as I sipped at my coffee. It was six o’clock now. No one else was going into the post office this late, although there seemed to be more people on the street. Two of them, I soon noticed with surprise, were Wally and the town Sheriff. These two walked along the far side of Main, and the Sheriff—a pot bellied balding man—held a sheet of paper in front of him, which Wally pointed at while talking. When they looked into the post office first, it occurred to me the sheet of paper was probably my rental agreement with Avis, once locked in the glove box of the Taurus. Using my binoculars, I confirmed it. As they started to cross the road, following several others who now entered the Slow Poke, I got up nervously, my heart suddenly beating faster and erratically.

  “Got a restroom?” I asked Edie, interrupting her as she greeted her new customers. She seemed surprised, not by my request, but by the number of people now entering her establishment. She hooked a thumb toward the swinging door behind her. “Thanks,” I said, and pushed my way through as if I couldn’t wait any longer with my spastic bladder.

  I turned back just in time to glimpse a third new face entering the diner. It was eclipsed by the door swinging back, although not before our eyes met. The man I’d seen was fiftyish, resembling a younger Anthony Hopkins, but with hair the color and unruly consistency of corn silk. I knew his slovenly appearance to be a disguise somehow, too. Partly because his pale blue intelligent eyes had seemed to recognize me.

  Walter Mills?

  I never looked at Paul, although I knew he was watching me as I came through, heading straight toward the open bathroom door. I had the impression, in peripheral vision, of a tall man busy
at his pots, who paused to cock his head at an intruder. The smell of meat and baked bread soon mingled with the faint odor of urine as I stood in the tiny restroom and contemplated the cracked window above me. Should I go back and face the music, maybe reveal my hand to the man I’d come here to find? What did my poker hand hold so far but a pair of deuces?

  No, I decided. I’d lock myself in here, let Wally and the Sheriff interrogate me through the door. I wouldn’t be exposed in front of Hannibal Lecter.

  But then I noticed that the door’s latch was broken. It explained why the door was open.

  My pulse went up tempo, like a snare drum in a Rumba band. Panicking, I jammed a thin sliver of soap from the sink into the door frame, to keep the thing shut so that Paul wouldn’t see me climb up onto the toilet and snake my way out through the window.

  6

  Darkness took its bloody time killing off the light that slowly faded from a high bank of crimson clouds to the west. I sat in a clearing amid the corn behind Main Street, bathed in an eerie golden sky paint, and considered the stupidity of what I’d just done. What the Sheriff had on me up to then was little more than lying to a service station cracker known for his practical jokes—a man who I intended on paying in cash anyway. Now, thanks to my bizarre bolting from the Slow Poke Café, they could add to this a suspicious disappearance through a restroom window on a skipout from a ten dollar restaurant meal. If George Carlin had been right about just what a “redneck hayseed” was capable of, I could also imagine a few paranoid townsfolk like Earl riding shotgun after me in a posse of Jeep Cherokees, hoping to bag the icepick killer who was on an elusive murder spree through five states. Winning bagger would, no doubt, get his photo on the front page of the Creston Gazette. Or was it the Clucksbury Chronicle? As for my binoculars and camera, my leaving those behind had only added to my mystery, and upped their ante on my poker face. If I didn’t turn myself in before long, and make things right, even Edie might come after me with the cleaver Paul used to cut up chickens.

  Night, when it finally came to Zion, might have been as dark as my prospects for marriage to a supermodel, were it not for the stars. I’d never seen so many with my unaided eye, anywhere near Washington. Those constellations that I recognized seemed filled in somehow, here. As if the Jolly Green Giant in Earl’s posse had used his shotgun on Bear and Ram, and so had punctured all the way through to that mystic brightness which you only got to see at the end of a tunnel when you died.

  I stood up within the corn, my head level with the tassels that stretched toward the silhouettes of a farm house and grain elevator on the western horizon. Standing there, I thought about Emily Danville for the first time in years. I wondered what she would make of my present situation. We’d dated steadily through our senior year in college, but I’d gotten cold feet as graduation approached. And so I’d resisted having my next fifty years planned out for me, as my roommate’s girlfriend had done for Joel. As it happened, the question I popped wasn’t the one Emily had expected, and so she’d left me in tears that night. Left me alone, with beach sand in my shoes. Ironically, I now found myself asking the same question again, only to myself this time.

  Do you know where you’ll be, or who you’ll be with, in ten years?

  Here it was, fifteen years later, and I still didn’t know the answer. All I knew for sure now was that Emily Danville knew the answer to that question, wherever she was. While I was still asking it. Among other questions.

  As I finally stepped out of the corn, it was almost like leaving the past behind. My decision, my intention, was to be shut of this before it ballooned out of control. My hope was that in exchange for a show of good will, the Sheriff would favor me with an answer to the question I had with Walter Mills’ name on it. I owned some trepidation in the matter, but saw no other way out. An hour and a half sitting in a corn field had brought me no new insights, for sure. What it all came down to was facing my fears. Fear of the company’s disappointment in me, and fear that the cards dealt me ever since that night on the beach in Atlantic City with Emily would continue to be losers. Add to this the fear of being caught up in a lie. And not just those I told to myself.

  The luminous dial of my watch read 8:21 p.m. as I walked back onto that darkened main road that was lit by no streetlights, only the softer lumination emanating from inside the few businesses still open. The five diners inside the Slow Poke, who I spied though the plate glass from across the street, were unknown to me. Although I saw Edie beaming as she moved among them over there with amiable grace, she didn’t look in my direction, and so she didn’t see me approaching the post office opposite her.

  The postmaster’s office was long closed, but the outer door remained unlocked, allowing access to the box section at any time. The spring that kept the door closed squeaked as I entered the lobby, but I prevented the door from banging behind me with a hand positioned behind my back. The fly-specked globe overhead cast an eerie twilight radiance on the narrow alcove. Its bulb couldn’t have been brighter than 25 watts when it was new and not caked with burnt dust. So it was difficult to validate my suspicion that the young Hannibal Lecter was indeed Walter Mills. Stooping and then squinting into the tiny box window, past the stenciled white number 16, I was greeted with a small square of darkness framed by the faint outline of an empty oblong metal box.

  Two hours ago you had mail, Walter, I confirmed, and now you have none.

  I stepped softly back outside, in stunned silence. Immediately, a truck pulled up, freezing me like a deer in its headlight beam. I squinted once more, and put up my hand, something a deer couldn’t do. Just shoot me, I thought, dully. But after the two truck doors slammed in unison, and the “Howdi” came, I knew it wasn’t Wally and the Sheriff. Instinctively, I moved out of the light before Edie could eyeball me from the Slow Poke. Then I looked back to see two more hog farmers, one of them carrying a sheaf of letters, the smell of one or both of the geezers wafting outward like the electric tang of a cherry bomb.

  From the darkness of the street fronting the closed hardware store, I counted the few lights visible amid this block of red brick buildings, which were surrounded in all directions by farmland. Inside the barber shop a luminous clock cast a blue pallor over two sheeted chairs, like corpses in a morgue. Thanks to a banker’s lamp atop a hidden desk, the tiny branch bank glowed green inside. The town hall that doubled as the Zion Baptist Church bore a fluorescent sign next to its one stained glass window. The sign advertised bingo, an antiques auction on Thursday, and a sermon by Pastor Felsen on II Peter 2:9 and the nature of temptation. The lawyer’s office next door—also lettered to be a notary and tax service—was as dark as sin except for a pasteboard poster lit in front by a small Tiffany lamp, advertising real estate in ten acre parcels. The only other light visible from where I stood was the one next to the brighter Slow Poke. This was Zion Drug, a narrow frontage with a deep interior, like the old oblong drug stores seen in sepia black and white photographs from the turn of the last century.

  I approached the drugstore from the left, out of view of Edie’s window, and then peered through the yellowed plate glass toward a partly open door in back. Toward the sliver of light that had attracted me. In that brighter back room I could see a bed and a sink. A shadow played across the white sheets on the bed as something or someone moved between it and the light source. There was another light source back there, too, but the second seemed to vacillate, and for whatever odd reason the words lava lamp came to mind. Meanwhile, the only light within the store itself emanated from the flickering glass display case containing, from what I could tell, cigars, film, electric razors and women’s compacts. Despite the dimness, I was certain there was no pharmacy here, only racks of nonprescription remedies, and sundries like rubbing alcohol, peroxide, vitamins, rental videos, and processed junk food snacks. Stacked in one corner were cases of various soft drinks and beers. In another corner, an ancient Pepsi cooler abutted the end of the display case. It was the kind of cooler that weighed a t
on, requiring you to pull your bottle up through a metal gate. Frozen overhead were three dust-caked fans, their long aluminum blades as motionless as petrified bat wings.

  I had just started to turn away when the sole resident of the back room suddenly appeared in the doorway. He saw me immediately, and momentarily arrested himself in place. Framed in the light as the door swung wider behind him, his silhouette revealed the man to be tall, muscular, perhaps in his late thirties, wearing a tank top tee shirt and cutoff blue jeans with frayed bottoms. For a full three seconds we both stood transfixed, looking at each other. But then his body language changed, and I sensed he regarded me with only casual curiosity, as though observing an undersized Mako behind the Plexiglas of a holding tank. On the television now visible behind him at the foot of the bed, a pornographic movie utilized a swimming pool setting for an orgy scene.

  I lifted my hand in a stoic wave, and then watched as this back room tenant seemed to work the stiffness out of his fingers, contemplating whether to return the acknowledgment. Instead of waving back, he then chose to walk toward me with a indifferent gliding gait, stopping halfway to light up a cigarette with a stick match, the sulfur flare of it lending brief life to his otherwise hidden eyes. I wasn’t sure what I saw in those eyes, but it didn’t register as caution or fear. And yet now he had stopped, as if he’d made a mistake. Or maybe he was waiting to see what I’d do next?

  I knocked twice sharply on the window.

  At that, the man blew smoke at me. The smoke drifted out like the slow-mo blast of a shotgun. Then he seemed to come to a decision, and shuffled quickly all the way to the door. His eyes studied mine with a reptilian-like magnetism. Another long three seconds without motion as I considered the possibilities of the man—the broad, vacant face, the V-shaped neck, the well developed arms and upper body, which gave way to a slight paunch. He was a hairy ape, too. In the U of his drooping tank top grew a clot of bunched black hair. The stuff was alive on his arms, thick on his legs, and probably grew in his ears too. It had almost connected his eyebrows.