The woman who used to live in the house had been very old before she died. Or maybe it would be better to say that she was very goddamn old by the time she kicked off, but the point of it all is that she’d had cats. A lot of fucking cats. I’m told that when she died in that house, those cats went to work on her after a few days of having no other source of food. Sometimes I swore that I could still smell her deep in the fabric of the couch.
Her son, who lived over in Edenburgh, decided to rent the place instead of selling it outright, and when I moved in about three years prior, it took me a long time to keep those cats from coming around all the time. There were holes in the walls and in the floor where they’d sneak in, but I eventually found all those holes and sealed them up. I didn’t want any cats in my house, especially cats that had supped on human flesh. Even though it had been years since I’d gotten them all out, it was as if their phantoms lived on, because whenever I turned my head, the furniture would be covered with clumps of orange hair. It was unbelievable. I always wondered if there was a hole somewhere that I didn’t know about, or if those ornery little bastards had a set of keys for the front door.
After checking all the windows, I put on a pair of jeans and slipped my skull-and-crossbones belt through the loops. I put on a Sabbath shirt, a flannel over that, and then I laced up my construction boots. I grabbed my keys, locked the four locks on my front door, and got in the truck—a blue 1983 Chevy flatbed. There were so many rusted-out holes in it that it looked like some hunters had mistaken the truck for an elephant and emptied their scatterguns into it.
I turned the key and cursed. Doing these two things at the same time was almost like a prayer in and of itself, because God came down every morning to help make the piece of shit move. The engine groaned like it had arthritis, and I headed out.
I drove to the corner and took Picket Street east—a quiet, tree-lined street of one-story homes and the occasional nursery or doctor’s office. There wasn’t another car on the road as far as I could see. It was very early, and anyone who was up at the time was probably at church, where, as I understood it, they gave people free coffee.
I wasn’t quite awake yet. I was picking at this piece of sleepysand in the corner of my eye that didn’t want to go. I was picking at it so much that it began to irritate me like a sonofabitch. It just got worse and worse. I shut my eyes real tight, and when I opened them up again, I saw that damn Indian in the middle of the road up ahead with that damn plastic bag slumped over his shoulder, full of all the cans he had picked up off the streets, like a bum.
That woke me up real quick.
I hit the brakes and jerked the wheel left. I missed him by a foot, if that, though I don’t know why I was so merciful. I stopped the truck and gave him the evil eye through the open passenger window. He was in a dirty black suit that he must have taken from a dead body. On his feet was a pair of cowboy boots.
He wasn’t a young man. He seemed practically ancient, but his age was anyone’s guess. His white hair was as long as mine, and in a ponytail. He looked back at me like he thought the whole thing was a fucking joke. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, me almost hitting him with the truck.
“Hey, you old bastard,” I yelled out the window, “what the fuck are you doing?”
My general distrust and hostility toward the natives was genetic in origin in the sense that my singular disorder evidently stems from a deranged red man whose vicious streak lives on through me. More presently, I had never had a good encounter with a native. Wherever I went, I felt as if they could smell the curse I carried inside of me, almost as if they saw me in a way that no one else could, could observe the inhumanity lurking beneath my flesh, and they hated me for not only what I was but why I was as well. Or at least that’s how it felt.
In his halted way of speaking, the Indian responded, “What … does it look like?”
“Looks like you have a death wish,” I replied. “Stay off the road. Next time, I won’t swerve to miss you.”
He pointed his sawed-off broomstick with the nail hammered through one end at me like it was a baton and said, “You have more important things to worry about … than me, paleface.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean? I ain’t too tired to take you to town, old man.” I felt like getting out of the truck to clobber the sonofabitch. “You looking for trouble?”
“No, no,” he said. “Trouble … is yours to find. Not mine.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Arright, you cryptic bastard,” I mumbled. “You want to talk like that, fine. Just stay off the fucking road.” He smiled. I flipped him the bird and took off.
I drove north on Hamilton Road to this little newsstand just off Main Street. I said hi to Gus, the old fellow who owned the place, and picked up copies of Evelyn’s two daily papers—the Harbinger and the Post—and also a copy of USA Today. From there I went east on Main till I got to Grant. There was another little newsstand over there where I picked up a few more newspapers, but not local ones. These papers were from other cities, and some were from other states. I didn’t like buying all my papers at one place. I wouldn’t want someone wondering why I read so goddamn much.
I stacked all the papers on the passenger seat and kept going east on Main till I got to the restaurant, which was almost at the edge of town. The restaurant was set far back on the sidewalk so cars could turn off the road and park up front of the place. Since the restaurant wasn’t open yet, all the spots should have been empty, but that wasn’t the case. There was a puke-green Toyota parked there, and I could recognize that puke-green car from a mile away.
I pulled up next to it, killed the engine, and got out. The burly man sitting in the Toyota got out too, followed by a wall of cheap cigar smoke. He was wearing a pair of khaki pants that accentuated his heavy ass and a golf shirt that was the same color as the car.
I shielded my eyes from the bright morning sun and said, “Howdy, Frank.”
“You’re late,” Frank said.
Frank owned the restaurant. It had been his father’s, and his father’s before that. I had never met Frank’s father, and to be honest I never wanted to because Frank was a prick. If I had to meet a second one just like him I would have lost my mind.
I looked at my watch. It was five past the hour.
“Hardly,” I responded. “Besides, it’s Sunday. The place is gonna be dead.”
“That’s not the point,” said Frank. “I pay you to be here at a certain time, and that’s when I expect you to be here.”
“C’mon, man, do you give anyone else a hard time when they’re late?”
“That’s not the point,” Frank grunted.
Frank and I never got along, if you couldn’t tell already.
“I think it is,” I said, as shock invaded his face. “I think this is sexual harassment.”
I had heard the expression once on the television. I thought it sounded cute.
“Shut up,” he said, disgusted. “Just open the fucking restaurant.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do.”
“Aren’t you even going to apologize for being late?”
I looked at him with pity for a second, like he was a street urchin, a latchkey kid, and then said, “Frank, I never volunteered to work the morning shift, okay? If you don’t like it, have me switch shifts with Carlos or something.”
Frank got back in the car and slammed the door. He rolled down the window and said, “The thought of you working here at night scares me, Marlowe. Just get here on time. And tell Abe that he’s a fucking asshole too.”