“Will do,” I said.
Frank pulled out of the spot, and I watched as he headed west on Main Street. Main ran from one end of town to the other, and right down the middle of the street was an old set of railroad tracks that carried about a half dozen freight trains through the town per day. Those trains, for all intents and purposes, were Evelyn’s sole connection to the outside world.
Main Street met up with Old Sherman Road at both ends of it. Farther east of Old Sherman, Main cut through several miles of deep woods as a country road. The tall trees bent over the road, forming a canopy, and in the fall, when the red-copper colors of autumn came out in startling abundance, it was beautiful. The road and the train tracks went on still and led to Campbell’s Bridge, which was an ancient thing of rusted metal and molded planks. The trains went over a separate bridge just to the south, and this one was just as old. Flowing underneath the bridges were the clear waters of the Ivy River.
Much farther south, the Ivy River connected to the St. Michael River, which ran in a southeastern direction along the western border of Evelyn, and made a hook along the southern end, thus encasing Evelyn on three sides with water. Many miles of dense forest served as a buffer between the rivers and this quaint little town, which rested, like a spider in a vast web, just outside the Tennessee border.
Up to the north beyond Old Sherman there were many, many miles of labyrinthine wilderness before you could come upon so much as a bottle half-buried in the dirt to remind you that you were still in the world.
I opened the passenger door of the truck, reached in, and pulled out my stack of papers. Then I climbed the three stairs to the front door, unlocked it, and entered the restaurant. A tiny, little bell jangled overhead as I entered. I flipped on all the lights, which, because of the sun, was hardly necessary. The restaurant had a fifties-era ambience, and the sun glinted off all the chrome along the tables and chairs. I took those hot, glowing chairs down from the tabletops and sat them all on the floor. After that, I turned the little radio behind the counter to KBTO. They were playing “Peace Frog” by The Doors.
I got the grill and the oven going in the kitchen, and just as I finished making that first precious pot of coffee, Abraham decided to show up.
Abraham Davis had worked at the restaurant about twice as long as me, about six years. He was a people person, very suave, which was why he worked the counter and dealt with the patrons, and why he never got fired for being consistently late. I, not even remotely being a people person, worked in the kitchen. Abraham wasn’t a young man anymore—he was nearing fifty—but he seemed to live to go out and drink and dip his wick in whatever was around.
While I was off in the war, he was back Stateside getting his ass gnawed off by police-trained German shepherds. He’d been married twice, divorced twice, and to hear him tell it, the time that he spent “shackled” to women who, after getting to know him, didn’t really care if he lived or died consumed about ten years of a precious life that would’ve been better spent chasing tail and having “experiences”—or getting into trouble, more like—that enriched the spirit and the mind.
Horseshit.
According to Abraham, he was making up for lost time by acting like a college boy on spring break, as if lost time could truly be returned to someone, like a deposit in a bank. As if anyone got a second chance to be happy in this world. It was foolish of him to think that way, and I think he knew it. But the hell of it was that it was hard to ever see the man without a smile on his face, which made it hard to vilify him for acting like a young man when he damn well knew he wasn’t.
When Abraham staggered into the restaurant, I could tell immediately that he was half in the bag from a Saturday night of drinking that turned into a Sunday morning of wondering not only where he’d woken up but where the hell his pants were.
“Sorry I’m late,” he whispered.
“Frank told me to tell you you’re a fucking asshole.”
“Great,” he said. “I’m an asshole.”
“A fucking asshole.”
I put my apron on as Abraham seemed to slither past the counter and into the bathroom. A moment later, I heard him through the door losing what sounded like a hundred dollars’ worth of used booze the hard way.
When he came out of the bathroom, he wiped his eyes with his fists and said, “Jesus Christ, man, I’m making up for sins from a past life this morning, you know what I mean?”
“Me too,” I said. “I’m working with you.”
“Cold motherfucker,” he groaned. “That’s what you are. You mind if I crash in the kitchen awhile? Just to rest my eyes. I can barely see.”
“Moonshine does that.”
“C’mon, man …”
“There’s no fucking way I’m working that counter, Abe. I did it once and nearly killed a man. I’m not doing it again. I don’t care how bad you feel.”
“It’s Sunday morning, man. I’ll be golden before anyone comes in, I swear.”
I thought for a second, then nodded. I was too nice sometimes. “In light of the mercy I’m showing, you still think I’m a cold motherfucker?”
“Man, you’re like a turd in the snow.”
Abraham took a chair from one of the tables and dragged it back into the kitchen through the double doors. He made some noises one would expect to hear coming from a circus tent, and then he fell asleep. I poured him a cup of coffee and set it down by his foot. I then went and made a cup for myself as well.
It might have been unwise to leave the restaurant unattended, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t paid to stand behind that counter. If anyone came in I’d know it because there was a long window looking out into the restaurant, and I’d wake Abe up by any means necessary. Until then, I took my stack of newspapers into the kitchen and got to reading. Behind me, Abraham didn’t so much snore as labor for each inflammable breath.
Reading the papers was a daily ritual of mine. Information was a crucial thing for me. There was a very specific kind of article I was looking for in all those different papers. Big-city politics didn’t mean a whole hell of a lot to me, nor did world affairs. I realized back in ‘Nam that nothing was ever going to change, that the same mistakes were going to be made over and over and over again for the rest of time because that’s just how people are made, I guess. You can have all the revolutions and protests you want, I don’t care. They say history repeats itself, and I suppose that’s just as true as anything else ever said, so I paid these articles no mind. I read the same ones when I was young, and I’d read them again when I was old and silver-haired.
What interested me were the smaller atrocities, the everyday miseries. Who was it—Lenin, I think—who said a million deaths is a statistic, but a single death is a tragedy? It’s true, man. The murders are what I read the papers for. The deaths. More specifically, I always kept an eye out for unsolved murders.
I didn’t get off on the stuff—I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles to that fact—but it was more like I had made misery my business. After all, I was the wrath of God. Wrath of God. Pleased to meet you.
I had begun reading as many daily papers as I could get my hands on around the time my mother died in 1981. I inherited this slightly creepy habit from one of my victims. You see, the wolf doesn’t just kill, it claims. It’s not just that the memories of the deceased become my memories; their traits become mine as well. I guess it’s like when people get some kind of organ transplant and they develop a taste for a certain kind of food they never liked before. All of a sudden they’re addicted to fish or chocolate because the person whose liver or kidney or heart they had couldn’t get enough of the stuff.