Chapter Three: Ninth of the Kalends of October

 

Chapter Three: Ninth of the Kalends of October

 

“Vedi Napoli, e poi muori!"

(See Naples, then die.)

 

-Johann Wolfgan Von Goethe

 

In which we meet the parents.

 

There was an online astrology site—for horoscopes and romantic compatibility—and Frank punched his and Gia's birth-dates into the handy boxes, hit enter, and beheld: “Forget marriage. These two won't even make it as friends.”

...

 

When he was thirty-something, as the story goes, Julius Caesar chastised himself in the mirror for not having yet conquered the known world. And then, maybe, the ghost of Alexander the Great appeared to him in a plume of candle smoke and told him to stop whining, get off his lazy ass and do something about it. Thus invigorated, Caesar gathered up his legions and went out and subdued the Gauls—those barbarous Frenchmen of the north, some of whom painted themselves blue and fought naked (because it freaked people out)—and embarked on the well-worn, bloodied path that would eventually lead him to the dictator's chair.

When Frank looked in a similar mirror, one that he'd purchased at Walmart for less than twenty dollars, he was already seven hours past forty. There were no ghosts present—only a belly that Caesar would have called  fat. Maybe he was thirty pounds over his ideal weight. The ancient Romans, terribly slim, used a different yardstick to measure obesity—food being less plentiful, more costly, and daily work, gruelling. Carnival-sized fatties did not exist in that world. If they did, they were likely used as fetish toys and votive torches.

Frank Burczyk had no desire to conquer the world. He had not yet conquered his own bedroom. (He owned more socks and underwear than he had space to store them.) Still, as he assayed his reflection there, he couldn't help but to wonder if he had missed an opportunity, somewhere along the line. Turned north instead of west, as the saying goes. This happened to everyone, he knew, from time to time, and has been the subject of more books than he could ever hope to read. “This life is more than half over,” he told himself. “What are you going to do next?”

He did not have an answer for himself. The Frank in the mirror was a dumb, dull brute in desperate need of a shave. Bad hair and ragged fingernails. Knobby, ridiculous knees. Crotch bulging with swollen agony—more nuts than cock. Everything muddled. Everything sore and muddled and middling and sad beyond measure.

“Life is a trifling mess, and not even worth bothering with,” someone said, once upon a time. Not Frank, but most days he would have agreed. Maybe it was Douglas Adams who said it. Something very much like it, at any rate. The Frank that would have agreed was the old him, the dying him, the dirty, rotten cynical him.

He was working on a new outlook.

It wasn't happening.

The world couldn't change soon enough.

...

 

To this one perfect woman he said, “I love you megabucks, super-sized, with a side of dipping sauce, extra fries, platinum rewards, and bonus air miles.”

This story is essentially a romance.

Everything works out at the end.

They had a house on the west side, an old two-story that, despite being painted pea green, was not without charm. A bit of a fixer-upper, but Frank and Gia were almost halfway done with the fixer-uppering. New carpet, new plumbing, new windows. Next up, the siding.

Oh fuck, the dreadful siding.

...

 

He had convinced himself that he could make everything perfect, by degrees.

In his former life, under the Tracy regime, perfection would have been unheard of.

This was different. With Gia Marvello, everything was fresh and new and different.

Her eyes were chlorine blue (sometimes) and her hair was sweet cherry-black (usually). Thin and pretty, but curvy in the right places—Frank told his crazy mother that Gia was “the finest thing that ever walked or crawled.” She had that darker, east-European tint in her complexion, and could do things with her legs that had no business being recording on paper.

They were starting over again, together.

It was a lightning bolt of a love affair and they were stupid for one another.

As Gia put it, “We have a shared fire and a common dream.”

But that was the beginning of the love cycle. Now it was nearly three years later—two full years of marriage. Frank was 40 as of right now. Certain features of the relationship were strained. There was less kissing, by and by. Sometimes Gia went to sleep without even saying goodnight.

Details like that.

Yeah, he pissed her off, sometimes.

...

 

Frank was 40 today. He told himself it was no big thing. In the grand scheme, it was no big thing. The Universe, he knew, probably didn't give a rat's ass. The Universe didn't even know he existed. And even if the Universe did notice him, it would probably say, “Everyone gets old and everyone dies and you aren't very special, kid,” in a voice that was oddly like that of his father, Francis, singer of Jezus Saves.

Frank went to Hector Park and beheld the white marble statue of Perseus, erected (with love) by the Caroling Club, those pesky Carolingians with their hats and bells and silly coats, Discord's not-so-secret society of decrepit grease-ball philanthropists. It was a colossus by local standards and seemed, to Frank, to be twenty feet tall when viewed directly upward from its base. Well-muscled and realistic in a way that would cause Michelangelo to weep, and with a weenie, for once, that was worth boasting about (Frank estimated its mass to be about three kilograms.) The head of the gorgon, held in the hero's left hand, was startlingly grotesque—ugly enough, perhaps, to turn at least a few passers-by to hard stone.

For style and execution, he gave it a thumbs-up. After all, Discord already had two wading pools. The inscription at the statue's base said—

 

I stand here, a marble statue instead of a man, a memorial to John Quay, the hero, and of his family's sad grief.

 

Another reminder of the 1989 train disaster, as if Discord fucking needed one more.

Frank made a “Humph” sound and stomped out his cigarette, spitting on it for extra measure.

Good thoughts were turning bad again. It was like the ticking of a metronome. A bit of happy, a bit of sad, and so on. Tick, tick, tick, tick. He realized he was probably going to die in Pisimatum. Most of the people of the world had no idea that a province called Pisimatum even existed, and Frank Burczyk was going to while away the rest of his days there.

Whoop de doo.

He said, “Fuck you, John Quay. You are no hero, in my book.”

He imagined that his book was about five hundred pages, with a blue cover.

...

 

If the ghost of John Quay walked by, Frank would have spit at that, too.

...

 

When she was born she was called Gia Carlita Marvello, a name so cool it sounded phony—like a stripper or movie star. Frank felt kind of awful about making her into a Burczyk. Like taking a beautiful monarch butterfly and transforming it back into a lowly caterpillar. Gia was a stunner—the middle child out of nine raven-haired Catholic girls, and the only one of the bunch who would  never sport peroxide locks because she was too proud of her parents and Mediterranean heritage to sully herself with that blitzy Euro-trash look .

Mother: Candelaria, Spanish. Father: Romano, Italian.

Both of them, long dead. Train accident, end of the eighties. Gia was a teenager when it happened. The next half-dozen years of her life turned into something like a waking nightmare.

It was the worst man-made disaster Discord had ever seen: The Northline's lead engine, conducted by John Quay, and two passenger cars derailed and careened off the Audet bridge and into the ice-cold, greeny blackness of the Ghost River.

Piotr Franciszka Burczyk, Frank's dad, was present when the bodies were pulled up and laid out. He and his crew, his best linemen, were on the scene because there was concern that the train had clipped a tower on the DC transmission line, which spanned the Ghost River. The whole line had to be shut down and inspected and, in the meantime, the power crew assisted with rescue and clean-up effort. 

This was a big secret between Francis and Frank.

The Burczyks and the Marvellos had not been officially acquainted, but Francis Burczyk had helped to retrieve their corpses, and had known Romano well enough in life to say hello. It was a detail that Frank chose to never share with Gia.

Just one of those things.

Strange things.

The universe is full of them.

...

 

The last couple years, Frank had worked with the old, ruined man, Oscar Fendiuk. He was seventy-four years old and crazy as fuck. Went completely out of his mind. That's how oil-based coffee cream works—it gives you Alzheimer's disease. And a life of working with swine couldn't have helped things. (The smell, the smell, oh Jezus, the smell.) If Oscar didn't have Alzheimer's, then he had a brain tumor. Something was seriously wrong with his upstairs suite—he was getting closer and closer, every passing day, to crossing the line that separates ordinary people from depraved perverts. Frank shouldn't have been surprised when the old fucker showed up at work wearing nothing but a diaper.

“You want to see this old patron shit himself, huh? Do ya?”

Frank wanted to laugh, at first, but his balls were nine shades of black and green from an incident, the night before, when Gia thought it would be fun to treat his body like a carnival attraction. She could be very aggressive, very enthusiastic, during love-play. Laughing, even a little bit, caused his genital muscles to tighten. The tiniest of movements made agony rock through his guts like a lightning migraine. He told Oscar, “You've forgotten your shoes again,” and Oscar shot him a look that suggested he wanted to harm him.

People with Alzheimer's disease can be extremely dangerous, it's true.

They were couriers. Oscar and Frank, plus Giton and Piper. Four owner-operators responsible for running bank deliveries in the area. Four of them doing five routes—Giton did two because he was a methamphetamine addict and tended to do everything fast. He was also the lead hand, which meant that he was something like a floor boss, or manager (not that he ever lived up to his role). Piper had more seniority, but she didn't think that the extra twelve bucks per day was worth the paperwork—waybills, check-sheets, and the like—that was due at the end of every business day.

Karl Steckler, the big boss, the voice of god, held the contract with Banking Central down in Sawanoko. The rest of them subcontracted from Karl. He lived outside of Tromso, in the shit-hole hamlet of Earp (population: Karl Steckler), not on any current map.

They'd all meet the plane at the Discord air-strip at six-thirty in the morning, unload the bags from the plane, deliver them to the designated financial institutions, usually within two hours, then kill five hours doing whatever—reading, snoozing, jacking off—and then reverse the route, picking up the bags and taking them all back to the air-strip at five-thirty in the afternoon. Easiest job Frank Burczyk ever had. It was an eleven-hour workday, on the one hand, but there was a huge chunk of free time in the middle, on the other hand, which was pretty much why Gia resented Frank, nowadays. For the rather middling paycheck, there was a fair bit of loafing going on.

About that, Frank would say, “Things usually balance out.”

But now Oscar was wearing a diaper, and the look on his face strongly suggested that he wanted to bite somebody. Everyone had each others' phone numbers stored in their “smart” cell-phones, so Piper called Oscar's wife and told her to come and take the old bugger to the hospital.

Oscar's wife was a dark, round Filipino woman named Fey—one of those obese women who think they're pretty because their tits are huge. She was two decades Oscar's junior, but the math still meant that she was at least fifty. She looked older than that, presumably because she grew up in a third world country. No spring chicken, that girl. Frank knew that half of Blue Sky's original workforce was Filipino, and he supposed they lacked certain olfactory sensors, making them somewhat immune to the shit-and-living-death stench of a pig barn.

For the longest time, Frank thought Oscar smuggled her into the country as part of an illegal workforce, or that he ordered her from an Asian wife service, but the fact was that he met her in person, in the late sixties, when he was in the Navy and stationed in Borneo. He never saw combat but he saw a lot of the world, even owned a small pig farm in Portugal, briefly, before he got the notion to relocate the operation to his homeland.

Back when he was still mostly sane, Oscar told Frank that Fey's favorite food was rotten duck embryos, called balut. She could eat a dozen in a sitting. Frank told him that was bizarre. Oscar also told him that the woman sucked dick “like a young Greek boy,” and Frank took that to mean she was good at it. He didn't ask for clarification. He hoped that it was an outdated nautical term.

Everything at sea is like a young Greek boy.

Their plan was to move back to Oceania, to Manila, when Oscar had enough money to finally retire  (That day was a long way off still because the Champion Cardboard/Blue Sky debacle absolutely wiped him out). Of course, that pleasant retirement never happened because Oscar lost his marbles and decided to go to work in a diaper.

It took three people to pack him back into his car—Giton, Piper, and Fey. Frank stood slack and well back because Oscar was flailing about like a bruised crab, and if one of his moving parts came within a centimeter of his wailing scrotum, Frank would surely die from shock.

Oscar frothed, screaming, “Let go of me, you dirty, yellow cocksucker ingrates! Fuck you, pirates! Fuck you, Christian missionaries! Let me go! Set me free!” The whole scene was completely stoopiculous. Fey got scratched above her left eye, and Piper got kicked in the boobs. Only Giton emerged unscathed, but that's because the drugs had him moving so damned quick all the time.

When he was safely in the car, Oscar announced, “I finally pooped.” Frank could smell it from eight feet away. It was like meat that had been left in the sun all day, mixed with the scent of citrus and maybe a teaspoon of cumin. Giton suggested, “I think his body has been digesting itself.” Fey lit a cheap Peruvian cigar and Frank was glad because it kind of disguised the horrible aroma of Oscar.

That was the last he ever saw of the old man. Good times and good tales, told well, all gone. Fey took him to the psych ward and he would never come back. And it wasn't very long before it was like he never existed at all, simply faded into the wallpaper and became dust. If the world would turn for just a few short weeks more, Piper would ask, “What was the name of the old man who worked here?”

That's how it goes.

Life was a Mobius Band.

...

 

About a month before Oscar put the diaper on, he and Fey bought a dog. Oscar had always wanted a dachshund. Fey, on the other hand, told him, “In the Phillipines, dog is considered a good meal.” Somehow, he convinced her that a puppy would make for a great addition to the household, being that they never had children together. They named the critter Nuna.

A couple times, Oscar had brought Nuna along for the drive. She was nine pounds soaking wet—part canine and part sausage. And the beadiest black eyes Frank ever saw.

On the night Oscar went away forever, Fey telephoned Frank to say, “I want to get rid of this goddamn beast. Either she goes, or I make her into a soup. You're the fourth person I've called, the fourth number in Oscar's address book. If you say no, and three more people say no, then I am going to chop her in her neck. Axe goes boom. Soup! Goddammit!”

Evidently, Oscar only knew seven people other than his wife.

Frank had to say no to the dog.

It was a tough call. He quite loved dogs, and had lived with a few them, but he'd had horrible experiences with euthanasia—having to put down a couple injured pooches—and he swore to himself he'd never go through that again. But what trouble could a dachshund get into? Why would he ever have to euthanize a dachshund? It didn't seem like it could possibly come to that.

He thought about running it past Gia. It seemed like she was frowning a lot, lately. It seemed like, maybe, she wasn't as patient as she used to be. It seemed like she wouldn't take kindly to the idea of boarding an animal.

He told Fey, “I turn 40 in a few days. Maybe I'm too old for a dog. Sorry.”

...

 

Fey was planning to move to Manila, all by herself.

Frank imagined that Oscar might have been a hero in another life.

He was old and ruined and forgotten, but maybe he was someone, once.

Maybe he was a freedom fighter, a Viking soldier, in a distant realm.

...

 

Originally, Frank and Gia had moved back to Discord so that he could take a job at the mill for fifty grand a year, but the mill ran for but a month before it, too, went bankrupt and Frank ended up grabbing the courier gig. Being a courier is a lot like being a security guard or a fast food cashier. Everyone hates you. You are the lowest animal on the food chain. This is true, good wisdom.

Frank Burczyk had been all over the chain.

Bartender, miner, equipment operator. Volunteer firefighter. Shipper, receiver, fuel attendant. Frank ran a swing saw with a twenty-four inch blade, cutting truss components, and never lost a single digit. He loaded and gassed-up airplanes when he was seventeen, just to raise the funds to leave home for the first time. Worked graveyard security at a slaughterhouse, which was fine because he didn't have to wear the guard's uniform, and he got to visit with doomed cattle in the wee hours of the morning. Brush-cutter, glass-cutter, janitor. He had pulled fishing nets and measured the PH balance in swimming pools. And also, the short gig at Champion Cardboard, making boxes, ten years back, when a crazed minority broke his face at the Christmas party.

Seemed to Frank like he'd done more jobs than his age would have allowed for, especially considering the mine ate up seven of his years.

He didn't mind the new deal, the courier gig. Light work and honest money.

Gia had a brand-new banana-yellow minivan that would have lent itself perfectly to the job, and got terrific mileage. Frank decided to use his trusty pick-up, instead. It chewed through more gas, to be sure, but at least he didn't have to worry about keeping Gia's seats clean.

There was nothing about Frank's job that didn't annoy his wife.

The truck was overloaded after Oscar went away to die. Giton was already doing two routes, so it was up to Piper and Frank to cover Oscar's run. They took half each, which added that much more to their existing routes. More miles, more pay, more likely to miss the airplane. And Frank's balls were boiling. He had to drive with his fly undone and his legs spread wide apart. He wished he was wearing a kilt—even a summer dress.

He would have worn a dress. No problem.

...

 

Piper was one of those born-again Christian types. She was quiet and shy, for the most part—not one of those Scripture-quoting assholes everyone fucking despises. She tried not to lose her temper, usually, and only cussed when it was absolutely necessary.

“I'm a turn the other cheek-type of gal,” she once told Frank.

Her breasts weighed about twenty-seven pounds apiece, he noticed.

Jezus would have been pleased.

...

 

 

 

Frank told Gia all about it—how Oscar flipped his lid. She'd met the old man on a couple occasions, knew some of his peculiarities, and figured the same as Frank: “Chemicals are probably what ate his brain, if you ask me. Olestra, aspartame, DDT, aluminum silicate, red number five, formaldehyde, permethrin—all that tasty shit. I'm as guilty as anyone for willingly ingesting it. What's the alternative? DDT is present in the tissue of every living thing on the planet—contamination at a molecular level. It's always the chemicals. There's no getting around it. Frank, this is what's eating your mother's brain.”

And she paused, then added, “One way or another, we're all going where Oscar went.”

“Absolutely,” said Frank.

“Did you have dinner, yet?”

“I don't feel much like eating. My stomach—“

“How are your, ahem, gonads?”

“Not very good.”

“I'm sorry, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

She kissed him on the cheek, just a peck, like she was being extra-careful not to harm him further. She promised to take it easy on him, next time. She told him to remember suite eleven-eleven and how off-the-scale that had been.

“You're going to be forty, baby. Just a couple days.”

In bed,  Gia told him that she loved him. All the way to his core.

This life was a good one—the very finest.

“I love you too, Gia, Princess.”

Kiss, smooch, hug, kiss.

It was perfect like a picture, that night—the sort of night that makes everyone forget for a spell that there's been a bit of trouble brewing. When Frank looked into his Gia's eyes, all his notes about missed kisses, wasted time, and careless sarcasm went blowing out the bedroom window.

Frank said, “How about a nice big fuck?”

...

 

On the morn of Frank's birthday, number 40, it was boss-man Karl Steckler who had to cover his route. The argument on the phone had been very brief. Frank said, “I'm taking the whole day off and that's the short answer. I'm not sick and I'm not well and I'm not stupid. I'm just taking the day. If there's a problem, we can discuss it later. Monday, I think.” (It kind of reminded him of the time he had to call fuck-head Roger Nelson, at Champion, and say what was what.)

Steckler said, “Are you asking me to drive your route?”

“That would be the general idea, yes, Karl.”

“What about Bob Scieszka? Can't he cover? The game shows are starting soon. Plinko!”

“Bob needs at least three days notice and he never drives on Friday.”

“So it's up to me to cover your tail, is it?”

“This conversation has already been twice as long as it needed to be, Karl.”

“Try to enjoy yourself, Frank.”

...

 

While Frank delivered bank bags for his living wages, Gia worked at the Creighton hotel, part-time, in north Discord.  The Creighton was about the worst of Discord's accommodations, next to the Rhine—which was closed more days than it was open due to health and safety violations. It was not unheard of for Gia and other staff to have to step over collapsed drunks and drug addicts, in the Creighton lobby, when coming onto the morning shift. But it was the largest of Discord's hotels, and the rates were low, and ran at full capacity from June through October, the tourist season.

Gia had spent over half her life in the service industry.

Sometimes Frank hated himself for moving her back to Discord.

They could have stayed in Meskanaw, or moved to Proud Lake or Tromso or Rebowken or wherever (except fucking Diesel Hovel), but he took the courier job and moved the light of his life back to the very spot where she'd become an orphan, two decades earlier.

Welcome Back to Discord, Assholes.

She said she didn't mind.

She said, “Honestly Frank, I really, really don't mind it here.”

...

 

He remembered the day they moved back to town.

That tasty mill job hanging like a buttered bone in front of his eyes.

The money was too good to pass up.

If the mill hadn't gone tits-up, things might have been much different.

...

 

They were newly married, bound for good years and big dreams, and they carried everything they owned—everything worth keeping—in a twenty-foot cube van that burned through diesel fuel faster than the Brits could refine it. Chugging along like a cancer-belching freight train, toot, with Frank behind the wheel, grinning all the way.

Ahead of him was Gia, in her yellow mini-van, with a jumbo-sized Winnie the Pooh—her favorite stuffed toy, from high school days—riding in the shotgun seat. With cell phones and instant text messaging, things weren't too different from the long-gone days of CB radio. “Ten-four, good buddy,” “Breaker, breaker, one-nine,” and, “I luv U 2 Sweetie, <3, :-))”

Frank couldn't go one notch over thirty miles per hour and that drove Gia damn near out of her mind, but she resisted every urge to leave her loving husband in the dust. A one-hour trip turned into two and a half.

Honk, tweet.

“This is killing me, baby. You drive like somebody's grandfather.”

“I can't help it. This thing is a tank.”

Bitch, bitch, bitch.

The road back to Discord was a short but winding one. They avoided Highway Six and came in on the unpaved Old Taylor Mill Road because the traffic was pretty lite and that fairly balanced things out. Plenty of ups and downs and blind, dangerous curves. Gia pulled over at a picnic site, at the top of the crest overlooking the new power dam at Lac du Nord  and Frank followed her there. She brought beer and sandwiches—better than any of that greasy truck-stop food—and they dined together at her tailgate.

Yum.

“I'm so glad we're doing this, Frank.”

“Yes. I love you, Gia.”

Smooch.

...

 

He thought back to that perfect day.

He wanted to punch himself in the face.

Maybe they should have stayed back in Meskanaw.

...

 

Meskanaw = Shithole

...

 

No matter how stupid and frightening the world might become, the story of Frank and Gia ought to exist above and beyond it—perfect, unspoiled, unafraid. And Frank wasn't greedy. There was no reason every single pathetic human couldn't have the exact same thing.

...

 

He was listening to Yellow Ledbetter by Pearl Jam.

“Oh yeah, can you see them? Out on the porch, ahh, but they don't wave.”

...

 

Frank sometimes thought back to the days before Gia. The dark and ugly days, nearly seven hundred of them, all in a row, when he was with Tracy, and about five hundred more, the days after that union dissolved, the days before he took Gia (instead of some floozy named Karyn Ayn) to Red Lobster for shrimp and shark-meat. He was single, had been for about eighteen months, and had yet to make contact with anyone of substance. He fucked a skeezy, dark woman in that awful meantime. The dating service had been mostly negative—people are all just so fucking shallow and phony—and was the ultimate domain of fatties, drunks, and vampires. The sheer multitude of lonely, desperate women who should have had the word Loser stamped next to their names did not.

The future looked pretty grim. He wrote a suicide note on a sheet of looseleaf paper. It said—

 

Goodbye, assholes. I never wanted to be here in the first place.

 

Gia thanked God he never went through with that.

Gia believed in God, somewhat, certainly more than Frank did.

Frank believed in the ghost of his burned-up, unknown sister—blackened like chicken or sea bass—that sometimes brought him oatmeal-raisin cookies.

...

 

He thought, fleetingly, about the woman he dated immediately after breaking up with Tracy fucking Olafson. It was less a relationship than a fling. It was short. He was sowing those oats, finally clear of the Devil's grasp. It was like being freed from a Chinese gulag, at long last.

This girl was a lithium-addled blonde who told him she'd given birth to a skeleton when she was eighteen. He thought she was being figurative. She said, “No, really, it was dead and it had no skin and barely any organs. It was an actual skeleton. I was into some weird shit when I was a teenager.”

That woman's name was Debra. She was eight years younger than Frank and a full-blown schizophrenic. It takes all kinds. After they started dating she said, “I love you so much, and I feel great when I'm with you, and I've decided to stop taking my medication because I don't think I need it anymore.” Anyway—the skeleton story was all the justification he needed in order to stop seeing her. He didn't even feel bad about it. He simply couldn't bring himself to have sex with a woman who had birthed a skeleton. Not ever.

...

 

He was 40 now, Frank, and Discord had become a strange, dangerous place.

The Little girl was still missing, gone for almost a whole year now.

No news, no break in the case.

Motorcycle gangs terrorizing everyone.

Why the hell were the Carolingians running around building statues?

Who needed fucking statues?

...

 

“There's a hole in space that needs repairing! Everybody pitch in!”

...

 

Another man, this one. A different man. An animal.

The secretive type, eyes wide open, always searching.

This was downtown Discord, on the French Street, the year before.

A predator searching for easy meat.

He found her at a used bookstore, not far from Vinyl Gigi—not at a playground or park or elementary school. She was browsing in the photography section. Damnedest thing he ever saw. Took him completely off guard. And the book she half decided upon, something about New York and the nineteen-seventies—red, overexposed lines of city traffic, high contrast architecture, the Brooklyn bridge at dawn, and every cliché you could imagine—weighed half as much as she did.

The price was $4.25, written in black marker on a yellow tag on the back of the dust jacket, which seemed a tad high, to him. He said, “What business does a squirt like you have with a volume like that? I half expect it to topple you over.”

Ordinary men flirted with grown women, yes, he was quite aware of the situation.

She shot him a look that almost burned his eyes out of his head and said, “It's for my father's birthday, I'll have you know.” There wasn't the slightest trace of fear there. Had nobody told this little human that she ought not to be conversing with strangers?

Especially strangers like me?

The clerk was preoccupied by a stack of Vonnegut relics—a first edition of Mother Night, three pristine copies of Sirens of Titan, a signed Cat's Cradle, the good stuff—and was only vaguely aware of his or the girl's presence. Upon closer examination of the topmost book in the pile, he hissed, “Jackpot!” Dollar signs were swirling around his head, just like in the cartoons. Like the cash-register eyeballs of Scrooge McDuck. For such a dusty old man, he looked like he was ready to go off in his pants. Ka-ching!

“What have you got there?” the girl asked.

He showed her the front cover of a ratty old pocketbook, a satyr playing a flute. He said, “This is Petronius. I doubt it would interest someone like you. It's just Romans talking dirty, acting dirty, thinking dirty. Horrible stuff, actually. Quite boring. I already own three copies.”

“Why would you need another if you already own three?”

“Because they are translated from the Latin language, and every version has something new to offer, something lacking in the others, because every translator finds something new and different buried there. Take Graves, for instance—“

The clerk paused and glanced his way, possibly troubled by the mention of Graves.

Tomb. Sepulcher.

“Boring. Rome is boring. It's all so boring!” she said. “Everything is old and boring and I don't think I like the smell in here.” The girl twirled around and set the photography book back where she got it from, on an overburdened shelf full-up with similar, antiquated picture-books.

“Changed your mind about the birthday gift?”

“It isn't for six more days, anyway. I bet I can find him something nicer at Barnes and Noble, online. Something new and modern. Something that doesn't smell like the centuries. And it will come directly to my mailbox.” She had spooked, after all. Clever girl, this one. But young minds were fluttery and whimsical like that, especially the female ones, and he knew better than to take it immediately to heart. All was not yet lost.

“Will you be leaving, then?” he asked, almost sneering.

“I'm getting my allowance money and going to the music store.”

“Ooh, your allowance—”

“My father works for the newspaper, so you can bet my allowance is pretty grand. He's a photographer. No small beans. You should get a load of the car he drives. It's a Geo.”

“A Geo, huh? You're new in town, aren't you?”

“That's none of your business.”

None of it is, but that won't stop me.

“Tell me, then—how much allowance do you have?”

“It isn't with me. It's with Lydia, my father's girlfriend, and she's across the street, buying shoes. Dancing shoes on account of the fact that she likes to dance. But it's fifty dollars, if you must know, and I can have it whenever I need it, which is not right now because I'm not buying anything.”

The clerk was taking an interest in them, now, looking sideways through his spectacles. Not a suspicious look, exactly—more like, Shut up and purchase a book.

The girl said, “I have to go.”

He told her, “I'll bet you do.”

“Who are you?”

“I'm the boyo. Who are you?”

“The boyo?”

“Some people say I'm the devil, himself.”

“You look like a frog.”

“I bet I can guess your name. Would you like for me to try?”

She flipped him the bird. Middle finger, crooked and perfect, with cheap, pink Barbie nail-polish layered on her too-chewed fingernail. A fine Fuck you, mister. But it was so much more playful than that. The ghost of a smile brewing on her lips. A lob, a volley, an invitation to play, maybe. Like a dirty old ditty that went—

 

Chase me Charlie,

I've got barley,

Up the leg of me drawers.

 

Almost exactly like that, in fact.

She stormed out of the shoppe and the bell above the heavy door went ding, ding, ding, ding.

The clerk barked, “Are you buying something?”

He held up Petronius. “Just this,” he said. It was $1.50, which was six times as much as the original cover price. Not the worst of deals. And while he was paying for it he saw, just as he expected to see, that his playmate was still lingering, outside. The vapor of her breath was misted on the window where her nose had only just been. She was standing near the bench at the bus stop, near the crosswalk, near but not at, talking on her cellular phone.

Checking me out, imagine that.

The girl's name turned out to be Alice, which was interesting because the girl from the Tromso swimming pool was named Alicia. It was like getting a green light signal from heaven. Two thumbs up. And who, in the twenty-first century, still names their kid Alice? He would tell himself later that he had known it all along, that he sensed the A and the L and the C immediately, along with the rosy tint of her aura.

The clerk gave him his change and apologized for being so gruff. “I'm very excited, you see. Overwhelmed,” he explained. “These auctions, you can never know if you're going to score. It's quite a shipment. The mother lode, if you take my meaning—got me a little on edge.”

“I know what that's like, old timer,” said the boyo.

He went outside with his purchased tucked into his coat pocket and Alice was still standing at the curb. He called to her, “Aren't you off to see Linda?”

“It's Lydia,” Alice called back. “She needs a few more minutes. We're parked over there—” she pointed at a red Geo, twenty feet yonder, third meter from the end. “That's my father's car, just like I told you, so you can know for sure he's a special somebody.”

“I already knew he was.”

The urge was overpowering. The girl at the pool, Alicia, had been a special project, carefully orchestrated over a two week period. All the ducks were put into a row, and everything went exactly according to plan. But this one, Alice, was going to be a rush job. Preying in public places was a dangerous game. Also, the girl was younger than he preferred—usually he went for the twelve to fifteen crowd—but she possessed a je ne sais quoi that he simply couldn't resist.

Snatch and grab, uh huh.

Should know better than to do it like this.

It wasn't yet dark. The storefront lights had only just come on, lending an eerie, orange glow to the evening strip. The funeral home at the intersection had its lights on, too, like it was ready for anyone's business. That, and the full moon in the west was twice its usual size. Smoke in the upper atmosphere. Smoke and a bit of snow, which was exactly how he liked it. Christmasy. And a few of the shoppes already had their seasonal trimmings strung.

“I'm parked right beside you,” he lied. “Would you like to see my Prius?”

Alice shook her head. Poor stupid little smart little thing.

“You're a villain,” she said, taking one step toward the boutique across the street.

Now or never—

Nothing pleasant came next.

...

 

 

 

 Two weeks after Alice Little was officially declared missing, the clerk from the book store went to the police with a description of the suspicious character that had been in the store. He'd drawn a  rendition, himself, of a fleshy white man with short, dark hair and glasses—much like half the males in the region. In any region.

“I heard him call himself the boyo,” the clerk said. “He was fairly diabolical, in my own personal estimation. Verbose, for one thing, and he smelled of Old Spice. His nose may have been artificial, too. Seems to me that a fellow would wear a disguise if he's hunting for children out in the open.”

“A rubber nose for a disguise?”

“I mean, it could have been. You never know.”

The man was thanked for the information.

“This will come in handy,” the interviewing officer told him.

...