Just North of Nowhere (51 page)

No. Not to worry. He’d go home. He’d sleep. He’d get up. He’d talk to his mother. Little bit by little bit, day by day, he’d make it up. He’d make something of himself. She wouldn’t be ashamed of him or be afraid for him. No.

He walked uphill toward home. The street was quiet. Of course it was quiet. Cripes, it was night in a small town. No snuffling things crossed his path, nothing rustled the bushes, nothing flapped water or sucked mud from down by the river. Owls and rabbits only.

At Leslie’s house, her window showed light.
Still up, witching?
He smiled. He was going to stop, toss a pebble at the pane; whisper back and forth with her.

No. He wouldn’t. What would be the point? She was a good kid but, a kid. It was late. Early! A hundred kids! Witchcraft and hexes! He smiled, headed home; headed into the darkness.

Why? Esther Elias had had it was why.

What happened was she woke that morning, night still black around the town, silence in the bed next to her, as always. That was part of it! She woke in the quiet, the radium green of her travel alarm nearly faded at the tail end of night, as always, but something there was about that dial, about the length of that silence, or the hue of that morning’s dark, because that morning it came to her: she’d never heard the damn alarm go. She wound the clock every night, a religion of sorts, but she’d wound the alarm key only once: the day she’d bought the thing years before! Every morning she awoke and lay staring at the radium dial until just about, then, by God, hit the button just before! Done that for a couple dozen years.

That morning, like all mornings, she lay there and considered pie while heart wished Hawaiian black sand beach. Like all mornings, she rolled on her back, stared at the ceiling and weighed one against the other: French apple, peach, cherry, the assortment of creams and meringues, banana, Boston and coconut, lemon and key lime or South Pacific sun?

Considering, weighing, she inhaled the ghosts of a hundred thousand pies and more. Then she exhaled the day.

Cripes!
she realized that morning,
I see each damn one!

She did. Pie ghost soaked her rooms from the restaurant below. She saw the quirks of each Goddamn one, their little faces scored to let off steam, their cute Goddamn dough florets baked on, each unique, each baked in grades from cinnamon gold to negro brown. She examined all their little pretty bits, things only she would notice: an endearing chip from the rim of one, a crust gone lumpy here and sagged just there, dimples and blushes, or the uneven finish where the butter gloss had spread a funny kind of way. Each ghost pie was an ugly child who smiled its hidden beauty to its mom.

One hundred and twenty three thousand, three hundred and seventy of them.
She’d sat down and worked out the number once. A joke, yes. After that she kept a running count: Now, one hundred and twenty three thousand, three hundred and seventy. That morning, she realized that was no joke.

And Marv gone now for how many of them pies?
she thought. She damn well had to think that out! When she did, it didn't seem important anymore but he’d been gone for almost all. After a moment of dark consideration of her Bluffton years, she realized:
Now’s just the last part of back then—plans me and Marv made thirty years ago in Philly…
this
is what’s left over.

What?

Nothing that included the daily making of pie.

And the daily making of pie was all that held her in this cold room in this cold place.

The window curtains bellied, rolled open, flapped hems at her.

Huh,
she thought
, didn’t leave the damn window open did I?

In the still-dark morning a colored light flickered.

She tensed.
Cops?
she thought. Cripes! Twenty years in the Driftless and she was still a city girl. For Esther from south Philly, blinking lights said “Emergency! Outta the Goddamn way!”

Her feet curled at the touch of autumn-cold linoleum. She cussed how close it was to rising time, cussed the problem-maker, cussed Vinnie. She cussed the morning limp that started at her hip and ran to her foot. That too.

At the window: No cop car, no Vinnie. The flicker was in the sky, a wink sliding in silence leaving a faint trail.

Lotta light for a damn aurora, shooting star, whatever
she thought.

The light blushed, settled down.
Ain’t shooting stars. Ain’t auroras? Cripes, it ain’t the rapture, just a plane up there, going.
“Pretty,” she said.

Satisfied, disappointed, Esther looked back at the green time on her clock. Choose: pie or Hawaii? Get up and bake? Get up and get? A deep breath.
Funny.
It was always easy. Never a real question to it. Never…

The dark room rang with a sharp brass chatter.

Cripes! The damn alarm. THAT’s what it sounds like.
She watched it as the bell rang down, slowed, paused, clanged again. Stopped.

“Well, huh!” she said. She was about to make the same decision she’d first made ninety-eight thousand two hundred and seventeen pies before, the same damn pitiful decision when…

Out in the universe, that patch of sliding light above the town went red, then orange, then yellow, green, blue, violet, gold, and back again.

Huh?

It winked again.

More like a wrinkle
, she thought. Esther winked back.
Was that?
She thought,
is that a flying whatchacall? UFO? Saucer?
Had some piece of the universal strange come to get her? Invite and take her? She shivered. Then, Christ, she recognized the shiver. Christ, she was afraid it wasn't that! Afraid it was nothing!
Hell that’s it!
She feared it never would be a saucer, UFO, or anything whatever out there. It would always be a weather balloon, a DC 10, or Seven-ought-something out from some city taking the high road so far up and so far away it didn't even sound a whisper down in Bluffton.

She opened the window all the way. Listened.

Not a sound.

Just a tube full of snores and dreams, for crineoutloud,
something to trail away unheard to nothing.
THAT's all it is
, she thought,
a big bright pipe loaded with dreams going somewhere…
“and waking up where I ain’t,” she said,
going, going…

It wrinkled again.

“Huh,” she said, “no it ain’t!”

The thing was not going. The thing had stopped just shy of disappearing over West Bluff. It had hung there the best part of a minute.

“Now that is different,” she said.

The colors shifted hues backwards. The light reached back along its own trail glowing in the morning.

“Right. Up where that fellow is, sun’s already over the edge of the world. Huh.”

Next, the light did another thing unusual: it reached out of the sky and down to Bluffton, down through the second floor front window of Esther’s place above the restaurant, down to Esther. When it did, the damn thing started in on her like Marv used to when he was after something. With the thing in the sky, though, she didn’t come back! “You’re Goddamn right,” she would’ve said, had she said anything at all. She didn’t. It made sense, listening. That thing in the sky, just shy of the far bluff, over on the sunset side of town? It made sense and that was that. Pies or black sand beaches? To hell with both of them.

Day was almost sorted out by the time Vinnie pulled up to the American House—Eats. He’d already heard:
the Eats is shut!
Someone had come running.

The Sons of Norway had gotten there first. They came same as usual, a troop of them to have their breakfast. They got to the porch. Then,
Uf-dah!
Lights is out, door is closed!

They tried it, gently.

Locked.

They looked in at the door, at each other, at the door again—some peered in the window. By then a couple guys from the stockyard had showed up, then another bunch from somewhere. Not talkative, the Sons stood aside and let the rest wonder it through.

That note on the door window?
“Uf-dah, anyone coulda wrote that there,”
someone said.
The Sons thought that way, too. None had said it. The plain fact was: no breakfast.

A few more showed, Einar among them.

“What? What’s’at?” he said.

“Criminies,” Mondon from the yards said, “she ain’t a restrant no more!”

“What d’ya mean? What’d’ya mean by that, for crineoutloud?” Einar said. “Here it is, for cripes!” He thumped his foot on the porch, three, four times. “We’re on her porch, for cripes sake. Place’s still here!” He dared anyone to argue them damn points! “Saying she ain’t a restaurant no more!” He would have hocked a good one for show but he knew what Esther would have done, catching him doing that!

Sure, the building was there. Just as sure: no eggs, ham, grits, biscuits, bacon, no coffee nor sweet pie, nothing warm came from it. There was just the closed door—not even the CLOSED sign, for cry-eye – and the dark.

More people showed. By then there were quite a few. There was milling and muttering and by then Vinnie was there and the sun was over the bluff and it was pretty much day and just the American House, the building. No Eats. Cripes.

“Christ’s own dipstick, Vinnie,” Einar said, leaning on the prowler’s window, “what the hay you gonna do? Esther Whatchacaller’s gone missing or dead, right? Foul play for sure. FOUL play we all figure.”

“
You
figure?”

“Yeah, sure. Me and them. You betcha.” He thumbed over his shoulder in the direction of the mob and missed the squint in Vinnie’s eye. “Foul play or worse.”

Vinnie was in no mood. In particular he was in no mood considering it was Einar leaning and figuring. Worse would have been if Karl Dorbler—particularly if Karl Dorbler—had come leaning on the prowler and figuring foul play for Vinnie to sort out. And Vinnie, sitting there without morning grunts and coffee!

Peculiar, though.

Vinnie shoved Einar out of the way with the car door and stepped into the street.

Now, Vinnie’d been a cop all his life. Seemed like it, anyway. He'd seen things, pile-ups on County H, farm implement tragedies, that sort of thing. The worst had been the Friedlander back yard on Centennial – a dozen State Patrol and forensic sorts, milling in the morning mist and shadows, feet bagged and shuffling, everyone afraid to mess something, voices low, flashbulbs flicking.

And the smell, Vinnie remembered. The place and time had a smell. The torn open and scooped out corpse of the Friedlander girl had let a stink of emptied bowel and let-go piss mixed with blood, mud and the copper touch of adrenalin that joined the smell on the tongue.
A reek of pain and caution that was,
Vinnie thought.

Here?
He took a few sniffs.
Nothing,
he realized. Strange, just not Friedlander strange.

The front of the American House, the porch, steps, the street around, looked,
cripes,
like what a crime scene ought to! People milling. Standing apart. Talking quiet. Afraid to touch, watching where they stepped like a dance. And, yeah, something smelled peculiar. Vinnie sniffed again.

First: Sweaty Norwegian. Then: shit and blood
(cow, maybe, maybe pig, breezing down Slaughterhouse from the yards or maybe off some‘the guys from the yards, here to breakfast)
. Higher in the air was a smell of turned dirt. Amish lands up the bluffs past Dorbler’s Folly. From down low and not too-far away was stink of the Kiddorf Banks. That too.
That’s Bluffton. Morning scent. Usual.

Still. Something. Something else, something different.

Took Vinnie some standing and scratching but he got it.
Missing something
, is what he got.

What?

Well, sure you big lug!
This
morning’s absent the scent of pie!
He damn near smacked his own forehead for dumbassedness.

The note taped to the inside glass of the door was hand-lettered and neat:

“Gone. Don't worry yourselfs. And DON’T (underlined three sharp times) mess the place too much!”

“That look to be Esther's hand to you?” Einar said, his face leaning next to Vinnie’s.

It did but Vinnie didn’t answer. He opened the door with his passkey.

Okay,
he thought, remembering the Book of Daddy,
first impression: this place is…

He couldn't think what.

“Different…”

Yes, sure. But, cripes, different how? Okay. The obvious: it’s dark. Yeah!
Usually it was white, bright.
Cripes, filled with damn light, sure. Electric, sun, fluorescence! Usually it was open, for cripes’ sake!
And, as previously noted, the absent smell of morning pie—and frying ham, bacon grease, other breakfast smells, griddling cakes and spuds and ham and grits boiling and other food all day, and coffee—coffee always.

Even absent the smells, just being in the place was making Vinnie drool.

Whatchacallit? That’s conditioning.
The screech of the screen door, his foot crossing the threshold: that was enough… He hungered.

So, first impression: The place is empty. No!
He changed his mind.
The place is hanging fire. It’s stalled, is what!

He closed the door on Einar, a dozen Norwegians, the stockmen, others, and Karl Dengler – Karl Dengler finally! Cripes! They bobbed and weaved at the glass. Vinnie threw the latch and locked himself into the quiet dark.

“Doff that Smokey, for cripes’s sake Vinnie! You’re in polite company!”

He could hear her, could hear his coffee cup clink on the counter…