Malus Domestica (16 page)

Nerd. I can live with nerd.

Finally, he looked up from the computer and regarded her with a wary, squinty eye. A battle was taking place in his head too, she could tell. She could almost hear the mental gears clanking.

She couldn’t take it anymore. “Well? Did I scare you away?”

“Hell
no,” Kenway blurted, talking to the screen with a weird nervous chuckle. “That was bad-
ass.
That was the most badass thing I’ve ever seen on YouTube. Up til now I thought it was all just—just people falling down and animal videos.” His eyes darted back up to her. “Now I know why you make the big bucks. You’re a one-woman production company. Do you do all your own special effects and everything?”

Caught off-guard, Robin tilted her head. “Yeeeah, you could say that,” she said with a coy wince. Her mouth screwed up to one side. “Sure.”

His mouth twitched, his face softened.

“I hate to interrupt you,” she asked, reaching out to tug the Macbook in her direction with a finger, “but do you mind if I get back to work editing today’s video?”

Kenway’s mental gears slipped. “Oh.
Oh!
Yeah. Yeah, here you go.” He turned the laptop around and watched her face over the Macbook’s lid as if he were waiting for some kind of tell.
Does he think it’s an elaborate joke?
She closed the web browser and pulled up the video-editing console.

Noticing the sandwich on the table by his hand, Kenway seemed to remember that he had food and picked it up, eating and staring into the middle distance.

“I want to be on your channel,” he said when he finished, startling her. He wiped his mouth with a napkin and wadded it up, shooting at the trash barrel from his seat. The balled-up napkin bounced off the wall and landed on the ground. “I want to fight witches too.”

Robin was speechless. “You
what?”

“I’m tired as shit of hanging around doin what I do. Bein the starving-artist cripple that spends all his time up in his studio painting.” Kenway got up and went over to the trash, leaning against the wall to snatch the paper off the ground and toss it.

When he came back to her, he leaned on the table with both hands as if he were about to make a business proposal. “It’s okay I guess. I mean, it’s better than sittin around with my thumb up my ass. But I do the car stuff because I’m good at it, not because I have a passion for it. And the paintings…eh. I thought I wanted to be a painter a long time ago. I’ll be straight with you, it’s wearin kinda thin.”

Kenway thrust a hand at the Macbook. “Shit! Look at these videos!
That’s
passion!” Sitting down, he threw back the last of the beer in the bottle and busied his hands with squeezing the cap into a clamshell shape. “That’s different, man. I wanna do something
different
for a change.”

“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”

He sat there peeling the label off the bottle for a little while, just long enough to give her time to finish the final touches on the video. She went to YouTube and started the transfer. “I didn’t tell you the whole truth of why I came here, Robin. And why I stayed.”

Cool anticipation trickled through her at recognizing the veiled pain on his face.

“When I lost my leg, it was my buddy Hendry, Chris Hendry, that pulled me out of that vehicle and put a tourniquet on me. Combat medic. He was in the vehicle behind us, he was the first one to get there.” Kenway rubbed his nose, pulling on it as if he were about to take a deep breath and dunk himself. He massaged his whole mouth, the beard grinding in his hand like dry grass. “But he couldn’t save everybody in there. Just me. It really messed him up, that he couldn’t save the others. After we got home, he didn’t do so hot. He had a lot of nightmares that year. Hard Christmas.”

The YouTube transfer was going rather slow. Way too slow for a twenty-minute video…she was going to have to find an alternative upload point.

“The next summer I came out here to see how he was doing. He was living in Blackfield and working at the mill. Had a Vicodin habit he was trying to kick, said he hurt his back in the, ahh—the incident. He had a job but it was on the rocks. No girlfriend, as far as I know. I got the idea in my head to take him out on the lake for a week, see if I could get him straightened up, right? He wasn’t too bad off yet. Not bad enough for rehab, I think. Maybe I caught him in time.”

As he spoke, he twirled the beer bottle on its butt, staring down at it. His voice was low, introspective.

“We spent a couple days out on a pontoon boat, fishing, tellin stories, had a good time. He looked good. He was laughing and making jokes. I thought he might be leveling out. Then one morning—that Wednesday—I got up, made coffee, and I was making breakfast when I went in to wake him up, and when I put my hand on him he was fucking
cold.”

Ice ran down Robin’s spine. She didn’t know what to do, or what to say, and suddenly this enormous man seemed so vulnerable and dark. He became an emotional hot potato in her hands.

“It was 95 degrees that morning, and it was like, almost noon when I went in there. He was cold, colder than 95 degrees. I remember the temperature because of that giant round thermometer on the cabin porch. How do you get colder than that? He felt like somebody stole him and replaced him with a ham. Right there, in that bedroom, I thought he was playing a prank on me and had put something under his blankets. And he was hiding in the closet, waiting to jump out and laugh at me.”

The stupid visual made him smirk darkly, but then he retreated into himself again.

“He brought the Vicodin to the cabin. Nothing left in the bottle.” Kenway shrugged slowly. “I reckon he had died during the night. Probably took it all before he laid down.” Closed his eyes, pressed the bottle against his mouth and tilted his head back, letting the very last drop of beer trickle down the glass onto his tongue.

Kenway put the bottle down and licked his lips, holding the bottle in both hands and staring down at it as if it were a precious heirloom. “I made breakfast and drank coffee while the man that saved my life was dead in the next room. And I didn’t do
shit about it.”

“Oh my God,” said Robin.

Kenway sat up straight and rolled his neck, squeezing his shoulder. “And I’ve been here ever since. …That was about three years ago.” He shot the bottle into the garbage with a bang and a rumble. “I don’t know, it just didn’t seem right to leave, you know? Felt like I was turnin my back on him. Walkin away from him. I couldn’t do it.”

Thoughts of hugging him occurred to her, but actually doing it seemed inappropriate. Instead, she reached over and squeezed his hand.

His eyes met hers and he smiled sadly.

“I’ve been over all my woulda-coulda-shouldas,” he said, patting her hand. The palm of his bear-paw was rough, leathery. “You spend a lot of time in your head when you’re painting. I think—ahh hell, this…isn’t really great lunch conversation, is it?” Kenway’s hand slithered out from under her own and he wadded up the sandwich wrapper, pitching it into the garbage too.

He was about to get up and probably say his see-ya-round when she reached out and took hold of his wrist.

“No,” she blurted. “—I mean, yes, well, it’s
not,
but I—”

He was nibbling the corner of his mouth, studying her face. In the sunlight, his eyes were the pale, dirty blue of a shallow lagoon, almost gray. He blinked and his eyebrows rose expectantly.

“Look, okay,” she said, glancing at the progress bar on her video upload. Two percent. The battery in her laptop would die before it ever got to twenty. “Umm. You’re already in this video I’m trying to upload. You can be in the next one too. …You don’t have to leave.”

Kenway visibly relaxed, settling into his seat. “I don’t know why I had to tell you that messed-up story. You… I dunno, you seem like a good listener.”

 
She smiled up at him. “I do a lot of talking to a camera. I like having someone to listen to for a change.”

“So what’s on the agenda for the rest of the day?” Fetching a deep, deep sigh, Kenway stroked his beard, smoothing it down. “Doing any witch-hunting?”

“Not today. Right now I’m trying to upload this video, but it’s taking forever. And I don’t have forever.”

“I live in the middle of town.” He tossed a thumb over his shoulder. “So my internet’s great. Fast as hell. You’re more than welcome to come over and use mine.”

“Smooth,” she said, a smile creeping across her face.
An enigma wrapped in pain wrapped in silk.
“But first, I’ve got something to show you. And if we’re telling stories, I should probably tell you mine.”

❂

As soon as the back doors of the van came open, Kenway recoiled in surprise, his eyes wide. The swords hanging from the pegboard glittered in the sunlight. “My God, you’ve got
an arsenal
in here.
Look
at all this.”

“Part of being a witch-hunter.” Robin gathered her power adapter and— “Actually…” She had planned on riding with him in his truck, but it made more sense to just take the van over there. No sense in leaving it here unattended. “…How about I just follow you to your place?”

“That’ll work.”

Apparently when he was alone in the truck, Kenway drove like a maniac. She had trouble keeping up with him in her lumbering panel van. The GoPro was mounted on the dash, facing out the windshield, recording the chase.
One of these days I’m going to have to have an actual car chase,
she thought, grumbling up Hwy 9.
The subscribers will love that.

Traffic was light when they got into town a few minutes later, the lunchtime rush winding down for an afternoon of work.

At the end of his block, Kenway whipped into a parking lot on the corner and she slid into a slot next to him. A sign standing in front of her grille said P
ARKING
FOR
S
TEVEN
D
REW
D.D.S O
FFICE
O
NLY
. One just like it was in front of his Chevy.

“What about this?” she asked him as they got out.

“I painted the mural in his waiting room for free. He lets me park here so I don’t have to use the parallel parking or the angled parking in front of the shop.”

“Oh.” Robin gathered her Macbook and charger, put them in her messenger bag, and unhitched the GoPro from its mount.

“Doing some filming?” Kenway asked, leading her up the sidewalk, along the storefronts. His art shop was four buildings down, past two empty shopfronts, a Mexican cafe called El Queso Grande, and a DUI driving course. As she walked, Robin panned the camera around, shooting B-roll of the street and all the buildings that they could see.

“Yep. I like to get as much footage as I can. Makes for a lot of variety and plenty of videos. The more videos you have, the more visible you are on YouTube.”

“Makes sense.”

I can make today’s video a clip episode, like they do on TV shows,
she thought. Kenway took out a jingling keyring and unlocked the front door of his studio, pulling the glass door open.
If I’m going to tell him my story, I can illustrate it by splicing in bits of earlier videos.
Silent excerpts would work best, playing under her voiceover.

Kenway flipped a light switch, and a forest of angular shadows turned into a small office, a computer workstation with two monitors, and several enormous machines of mysterious purpose. One of them looked like a giant laminator, or maybe something that pressed trousers for elephants.

A large table stretched to her right, and both the walls and the table were covered in hundreds of vinyl appliques: sports logos, automobile logos, clothing logos, tattoo designs of gryphons, dragons, tigers; mottos like N
O
F
EAR
and R
OLL
T
IDE
R
OLL
and A
DVENTURE
H
URTS
B
UT
S
TAYING
H
OME
K
ILLS
. A huge cutout of a running football player. Big flappy refrigerator magnets and a couple of coffee mugs with promotional artwork for local businesses.

She followed him through a door in the back, coming out into a huge open space with a garage roll-up and a set of steel stairs leading through a hole in the ceiling.

The garage was strewn with all manner of work trash, bits of vinyl, pieces of broken easel, scraps of canvas, a disassembled foosball table, sheets of plywood and pressboard, and four wide boards with holes cut in them.

The boards made her think of skeeball games. Two legs were bolted to their sides so that they stood up at an angle. “What are these?”

“Cornhole.”

“What?”

“Cornhole,” Kenway said again, walking over to a wobbly drafting table and picking up a green beanbag about the size of a baseball. He turned and lobbed it high; she watched it with the camera as it made an arc just under the garage rafters and slapped against the cornhole board, inches from the hole.

“—Oh.”

He tossed her a beanbag. “You give it a shot.”

Robin caught it and fired it across the room. The beanbag hit the wall and landed on top of an electrical conduit some ten feet up.

“Well, shit.”

Kenway laughed, climbing the stairs. “Ten points.”

They were impossibly high, climbing twenty feet up the wall and passing between the steel rafters. There were no acoustical tiles, so the ceiling was just gray-green-brown wood that looked like it had been salvaged from a shipwreck.

Emerging from the stairwell, Robin found herself in a space that was somehow majestic and quaint at the same time. The entire second story was one big open space like the garage downstairs, with a naked fifteen-foot ceiling. Taken as a whole it resembled some kind of modernized Viking lodge, all polished dark wood and hard angles. The south wall was plate-glass windows, looking out at the back of the building behind them and a vast blue sky.

Green marble countertops, steel fixtures, and black appliances made a sprawling kitchen to her left. Directly in front of her was a coffee table made out of a front door, with a short pole jutting up through where the knob used to be.