Malus Domestica (9 page)

He gave one to Robin and she slid into the booth, sitting against the wall. “What
does
he eat?” she asked, placing her camera against the wall to capture the table and its occupants.

“Meat. Vegetables.” He wagged his hand. “Bacon all day erry day. He cobble together regular food outta irregular bullshit. And the man fry
everything
in coconut oil. I tell you, one time he talked me into comin down to his place, and he made pizza with this dough made outta pureed cauliflower.”

“Was it good?”

“As good goin down as it was comin up.”

She made a face.

Fish, his tiny girlfriend Marissa, and a big white biker-looking guy named Kenway came to sit with her in the booth. She helped them destroy the pizza and an army of craft beers while they ignored the movie and played a game of Cards Against Humanity.

Kenway held up a black card in one tattooed hand. A riot of color and lines ran down his huge arms in sleeves. “We never did find
blank,
but along the way we sure learned a lot about
blank.”
His Sasquatch frame was crammed into a black T-shirt and he had a massive beard that made him look like a lumberjack having a mid-life crisis. A piercing in his eyebrow twinkled in the projector’s glow.

Robin smirked and plucked two white cards—
the tiniest shred of evidence that God is real,
and
tripping balls
—from her hand, putting them face down on the table next to the others.

Marissa’s cards won the round. “We never did find passable transvestites,” Kenway recited out loud, and a huge grin gleamed through the dark cloud of his beard. “But along the way we sure learned a lot about Grandma.”

The table roared with laughter, and a couple of the people watching the movie glanced at them.

As the evening progressed toward midnight, Robin became more and more glad that she’d agreed to come. Several dozen hands into a
Halloween
marathon, she looked up from her beer and realized that all the movie-watchers had disappeared. Michael Myers stared blankly out of the screen at a roomful of empty chairs.

“I think it’s about time I head home,” said Kenway, and Marissa let him out. Robin was taken aback at how tall he was as he unfolded himself from the booth and stretched six feet of broad muscle.

She polished off her beer. “Got work in the morning?”

“…No, ahh—”

Fish stiffened. Robin scrunched her brow at him in confusion.

“I don’t really work,” Kenway said, jamming his fingers into his jeans pockets. “Well, I
do—”
He gestured with a big craggy hand. “—But it’s not really your usual nine-to-five.”

Marissa smiled. “Kenny is Blackfield’s local
artiste.”

“Is that so?” Robin beamed. The smile felt alien and uncomfortable on her face even after laughing at the card game, and as usual it faded quickly. “What kind of art do you do?”

“A little of this, a little of that.” The hulking man folded his arms. It should have looked authoritative, menacing even, but somehow it seemed protective, bashful. “I did the big mural on the wall at the park, and I did the superheroes out there on the windows. I have vinyl equipment too, and I make leather stuff.”

“Maybe I can commission you to paint my van.”

“That skeezy-ass candy van?” asked Joel.

Robin pursed her lips at him. “Yes, my skeezy-ass candy van. It needs a little style, maybe.”

Kenway rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ll take a look at it, then.” He started gathering up the cards and shuffling them, sorting them into clean stacks and putting them into boxes. “What’d you have in mind?”

“Do you do a lot of vans?”

“A couple. Mostly pick-up trucks and hot-rods from out of town. I do a shit-ton of motorcycles for guys out of Atlanta and Chattanooga. I did a big-ass snake on a dude’s truck a few years ago. It was pretty freakin’ sick, took forever. Went all the way around the back from one door to the other.”

Robin tried to picture the van with a new paint job. “It’d have to be something black, with stylized artwork. Nothing cheesy.”

“I’m sure I could figure something out.”

“I think you should take the lady back over there and let her show you her skeezy-ass candy van,” suggested Joel, with a devil’s grin. “I live on the other side of town, and it’d be out of my way, but your studio is between here and there.”

A rush of cold heat shot down Robin’s neck in embarrassment. She narrowed her eyes at him.
You planned this all along, didn’t you?

Kenway rubbed the back of his neck. “…Yeah, I
guess
I could.”

After taking down the projector equipment and cleaning up the mess from the pizza, the five of them regrouped on the sidewalk and said their good-nights. Turned out the
artiste
drove a rattletrap Chevy pickup, an antique land-yacht with a bicycle lying in the back. The paint job was the tired Dustbowl-blue of the sky in old photographs, wistful and cool.

Climbing into the cab, Robin pulled her hoodie’s sleeves down to cover her hands and pushed her hands into the muff pockets. She wasn’t cold, but it made her feel better. Safer.

A set of dog-tags dangled from the rear-view mirror, twinkling in the light.

She rolled the window down and sat back to listen to the cicadas buzz and whisper in the distance. Kenway got in, filling the driver’s seat with his muscular bulk, and turned the engine over with an oily, exhausted
chugga chugga chugga.
He fiddled with the radio, producing a static-chewed gabble.

“What kind of music do you like?”

“Any kind.” She smiled as warmly as she could.

He settled on a classic rock station—
Revved up, like a deuce, another runner in the night—
and looked to her for approval. It was the clearest signal on the band, so she pursed her lips in an agreeing smile. “That’s fine.”

The gearshift was a twenty-sided die as big as an apple. As he went to put the truck in gear, he noticed her eyes on it. “I won it playing Trivial Pursuit at Fish’s shop one night.” He chuckled and pushed it across the gearbox, and the engine dropped in pitch. “First time my encyclopedic knowledge of TV shows has ever come in handy. It’s actually not a real gearshift, I had to drill a hole in the back of it.”

The Chevy swung out of the parking spot and lumbered down Main Street, passing a tremendous Gothic church that looked as if it were made of sandstone blocks.

The hallucination stood under one of the stone buttresses, in an alleyway.

Luminous green lamp-eyes gleamed in the darkness of its broad face, strobing between the bars of the churchyard fence. A yellow security light on the church wall illuminated it from behind, making a halo of the reddish hair covering its lumpy shoulders and long arms. Years ago, she had pegged it for at least eight feet tall, but next to Walker Memorial it almost looked delicate.

I must be late for my medication,
Robin thought, making a mental note to take it as soon as she got back to the van.

“So what do
you
do for a living?” Kenway asked. “It must be pretty interesting—”

“Cause of the way I look?”

She glanced at herself in the wing mirror and suddenly she seemed outlandish, like an extra out of a
Mad Max
movie, all dark-eyed and gray-scalped. For the first time in a long time—maybe the first time
period
—she wished she were wearing more make-up. Her fingernails had been black earlier that week, but now they were only mostly black, chipped away.

Kenway scoffed, grinning. “You said it, not me.”

“I make YouTube videos.” She remembered that she was holding her camera, and she waggled it indicatively. It was not filming.

“Really. Huh.” Kenway stopped at a red light, waiting for cross-traffic that never came. “I didn’t even know you could make money doing that. What do you do in em?”

I bet you thought I did porn,
she thought.
Or worse. You wouldn’t be the first to make that assumption.
The radio was turned so low that Robin could hear the traffic light clicking softly in the breeze. Lyrics squirmed at the edge of her hearing like voices on a telephone.

“Vlog.”

“Gesundheit.”

“No, it’s like a video journal. I… ‘document’ things.”

She hesitated. Kenway was good-looking, and she didn’t want to jeopardize whatever tenuous thing she could sense hovering in the cab between them with the goofy truth. The elephant in the room was a flighty one. “Ahh…I don’t know, it’s nothing. Not really that great. I just talk to the camera a lot. Drive around, visit places. Joel says I’m a homeless Guy Fieri.”

“Cool, cool,” he said, and laughed as the mental image sunk in.
The light turned green and the truck grumbled across the intersection. “Anyway, I wanted to tell you, I really dig that mohawk.”

She instinctively brushed a hand across her bristly scalp. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I’m—I’m really into rock chicks. Biker chicks. That kind of thing. I guess.” He rolled his own window down and laid an elbow out of it, leaning away from her. He shrugged. “I don’t know. I just…wanted to say it, say something. You look good. It’s a good look for you.”

“…Thank you.”

“Suits your face.”

Kenway’s smile was a tight, polite one. It didn’t reach his eyes.

Robin summoned up her curiosity. “So…you don’t really look like a local. I don’t remember you from when I was a kid.”

“I moved out here a couple years ago. I was visiting a friend of mine and decided to stay. I like this town. It’s quiet, and I, uhh…I guess I had some baggage I needed to get rid of. And this place is a good place to lose it.” He glanced at her and back at the road. “The baggage.”

“I know what you meant.” Robin stared through the windshield. “I think I brought some back here myself.”

At night, Blackfield was a dead city, an abandoned town painted in shades of rust-orange. They only saw two cars, and both of them turned down side streets, heading home.

“Y’know, I guess it must not be ‘nothing’—” Flicking the turn signal,
tick tock tick tock tick tock,
Kenway eased into a turning lane and boated left. “—I mean, if you can make a living at it, that whatever-it-is you do on YouTube must be good enough to pay the bills. Right?”

Robin sighed. “Yeah, I guess it’s all right.”

“So come on. Out with it, Miss Mysterious. What do you do?” He smirked at her, lip curling in one corner, white teeth glinting in his beard.

They crossed a small bridge over a canal running parallel to the main drag, and she could hear the faint gurgle of rushing water. On the other side, Kenway turned right and carried them up a street of quaint two-story buildings like some kind of historical business district.

“Do you watch a lot of YouTube videos?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No, not really. I don’t even have a smartphone. I have a computer at the shop, but I only use it for work. My laptop in my apartment, I don’t use it much at all except for watching movies or checking email. Reading the news.”

She squinted. “What about that movie
The Blair Witch Project?”

“I remember that, yeah. Came out in like, 1999 or 2000, something like that, didn’t it?”

“Something like that. I do—my channel is sort of like that. Fake real-life footage of supernatural events in my life. There are…actually a lot of channels like mine, but not. Not exactly like mine. Most of them are people dealing with ghosts. Haunted houses. And monsters. Extra-dimensional monsters?”

Coming out of her mouth, it sounded stupid as hell. “Mm-hmm.” Kenway nodded.

They slowed to a crawl, level with a dark shopfront. The plate-glass windows were painted with a gryphon in rampant red, and underneath was lettering in Olde English: G
RIFFIN
’
S
A
RTS
& S
IGNS
. “This is my place. I live upstairs from my shop in a drafty studio apartment. Yep, I’m the stereotypical starving artist.”

They drove on. He took them to the end of the median and did a U-turn through the turning lane, going the way they came.

“Do you do a lot of business?” she asked.

“Not really. But I like it that way. I might have one or two big projects a month. The rest of the time I paint.” He tugged his jeans leg up, revealing the sheen of a metal rod. His lower left leg was a prosthetic foot. “VA disability,” he said, knocking on it with a hollow
tonk, tonk.
“Gives me a lot of free time.”

“I
was
wondering if you were in the Army.” Robin’s eyes flicked to the dog tags hanging from the mirror. She caught one of them and turned it to the light. SFC G
RIFFIN
, K
ENWAY
. B
LOOD
T
YPE
AB. R
ELIGION
N
ONE
.

“Used to be.”

“Do you mind if I ask what happened?”

He didn’t answer right away. His eyes were fixed on some point a thousand miles in front of the Chevy.

“I’m sorry,” Robin said. “I shouldn’t—”

“It’s okay. I was uhh…collecting my thoughts.” He tipped down the visor and caught a pack of cigarettes, pulling one out with his lips.

He didn’t light it, but he put the box back in the visor and drove with his lighter in his wheel hand. “I was part of an escort for a Provincial Reconstruction Team convoy. They’re the ones that…they have a lot…
women,
we brought female soldiers out to the villages where we were building schools and shit, you know, to talk to the Afghan women and kids. They don’t really talk to the men, I guess.” The wind played with his hair. His temples were shaved but the top was long, and it whipped in the breeze coming through the window.

A wincing expression had slowly come over his face as if he’d developed a headache. “Anyway. I stopped our vehicle when I shouldn’t have. Ka-blooey. End of the line.”

“I’m sorry.”

Kenway lit the cigarette and took a draw, shrugging. “Oh—do you mind?” he asked, indicating the cigarette.

She smiled wanly. “It’s your truck.”

“You smoke? You want one?”

“Trying to quit.”

The night blurred past them for a few more moments as they passed lightless storefronts, dead barber’s shops, dark alleyways yawning in brick throats. They startled a cat that had been peering into a storm drain and it bounded away, leaping into a hedge.