Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [112]
“What was that?” Jodie asked. “What just happened?” She was shaking.
“That,” Walton told her, “was a typical incident at Clara’s Country Kitchen Café. The last time Tad gave someone three wishes, it was because the guy’d bought him a cup of coffee, and a tornado hit the guy’s garage a couple of weeks later. Fat guys have really funny delusions, have you noticed that?” He waited. “You’re shaking,” he said, and put his hand on her shoulder. “What’d you ask for, Jodie?”
She turned to look out the front window and saw Walton’s dog gazing straight back at her in an eerie manner.
“I asked for a job, and a better radio, and a million dollars.”
“Then what was all that stuff about ‘kiss away’?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Walton, can we go, please? Can we pay our bill and leave?”
“I just remembered,” Walton said. “It’s that Rolling Stones tune. It’s on one of those antique albums, I think.” He raised his head to sing.
Love, sister, is just a kiss away,
Kiss away, kiss away, kiss away.
“I don’t think that’s what he meant,” Jodie said.
Walton leaned forward and gave her a little harmless peck on the cheek. “Who knows?” he said. “Maybe it was. Anyhow, just think of him as an overweight placebo-person. He doesn’t grant you the wish because, after all, he’s just a fat psycho, but he could put you in the right frame of mind. We’ve got to think positively here.”
“I like how you defended me,” Jodie said. “Getting all male and everything.”
“No problem,” Walton said, holding up his fist for inspection. “I like fights.”
She thought that she had interviewed well, but she wasn’t offered the job she had applied for that day. They called her a week later—she had finally had a phone installed—and told her that they had given the position to someone else but that they had been impressed by her qualities and might call her again soon if another position opened up.
She and Walton continued their job-and-castoffs hunt, and it was Walton who found a job first, at the loading dock of a retailer in the suburbs, a twenty-four-hour discount store known internationally for shoddy merchandise. The job went from midnight to eight a.m.
She thought he wasn’t quite physically robust enough for such work, but he claimed that he was stronger than he appeared. “It’s all down here,” he said, pointing to his lower back. “This is where you need it.”
She didn’t ask him what he was referring to—the muscles or the vertebrae or the cartilage. She had never seen his lower back. However, she was beginning to want to. On the passenger side of his car, she considered the swinging fuzzy dice and the intricately woven twigs of a bird’s nest tossed on the top of the dashboard as he drove her to her various job interviews. His conversation was sprinkled with references to local geology and puzzles in medicine and biology. He was interested in most observable phenomena, and the pileup of souvenirs in the car reflected him. She liked this car. She had become accustomed to its ratty disarray and to the happy panting of Einstein, who always sat in the backseat, monitoring other dogs in other cars at intersections.
At one job interview, in a glass building so sterile she thought she should wear surgery-room snoods over her shoes, she was asked about her computer skills; at another, about what hobbies she liked to fill her spare time. She didn’t think that the personnel director had any business asking her such questions. These days she filled her spare time daydreaming about sex with Walton. She didn’t say so and didn’t get the job. But at a wholesale supplier of office furniture and stationery, she