The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [163]
To the left of the front counter register and seated atop a barstool was another elderly chap, garbed in the worn denim of Dickie coveralls and nothing but bare skin beneath. His scrawny, barefooted hillbilly self was undistracted from the cracker island he erected upon the green waters of his split pea soup.
The other side of the diner’s interior was just as uneventful and lifeless; to the rearward left,at the last window seat of the last booth, a nest-like mound of dark auburn hair crowned a face buried in cradled arms slumped over the table.
Six people as inert as the outside night itself, yet given the outside night and the area beyond, this was the most happening place around. Accompanying all this was the barely audible, subtle, soothing sounds of “Do You Know the Way To San José,” ala elevator music, via speakers resembling shower drains dispersed every yard or so across the ceiling.
“Ralston,” Andrew said in a whisper, “what do we do?”
“We stay together,” Ralston answered. “It’s likely they’ll want us separated.”
“You think they’re here?”
Ralston’s eyes squinted, eyelids blinked like the flicking of pale white camera shutters over two glistening black lenses. He spied a pack of menthol longs upon the polished counter in clear view beside the denim Dickies man’s split pea soup.
For one thing, Ralston figured, it would be nice to partake in a little nicotine rush. For another thing....
“Wait here,” Ralston said next. “I think I’ll test the waters a bit.”
“Good luck,” was the only reply at Andrew’s disposal and he chose to wait for him. Ralston wasn’t about to stray too far and wasn’t about to leave his sight, and none of the six patrons had given them notice yet anyway.
Just like Ralston, too, to want to be the first to instigate attention.
“Excuse me, friend,” Ralston straightened himself gentlemanly and groped for a tug at the Dickies man’s denim, “you don’t suppose I can bum a smoke from you....?”
“You ain’t my goddamn wife,” the Dickies man muttered nonchalantly, undistracted from his saltine crackers. “So go ‘head, young tadpole-man, help yerself.”
Tadpole-man???
“Uh...don’t mind if I do. Thanks.” Ralston sidestepped the barstool at one side of the man and snagged the pack of smokes from the counter, picked a single from the pack, perched the cigarette’s butt between what slits remained of his lips, and returned the pack to its place. His eyes never withdrew from the man and the man’s eyes never withdrew from his soup.
Ralston nagged at him again. “Hey, sorry. Umm, you got a light? I seem to have misplaced mine on my intergalactic star cruiser....”
“Ain’t got one,” the man replied, unflinching. Then, the denim man’s right arm lifted, exposing an underarm pit infested with carefully braided hairs. All of his fingers curled fist-like but the index, which pointed as he spoke again. “But they do. They have a light for ya. Those ones, the ones on the other side….”
Ralston turned his gaze into the direction where he indicated, the direction of the thermal jacketed couple at the counter’s opposite end.
It was as though the couple sensed they’d become the objects of attention, for as soon as the attention was drawn to them they simultaneously returned Ralston’s gaze.
Ralston immediately recognized the couple, and the very reality of who they were drew him towards them in hopeless abandon, utterly awed, and it wasn’t because the couple might’ve held between them a light for his smoke that he lost a grip on reality himself.
It was because the red thermal jacket contained his prodigal girlfriend, Jessica as she reared her head to teeter Ralston’s way, and the wearer of the lavender blue thermal jacket at the hind side of her raised a muted expression belonging to none other than his literary agent William Behn.
To make matters even more confounding, the two withdrew their mutual glares as he approached, and they turned towards each other, arching forward face-to-face, hidden all too intimately