The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [36]
Officially, there within and about the small Long Beach cathedral, Melony Lambert met Maxwell Polito for the first time. Since then, they came to prefer the less detailed story of having met one another on a March day of that year, their match made by Melony’s younger brothers, both of which attended the same university and the same Ancient History class taught by Max, one a student of Max’s the previous semester and the other a student from last Spring. The elder brother had become a favorite of Maxwell’s, and this semester had enrolled afresh into Max’s Human Psyche and Behavior, simply due to Max conveniently being the teacher in a minor curriculum course.
It was the brother’s deaths that brought Max to the funeral, that brought Max to meet Melony, that led Max to eventually exchange sympathies and then phone numbers,, that finally coaxed Max to phone Melony for a coffee date on that often-reminisced March day.
And it was from then, when Melony began to learn that though life may at times seem like a lie, what really matters is not to live it like one, but to live it in truth right the hell back.
Like she had been doing before, all along.
And like she learned to do all over again.
If only she’d left it that way, instead of signing up for a shuttle mission to the clouds for a sky-high straddle with a truth that’d most likely prefer her to lie.
Down.
Below it.
And simply watch and wonder.
And perhaps paint.
***
Melony Polito had to remind herself of the reasons for her arrival at a pit-stop corner bar known insipidly as The Crow Job. The black painted wood cut-out of a sickly, red neon-laced crow intermittently tipped a yellow neon straw hat beside the heralding rooftop Crow Job sign, bringing to Melony’s mind the flock of crows in Disney’s Dumbo singing a twisted variation of seeing an elephant die in there, rather than fly. And by the look of things, more than that.
And the handful of rent-a-pussies dispersed amongst the overflow of parking lot slum mobiles appeared like extras in a John Waters movie lost in the used car lot of a third-world country. But trailing along the rickety wooden railway leading from the outer sidewalk and encasing the double front entrance doors opposite the lively Friday night motor traffic of Stewart Avenue stood a spirited and sizeable line of above-average bar patrons. Above-average, much like Melony herself visiting this dive, or at least above-average looking.
And just like Melony, most likely, a good many of these anxious party-mongers would not dare to risk their necks and wallets around such a place on any night, if not for the wow and the newsworthy spectacle of one of modern day’s most celebrated novelists jammin’ with his own rock n’ roll band at a premiere gig. What hit the public even more was how Ralston Cooper negotiated temporary ownership of the bar just to ensure his own total control over the entire venture.
And contrary to press jargon, this writer’s venture was in Mr. Cooper’s eyes anything but experimental.
This band was going to fly.
And yes, even fly like the Disney crows’ Dumbo.
But Melony was here for more than this. Sure, she had read more than a Cooper book or two. Even still, her interest in Ralston Cooper went to anything truly but his frighteningly entertaining works. Frankly, she was more into King, like the other remaining half of the world.
Here, at The Crow Job, Melony Polito was a private investigator doing her job, not for anyone else this time but for the ambitious investigative efforts of herself and her husband, for blowing the lid wide open on a case shrouded in secrecy and years of pursuit.
Here, at The Crow Job.
Melony hoped she hadn’t gone nuts. She continued towards the entrance, towards the two door attendants, one big and chunky, one big and tall, and they looked like professional wrestling equivalents of Abbott & Costello keeping alert stances at the head of the line. They checked the opened flaps of wallets drooping like leather and velcro tongues before them and beneath the scrutiny