The Methuselah Gene (8 page)

My order came out to me, and as Edie placed it in front of me, I realized why the name of the place was the Slow Poke Cafe.
 
“You ever get busy?” I asked.

She bobbed her head, made a surprised face.
 
“Well, sure, you just wait and see.
 
Early bird gets the worm round here, since there's jus' Paul and me.
 
Come lunchtime we do the most business, though, with to-go orders.”

“Rush hour?”
 
I chuckled at the idea.
 
“So the name keeps folks from complaining?”

“You got it, hon.
 
And some of the old timers?
 
They'd linger round ‘til two or three o'clock, if they could.
 
Have
ta
shoo'em
out, make room.
 
We don't do as well evenings, like I said.
 
Jus' get some regulars who got no wife
cookin
' for ‘em.
 
Like you, maybe?”

She was looking at my bare ring finger.
 
I said, “If the food's as good as it looks, I may be back, even from Richmond.”

“Virginia?
 
Got an uncle there.
 
Bill Polk, in Newport News.”

I nodded, then forked a tender bite of steak into my mouth.
 
It was more delicious than I'd hoped.
 
“
Ummmm
.”

“The secret's in the gravy,” Edie confided.
 
“You
jus
' need to find you a woman there in Richmond, make a wife of one knows how to cook.”

I smiled as I chewed, took a swig of Coke from the bottle, then said, “Maybe you're right.
 
But then most of the women I've met who know how to cook are already cooking for their own families.”

Edie opened her mouth, about to share her wisdom on relationships, but she seemed to decide it would be lost on me because she shut her mouth instead, made a polite smile, and left me to enjoy my dinner.
 
I looked out the front window toward the post office across the street.
 
An old man entered over there, wearing shiny overalls held up with suspenders.
 
The overalls were slick with muck.
 
I imagined the old guy had just finished slopping his hogs, and now wanted to check on what those swine known as his creditors were demanding today, after discarding whatever hogwash his junk mail touted.
 
With my limited view of the postal boxes, I was positioned to see everyone who came and went over there, but I didn't bother to lift my binoculars or ready my camera yet.
 
It was more likely to see Edie or Wally checking Box 16 than that old timer.

Fifteen minutes later a middle aged dark-haired woman arrived with her teenage son.
 
They drove up in a Jeep, and the kid ran in, holding his mother's keys, to check a box higher than I knew 16 to be.
 
Five minutes later a bearded yokel in his mid-fifties pulled into the spot vacated by the Jeep.
 
He drove the same blue Chevy pickup I'd seen in the bay at Wally's Shell station.
 
As he entered, his burnt orange Bulldog sighted me from the truck's bed twenty yards away.
 
The thing looked like its last bath had been in acid.
 
It barked, hoarsely.
 
I noted the Iowa plate below the dented fender, and then went back to my own plate.
 
I finished off the steak and then sopped up the remains of my gravy with a final flaky biscuit that was so tasty I doubted Betty Crocker herself had ever made better.

“Another Coke there?” Edie called to me from the register where she kept boxes of mints, beef jerky, and pickled eggs floating in a jar of vinegar.

I must have been looking at the eggs as if staring at cue balls basting in urine, because Edie appeared perplexed until I shook my head and asked, “How about a cup of coffee and a slice of pie?”

“Cherry, apple, rhubarb, or lemon?”

I considered the possibility of visiting every tiny café in every tiny town in America during my retirement, and writing a book about it.
 
“Apple, with a scoop of vanilla ice cream if you got it,” I replied.

Edie scribbled on her pad, then called my request back to Paul somewhere behind the swinging doors.
 
Suddenly the front door binged, and I turned my head to see a man my own age push his way inside.
 
He was alone, a few inches under six feet, and had a beer gut filling out his green flannel shirt like he had a blue ribbon watermelon hidden under there.
 
His dark eyes were set narrow, and seemed guilty somehow, or wary.
 
He acknowledged me mistakenly, it seemed.
 
But I nodded back anyway, like a stranger to the big city who is forced to share his first subway car with a potential nut case.

“Hi there, Earl,” Edie greeted him.
 
“How's Karen?”

“
Doin
' just fine,” Earl announced broadly.
 
“How's Paul these days?”

“Howdy Earl,” a scratchy nicotine voice croaked from the kitchen.
 
“Can't stay away from my pork chops, can
ya
?”

“No can do,” Earl confessed loudly, then looked at me as if trying to place a face in a detective's
mugshot
book.
 
“And who might you be?”

“He's from Virginia,” Edie informed him.
 
“Richmond, Virginia.”

“That right.”
 
Earl's brassy voice sounded mildly skeptical.
 
His thin set blueberry eyes studied me with a secret animosity I couldn't place, as if the memory of a past cowardice with another stranger still ate at him like an ulcer.
 
“Looking for somebody, are
ya
, pal?”

“Now, Earl,” Edie said, and looked over at me as though to explain a rabid dog.
 
“Earl's a bit suspicious of strangers.
 
Always has been.
 
Isn't that right, Earl?”

Earl ignored her, dropping his level gaze to my binocular and camera cases.
 
“You a birder, or what?” he asked, not careful enough to keep the tin from his intonation.

From where I sat at the window I could feel his natural, underlying bent toward confrontation, his covert inclination toward domination.
 
I guessed him to be competitive, but shallow.
 
He had sixty pounds on me at least, but I knew he'd fold in the end.
 
I'd seen his type before.
 
The sports freak who'd never played the game, only watched it on ESPN.
 
The ugly kid who'd never been picked, and made up for it later by seeing who he might intimidate.
 
Strangers were easy targets, since he'd never see them again.
 
But there was a sense that he'd once picked the wrong man to practice his self-therapy on, too.
 
Maybe that man hadn't seemed much of a threat, either.
 
So I looked away, and didn't answer.

“What's that?” Earl asked, as if I'd spoken.
 
“Eh?”

“Earl,” Edie warned, her usually sweet voice stern.

I smiled at the window, wondering what other voices he heard in his own head.
 
Edie gave Earl an iced tea, then brought me my coffee.
 
Homemade pie a la mode was coming right up, she assured me.
 
Earl gulped his tea, his eyes continuing to assess me, but I never met his gaze.
 
After a moment, he laughed, dismissing me.
 
Then he made small talk with Edie about Zion's Pastor
Felsen
, and someone named June Applegate.

I stared out the window as I sipped at my coffee.
 
It was six o'clock now.
 
No one else was going into the post office this late, although there seemed to be more people on the street.
 
Two of them, I soon noticed with surprise, were Wally and the town Sheriff.
 
These two walked along the far side of Main, and the Sheriff—a pot bellied balding man—held a sheet of paper in front of him, which Wally pointed at while talking.
 
When they looked into the post office first, it occurred to me the sheet of paper was probably my rental agreement with Avis, once locked in the glove box of the Taurus.
 
Using my binoculars, I confirmed it.
 
As they started to cross the road, following several others who now entered the Slow Poke, I got up nervously, my heart suddenly beating faster and erratically.

“Got a restroom?” I asked Edie, interrupting her as she greeted her new customers.
 
She seemed surprised, not by my request, but by the number of people now entering her establishment.
 
She hooked a thumb toward the swinging door behind her.
 
“Thanks,” I said, and pushed my way through as if I couldn't wait any longer with my spastic bladder.

I turned back just in time to glimpse a third new face entering the diner.
 
It was eclipsed by the door swinging back, although not before our eyes met.
 
The man I'd seen was fiftyish, resembling a younger Anthony Hopkins, but with hair the color and unruly consistency of corn silk.
 
I knew his slovenly appearance to be a disguise somehow, too.
 
Partly because his pale blue intelligent eyes had seemed to recognize me.

Walter Mills?

I never looked at Paul, although I knew he was watching me as I came through, heading straight toward the open bathroom door.
 
I had the impression, in peripheral vision, of a tall man busy at his pots, who paused to cock his head at an intruder.
 
The smell of meat and baked bread soon mingled with the faint odor of urine as I stood in the tiny restroom and contemplated the cracked window above me.
 
Should I go back and face the music, maybe reveal my hand to the man I'd come here to find?
 
What did my poker hand hold so far but a pair of deuces?

No, I decided.
 
I'd lock myself in here, let Wally and the Sheriff interrogate me through the door.
 
I wouldn't be exposed in front of Hannibal
Lecter
.

But then I noticed that the door's latch was broken.
 
It explained why the door was open.

My pulse went up tempo, like a snare drum in a Rumba band.
 
Panicking, I jammed a thin sliver of soap from the sink into the door frame, to keep the thing shut so that Paul wouldn't see me climb up onto the toilet and snake my way out through the window.

Darkness took its bloody time killing off the light that slowly faded from a high bank of crimson clouds to the west.
 
I sat in a clearing amid the corn behind Main Street, bathed in an eerie golden sky paint, and considered the stupidity of what I'd just done.
 
What the Sheriff had on me up to then was little more than lying to a service station cracker known for his practical jokes—a man who I intended on paying in cash anyway.
 
Now, thanks to my bizarre bolting from the Slow Poke Café, they could add to this a suspicious disappearance through a restroom window on a
skipout
from a ten dollar restaurant meal.
 
If George Carlin had been right about just what a “redneck hayseed” was capable of, I could also imagine a few paranoid townsfolk like Earl riding shotgun after me in a posse of Jeep Cherokees, hoping to bag the
icepick
killer who was on an elusive murder spree through five states.
 
Winning bagger would, no doubt, get his photo on the front page of the
Creston Gazette
.
 
Or was it the
Clucksbury
Chronicle
?
 
As for my binoculars and camera, my leaving those behind had only added to my mystery, and upped their ante on my poker face.
 
If I didn't turn myself in before long, and make things right, even Edie might come after me with the cleaver Paul used to cut up chickens.

Night, when it finally came to Zion, might have been as dark as my prospects for marriage to a supermodel, were it not for the stars.
 
I'd never seen so many with my unaided eye, anywhere near Washington.
 
Those constellations that I recognized seemed filled in somehow, here.
 
As if the Jolly Green Giant in Earl's posse had used his shotgun on Bear and Ram, and so had punctured all the way through to that mystic brightness which you only got to see at the end of a tunnel when you died.

I stood up within the corn, my head level with the tassels that stretched toward the silhouettes of a farm house and grain elevator on the western horizon.
 
Standing there, I thought about Emily Danville for the first time in years.
 
I wondered what she would make of my present situation.
 
We'd dated steadily through our senior year in college, but I'd gotten cold feet as graduation approached.
 
And so I'd resisted having my next fifty years planned out for me, as my roommate's girlfriend had done for Joel.
 
As it happened, the question I popped wasn't the one Emily had expected, and so she'd left me in tears that night.
 
Left me alone, with beach sand in my shoes.
 
Ironically, I now found myself asking the same question again, only to myself this time.