The Road Narrows As You Go (50 page)

Totally turned off, Wendy said. Blair's ponytail's so yicky, the turn-off is what's such a turn-
on
about it.

Patrick said, The guy looks like Richard Dreyfuss on horse pills.

A longhaired Richard Dreyfuss crossed with Li'l Abner, said Biz Aziz.

Watch steam rise around Dick Dreyfuss as he stirs the cooling beans in the front vat, said Patrick.

He imports beans direct from a plantation in Guatemala, Wendy said. A floatplane flies sacks up here for him once a week. He told me so.

Did he? said Twyla.

Wendy wiped the side of her mouth and adjusted the Rolex on her wrist.

I thought Frank kidnapped you, said Mark Bread, who had been silent for almost three weeks up until that point.

He did, didn't he? said Biz Aziz. That's what I wrote in my diary.

You didn't, said Wendy.

Maybe blackmail or something, said Patrick.

Wendy, get real,
this won't last
, Twyla said. I
hate
to be the one to say so because pot calling the kettle black and no one
I
do sticks around but— but Frank's a corporate
raider
. You're a car
too
nist.

Wendy said, Frank and Sue lived separate lives. He told me the love that was there vanished a long time ago. Then I came along and threw a monkeywrench into his mindset.

A hella swindler's what I know about him. Biz Aziz wasn't one of those friends to mince words. I mean, don't you read the headlines? They call him a pirate in pinstripes.

Pishy-poshy, Biz, you're suckered by the press, she said. I've spent like ten months at his side, eating with him, talking with him, seeing him sad, bereft, and in pain, naked, and also laughing and joyful, seeing him work, seeing him at home, sleeping with him, fucking Frank. Fucking him. What am I going to learn in the papers I don't know better from fucking him?

Okay, Twyla said, then
at least
tell us what he's like in bed. Hairpiece on or off?

One of the espresso machines behind the counter roared into action and drowned out Wendy's reply as she twisted her wristwatch back and forth. The smell of espresso overcame our senses.

But where's that funky hippie? I
love
watching him work the roaster, said Wendy. He roasts the best, she sang. I love dark inky coffee, the spicy earthy smell of coffee, the golden revitalizing taste of coffee. Gold you can
drink. Manic headrush, stomach boiling, gut racing. Dark warm liberation in a cup. Liquid midnight, river of insomnia. No offence, beer and wine, but if creativity has a flavour it must be coffee. The brainwave accelerator. Cheers.

Cheers, said all and polished off our cups. Mark went to the counter for another round.

I love the productive buzz I get on coffee, said Twyla. I can do strange feats of folly and profound firsts. I revamped those first minutes of character animation thanks to coffee. And some pot.

Smooth Patrick agreed. But you gotta make sure to pay attention to the mug you pick up. I've been known to swig back the water I'd been washing my brushes in.

I've done that, said Wendy. I thought a water glass swirling with pigment was the worst-tasting iced tea.

Let's play a game I just thought of, okay? Patrick said. Absences in comic strips. I'll start. The most obvious.
Peanuts.
Nobody taller than Charlie Brown appears inside those panels. The teachers and parents and barbers are always outside the panel. Even on TV, only the voices of adults are heard.

Wendy said,
Wa wa wa-wa
. We never see the red-headed girl Charlie Brown has a crush either, or the cat next door that Snoopy hates. Do those count?

Patrick raised his espresso cup to her. There you go.

The Great Pumpkin in
Peanuts
, said Wendy, and the Red Baron.

Twyla said the eyedots in
Little Orphan Annie
. She loved that a reader's imagination had to fill in the dots in the eyes, the souls of the character. And Annie is such a soulful character, she said.

Biz Aziz suggested the absence of an enemy in
Beetle Bailey
.

Mort Walker, said Rachael. Remember his strip
Sam and Silo
? What's missing from
Sam and Silo
is the fourth wall.

Wendy wagered, Well, how about George Herriman's
The Dingbat
Family
, better known as
The Family Upstairs
because the family upstairs is never seen?

Offissa Pupp's unrequited love for Krazy Kat, maybe? Patrick suggested.

Oh no, wait, wait, Wendy raised her hand, me me me, I know, I know: Krazy Kat's gender.

Mark said Nemo's father was absent from
Little Nemo in Slumberland
.

And the absent father figure of Phil Fumble in
Nancy
, said Twyla.

Reagan is conspicuously absent from
Doonesbury—
Trudeau uses that popped bubble to signify him, or the White House.

We knew Wendy was laughing at herself.

What's missing from
your
strip, Wendy? Biz Aziz asked playfully.

Home, obviously. Buck can't remember where his home is. Murphy wants the home he never had.

And the junkyard dog Buck is so afraid of is never seen, said Patrick.

Ah ha! So you
do
read
Strays
, said Wendy.

I read
all
my competition, said Patrick.

Rachael said, Why don't all sandwiches contain potato chips? Then she swallowed some coffee the wrong way, hid her mouth behind her hand, and said, There he
is
.

Oh my god, look at him, said Twyla.

The bean roaster came around a corner. He carried a sack of fresh coffee beans over each shoulder. He was wearing a sleeveless undershirt and his arms were flexed. He was oblivious to his audience as his work absorbed him. He made it look effortless to hump so many beansacks. Everyone at the table stopped talking for a moment and started drawing him as he got a knife and cut open the first sack. Then he poured the beans into the roaster and shut the lid on the roaster and using his whole body turned the lock, which was like an old submarine's lock, until the roaster was securely shut.

Inside his cage, he stood at attention, inspecting the roaster piece by
piece. We watched, and drew sketches, as he lifted the lid and stirred the beans. A great plume of steam rose that he narrowly dodged.

Blair the coffee roaster. He turned the wheel, dialed the temperature, poured the beans into the galvanized steel funnel. Stirred the roasted beans, steaming in the cooling drum. Skin the colour of coffee. The smell of coffee. Brown as the bums who lived on the beach. Leatherskin beans. Offset by Blair's white undershirt. Dark spots on his dark shoulders, ancient acne. On his cheek there's a star-shaped imprint like an indent from a Phillips screwdriver.

Where's the
ponytail
? said Rachael. She was an amazing drawer when she wanted to be. Her drawing of the bean roaster that afternoon bore a satirical resemblance to the work of Hogarth, full of feeling.

In a bun, swooned Wendy. He's tied it in a bun.

Something about how Wendy's eyes burned twigged us.

Stop the clock. Tell
all
, said Twyla Noon. Did you fucking
sleep
with Mr. Blair the bean roaster or
not
?

Wendy laughed, tossed a balled-up napkin at her friend, and said, Shimminy boo-bop, you are a jerkface, Twyla. I did I did I fucked him okay I did. God. Okay okay. When was that, geez, a year or more, sixteen months ago. No, two years ago. Anyway. Same time this place opened, okay, I fucked him, once, in the freight elevator.

Twyla did a doubletake. Why didn't you ever tell us? He's
thrice
our age.

Plus
, to make matters worse we got caught.

Of
course
you did, said Patrick.

Busted by the guy at the
cash
register when he went on a smoke break, found me with my legs up around the bean roaster.

That was when Blair stood to his full height and looked us all in the eyes.

Busted again, whispered Biz. He knows we're sketching him.

He bent back to stretch and untied the bun and let the white
ponytail swing low enough to touch his sacrum, and then, after cracking his neck in two directions, proceeded to reach his arm between the iron bars of his cage and turn the handle on a door that was not locked and let himself out.

Now he was standing over our table, tall as a tree and musky with the attractive oily, earthy, living smell of coffee beans, half in shadow, the ceiling light bouncing over his gleaming shoulder so that we squinted and shrank from him without meaning to. A broad-shouldered, tall, narrow Richard Dreyfuss. The ponytail, the starch-white sleeveless undershirt. His jeans, new. Blue eyes shone through bean grease on his eyeglasses.

Blair Slobodchikoff, he said and in turn learned all our names. His attention to Wendy. Hello, Wendy, he said.

Hello, Blair.

Thought I'd introduce myself to your friends. Nice drawings. That supposed to be me, huh?

Twyla tried to show she'd drawn him as a mutant enemy of the X-Men—
The Insomnomaniac
.

We're your biggest fans, said Wendy and lifted her cup to him. Your sandwiches are a masterstroke, but we come for the shots. We love your coffee. Espresso is coffee with a genius IQ.

Thanks. You know, a goat-herding Coptic monk discovered coffee seventeen hundred years ago, said Blair Slobodchikoff, who looked like he could herd goats if need be. The so-called bitter invention of Satan. It
is
delicious. And good for your pulse.

… !, choked Wendy on her own tongue before being able to say, … And then some! You sure know your stuff, Blair.

The table broke out into laughter. We love coffee, said Twyla.

It's not just my fax machine that brings you back?

You on a break, Blair? Wendy asked. Want to join us for lunch?

Blair clapped his hands together in a washing motion. He pulled at his shirt to air out his chest. I'll be right back with a sandwich.

Don't lead him on, you're not single, said Twyla when he was out of earshot.

Oh, shush, said Wendy. It's merely lunch. I'm a monogtapus now.

After Blair ate a sandwich he invited us on a field trip to the shipyard docks down at the far east side of Chavez where he collected his coffee beans. I'm striving for the perfect roast, he said of his coffee. Then he turned to Rachael and said, I saw you open for Dead Kennedys at the Mab.

He fished in his glove compartment for the dubbed cassette he'd made of her singles that he listened to in his van.

I'll give you a copy of my new one about to come out, she said. Sounds the same as the others.

You want to go see her perform sometime? Blair asked Twyla.

She didn't catch what he said. She said, Me? Yeah, I've seen Aluminum Uvula play dozens of times, always a brainmelting experience.

Yeah, okay, said Blair.

The docks at the end of Chavez were restricted to the public, so Blair Slobodchikoff knew he was giving us a rare treat, a glimpse at the bay's inner harbour. A two-minute drive away from his coffee shop. He let us watch as Central American longshoremen silently unloaded his weekly shipment of five thousand pounds of coffee beans from Guatemala in sacks labelled Antigua and Huehue and delivered by a Panamanian floatplane. He said, They say that two thousand hours of work goes into every cup, from the time you germinate the seed to the time you brew it. Blair Slobodchikoff was not just the bean roaster, and expert in beans, he owned the coffee shop. Why no name? we asked. Who needs a name? said Blair. The docks around us pulsed with similar activity, anonymous bustling trade. Crates and barrels full of who knows what unloaded onto trucks and vans. Paperwork to be signed. The shadowy underworld of the docks was all we could think about, even if everything happened to be on the level.

Hell shit, everyone down here brags they know the pilot delivering the CIA coke, a secret plane that docks here every couple days with no paperwork, pilot with no ID. I could give two shits about what else happens down here on the docks, Blair said as he drove his twenty-five sacks of beans the short trip back to his coffee shop. Deliciousness is my primary concern.

Your coffee
is
delicious, said Twyla.

Coffee is as much an art as a science, he said. Maybe I could have your number. Maybe you like going to the movies? he said.

Twyla didn't know what to say. Movies? My number? She looked at Wendy.

Don't look at me, Wendy laughed.

I love movies, Twyla said.

I haven't seen a movie in the theatre in years, Blair said.

Twyla looked at Wendy again in that moment, her mind so focused on the chance that Blair Slobodchikoff might come to the rescue and save Wendy from Frank that she did not notice Blair was paying more attention to
her
.

My whole day just did a backflip, Blair Slobodchikoff, said Twyla when she got out of his van in front of No Manors.

33

Four A.M. Breakfast for Frank. Bedtime snack for Wendy. November of eighty-five. A year after Jonjay and Sue vanished. No sign of them, not a clue. Frank at the kitchen island, in the former home of the Evangelists next door, modernized top to bottom. Reading the
Youngstown Vindicator
, which subscribed to
Strays
, while Wendy toasted and buttered sides of a bagel. They each ate a half and listened to the rain against the skylights tapping along with the music on the radio. Frank was not in any hurry because the markets were closed for Thanksgiving. Such heavy weather meant it was dark as ink when his driver pulled up outside in the European to take him downtown. She refused to let Frank behind the wheel. Hexen's offices weren't in San Jose anymore—the twenty-minute commute took him north to the new offices leased in three storeys of the Transamerica Pyramid. Today he needed to spend a few hours strategizing with his brother and others—Frank's latest project was Washington, D.C., and influencing the policy wonks. To his mind, Reagan had not taken enough steps to free up credit in the financial sector. If banks are private businesses, then a regional savings and loans had to be able to borrow over thirty
times the amount of its deposits in order to do business in the new global village. It was time for Frank to wage a publicity war. The Baskin-Robbins argument was plan A—everyone wants more flavours.
Government isn't the solution to the problem, government
is
the problem
—weren't those Reagan's words? So Frank hired a team of lobbyists to push government through covert channels to form an independent financial quango to handle the deregulation of the bond market. Frank Fleecen would be placed in charge of this quango, and in this capacity, advise the president on the market's ins and outs. Once Frank was out the door, Wendy made a bowl of cereal and went back to bed and there read newspapers and planned to sketch.