Austin and Emily Read online

  Austin hung up the phone as he opened the bathroom door. Kenneth squeezed through the doorframe at the same time as Austin. The two men became momentarily stuck face-to-face like lovers on a moonlit beach. Austin sucked in his belly, releasing the thin man from the intimate wedge.

  Kenneth turned on Austin. “Are you tryin’ to kill me? Because if you’re tryin’ to kill me, just say so.”

  They packed their bags in silence. The absence of Emily and the cats had created a void of sorts, a new dynamic, and after the personal revelations of the night before, and the moment together in the door frame, the men were each slightly lost.

  From the passenger seat of the red car, Kenneth turned the knob on the radio. Nothing. He turned again, listening for the click. Again, nothing.

  Kenneth inhaled a long exasperated breath. “I don’t think I will survive the day without music.”

  Austin looked over. “I believe you are perhaps the most contradictory person I have ever met. You have no worldly possessions, poor hygiene, and act like you need none of the simple luxuries, and yet, you cannot survive the day without the inane background noise of a local radio station.”

  Kenneth shot back, “Well you know what, brother Austin, inconsistency is the only common thread amongst cultures, sexes, ages, religions, and head sizes. We strive toward congruity in our beliefs and ideas, but eventually, ultimately, through necessity or laziness, we constantly contradict ourselves. Now let’s go have some breakfast before I gag on my own profound understanding of the human condition.”

  It was as though Emily, and to a lesser extent, Glenn, had served as valuable buffers between the two demanding personalities, and now, left alone, the men rubbed each other like sandpaper.

  They sat across from one another in the booth at the Waffle Hut. As usual, Kenneth’s back was against the far wall, giving him a clear view of the door. The waitress approached and stood above, white pad and blue pen in her hand. She looked down at the hungry men, stuck out her bottom lip, and then said, “Well good morning, Senator. Captain John.”

  “Oh my God,” Austin said.

  Kenneth’s eyes grew wide. “Oh my God is right. You work at Waffle Hut?”

  Tina made the meanest face she could make. In the light of day Austin could see the thick layer of brownish base make-up and the gray roots in the blonde hair. The memory of her lumpy bare ass appeared like a snapshot and then faded away.

  Kenneth released a laugh and sat up straight like a kid in trouble at school.

  “He’s not really a senator, Tina.”

  “I ain’t stupid,” she snorted. “I figured that out.”

  “He’s a Supreme Court Justice,” Kenneth said. He smiled a little smile at the toadlike woman and lowered his voice to say, “You know, you’re a lot better lookin’ in the daytime.”

  She said, “And you owe me money, whatever your name is.”

  “Pay the woman, Austin,” Kenneth said earnestly.

  “I’ll do no such thing.”

  “I’m callin’ the damn cops,” she said and turned her body to the phone.

  Austin was immediately struck by the familiar wave of fear, his body instantly sucked dry of energy, his head floating in a bath of warm fluid. He heard his voice say, “No.”

  So Tina Louise Dalrimple stopped. She went back to the table and held out her red-palmed hand. Austin put money in the leathery palm. His predicament sickened him, but the alternative was hardly an alternative at all. The prospect of being questioned by the local authorities in Waffle Hut concerning the events of the night before, in the company of the toad-waitress and Kenneth Mint, sent shivers up his sternum.

  Austin rubbed the moisture from his forehead. “Please bring me a large number of waffles with extra syrup, a whole tomato, and chocolate milk.”

  Tina looked at Kenneth Mint. He said, “I’ll have one raw egg and a glass of warm apple juice.”

  She walked away with a smirk.

  Kenneth said to Austin, “She’s gonna spit in your chocolate milk.”

  Austin said to no one in particular, “Please God, get me through this day, and I will do as you ask.”

  The men sat waiting for their food.

  Kenneth said, “Have I ever told you about my friend, Ray?”

  Austin’s face remained expressionless.

  “Well, anyway, my friend Ray decided he was gonna kill himself. He just didn’t want to live anymore. And for some crazy reason, he decided he wanted to do it on the railroad tracks.

  “So he found out what time the next train was comin’ through town, and he went down to the railroad tracks behind the hardware store to wait. He figured if he laid his head on the tracks, it would be painless, and for some reason, he thought it would be better if it looked like an accident.”

  Austin listened with a blank face. A young woman passed the table on the way to the bathroom. He recognized the lime-green bandana he had seen on the familiar girl at the bus station the night before.

  “So Ray saw the train comin’ a mile away. He got down on his knees, bent over, and laid his neck on the hot steel track. He thought about all the reasons he wanted to die, and the way they’d find his body mutilated in the rocks, and waited.

  “The train got closer and closer, and he could feel the power of the engine in the metal beneath his head. But the train was slowing down, and Ray prayed it wouldn’t stop. The big wheels kept turning, and Ray kept praying, until the giant train was only a hundred yards away, and then fifty, and then twenty-five.

  “Ray pushed his neck down on the track and awaited his fate. He watched the train decelerate, ever so slowly, ten feet away, five feet, and he anticipated the end. But the first steel wheel of the engine inched up to Ray and came to a complete stop just as it pinched the flesh of Ray’s neck between the big steel wheel and the smooth iron traintrack.”

  Austin hated himself for caring how the story would end.

  “And so there he was, down on his knees. A sharp pain shooting from the skin pinched between the wheel and the track. He tried to pull away, stretching the skin, but it wouldn’t let loose. He started screaming, ‘Back it up. Back up the train. For the love of God.’“

  Austin wished his waffles would arrive.

  “But you just can’t back up a train like that. It takes time,” Kenneth added.

  The bathroom door opened. The young woman with the lime-green bandana headed toward Austin McAdoo. He knew her. He knew he knew her. And she looked at him. And she recognized the oversized head and jet-black wavy hair.

  The woman stopped at the table.

  Austin said, “Cremora?”

  Cremora asked, “Fat guy from my apartment?”

  And Kenneth Mint felt a tingle. A flutter in his chest.

  CHAPTER 10

  “What are you doing here?” Austin asked Cremora.

  “Let me guess,” Cremora said, “Emily’s gone.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “What did you expect from a girl who quit her job, packed her bags, and ran off in the middle of the night with somebody like you? Did you consider that to be the act of a stable, rational human being?”

  Austin hadn’t thought about Emily in such a way. For Austin, spontaneous and irrational had conveniently drifted apart from one another since the moment Emily had sat down in his car. It just made sense.

  “What are you doing here?” Austin repeated, his reactions dulled by the funk of a smelly hangover.

  “You’re mother told me where you were going. Besides, there’s a hurricane in the Gulf. A big son-of-a-bitch, named Austin as a matter of fact. Let’s not pretend it’s a coincidence. People started evacuating. I evacuated to Las Vegas. You might as well go someplace more interesting than Valdosta, Georgia. Besides, the Weather Channel is everywhere now. You can watch your home get destroyed from the safety and security of a hotel room two thousand miles away. It’s not officially reality TV unless it’s your stuff actually being swept into the raging waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
”

  Kenneth Mint couldn’t stop staring at her mouth as she spoke. It was small and quick. The lips moved with purpose and precision.

  “What are you staring at?”

  “Your mouth. It’s fantastic.”

  Cremora, still standing, bent her attention to Kenneth. She said, “My mother explained to me a long time ago, if a male and a female bear run into each other in the woods, the survival of the species demands they copulate. If both were equally driven to hump, they would inevitably fight about who’s on top, et cetera. The bickering would spoil the mood and the bears would simply drift apart, going their own ways without doing their share to insure the existence of bears.

  “So one bear, the male, was selected to be blinded and stupified by the desire to screw. He’s bigger and stronger, so he can have his way with minimal bickering or resistance. The female bear was chosen to have a vivid imagination so she can think about other things while she’s being violated. She’s also programmed to remain rational during the act, carry the baby in her womb, use her superior intellect to select a safe home, and provide for her cub. In the meantime, Horny Harry is wandering around the woods porkin’ whatever moves.”

  Kenny was mesmerized. Cremora concluded, “You, my friend, will never see or touch my privates, no matter how rich, or dashing, or humorous, you turn out to be. So tuck your bear penis back in your pouch.”

  Austin said, “Will you help us find Emily? We’re getting married.”

  She looked at Kenneth. “Scoot over.” And he did, making room in the booth on his side.

  Tina arrived with food. She set down the plates and looked at Cremora. “Don’t let ‘em screw ya, honey. This one ain’t no senator, and this one ain’t no captain. I didn’t figure it out until I was buck naked ridin’ Moby Dick here.”

  In the most condescending tone imaginable, Cremora Watson said to Austin, “Did you say something about getting married?”

  Austin looked down at his waffle, hoping for Tina to go away. She waited, arms crossed, believing she had found an ally in the odd-looking woman with the lime-green bandana.

  Austin looked up at the waitress, and they locked eyes for a long, exasperating period of discomfort. He could taste whiskey on the fat part of his tongue.

  Austin could wait no longer. “Go, please. Go anywhere.”

  She stood her ground, tapping the toe of her little white tennis shoe against the beige tile floor.

  “You don’t fool me,” she finally said.

  Austin felt himself ready to explode, but he was aware of the pitfalls of the situation, the potential to alienate Cremora, whom he needed, by attacking a woman he’d seen naked in a hotel room the day after he proposed marriage to Emily, a woman who simply refused to go away.

  “Please,” Austin begged.

  Tina stuck out her bottom lip like her point had been made. She turned and walked away, a little extra swing in her hips.

  Austin set about explaining himself. “It’s complicated.”

  Kenneth looked at Cremora’s hands folded together on the top of the table. They were soft and small, the nails chewed to the quick.

  “It was a bachelor party,” Austin said. “Things went wrong. Kenneth went too far.”

  Cremora turned to look at the man beside her. Kenneth Mint shrugged his shoulders and made a face of misunderstanding.

  “Your hands are quite nice,” he said.

  Cremora rolled her eyes and waited for the remainder of Austin’s excuse.

  “It’s complicated. I guess all I can say is, ‘I’m sorry.’ I want to marry Emily. We got engaged at the Grand Canyon. She’s the only thing I’ve ever really wanted. Everything before her seems remote and stupid.”

  There was silence between the three.

  “Tell me the bear story again,” Kenneth said.

  Cremora was focused on Austin. Austin looked down at the cold waffles.

  “I love her,” he said to himself, and then couldn’t believe the words had come from his mouth.

  The man across from Cremora was simply huge. Her eyes scanned him for signals of insincerity. There were none.

  “I believe you,” Cremora said.

  “You do?”

  “Yeah, I do. I don’t have to understand it to believe it’s true.”

  Kenneth had forgotten about his delicious breakfast of warm apple juice and a raw egg in a white bowl.

  “What do you really know about Emily?” she asked Austin.

  She answered her own question. “Nothing, I bet.”

  Cremora said, “When she was six years old, one morning, her mother and father just got in the car and drove away. They weren’t killed in some horrible accident, or murdered by devil worshippers. They just told Emily to play with her doll for a minute while they went to the store for cigarettes. And they never came back. Ever.”

  Even Kenneth followed the story.

  Cremora continued, “Some people are devoid of the stuff that makes us worthwhile. She never saw her parents again. They never came back. They never called. They never even sent a card.

  “And so Emily came to live with us when she was about seven. Our mothers are sisters. She grew up in my home, but there was always something missing. When she got older, starting in high school, she’d wander off in different directions, like she was looking for something but didn’t have a single clue what it was, or where it could be.

  “She’d always come back home. This is the longest she’s been gone.”

  Austin listened. When the story ended, he spoke from his heart for the first time since he was a small child, unafraid for reasons he couldn’t possibly explain. “I wish I could say I’m what she’s been looking for. Maybe she’s just been looking for somebody who’s been looking for her. And I can say without a doubt, that’s me.

  “Will you help us find her?” Austin asked as a sudden pang of nausea invaded his belly.

  Cremora stared into the big man’s face. She seemed to be reading something written just below the first layer of his skin. Finally she said, “You don’t seem like the same jackass who stood in my kitchen last week.”

  Kenneth said, “He’s a different jackass.”

  Both Austin and Cremora turned to Kenneth Mint. The Waffle Hut was alive with strange intentions and wounded creatures.

  Finally Cremora said, “We all get left sooner or later, Austin. It’s what we do afterwards that counts. Let’s go find Emily.”

  Kenneth held the white bowl to his lips and drank the single raw egg. As they stood to leave, Austin found himself incapable of abandoning one particular round waffle. He held it in his hand at his side like it was perfectly normal to carry a waffle in such a way.

  Tina stood across the cash register from Austin. For a moment, it was as though no one else was around. Only a few short hours earlier they had been slightly intimate in a Las Vegas hotel room. Now they were like strangers, which, in fact, is exactly what they were.

  Tina took the twenty dollar bill from Austin. She didn’t notice the waffle in his other hand. She gave Austin his change, and as he counted the last two dimes, Tina said, “I had a good time last night.”

  Austin looked up at the woman in her Waffle Hut uniform. Immersed in his private hangover, he truly could summon no response, and as he walked away, no response came to him. He merely thought, “What could she mean by such a statement?”

  Kenneth took his customary position in the backseat of the little red car. Cremora sat in the passenger seat and watched curiously as Austin contorted through the ritual of entering the cockpit.

  “Can you run by the bus station so I can get my stuff out of the locker?” she asked.

  From the backseat, Kenneth declared, “I spent a year in Oregon looking for Bigfoot.”

  When there was no response, Kenneth said, “We slept in tents during the day and at night we got out all the equipment - night vision goggles, motion sensors. There’s a whole group of people who stay up there in a camp in the woods, go home to their families, and
back to the camp. Two weeks on, two weeks off, like working on an oil rig.”

  Austin noticed the difference in the tone of Kenneth’s voice. It was a bit more high-pitched, boasting.

  Cremora turned to look at Kenneth.

  He said, sitting up straighter than usual, “One time I thought I saw him. At night, that’s when they forage. I was stationed in a tree. I heard a sound, like a twig snapping. I waited. It got closer.

  “I think I saw him. He was about Austin’s size. Everybody thinks Bigfoot’s hairy, but he’s not. He’s white-skinned, pale, smooth, and hairless. That’s why he hides in the daytime. Too easy to see. He only goes out at night.”

  Cremora took a slow, deep breath.

  Kenneth concluded, “Anyway, I wasn’t scared of him.”

  Cremora let the last sentence hang for a while. She turned around and tried to click on the radio.

  “It doesn’t work,” Austin said.

  Cremora turned the knob to increase the airflow from the air conditioner. The fan blew a loud gust of frigid air, sputtered, and then abruptly stopped.

  “Oh, shit,” Kenneth muttered.

  Cremora said, “Air-conditioning makes you weak anyway. It destroys your natural immune system. The sudden change in temperature just isn’t something our bodies usually experience in nature. Roll down the windows.”

  Austin pushed the buttons on the door to roll down the electric windows down. Nothing moved. He tried again. Nothing moved.

  “Oh, shit,” Kenneth said again.

  Austin slammed the armrest on the door with his clenched fist. His state of mind was weak, and the blood pounded rhythmically in his sealed head like a pump. As the heat reached a stifling level inside the car, Austin parked outside the bus station.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” Cremora said, and left the two men in the sauna.

  “What do you think of her?” Kenneth asked.

  “Who?”

  “The girl, Cremora. Who the hell do you think?”

  “I believe she better hurry, or I may die of heat stroke.”

  There was a pause. Kenneth asked, “Was that Bigfoot story stupid? It sounded kinda stupid, didn’t it? Tell the truth.”