Docker's Skillet

Inside the diner I saw him immediately and sat in the booth beside his, my back to his back. Arliss’s Diner was perfect: featureless and devoid of charm yet filled at this hour with the breakfast crowd who could work a full shift at the docks once they’d swallowed the marvel of Arliss’s five-dollar docker’s skillet washed down by her lusty unlimited coffee. Here we could talk quietly amid the din of morning and watch the sleet play havoc with the waking streets through scuffed plexiglas.

“This better be good,” said Dreisel. 

“It is. At least for your tastebuds. They toss every fried thing in there you ever thought of.”

“You know what the fuck I mean. Ain’t here to eat.”

Suddenly I wasn’t hungry either. I found eye contact with a waitress and mimed a coffee with my pinkie raised, which made her smile. I was glad someone could still do that. Smile, I mean.

Caffeinated, I looked away from him anew and settled on sincerity.

“So we tailed Langstrom, and that was fine. Every day we saw him leave and return to his apartment.”

“Then why’re we talking about it here, fucko?”

Fucko? This man wasn’t stable.

“We’re discussing it here, jefe, because of one thing: when we checked out his apartment, it was never there.”

I felt him shift behind me and heard him slurp his coffee like a great beast at some tenuous waterhole between dry seasons, scowling at a blurred horizon. 

“Go on,” he said.

“There was a door, but beyond it, nothing. We don’t know where he went when he came home. There was no home, just a door.”

He cleared his throat, finished the dark dregs of his cup, and somehow sent out vibes that would curdle your blood.

“You leave now. Next time we meet, you will tell me things that make sense. If you tell me things that don’t make sense, like now, everything will go badly for you. Now get the fucking fuck out of here.”

Something in me balked. No idea why or why then. Maybe the absence of grace in everything he did and everything he said. I’d worked for him a long time, and a long time is sometimes enough to nurture a coal of loathing. From across the greasy air, my waitress raised a brow, and I beckoned her with a nod. She came right away, and I saw her eyes skim the booths and see the boss. I could tell she felt it too.

Like the world had drawn a bow across some terrible vibrancy. 

Dreisel wanted to move, ached to reassert himself, but the place was awash with life and sound and smells, and the peach-skin eastern light had snuck inside unnoticed.

“More coffee?” she asked, her ruby throat frail with hummingbird doubt.

“Yes. And bring me that docker’s skillet after all. I got me a sudden appetite.”

Safety Deposit

I placed something valuable somewhere hidden.

They didn’t know what happened to you. Everyone speculated about where you’d gone, wide-eyed and wildly wrong. As if acknowledging the most likely truth would allow something irrevocably dark into their own lives, god forbid. I was the least likely to say it, yet I did say it. You were gone. Chances are for good. You burned bright yet short, which is better than some longlived nobody never even sputtering into life at all. You were somebody. Somebody. Your dreams were also concrete—your adherence to the well-trod trails while attending countless wild auditions; your marriage of pragmatism and fancy. Possessing neither, truth be told, I envied both. Hell, probably I envied you. Publicly (and far worse, privately) I cried as much over this as over your absence.

None of which anyone knew.

Observe that bank of trees, that near-vertical forest, bearing its weight of snow with nary a complaint. It is the triumph of the mindless collective. But also, one has to admit, deeply, deeply beautiful. Heavy limbs so darkly green they may as well be black, straining and actually prevailing against the weighty onslaught of white, as if the history of the races of our world were being mockingly re-enacted with alternate outcomes through this silent, neutral Canadian landscape.

In this aquarium of traffic—blue-green bleeding to blue-violet—everyone feels the need to flick on headlights. Especially here, right here in this place, the exact location in which you stepped from your Subaru Forester, apparently for a bathroom break, beneath the gathering imposition of pine and fir and spruce and cedar as the daylight failed to the sound of a seething creek, only to disappear forever, my love, my enemy, my perplexing friend. Your ticking station wagon abandoned on the shoulder, shut down, cooling fast, the last CD in the changer an ABBA mix.

I can almost hear the shush-shush of tires as they pass, taut-faced drivers all wary of twilight ungulates, kids asleep or grumpy-sly in back, nobody paying any meaningful attention as the vengeful shadow pulls up behind, bides his quiet time until your hip-hugging pants are lowered mid-thigh…

…and you squat quickly and neatly, desiring a quick release in the cold, never even suspecting that a quick release could mean something else entirely, while the avenger falls upon you—crushing, final—and your still-warm body is dispatched (the wrench) and collected (the flinch) and deposited far, far way, somewhere, I don’t ever want to say where (the stench), and perhaps we’ll recite Donne or Auden and play “Dancing Queen” at your memorial amid a galaxy of white lilies while I alone recall those laden branches—the burden of life beneath wet relentless weather, a quick shudder while the ghost vacates—and smile a little self-mockingly at one small victory however fucking tawdry and goddamn it all to hell I so ache with missing you girl.

*     *     *     *     *

A version of this post appeared on BlergPop on June 28, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.