He arrived right on time, his aged Nissan belching blue fumes that tainted the air like nicotine on a lung. He stepped out of the car wearing paint-splattered jeans, a denim shirt and a blue sweater that was little more than an assortment of holes held together by yarn. A pair of brown cowhide work gloves hung from one of the ass pockets of his jeans and a black watch cap was pulled down over his ears. From beneath it, strands of dark hair hung like the legs of a hermit crab. A cigarette dangled from his lips, a gravity-defying pillar of ash forming at the tip.
I gave him a mug of coffee and he drank it while examining the roof critically, as if seeing it for the first time. He had been up there about three times already, checking the rafters and the roof supports and measuring the angles, so I didn't think it was likely to hold any surprises for him. He thanked me for the coffee and handed back the mug. "Thanks" was the first word he had said to me since he arrived; Roger was a great worker but the amount of air he wasted on unnecessary small talk wouldn't have saved a gnat's life.
We had already laid down strips of lath in preparation for the shingles, using pieces of two-by-four cut lengthways in half and oiled with wood preservative. Now, with the air crisp and cold and no promise of rain in the sky, we began our work. There was something in the placing of shingles, its rhythms and routines, that made it an almost meditative exercise. Traveling methodically across the face of the roof, I reached for a shingle, placed it on the one below, adjusted its exposure using a notch on the handle of my hammer, nailed down the shingle, reached for another and began the process again. I found a kind of peace in it and the morning passed quickly. I decided not to share my meditative speculations with Roger. Somehow, those who do jobs like roofing for a living tend to resent the musings of amateurs on the nature of the task. Roger would probably have thrown his hammer at me.
We worked for four hours, each of us resting when the mood took him, until I climbed carefully down and told Roger that I was heading up to the Seng Thai on Congress to get us some food. He grunted something that I took as an okay and I started up the Mustang and drove toward South Portland. As usual, there were plenty of cars on Maine Mall Road, people nosing about in Filene's or heading for the movies, eating in the Old Country Buffet or sizing up the motels on the strip. I drove past the airport, along Johnson and, finally, onto Congress. I parked in the lot behind the Inn at St. John between a Pinto and a Fiat, then headed down a block, bought the food and dumped it on the backseat of the car.
There was still a crate of my stuff behind the reception desk at the inn and I figured I might as well pick it up while I was in the area. I opened the door and entered the ornate, old-style lobby, with its ancient radio and its neat piles of tourist brochures. Mark, who was manning the desk, hauled the crate out, gave me a smile and then went back to counting receipts. I left him to it.
When I stepped back into the lot, I saw that someone had boxed me in. A huge black Cadillac Coupe De Ville, forty years old and virtually an antique, was parked behind the Mustang, leaving me with no way to get out. The car had whitewall tires and restored tan upholstery, and the distinctive pontoon bumpers at the front were shiny and intact. A map of Maine lay on the backseat and it had Massachusetts plates but, apart from that, there was nothing about the car to identify its owner. It could have come straight from a museum exhibit.
I placed the crate in the trunk of the Mustang and headed back into the inn, but Mark said he'd never seen the Cadillac before. He offered to have it towed but I decided to try to track down the owner first. I asked in Pizza Villa across the street but they didn't know anything about it either. I tried the Seng Thai and the local bars until, still unsuccessful, I recrossed the street and slapped the roof of the Cadillac in frustration.
"Nice car," said a voice, as the echo of the slap faded. The voice was high, almost girlish, the words drawn out with what sounded more like malice than admiration, the sibilance in the first word almost menacing.
At the entrance to the inn's back lot, a man was leaning against the wall. He was short and squat, probably no more than five-five and maybe 230 pounds. He wore a tan raincoat, belted at the front, with brown pants and a pair of brown brogues.
He had a face from a horror movie.
His head was completely bald, with a rounded crown that ran into wrinkles of fat at the back. The head seemed to grow wider instead of narrower from the temples to the mouth, before it lost itself in his shoulders. He had no neck, or at least nothing that was worthy of the name. His face was deathly pale, apart from his long, thick, red lips, which were stretched into a rictus of a grin. He had wide dark nostrils, set in a flattened snout of a nose, and his eyes were so gray as to be almost colorless, the pupils like black pinpoints at their center, tiny dark worlds in a cold, hostile universe.
He pulled himself from the wall and advanced slowly and steadily, and as he did so I caught the smell. It was indistinct and masked by some cheap cologne, but it caused me to hold my breath and take a step back from him nonetheless. It was the smell of earth and blood, the stench of rotting meat and stale animal fear that hangs in a slaughterhouse at the end of a long day's butchering.
"Nice car," he repeated, and a fat white hand emerged from one of his pockets, the fingers like thick, pale slugs that had spent too long in dark places. He caressed the roof of the Mustang appreciatively, and it seemed as if the paint would corrode spontaneously beneath his fingers. It was the touch a child molester would give a kid in a playground when his mother's back was turned. For some reason, I felt the urge to push him away, but I was stopped by a stronger instinct that told me not to touch him. I couldn't have explained why, but something foul appeared to emanate from him that discouraged any contact. To touch him, it seemed, would be to blight oneself, to risk contamination or contagion.
But it was more than that. He exuded a sense of extreme lethality, a capacity for inflicting hurt and pain that was so profound as to be almost sexual. It seeped from his pores and flowed viscously over his skin, seeming almost to drip visibly from the tips of his fingers and the end of his ugly, brutish nose. Despite the cold, tiny beads of perspiration glittered on his forehead and upper lip, spangling his soft features with moisture. Touch him, I sensed, and your fingers would sink into his flesh, the skin yielding clammily to the pressure as it sucked you in.
And then he would kill you, because that was what he did. I was certain of it.
"Your car?" he asked. Those gray eyes glittered coldly and the tip of a pink tongue appeared between his lips, like a snake testing the air.
"Yes, it's my car," I replied. "That your Cadillac?"
He didn't seem to notice the question, or decided not to notice it. Instead, he passed another long caressing movement along the roof of the Mustang.
"Good car, the Mustang," he said, nodding to himself, and again there was that intense sibilance on the S sound, like water dropped on a hot stove. "Me and the Mustang, we got a lot in common."
He moved closer to me, as if to share some deep, darkly funny secret. I could smell his breath on me, sweet and overripe as late-summer fruit.
"We both went to hell after nineteen seventy."
And then he laughed, a low hissing sound like gas escaping from a corpse. "Better take care of that car, make sure nothing happens to it," he said. "A man's got to look out for what's his. He should take care of his own business, and keep his nose out of other people's." He walked around the back of the car before entering the Cadillac, so I had to turn to watch him.