One report has come back: a coyote chasing a little white dog, but the sighting cannot be confirmed and it may have been an illusion brought on by the fog.
Encouragement
I think about all the encouragement I’ve received over the years. Are people just being friendly? Or do they hate me?
Mississippi River
I’ll never forget the first time Bill saw the Mississippi River.
He said, “Who cares?”
The Black Parasol
AMY O’BRIEN, ALL ALONE, TOOK A WALK AT NIGHT THROUGH THE dilapidated town square of Ordain, Mississippi, to the creepy old doll hospital where the horrible murders had taken place. She pressed her palm to the cool lemon stucco just as lightning struck.
O’Brien ducked around the corner and under an awning. Big, slow drops of rain began to pelt the canvas.
Past the end of the alley was a bar she had never noticed, made of red cinder blocks. It had a glossy black wooden door. Warm yellow light streamed from the dirty windows.
The rain and wind picked up. She ran for it.
The insides were dimmer and gloomier than the welcoming light had suggested. At the end of the long bar, one old man shook dice in a long leather cup while another old man watched. A jowly, furtive middle-aged couple sat at a table in a far corner, staring at their empty glasses.
The rain came harder still. The bar’s corrugated tin roof rang and roared with it, a sound both pleasant and frightening.
O’Brien stood just inside the door. There was no bartender. Powerful rumbling rattled the bottles. She stepped up bravely and took her place on a stool. O’Brien steadied herself, putting her hands on the clammy bar. The surface was light green streaked with black, made of futuristic material, like a kitchen counter from the 1950s, so ugly. The old men kept going with their game. O’Brien turned and tried to get a better look at the soft, chubby couple — man and wife, she imagined, having a terrible anniversary.
When she turned again the bartender was there, slicing up a puny lime on a white plastic cutting board as if he’d been there the whole time. He looked up at her and smiled. He was a handsome, dark guy with crooked teeth and a funny hat. Like, a half black guy, maybe? Not that it mattered. She kicked herself for even wondering. The air smelled like limes. O’Brien heard guitar music, snatches and hints above the rain outside.
“You ordering, sweetheart?” said the bartender.
“Yes, please.”
He wiped his hands on his apron.
“Got some ID on you, sweetheart?”
“Oh, I’m twenty-five. I get that a lot.”
“Still need to see it, darling.”
He didn’t look any older than O’Brien, and certainly not old enough to call women “sweetheart” and “darling” with such casual sincerity. Was it some irritating Mississippi affectation? She thought she would say something about it, but didn’t. She gave him her driver’s license.
“Could I get a white wine spritzer?”
He laughed at her.
“Something funny?”
“It’s a funny drink.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “Yeah, but it’s what I want.”
“You got it, sweetheart.”
The bottle of white he grabbed from the little glass-doored cooler had about a quarter left in it, the cork barely jammed into the neck.
She finished half her drink in two desperate gulps.
“Oh baby,” she said.
“Whoa, you really wanted that white wine spritzer.”
“Brother, you have no idea. Tell me about your hat.”
He took it off and examined it. His hair was very curly. He frowned and picked a piece of lint off the crown of his funny hat.
“Want to hold it?” he said.
“No thanks, sport.”
He showed it to her from a number of angles. “It’s felt, but sturdy. It’s bespoke. Do you know what that means?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, a lot of people don’t know what that means. But okay, you’re all right. I dated this hatter from Tennessee. She’s famous on the internet. I did a lot of research on this hat.” He put it on again, cocked it just so. “Some call it a Goober hat or a Jughead hat. I saw an old picture of one and they called it a whoopee cap. It was also associated with juvenile delinquency. You’re supposed to stick collectible pins in it, but I don’t choose to do that. The felt is mulberry, an unusual color for this kind of hat. My girlfriend picked it out, my ex-girlfriend, the well-known hatter, she picked out the color, said it went well with my rich skin tone. Well, you’d have to see it in the light.”
O’Brien downed the rest of her spritzer. “That was one sour-ass spritzer,” she said.
“Yeah, I’m sorry, honey. Don’t serve much white wine in here. I’m sure that bottle was pretty skunky. Want the rest of it? No charge.”
“Hell yes,” she said.
The door blew open. A flash of purple lightning showed a tall, thin figure draped in a long black cape. O’Brien could smell stinking wet wool all the way across the room.
“No book tonight, Doctor?”
The cadaverous stranger shook his head.
“Too wet, I guess,” said the bartender.
The man hung his dripping cape on a peg by the door. His slate-dark hair, parted in the middle, reached his shoulders. Putting down his twisty walking stick, he wrung out one side of his hair and then the other, splashing rainwater on the floor, and moved to a large round table in the middle of the bar, obviously his regular spot.
The bartender got a cheap bottle of port and filled a whole water glass with it. After he had delivered it to the tall, thin man, he came back and leaned over the bar, speaking quietly to O’Brien as if in confidence. “Dr. Cherubino. He usually brings his big black book. It must be two feet tall and a foot across and five inches thick. I don’t know how he carries it. He lays it out on that table there and gets out an old ink bottle and some blotting paper and writes in it with a big old goose-quill pen.”
“What is it?”
“You should go ask him about it.”
O’Brien looked over her shoulder. The man was there in the dark, staring at her. She gave a little shudder.
“No thanks.”
The bartender pushed another spritzer in front of her.
“How old you think he is?”
O’Brien took the tiniest sip of the new spritzer. She grimaced.
“Oh, that’s the worst,” she said. “Yeah, I don’t want to look at him again. I don’t know, fifty-five?”
“That’s the thing. He must be eighty. He’s been all over the world. People gave him herbs and all kinds of things to make him live longer. Techniques and secrets.”
Despite herself, O’Brien looked back at the doctor again. He was crumbling something into his port, maybe a dried leaf.
“You should talk to him. What else are you going to do? You two would really hit it off.”
“Seems like a loner.”
“Aw, he’s an old ham.”
The bartender went back to his sad lime. O’Brien contemplated her flat spritzer. She looked back at the old man and thought what the hell. She went over.
“Hi, I’m O’Brien. Do you mind if I sit down?”
He spoke without looking at her. “When I was a young man I broke my back entirely. I was healed by a weird shaman.”
O’Brien took it as a yes. She pulled out a chair at the end of the table.
“I like your stick,” she said.
“Crepe myrtle,” he said. And now that she was seated he looked at her. “According to Robert Graves, the myrtle is simultaneously the tree of love and the tree of death.”
“Wow,” said O’Brien.
Dr. Cherubino’s face was drawn and sunken, streaked with violet but not especially wrinkled. His eyes glowed black.