Her paltry attempt at positive thinking suddenly dissolved into a whole agenda of first-date fears, which somehow seemed more comfortable than the limitless possibilities of positive thinking because she had been through them before.
She took a bar of deodorant soap from the soap dish, lost her grip, and dropped it into the water. The splash covered the faint death gasp the water let out as the soap’s toxic chemicals hit it.
PART THREE
SUNDAY NIGHT
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the Earth.
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.
— John Milton
13
NIGHTFALL
Overall, the village of Pine Cove was in a cranky mood. No one had slept well Saturday night. Through most of Sunday the weekend tourists were finding ugly chips in Pine Cove’s veneer of small-town charm.
Shopkeepers had been abrupt and sarcastic when asked the usual inane questions about whales and sea otters. Waiters and waitresses lost their tolerance for complaints about the unpalatable English food they served and either snapped at their customers outright, or intentionally gave them bad service. Motel desk clerks indulged themselves by arbitrarily changing check-out times, refusing reservations, and turning on the NO VACANCY signs every time someone pulled up to the office, proclaiming that they had just filled their last room.
Rosa Cruz, who was a chambermaid at the Rooms-R-Us Motel, slipped “sanitized for your protection” bands across all the toilets without even lifting the lids. That afternoon, when a guest protested and she was called on the carpet by the manager, who stood over the toilet in room 103, pointing to a floating turd as if it were a smoking murder weapon, Rosa said, “Well, I sanitized that, too.”
It might have been declared Tourist Abuse Day in Pine Cove for all the injustices that were inflicted on unsuspecting travelers. As far as the locals were concerned, the world would be a better place if every tourist decided to hang bug-eyed and blue-tongued by his camera strap from a motel shower rod.
As the day wore into evening and the tourists vacated the streets, the residents of Pine Cove turned to each other to vent their irritability. At the Slug, Mavis Sand, who was stocking her bar for the evening, and who was a keen observer of social behavior, had watched the tension grow in her customers and herself all afternoon.
She must have told the story of Slick McCall’s eight-ball match with the dark stranger thirty times. Mavis usually enjoyed the telling and retelling of the events that occurred in The Head of the Slug (even to the point of keeping a microcassette recorder under the bar to save some of her better versions). She allowed the tales to grow into myths and legends as she replaced truths forgotten with details fabricated. Often a tale that started out as a one-beer anecdote would become, in the retelling, a three-beer epic (for Mavis let no glass go dry when she was telling a story). Storytelling, for Mavis, was just good business.
But today people had been impatient. They wanted Mavis to draw a beer and get to the point. They questioned her credibility, denied the facts, and all but called her a liar. The story was too fantastic to be taken at face value.
Mavis lost her patience with those who asked about the incident, and they did ask. News travels fast in a small town.
“If you don’t want to know what happened, don’t ask,” Mavis snapped.
What did they expect? Slick McCall was an institution, a hero, in his own greasy way. The story of his defeat should be an epic, not an obituary.
Even that good-looking fellow who owned the general store had rushed her through the story. What was his name, Asbestos Wine? No, Augustus Brine. That was it. Now, there was a man she could spend some time under. But he, too, had been impatient, and had rushed out of the bar without even buying a drink. It had pissed her off.
Mavis watched her own mood changes like the needle on a barometer. Given her current crankiness, the social climate in the Slug tonight would be stormy; she predicted fights. The liquor she stocked into the well that evening was diluted to half strength with distilled water. If people were going to get drunk and break up her place, it was going to cost them.
In her heart of hearts, she hoped she would get an opportunity to whack someone with her baseball bat.
As darkness fell on Pine Cove that evening, Augustus Brine was filled with an uncharacteristic feeling of dread. In the past he had always seen sunset as a promise, a beginning. As a young man sunset had been a call to romance and excitement, more recently it signaled a time of rest and contemplation. Tonight it was not sunset, the promise, but sundown, the threat. With nightfall the full weight of his responsibility fell across his back like a leaden yoke, and try as he might, Brine could not shrug it off.
Gian Hen Gian had convinced him that he must find the one that commanded the demon. Brine had driven to the Head of the Slug, and after enduring a barrage of lewd advances from Mavis Sand, he was able to pry out of her the direction the dark stranger had gone when he left the bar. Virgil Long, the mechanic, gave him a description of the car and tried to convince him that his truck needed a tune-up.
Brine had then returned home to discuss a course of action with the king of the Djinn, who was engrossed in his fourth Marx Brothers movie.
“But how did you know he was coming here?” Brine asked.
“It was a feeling.”
“Then why can’t you get a feeling of where he is now?”
“You must find him, Augustus Brine.”
“And do what?”
“Get the Seal of Solomon and send Catch back to hell.”
“Or get eaten.”
“Yes, there is that possibility.”
“Why don’t you do it? He can’t hurt you.”
“If the dark one has the Seal of Solomon, then I too could become his slave. This would not be good. You must do it.”
The biggest problem for Brine was that Pine Cove was small enough that he could actually search the entire town. In Los Angles or San Francisco he might have been able to give up before starting, open a bottle of wine, and let the mass of humanity bear the responsibility while he sank into a peaceful fog of nonaction.
Brine had come to Pine Cove to avoid conflict, to pursue a life of simple pleasures, to meditate and find peace and oneness with all things. Now, forced to act, he realized how deluded he had become. Life was action, and there was no peace this side of the grave. He had read about the kendo swordsman, who affected the Zen of controlled spontaneity, never anticipating a move so that he might never have to correct his strategy to an unanticipated attack, but always ready to act. Brine had removed himself from the flow of action, built his life into a fortress of comfort and safety without realizing that his fortress was also a prison.
“Think long and hard on your fate, Augustus Brine,” the Djinn said around a mouthful of potato chips. “Your neighbors pay for this time with their lives.”
Brine pushed himself out of the chair and stormed into his study. He riffled through the drawers of the desk until he found a street map of Pine Cove. He spread the map out on the desk and began to divide the village into blocks with a red marker. Gian Hen Gian came into the study while he worked.
“What will you do?”
“Find the demon,” Brine said through gritted teeth.
“And when you find him?”
“I don’t know.”
“You are a good man, Augustus Brine.”
“You are a pain in the ass, Gian Hen Gian.” Brine gathered up the map and headed out of the room.
“If it be so, then so be it,” the Djinn shouted after him. “But I am a grand pain in the ass.”