“He’s amazing,” she said. “I have to admit, you may be right about him.”
“Yep,” I said proudly.
“Watch yourself, Sparky. You know how you get when these things start to go south.”
“What are you talking about?”
“When one of your problem children runs off the tracks, you take it hard. That’s all I’m saying.” Andrea rubbed my shoulder. “You may want to think about speeding things up with Stanky. Walk him a shorter distance and let someone else deal with him. It might save you some wear and tear.”
We drove in silence; the river widened, slowed its race, flowing in under the concrete lees of the mill; the first row house came up on the right. I was tempted to respond as usually I did to her advice, to say it’s all good, I’ve got it under control, but for some reason I listened that night and thought about everything that could go wrong.
Carol was waiting for me in the office when I came downstairs at eight o’clock the following morning. She was sitting in my swivel chair, going through my Rolodex. She looked weary, her hair mussed, and displeased. “That guy’s a freak,” she said flatly. “I want two hundred more. And in the future, I want to meet the guys you set me up with before I commit.”
“What’d he do?” I asked.
“Do you really want to know?”
“I’m kind of curious… Yeah.”
She began to recite a list of Stanky-esque perversion—I cut her off.
“Okay,” I said, and reached for my checkbook. “He didn’t get rough, did he?”
“Au contraire.” She crossed her legs. “He wanted me to…”
“Please,” I said. “Enough.”
“I don’t do that sort of work,” she said primly.
I told her I’d written the check for three hundred and she was somewhat mollified. I apologized for Stanky and told her I hadn’t realized he was so twisted.
“We’re okay,” she said. “I’ve had… Hi, sweetie!”
She directed this greeting to a point above my shoulder as Andrea, sleepily scratching her head, wearing her sweats, entered the office. “Hi, Carol,” she said, bewildered.
Carol hugged her, then turned to me and waved goodbye with my check. “Call me.”
“Pretty early for hookers,” Andrea said, perching on the edge of the desk.
“Let me guess. You defended her.”
“Nope. One of her clients died and left her a little money. I helped her invest. But that begs the question, what was she doing here?”
“I got her for Stanky.”
“A reward?”
“Something like that.”
She nodded and idly kicked the back of her heel against the side of the desk. “How come you were never interested in the men I dated after we broke up?”
I was used to her sudden conversational U-turns, but I had expected her to interrogate me about Carol and this caught me off-guard. “I don’t know. I suppose I didn’t want to think about who you were sleeping with.”
“Must be a guy thing. I always checked out your girlfriends. Even the ones you had when I was mad at you.” She slipped off the desk and padded toward the door. “See you upstairs.”
I spent the next two days between the phone and the studio, recording a good take of “The Sunset Side of You”—it was the closest thing Stanky had to a ballad, and I thought, with its easy, Dr. John-ish feel, it might get some play on college radio:
Stanky wasn’t happy with me—he was writing a song a day, sometimes two songs, and didn’t want to disrupt his creative process by doing something that might actually make money, but I gamed him into cutting the track.
Wednesday morning, I visited Rudy Bowen in his office. Rudy was an architect who yearned to be a cartoonist, but who had never met with much success in the latter pursuit, and the resonance of our creative failures, I believe, helped to cement our friendship. He was also the only person I knew who had caught a fish in the Polozny downstream from the mill. It occupied a place of honor in his office, a hideous thing mounted on a plaque, some sort of mutant trout nourished upon pollution. Whenever I saw it, I would speculate on what else might lurk beneath the surface of the cold, deep pools east of town, imagining telepathic monstrosities plated with armor like fish of the Mesozoic and frail tentacled creatures, their skins having the rainbow sheen of an oil slick, to whom mankind were sacred figures in their dream of life.
Rudy’s secretary, a matronly woman named Gwen, told me he had gone out for a latte and let me wait in his private office. I stepped over to his drafting table, curious about what he was working on. Held in place on the table was a clean sheet of paper, but in a folder beside the table was a batch of new cartoons, a series featuring shadowy figures in a mineshaft who conversed about current events, celebrities, etc., while excavating a vein of pork that twisted through a mountain… This gave rise to the title of the strip: Meat Mountain Stories. They were silhouettes, really. Given identity by their shapes, eccentric hairstyles, and speech signatures. The strip was contemporary and hilarious—everything Rudy’s usual work was not. In some frames, a cluster of tiny white objects appeared to be floating. Moths, I thought. Lights of some kind. They, too, carried on conversations, but in pictographs. I was still going through them when Rudy came in, a big, blond man with the beginnings of a gut and thick glasses that lent him a baffled look. Every time I saw him, he looked more depressed, more middle-aged.
“These are great, man!” I said. “They’re new, right?”
He crossed the room and stood beside me.
“I been working on them all week. You like ’em, huh?”
“I love them. You did all this this week? You must not be sleeping.” I pointed to the white things. “What’re these?”
“Stars. I got the idea from that song Stanky did. ‘Stars Seen Through Stone.’”
“So they’re seeing them, the people in the mine?”
“Yeah. They don’t pay much attention to them, but they’re going to start interacting soon.”
“It must be going around.” I told him about Stanky’s burst of writing, Kiwanda’s adventures in office management.
“That’s odd, you know.” He sipped his latte. “It seems like there’s been a real rash of creativity in town. Last week, some grunt at the mill came up with an improvement in the cold forming process that everybody says is a huge deal. Jimmy Galvin, that guy who does handyman work? He invented a new gardening tool. Bucky Bucklin’s paying his patent fees. He says they’re going to make millions. Beth started writing a novel. She never said anything to me about wanting to write, but she’s hardly had time for the kids, she’s been so busy ripping off the pages. It’s not bad.”
“Well, I wish I’d catch it,” I said. “With me, it’s same old same old. Drudgeree, drudgeroo. Except for Andrea’s back.”
“Andrea? You mean you guys are dating?”
“I mean back as in back in my house. Living with me.”
“Damn!” he said. “That’s incredible!”