you just get here?”
“Since two hours ago.”
“There hasn’t been anyone here in two hours?”
“People were here. Lou was here. But they left.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Lou wouldn’t just leave the store to be robbed by gangs.”
“No gangs come in here.”
“My point is that there are valuable items lying around.”
“I’m not saying if it were my store I would go away, but Lou is different. He is a smart businessman.”
“I’ve never heard anyone call him that.”
They sat in silence for some time before Silas said, “You mind if I ask you something?”
“Okay.”
“A few days ago, in the morning, early, did you come by my place and peek through the window for a minute and then run away?”
“Me?”
“I’m just curious.”
“You think I spy on you?”
“That’s not necessarily what I’m asking.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“Okay.”
Beto pulled three white gold rings from his left hand and laid them on top of one another on the smudged porcelain countertop. Silas reached around the soda dispenser for a glass that he filled with cola before adding a thick vanilla syrup. Beto stared at the carbonation running up the insides of the glass and whistled. Silas drank it all out of a bent straw.
“You were thirsty,” said Beto appreciatively.
“Yes.”
The front door jangled open and Lou walked in, a short man with a brush-bristle crew cut dyed jet black. His eyes were red from the conjunctivitis he claimed to have gotten from the redwood and marijuana pollen in Humboldt County’s air. It clogged his tear ducts. Although he’d lived in Eureka for forty-seven years, his Georgia accent sounded thicker to Silas than any Southerner he’d ever heard. Lou talked about retiring in Georgia, but he hadn’t been back to visit in over a decade and feared the changes time had wrought. Better the devil you know, he said.
“Lou,” Silas said. “You left this place unattended. Beto and I could have broken into the pharmacy and taken everything.”
“You’d have left fingerprints.”
“True.”
“I went to the police station.”
“What for?”
“My employee Leon—part-time guy—is missing.”
“I read that,” said Silas.
“His mother’s offering ten thousand dollars for his return.”
“They think he’s been kidnapped?” Beto asked.
“They didn’t let on what they think.”
“What’d you tell them?” asked Silas.
“That a couple months back he stopped coming in because of an illness.”
“They think he’s dead?” Beto asked.
“They didn’t let on what they think.”
“You going to hire new help?” Silas said.
“I am.”
Silas left money for his soda on the counter and left. Walking down and up Buhne hurt his knees this time, and when he got home he took pills and lay in bed until his consciousness went blank.
In a small condominium in Old Town Eureka, Barry Klein dabbed water on the button-sized stain marring the front of his double-knit sweater and rubbed and rubbed it and then draped the sweater over the radiator. He went to the kitchen and placed two apples, a shearing knife, a corned beef sandwich, a pockmarked copy of The God of Small Things, and a thin folded blanket into a wicker basket, his Prairiewalker model Longaberger, and closed the top. It was four thirty and he wasn’t gay. Sunlight dappled the checkerboard carpet on which he rested his huge feet in the living room. The hairs growing out of his two big toes were long and he was ashamed of their coarseness, of their pubic quality. He would never again wear sandals.
A cat meowed from the top of a bookshelf and he said to it, “You could easily be a dog. I could’ve gotten a dog and been happy. It’s a cliché for gay men to have cats but that doesn’t matter because maybe I’ll meet a girl at Rainie’s tonight.”
He thought about eating half the corned beef sandwich, but then thought better of it. As a new guest, he was presenting at that evening’s Longaberger party, meaning whatever he packed was what he’d show, and if that included a half-eaten sandwich, what impression would that make? That he couldn’t control himself? That he was too poor to afford a whole one? That he kept an unkempt home? What a wrong impression that would be. Barry looked at the walls of his one-bedroom apartment and saw the Napa wine poster perfectly aligned with the street-facing window, a photo collage of his family and college friends, the theater masks of laughter and tears, a giant handwritten quote, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Now hold on. Would he have an Oscar Wilde quote on his wall if he weren’t gay?
“Don’t be so literal,” he said to the cat, which stared at him mercilessly. “Lots of straight people like Oscar Wilde. He has big crossover appeal.”
He shaved again and applied antioxidant cream to the worry lines on his forehead and put on the sweater he’d cleaned, which was casual and said I’m approachable. He really hoped he would meet a girl at the party.
He looked in the mirror and raised his eyebrows and saw with a sinking feeling that the worry lines weren’t fading despite the diligence with which he daily applied the cream. And the hairline at his temples was getting uneven. And that stain on his sweater hadn’t gone away! What did he have to do, cut it out? Put on a patch? Bleach the whole sweater? He ran more water over it and said to the cat, who had followed him into the bathroom, “Last night didn’t happen so I wish you’d stop thinking that.” He’d been roaming around on the Internet and had paused to graze in a pasture that wasn’t his preferred pasture, not his oriented field, and the stain was proving impossible. “I was just looking around,” he said. “It doesn’t mean anything.” The cat sneezed. “Do you understand? Nothing.” The image of loving a man and touching a man and intimate urgent kissing and reaching down to grab an erect cock and his grabbing yours … Tonight he would meet a girl and impress her with his observations about Rainie and the ridiculousness of Longaberger parties—twenty adults all swapping
