The River at Night(11)

Claws scratched across a wooden floor. A filthy dog, a mix of pit bull and something hairless and bigger, scrambled out from behind the display case and galloped at us, tongue flapping. It licked our hands as if frantic for our love, wagging hard its half-a-tail, which looked lopped off for no particular reason.

Pia and Rachel cooed at it. They lifted its pig-pink muzzle up to their faces and accepted every kiss, while Sandra and I more or less backed away after a quick pat or two. We wandered past wooden bins overflowing with potatoes, carrots, and radishes still wearing their sooty coats of earth. Jars of homemade bread-and-butter pickles, pots of “Marge’s Blubarb Jam” cinched with cloth checkerboard hats, knitted dolls staring through button eyes, and moose-themed ashtrays crowded the shelves. Coffee burned in a crusty pot on a glowing hot plate.

“You get offa them ladies, Corky.” A squeak, followed by a whiff of acrid body odor mixed with a sweetish onion smell.

We all turned to the source of the voice, the smell. Another squeak, more shrill this time, like rusted metal parts grinding together. A circle of light cast by a banker’s lamp on a glass counter illuminated a massive pair of hands spread open on a magazine. We followed the light up to a gelatinous mountain of a man, maybe five or six hundred pounds, wearing overalls and no shirt, sitting in what looked like a mattress folded in half and fitted into an armchair of sorts. Uplit, his tufted red eyebrows grew untended. His features nestled close together, a face meant for a smaller man but tucked in between rolls of flesh and jowls. A neat, oddly fussy mustache had been waxed into two perfect tips. I doubted he could get out of the chair contraption on his own.

“That’s okay,” Pia said, trying to shed Corky, who had begun to hump her leg, its age-spot-stained back curved and straining. “I love dogs.”

As we approached, he flipped his magazine shut and slipped it somewhere under the counter, a practiced move. Underneath the glass shelving all manner of bullets glowed copper and silver in rows of cardboard boxes. A crossbow hung from the ceiling. Girlie magazines, scratch tickets, chewing tobacco, and more candy and gum filled the racks and displays behind him, disappearing into the gloom.

The man looked at all of us but especially Pia. The old up and down. “What can I do for you ladies?” His voice was surprisingly high and soft.

“Actually,” Pia said with her blinding Pia smile, “we’ve been driving since Millinocket and could really use a bathroom right now, if that’s okay.”

The mustache twitched. The man took a pen, tapped it twice on the counter, then pointed with it at a sign behind his right shoulder without turning his head. It read, BATHROOMS FOR CUSTOMERS ONLY.

“Oh!” Pia said. “Of course.” She glanced at the girlie mags, the bullets, the crossbow, and stepped back to the candy aisle, returning with a Snickers bar.

He rang up her purchase and, expressionless, head-gestured to a door in the shadows behind him. “Light’s outside on the right.”

Pia thanked him with embarrassing intensity as the rest of us pretended to be fascinated by rolls of duct tape and fishing tackle. She emerged a few moments later and nodded at Rachel, who visibly braced herself before heading to the bathroom.

“Excuse me?” the man said, staring at a point somewhere toward the top right corner of the ceiling, one pupil drifting skyward independently of the other.

Rachel halted in her tracks. Like a statue, arm out for the bathroom light.

“What did I just say?” he said flatly, curling a meaty thumb at the sign. “Customers only.”

“Oh . . . oh.” Rachel reached out for one of the magazines, her hand jumping back as if burned when she saw what kind they were.

Gravel crunched under tires outside. The muffled sound of men’s voices, citizens band radio, switched off. A truck door slammed. Through the greasy windows of the store, the dead eyes of a doe regarded us, its body roped to the bed of the truck, slender front legs crossed daintily. Its velvet black nose still glistened with moisture. Heavy footsteps and the creak and bang of the screen door.

A big young man in a John Deere cap blustered in, still full of the rush of killing. Head down, he muttered, “Hey, Vincent,” wrenched open the glass door of the case that held the sodas, and tipped back a bottle of Fresca, almost finishing it in one go. He wiped his mouth, heard the silence. Turned to look at us, his face long and wolfish. “Whoa, Vince, got yourself a party.”

Rachel’s hand still hovered near the magazines. She moved it a bit to the right. “I’ll have a . . . couple of scratch tickets.”

“What kind?” the fat man said.

“Whatever’s lucky.”

He rolled his eyes and swiveled in his mattress chair, its metal innards shrieking, then reached an arm as thick around as my waist up into the darkness and snapped off a couple of tickets. He tossed them on the counter as Rachel slipped into the bathroom. “Looks like you got yourself a real beaut out there, Graham. Need anything to dress ’er?”

The hunter took us in one by one, as if we were words in a sentence he was trying to understand. Greasy black hair stuck out crazily from under his cap. Blood clotted his fingernails and stained the ragged hem of the long underwear that poked out from under his shirt. His eyes came to rest on me and stayed there. “Tried to cut her, but my knife is for shit. Mind if I use your—”

“Kit’s out back. Knock yourself out. Where’d you bag ’er?” The fat man popped a caramel in his mouth from an open bag of candy.