The Unquiet-CP-6 (2 page)

He pocketed his earnings and took a last look around before he prepared to close up. He was tired, and his head hurt a little, but he would miss being here once the crowds were gone. The Guesser knew that there were those who bemoaned the state of Old Orchard and felt that the beautiful beach had been ruined by a century of development, by the arrival of roller coasters and fun houses and merry-go-rounds, by the smell of cotton candy and hot dogs and suntan lotion. Maybe they were right, but there were plenty of other places for folks like that to go, while there weren’t so many where people could come for a week with their kids and live relatively cheaply while enjoying the sea, the sand, and the pleasure of trying to beat men like the Guesser. True, Old Orchard wasn’t like it once was. The kids were tougher, maybe even a little more dangerous. The town was looking more tawdry than before, and there was a sense of innocence lost rather than innocence recaptured. Ocean Park, the family-oriented religious resort that was part of Old Orchard, now looked increasingly like a throwback to another era, when education and self-improvement were as much a part of one’s vacation time as amusement and relaxation. He wondered how many of those who came here to drink cheap beer and eat lobster from paper plates knew of the Methodists who had formed the Old Orchard Campground Association back in the 1870s, sometimes attracting crowds of ten thousand or more to hear speakers extoll the benefits of a virtuous, sin-free life. Good luck trying to convince today’s tourists to give up an afternoon of sunbathing to listen to stories from the Bible. You didn’t have to be Dave the Guesser to figure out the odds on that one.

Nevertheless, the Guesser loved Old Orchard. Through his little concession, he had been privileged to meet men like Tommy Dorsey and Louis Armstrong, and he had the pictures on his wall to prove it. But while those encounters represented the great peaks of his career, his dealings with ordinary people had given him consistent pleasure and allowed him to stay young and sharp inside. Without people, Old Orchard would have meant far less to him, sea or no sea. The Guesser was already putting away his signs and his scales when the man approached; or perhaps it would be truer to say that the Guesser became aware of his approach before he even saw the man, for his long-departed ancestors had not relied on their senses to play guessing games in flame-lit caves. No, they had required these senses to stay alive, to warn them of the coming of predators and enemies, and so their continued survival was dependent upon their constant engagement with the world around them.

Immediately, the Guesser turned casually and began taking in the stranger: late thirties, but looking older than his years; his blue jeans looser than was the current fashion; his T-shirt white but stained slightly at the belly; his boots heavy and suited to a motorcycle, not a car, yet without the wear on the soles that might have come from riding a hog; his hair dark and greased back in a D.A.; his features sharp and almost delicate; his chin small, his head compressed as if from long suffering beneath a great weight placed upon it, the bones in his face shaped like a kite beneath his tanned skin. He had a scar below his hairline: three parallel lines, as though the tines of a fork had been inserted into his flesh and dragged down toward the bridge of his nose. His mouth was crooked, permanently downturned on one side and upturned slightly on the other, giving the impression that the symbolic masks of drama had been bisected and their disparate halves fused together over his skull. The lips were too big. They might almost have been called sensuous, but this was not a man whose demeanor spoke of such things. His eyes were brown, but flecked with tiny white flaws, like stars and planets suspended in their darkness. He smelled of eau de cologne and, lurking beneath, the rank stink of rendered animal fats, of blood and decay and waste voided in the final moment when living became dying.

Suddenly, Dave the Guesser wished that he had decided to pack up fifteen minutes earlier, that his concession stand were firmly locked and bolted, and that he had already put as much distance between him and his beloved scales and signs as it was possible for a man of his advancing years to do. But even as he tried to break eye contact with the new arrival, he still found himself analyzing him, drawing information from his movements, his clothing, his scent. The man reached into one of the front pockets of his denims and drew from it a steel comb, which he raked through his hair with his right hand, his left following along behind to smooth down any stray strands. He cocked his head slightly to the right as he did so, as though sizing himself up in some mirror visible only to him, and it took the Guesser a moment to realize that he himself was that mirror. The stranger knew all about Dave and his “gift,” and even as he willed himself to stop, the Guesser was separating the preening man into his constituent parts, and the man was aware of what was being done and was enjoying seeing himself refracted through the older man’s perceptions.

Clean, pressed denims, but with dirt on the knees. The stain on the T-shirt, like dried blood. The earth beneath the nails. The smell. Sweet God, the smell…

And now the stranger was in front of him, and the comb was being eased back into the tight sheath of his pocket. The smile widened, all false bonhomie, and the man spoke.

“You the guessin’ man?” he asked. His accent had an element of the South to it, but there was Down East there as well. He was trying to hide it, but Dave’s ear was too acute. The touch of Mainer to it wasn’t native, though. No, this was a man who could blend in, when he chose, who picked up the speech patterns and mannerisms of those around him, camouflaging himself the way—

The way predators did.

“I’m all done for today,” the Guesser said. “Tired out. I got nothing left.”

“Ah, you got time for one more,” came the reply, and the Guesser knew that he was not being cajoled. He was being told.

He looked around, seeking a distraction, an excuse to depart, but now it seemed as if the stranger had cleared a space for himself, for there was no one else within earshot, and the attention of those who passed was clearly directed elsewhere. They looked at the other concessions, at the sea, at the shifting sands. They looked at distant cars and the unfamiliar faces of those who passed them by. They looked at the old boardwalk and at their feet and deep into the eyes of husbands and wives whom they had long since ceased to find interesting but who now held inside them some previously unsuspected, if fleeting, source of fascination. And had one suggested to them that they had somehow decided to turn their attention away from the little Guesser and the man who now stood before him, they would have dismissed the idea without appearing to give it a moment’s serious thought, but to an observant person—to someone like Dave the Guesser—the fleeting expression of unease upon their faces as they spoke would have been enough to give the lie to their protestations. In that moment, they had become a little like the Guesser, some ancient, primal instinct woken from dormancy on a bright summer evening with the sun setting bloodily in the west. Maybe they truly didn’t realize that they were doing it, or perhaps self-respect and self-preservation prevented them from acknowledging it, even to themselves, but they were giving space to the man with the slicked-back hair. He exuded menace and threat and harm, and just to acknowledge his existence was to risk drawing attention to oneself. Better, then, to look away. Better for another to suffer, for a stranger to incur his displeasure, than to have him take an interest in one’s own affairs. Better to keep walking, to get into one’s car, to drive away without a single backward glance for fear that one might find him staring into one’s eyes, his lazy half smile slowly widening as he memorized faces, the numbers on a license plate, the color of the paintwork, the dark hair of a wife, the budding body of an adolescent daughter. Better to pretend, then. Better not to notice. Better that than to wake up in the night to find such a man staring down at you, blood warm upon him and a telltale light coming from a nearby bedroom, something dripping softly upon the bare floorboards within, something that was once alive there now alive no longer…

Dave knew then that this man was not so different from himself. He was an observer, a cataloger of human characteristics, but in the stranger’s case the observations were a prelude to harm. And now there were only the sounds of waves breaking, and voices fading, and the noises of the fairground rides dulling and muting as the stranger spoke, his tone insisting upon the attention of the listener to the exclusion of all else.

“I want you to guess somethin’ about me,” he said.

“What do you want to know?” said the Guesser, and all pretense of goodwill departed from his own voice. It would serve no purpose here. They were equals, of a sort. The man closed his right hand into a fist. Two quarters rose from between his clenched fingers. He raised the hand toward Dave, and Dave removed the coins with fingers that barely trembled.

“Tell me what I do for a livin’,” said the stranger. “And I want you to make your best guess. Your very best guess.”

Dave heard the warning. He could have come up with something harmless, something innocent. You dig roads, maybe. You’re a gardener. You—

You work in an abattoir.

No, too close. Mustn’t say that.

You tear things apart. Living things. You hurt and you kill and you bury the evidence beneath the ground. And sometimes they fight back. I see the scars around your eyes, and in the soft flesh beneath your jaw. There’s a cluster of rough strands just above your forehead, and an inflamed patch of red at its base where the hair hasn’t grown back properly. What happened? Did a hand get free? Did fingers grasp in desperation and tear a clump from your head? And even in your pain, was there not a part of you that relished the struggle, that enjoyed having to work for its prize? And what of those incisions below your hairline, what of them? You are a violent man, and violence has been visited upon you. You have been marked as a warning to others, so that even those who are foolish and distracted might know you when you come. Too late for the one who did it, perhaps, but a warning nonetheless.

A lie might be the death of him. Maybe not now, maybe not even a week from now, but the man would remember, and he would return. Some night, Dave the Guesser would go back to his room, and the stranger would be sitting in an easy chair in the darkness opposite the window, taking long drags from a cigarette in his left hand, his right toying with a blade.

“Glad you could make it at last. I been waitin’ for you. You remember me? I asked you to guess somethin’ about me, but you guessed wrong. You gave me a child’s toy as a prize, a prize for beating the Guesser, but that ain’t prize enough for me, and you was wrong to think that it was. I figure I ought to correct your misapprehension. I figure you really ought to know what I do for a livin’. Here, let me show you…”

The stranger turned his hands slowly for Dave, displaying the palms, then the backs of the hands, and finally the almost delicate fingers, a thin sliver of dirt visible beneath the tip of each nail.

“So tell me,” he said. “Tell me true.”

Dave looked him in the eye.

“You cause pain,” said Dave.

The stranger looked amused.

“Is that so?” he said. “You hurt people.”

“Uh-huh?”

“You’ve killed,” and Dave both heard himself say the words and saw himself from without. He was floating apart from the scene unfolding before him, his soul already anticipating the separation from this life that was to come.

The stranger shook his head and looked at his own hands, as though quietly astonished at what they had revealed.

“Well,” he said at last, “I reckon that’s worth fifty cents of any man’s money, and no mistake. That’s quite the tale. Quite the tale.” He nodded to himself. “Uh-huh,” he said softly. “Uh-huh.”

“You want to claim a prize?” said Dave. “You can have a prize if I guessed wrong.”

He gestured behind him at the rubber bands, the hair clips, the packs of balloons. Take one. Please take one. Take ’em all, anything you want, just get away from me. Walk away and keep walking and never, ever come back here. And if it’s any consolation, know that I’ll never forget the smell of you or the sight of you. Not ever. I’ll keep it with me, and I’ll always be watching for you in case you come again.

“Nah,” said the stranger. “You keep ’em. I was entertained. You entertained me.”

He backed away from Dave the Guesser, still nodding, still softly “uh-huh”-ing. Just as the Guesser felt certain he was about to be rid of him, the stranger stopped.

“Professional pride,” he said suddenly.

“Pardon me?” said the Guesser.

“I think that’s what we got in common: we take pride in what we do. You could have lied to me, but you didn’t. I could have lied to you and taken one of them shitty balloon packs, but I didn’t do that either. You respected me, and I respected you in return. We’re men, you and I.”

The Guesser didn’t reply. There was nothing to say. He tasted something in his mouth. It was sour and unpleasant. He wanted to open his mouth and breathe in the salt sea air, but not yet, not while the stranger was nearby. He wanted to be rid of him first, for fear that some of his essence might enter him in that single breath, polluting his being.

“You can tell folks about me, if you like,” said the stranger. “I don’t much care either way. I’ll be long gone before anybody takes it into his head to come looking for me, and even if they do find me, what are they gonna say? That some little sideshow huckster in a cheap T-shirt told them to look me up, that maybe I might have somethin’ to hide or a story to tell?”

His hands busied themselves retrieving his pack of cigarettes from his jeans. The pack was battered, and slightly flattened. He shook a slim brass lighter from within, then followed it with a cigarette. He rolled the cigarette between his finger and thumb before lighting up, the lighter and the pack disappearing back into his pocket.

“Maybe I’ll be through here again someday,” he said. “I’ll look you up.”