Fadeaway by R. D. Rosen

Author:R. D. Rosen [Rosen, R.D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-9041-5
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2013-01-15T17:27:00+00:00

Chapter 20

WHISTLING A DOOBIE BROTHERS tune, Jack wheeled the Caprice Classic up North Main Street, past the Moshassuck Square condos and a low glass-enclosed showroom advertising itself across the façade as “The Leader in Stylish Dinettes.”

“Stylish dinettes.” Harvey laughed nervously. “Now that’s an oxymoron if I ever heard one.”

Jack stopped whistling and rotated his big boyish head toward Harvey. “You said it.” he laughed. “I didn’t.” He was immense, like a child who had been filled with too much air.

“So you work for Coach?” Harvey said after a silence. They cut over 95.

“That’s right,” Jack said.

“Going to help him get to the U.S. Senate?”

“That’s the ticket,” Jack said, and whistled a few more bars. “Here you go.” He pulled into a badly pitted asphalt lot about a mile off of 95.

“Here?” Harvey said.

He put the station wagon in park. “Coach is waiting for youse inside.”

Out the car window Harvey saw a small gypsy wagon of a diner marooned in the center of the lot. It was painted red with yellow trim, and from the buzzing, vandalized, burnt-out neon sign over it Harvey inferred its name: The Speedy Diner. Behind the wagon there were half a dozen semitrailers propped up on their support legs.

“There?” Harvey said, indicating the diner with his head.

Jack nodded.

The Caprice Classic pulled away, leaving Harvey alone on the gouged blacktop. Across the street bordering one side of the lot was a retired red brick shoe factory with gaping windows. A stripped tricycle frame lay in the uncut grass. On the other side of the lot sat a boiler and welding company. The wind blew some papers around the patches of snow by its loading dock.

“Oh, shit,” Harvey said.

He mounted the three cement stairs to the diner and pushed open the door. At one end of the row of fifteen or so red vinyl stools, an aged man in a Tyrolean hat was alternately gumming a piece of buttered white bread and taking loud delicate slurps of coffee out of a Buffalo china cup. Directly in front of Harvey, the counterman, who had been talking to the only other customer, interrupted himself in midsentence and looked up at Harvey. The man to whom he had been talking revolved slowly on his stool and faced Harvey with a forkful of custard pie in his left hand.

“Hi howaya,” Francis F. Heaney said. His attire was ludicrously at odds with his surroundings. He wore a double-breasted navy chalk-stripe suit and cap-toe cordovans. The whole scene reminded Harvey of one of those New York Times Magazine fashion ads in which the model is photographed next to “real people” in a debased urban location. The counterman fiddled with his nose, finely detailed with burst capillaries, and wiped his hand on his T-shirt. He hadn’t cut his thick fingernails in a decade.

“Siddown.” Heaney smiled, dropping his milky green eyes to the next stool.

Harvey looked around him. Behind the counter, the old Hotpoint deep fryer looked like it had been itself deep-fried in dirty oil.

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