Kzine Issue 21 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kimota Publishing
Published: 2018-05-21T23:00:00+00:00

THE WORLD OF HARRY OVERTON

by Jamie McNabb

On Harry Overton’s seventy-fifth birthday, he drove in to the lovely and gracious coastal town of Innocent, Oregon, for breakfast. The town had been good to him over the years, but he was especially fond of the fact that it had taken its name from a ship, the Innocent. The Innocent had been a four-masted lumber schooner that had come to grief on Lovejoy Rock during a winter gale in 1905.

Harry knew better than anyone else that the Innocent wasn’t the only thing that had come to grief on that damn rock.

He did his best to ignore the rock as he stepped into the Drowning Tourist, the cozy little café where he ate when he was in town. As he waited for Imogene, the owner, to seat him, Harry took in the aromas of frying bacon and freshly brewed coffee.

The café’s décor was early garage sale: tables and wooden chairs from at least a dozen defunct restaurants; dishes, bowls, cups, and saucers Imogene had bought at countless garage sales, estate sales, and going-out-of-business sales. Ditto the flatware. Ditto the table clothes and napkins. Harry could almost pick out the eras: the 70s, 80s, and 90’s. Nothing was newer than that, not that he could tell.

Which was fine with Harry. To him, new seemed pretentious, and matched sets of anything made him feel queasy. His pickup was twenty years old and had seen better days. The driver’s-side door had come out of a wrecking yard down in Newport; the tailgate had come from another wrecking yard over in Salem.

Imogene Blanchet was a stick-figure of a woman in her late fifties. She had dyed black hair, sunken eyes, and papery skin. She greeted Harry at the door and led him over to a window table while they caught up on trivialities.

Harry hadn’t wanted a window table. He hadn’t wanted to take a chance on looking out at that rock. He would of course, but he didn’t want to, not even by accident.

However, he dutifully sat where she told him to. It was a case of go along to get along, of being a help, not a hindrance, and from the looks of her, Imogene needed all the help she could get.

“Phil was in looking for you earlier,” Imogene commented.

Harry snorted. As far as he was concerned, Phillip Alger Duzermann was thirty-something going on fifteen, all talk and no brains. His one claim to fame was that—thanks to a loan from his mother—he was the proud owner of the Puffing Puffin, Innocent’s one and only legal marijuana dispensary.

“Did he say what he wanted?” Harry asked.

“A cord of firewood?” Imogene asked. She was a master of deadpan humor.

“Well, I got lots,” Harry said.

Imogene left him a menu and went back to whatever she’d been doing when he’d walked in. Harry studied the menu for a moment and then somehow found himself looking out the window, staring directly at Lovejoy Rock.

For hundreds of years the surf had hammered away

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