The Temple of Air by Patricia Ann McNair

Author:Patricia Ann McNair
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Elephant Rock Productions, Inc.
Published: 2011-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE TWIN

Ernie heard the yelling first as he climbed out of the i_Lifront seat of the old Toyota. “Buy American,” some punk or other was always yelling at them, him and Bert when they drove past the park or the high school. But that wasn’t what he heard when he arrived at seven that morning to open up the ice cream parlor. From the parking lot, the yelling sounded like wailing. Or howling. A desperate, long, low-pitched sob.

Ernie thought maybe it came from the storefront meditation church, the Temple of Air. The ice cream parlor and temple shared a wall in the small strip shopping center. There was always singing or praying or some sort of joyful noise going on over there, sometimes yelling even, especially on a Saturday, their main day of worship. But this was a little too early for the temple, and the parking lot was empty. The white stripes between the spaces looked like they needed painting, which they did; they were much too ghostly and weak on the faded blacktop to keep the cars apart. On a busy temple morning, which this was sure to be when the sun moved up into a warm spot that would burn off the early mist, cars would be parked in nothing near order, spilling over the lines and squeezed in too tightly, or parked at odd angles meant to protect side panels and doors from bumps and dings. It about drove Ernie crazy.

But the yelling. The sobbing. Ernie stood beside the Toyota for a minute to try to hear where it was coming from. It sounded like it was in front of him in the shopping center somewhere, but also above him somehow. And then it stopped.

“Hmmph,” he exhaled, and turned the key in the lock of the car door (a habit left over from the city) and then spun the big jangling ring of keys around until he found the one for the ice cream shop. He stepped up to the door and put the key in the lock, turned it, then pushed the door open so that the bell over it rang out prettily.

“Hey! Fuck! Hey!”

The yelling rose over the hum of the freezers and stopped Ernie still under the bell. “What the…?” he mumbled.

“Hey, help! Back here! Help!”

It wasn’t Ernie’s morning to open the shop; it was Bert’s. Those weren’t their real names, Bert and Ernie, but the ones they’d taken on when they took off from the city, from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange where they shared the position of back office manager at Bronstein Financials for six years before they got the idea to slide a couple of winning trades into an account with their real names, Robert and Henry Saltzman, on it. Well, it started with a couple of trades—but then when no one noticed, and it seemed so effortless, so easy, unlike the rest of their days filled with brokers and clients bothering them all the time, all the time, calling on

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