which makes anythin’ tolerable.”
Stitched on the breast pocket of his uniform shirt is the name DONNY.
He blinks back his tears and says, “What can I do for you, son?”
“I’ve been up awhile, need to stay awake awhile longer. I figure anyplace truckers stop must sell caffeine tablets.”
“I’ve got NoDoz in the gum-and-candy case. Or in the vendin’ machine, there’s high-octane stuff like Red Bull or Mountain Dew, or that new energy drink called Kick-Ass.”
“They really named it Kick-Ass?”
“Aren’t no standards anymore, anywhere, in anythin’. If they thought it would sell better, they’d call the stuff Good Shit. Excuse my language.”
“No problem, sir. I’ll take a package of NoDoz.”
Leading me through the garage to the station office, Donny says, “Our seven-year-old, he learned about sex from some Saturday-mornin’ cartoon show. Out of nowhere one day, Ricky he says he don’t want to be either straight or gay, it’s all disgustin’. We unplugged our satellite dish. No standards anymore. Now Ricky he watches all them old Disney and Warner Brothers toons on DVD. You never have to worry if maybe Bugs Bunny is goin’ to get it on with Daffy Duck.”
In addition to the NoDoz, I purchase two candy bars. “Does the vending machine accept dollars or do I need change?”
“It takes bills just fine,” Donny says. “Young as you look, you can’t have been drivin’ a rig long.”
“I’m not a trucker, sir. I’m an out-of-work fry cook.”
Donny follows me outside, where I get a can of Mountain Dew from the vending machine. “My Denise, she’s a fry cook over to the diner. You got yourself your own private language.”
“Who does?”
“You fry cooks.” The two sections of his scar become misaligned when he grins, as if his face is coming apart like a piece of dropped crockery. “Two cows, make ’em cry, give ’em blankets, and mate ’em with pigs.”
“Diner lingo. That’s a waitress calling out an order for two hamburgers with onions, cheese, and bacon.”
“That stuff tickles me,” he says, and indeed he looks tickled. “Where you been a fry cook—when you had work, I mean?”
“Well, sir, I’ve been bouncing around all over.”
“It must be nice seein’ new places. Haven’t seen no new place in a long time. Sure would like to take Denise somewhere fresh. Just the two of us.” His eyes fill with tears again. He must be the most sentimental auto mechanic on the West Coast. “Just the two of us,” he repeats, and under the tenderness in his voice, which any mention of his wife seems to evoke, I hear a note of desperation.
“I guess with children it’s hard to get away, just you two.”
“There’s never no gettin’ away. No way, no how.”
Maybe I’m imagining more in his eyes than is really there, but I suspect that these latest unshed tears are as bitter as they are salty.
When I wash down a pair of NoDoz with the soda, he says, “You jolt your system like this a lot?”
“Not a lot.”
“You do too much of this, son, you’ll give yourself a for-sure bleedin’ ulcer. Too much caffeine eats away the stomach linin’.”
I tilt my head back and drain the too-sweet soda in a few long swallows.
When I drop the empty can in a nearby trash barrel, Donny says, “What’s your name, boy?”
The voice is the same, but the tone is different. His affability is gone. When I meet his eyes, they’re still blue, but they have a steely quality that I have not seen before, a new directness.
Sometimes an unlikely story can seem too unlikely to be a lie, and therefore it allays suspicion. So I decide on: “Potter. Harry Potter.”
His stare is as sharp as the stylus on a polygraph. “That sounds as real as if you’d said ‘Bond. James Bond.’”
“Well, sir, it’s the name I’ve got. I always liked it until the books and movies. About the thousandth time someone asked me if I was really a wizard, I started wishing my name was just about anything else, like Lex Luthor or something.”
Donny’s friendliness and folksy manner have for a moment made Harmony Corner seem almost as benign as Pooh Corner. But now the air smells less of the salty sea than of decaying seaweed, the pump-island glare seems as harsh as the lights of an interrogation room in a police station, and when I look up at the sky, I cannot find Cassiopeia or any constellation that I know, as if Earth has turned away from all that is familiar and comforting.
“So if you’re not a wizard, Harry, what line of work do you claim to be in?”
Not only is his tone different, but also his diction. And he seems to have developed a problem with his short-term memory.
Perhaps he registers my surprise and correctly surmises the cause of it, because he says, “Yeah, I know what you said, but I suspect that’s not the half of it.”
“Sorry, but fry cook is the whole of it, sir. I’m not a guy of many talents.”
His eyes narrow with suspicion. “Eggs—wreck ’em and stretch ’em. Cardiac shingles.”
I translate as before. “Serving three eggs instead of two is stretching them. Wrecking them means scrambling. Cardiac shingles are toast with extra butter.”
With his eyes squinted to slits, Donny reminds me of Clint Eastwood, if Clint Eastwood were eight inches shorter, thirty pounds heavier, less good-looking, with male-pattern baldness, and badly scarred.
He makes a simple statement sound like a threat: “Harmony doesn’t need another short-order cook.”
“I’m not applying for a job, sir.”
“What are you doing here, Harry Potter?”
“Seeking the meaning of my life.”
“Maybe your life doesn’t have any meaning.”
“I’m pretty sure it does.”
“Life is meaningless. Every life.”
“Maybe that works for you. It doesn’t work for me.”
He clears his throat with a noise that makes me wonder if he indulges in unconventional personal grooming habits and has a nasty hairball stuck in his esophagus. When he spits, a disgusting wad of mucus splatters the pavement, two inches from my right shoe, which no doubt was his intended target.
“Life is meaningless except in your case. Is that it, Harry? You’re better than the rest of us, huh?”
His face tightens with inexplicable anger. Gentle, sentimental Donny has morphed into Donny the Hun, descendant of Attila, who seems capable of sudden mindless violence.
“Not better, sir. Probably worse than a lot of people. Anyway, it isn’t a matter of better or worse. I’m just different. Sort of like a porpoise, which looks like a fish and swims like a fish but isn’t a fish because it’s a mammal and because no one wants to eat it with a side of chips. Or maybe like a prairie dog, which everyone calls a dog but isn’t really a dog at all. It looks like maybe a chubby squirrel, but it isn’t a squirrel, either, because it lives in tunnels, not in trees, and it hibernates in the winter but it isn’t a bear. A prairie dog wouldn’t say it was better than real dogs or better than squirrels or bears, just different like a porpoise is different, but of course it’s nothing like a porpoise, either. So I think I’ll go back to my cottage and eat my candy bars and think about porpoises and prairie dogs until I can express this analogy more clearly.”
Sometimes,