Jonathan Strahan - Eclipse Three

Tug explained all his troubles, starting with his eviction and culminating in his dismissal from the Little Theatre.

Pieter seemed truly moved. "Aw, man, that sucks so bad. Listen, we approach lunchtime. Let me treat you to a trash platter, and we can talk things through."

Tug began perforce to salivate at the mention of the Carrollboro gastronomic speciality. "Okay, that's swell of you, Pete."

"So long as I still possess a paycheck, why not?"

Pieter stood his broom up in a corner with loving precision, found a coat in the cloakroom-not necessarily his own, judging by the misfit, Tug guessed-and led the way five blocks south to the Hatch Suit Nook.

The clean and simple proletarian ambiance of the big diner instantly soothed Tug's nerves. Established nearly a century ago, the place ranked high in Carrollboro traditions. Tug had been dining here since childhood. (Thoughts of his departed folks engendered a momentary sweet yet faded sorrow, but then the enzymatic call of his stomach overpowered the old emotions.) Amidst the jolly noise of the customers, Tug and Pieter found seats at the counter.

Composing one's trash platter was an art. The dish consisted of the eater's choice of cheeseburger, hamburger, red hots, white hots, Italian sausage, chicken tender, haddock, fried ham, grilled cheese, or eggs; and two sides of either home fries, French fries, baked beans, or macaroni salad. Atop the whole toothsome farrago could be deposited mustard, onions, ketchup, and a proprietary greasy hot sauce of heavily spiced ground beef. The finishing touch: Italian toast.

Pieter and Tug ordered. While they were waiting, Pieter took out his pipe. Tug was appalled.

"You're not going to smoke that here, are you?"

"Why not? The practice is perfectly legal."

"But you'll give everyone around us a contact high."

"Nobody cares but you, Ginger Ale. And if they do, they can move off. This helps me think. And your fix demands a lot of thinking."

Pieter fired up and, as he predicted, no neighbors objected. But they were all younger than Tug. Another sign of his antiquity, he supposed.

After a few puffs of Shepherdess, Pieter said, "You could come live with me."

Pieter lived with two women, Georgia and Carolina, commonly referred to as "The Dixie Twins," although they were unrelated, looked nothing alike and hailed from Massachusetts. Tug had never precisely parsed the exact relations among the trio, and suspected that Pieter and the Dixie Twins themselves would have been hard-pressed to define their menage.

"Again, that's real generous of you, Pete. But I don't think I'd be comfortable freeloading in your apartment."

Pieter shrugged. "Your call."

The trash platters arrived then, and further discussion awaited whole-hearted ingestion of the jumbled mock-garbage ambrosia…

Pieter wiped his grease-smeared face with a paper napkin and took up his smoldering pipe from the built-in countertop ashtray. Sated, Tub performed his own ablutions. A good meal was a temporary buttress against all misfortunes…

"Maybe you could live with Olive."

Tug's ease instantly evaporated, to be replaced by a crimson mélange of guilt, frustration, anger and shame: the standard emotional recipe for his post-breakup dealings with Olive Ridley.

"That-that is not a viable idea, Pete. I'm sorry, it's just not."

"You and Olive had a lot going for you. Everybody said so."

"Yeah, we had almost as much going for us as we had against. There's no way I'm going to ask her for any charity."

Pete issued hallucinogenic smoke rings toward the diner's ceiling. His eyes assumed a glazed opacity lucid with reflections of a sourceless starlight.

"Tom Pudding."

Tug scanned the menu board posted above the grill. "Is that a dessert? I don't see-"

Pieter jabbed Tug in the chest with the stem of his pipe. "Wake up! The Tom Pudding. It's a boat. An old canal barge, anchored on the Attawandaron. People are using it as a squat. Some guy named Vasterling runs it. He fixed it all up. Supposed to be real nice."

Tug pondered the possibilities. A radical recasting of his existence, new people, new circumstances… Life on a houseboat, rent-free. The romantic, history-soaked vista of the Attawandaron Canal. Currier & Ives engravings of grassy towpath, overhanging willow trees, merry bargemen singing as they hefted bales and crates-

"I'll do it! Thanks, Pete!"

But Pieter had already lost interest in Tug and his plight, the Dikelander's Shepherdess-transmogrified proleptic attention directed elsewhere. "Yeah, cool, great."

Tug helped his hazey-dazey friend stand and don his coat. They headed toward the exit.

Pieter stopped suddenly short and goggled in amazement at nothing visible to Tug. Other customers strained to see whatever had so potently transfixed the Dikelander.

"A Nubian! I see a Nubian princess! She's here, here in Carrollboro!"

"A Nubian princess? You mean, like a black woman? From Africa?"

"Yes!"

Tug scratched his head. "What would a black woman be doing in Carrollboro? I've never seen one here in my whole life, have you?"

After his impulsive decision at the Hatch Suit Nook-a decision to abandon all his old ways for a footloose lifestyle-Tug had nervous second thoughts. So in the two weeks left until his scheduled eviction on November first, he searched for a new job. But the surge of competing talented shorebirds made slots sparse.

Tug's best chance, he thought, had come at the Aristo Nodak Company. That large, long-established national firm, purveyor of all things photographic, ran a film archive and theater, mounting retrospective festivals of classic features, everything from Hollywood spectacles such as Elizabeth Taylor's Salammbô to indie productions like Carolee Schneemann's avant-garde home movies of the 1960s, featuring her hillbilly-skiffle-playing husband John Lennon. With their emphasis on old-school materials, there'd be no nonsense about Cinemeccanica o-500s. But, despite a sympathetic and well-carried interview, Tug had come in second for the lone projectionist job to a Brit shorebird who had worked for the drowned Elstree Studios.

Despondent at the first rejection, Tug had immediately quit looking. That was how he always reacted, he ruefully acknowledged. One blow, and he was down for the count. Take his only serious adult romantic relationship, with Olive. The disintegration of that affair a few years ago had left him entirely hors de combat on the fields of Venus.

But what could he do now about this fatal trait? He was too damn old to change…

Tug didn't own a fancy o-phone or even a cheap laptop ordinateur. The hard drive on his old desktop model had cratered a year ago, and he had been too broke to replace the machine. Consequently, he used a local o-café, The Happy Applet, to manage his sparse o-mail and to surf CERN-space. A week before his scheduled eviction, he went to Craig's List and posted a plea for help with getting his possessions over to the Little Theatre. Too proud and ashamed to approach his friends directly, Tug hoped that at least one or two people would show up.

Far from that meager attendance, he got a massive turnout.

The morning of October 31 dawned bright, crisp and white as Jack Frost's bedsheets, thanks to an early dusting of snow. (The altered climate had pushed the typical wintry autumn weather of Tug's youth back into December, and he regarded this rare October snow, however transitory, as a good omen.) After abandoning his futile job search, Tug had furiously boxed all his treasured possessions, donating quite a bit to Goodfaith Industries. Handling all the accumulated wrack of thirty years left him simultaneously depressed and nostalgic. He had set aside a smattering of essential clothes, toiletries and touchstones, stuffing them all into a beat-up North Face backpack resurrected from deep within a closet, token of his quondam affiliation with a hiking club out near Palmyra.