Rob Thurman: Blackout

“You threw Luther Van Johnson through my window?” Miss Terrwyn’s voice said at my shoulder; she wasn’t much taller than that. “You threw that boy through my window? On your very first day?”

That boy weighed two-thirty easy, with the thirty being his gut. He was also at least forty. He’d been a full-grown man and full-grown pervert for a long time now.

I put the smile away and tried to look contrite. But since I barely knew what the word contrite meant and I in no way was feeling it, pulling that off wasn’t easy. “He had it coming?” I tried, saying aloud the same excuse I’d given myself internally when I’d first considered tossing Luther’s ass like a ball for a golden retriever. Of course I hadn’t been at all difficult to convince, so that excuse might have been somewhat lacking. “Ma’am,” I added hastily.

The high school girls, however, were quick to back me up. “He was looking at us and making these pervy gestures.” One of the girls demonstrated, and it was indeed damn fucking pervy with two fingers and a tongue.

Miss Terrwyn had passed me to lean and look out what was left of the window at good old Luther, who’d stopped flopping around. “Good Lord, I can smell the whiskey on him from here. And, Rachel Kaysha Marie, you could’ve described that. You didn’t have to show us. You girls should be home now anyway. Not sitting around eating pie and mooning over the help. He could be as perverted as Luther out there for all you know. Now get on home.”

The girls went as ordered. One of them had red hair, curly, a cloud of it, bright as fire. I watched her until the door shut behind her. She looked almost familiar, but I couldn’t pin the feeling down, so I let it go as I moved my eyes back to those of my new boss. “You aren’t, are you?” she demanded. “A pervert? With lust in your heart and nothing in your soul but wicked desire, because I have a butcher’s knife behind the counter that’ll do just the trick if you are. We don’t serve that kind of sausage here, no sir. Well? Are you?”

Pervert, lust, wicked desire. None of that rang a bell … Eh, maybe lust. But appropriate lust for the appropriate age group. “No, ma’am,” I replied, and began to bus the table of the pie plates and glasses the girls had left behind. “No butcher knife needed, ma’am.”

“Good. You keep it that way. I have no tolerance for the wicked. Like Luther. If I hadn’t been in back making sure Joseph didn’t set all the food afire, I never would’ve let that man sit down in my diner.” She took another look at him and sighed. “I have to say, it needed doing. But the door is only about fifteen feet away and windows cost.”

That made sense. Windows did cost, but throwing someone out a door just didn’t have the same bang for your buck. But she was my boss and I wanted to fit in here temporarily to find out where I actually fit in when it came to the world. Keeping my boss happy would help me out. I dropped my towel on the table, moved to Luther’s former booth, and stepped over that metal frame that had held the glass. Landing in the bushes with my victim, I took Luther’s wallet out of his pocket and stripped it of money.

“He still alive?” Miss Terrwyn demanded.

“Yeah. I mean, yes, ma’am. You want me to change that for you?” I wasn’t serious—entirely.

“You have a mouth on you, don’t you? I was thinking you were the quiet sort, but maybe I was only thinking you should be the quiet sort,” she warned.

I handed her the money. “Here. That should cover the window. And I’ll take it under advisement, ma’am.”

“You do that. Now get back inside while I call the sheriff. We’ll say perverted old Luther there was so drunk, and on the Lord’s day too, the heathen, that he fell through the window. He’s so liquored up, he won’t remember if it’s the truth or not. Maybe this time they’ll lock him up for a while like he deserves.” She stashed the money away in her own red-and-white apron, then clapped her hands. “Well, come on. We’ve got to close the place up for the night and board up the window. You playing Superman doesn’t change that. Hurry. Hurry.”

That was the beginning of the end of my first day working at the Oleander Diner, the Ole Diner, as everyone who came in called it. I’d worked my ass off, was paid a little better than nothing plus tips, and not one person had recognized me. Or if they had, they hadn’t mentioned it to me.

I had seen one guy walk by outside. I just caught a glimpse of ginger hair and a rangy male frame through the window before he disappeared from sight. He seemed familiar, but not the kind of familiar where you think you know a person. It was more the kind of familiar of recognizing one snake as being poisonous and one as being not. If he was a snake, I’d say he was dead-on poisonous. But that was a weird, freaky thought, so I shrugged and did what I was starting to get good at—I let it go.

Miss Terrwyn caught me watching. “Pshhh. Jesse. Ignore that one. He slinks into town once a week to buy raw meat. He must have some mighty big, hungry dogs, but he’s like Luther. He doesn’t smell righteous.”

I wasn’t surprised she could smell righteous. I wouldn’t have been surprised at anything Miss Terrwyn could do. Before I left for the day, I filled out my paperwork for the job using the Calvin fake ID, and promised Miss Terrwyn I’d be back bright and early. Her bright and early turned out to be different from my bright and early, and there was nothing but a storm of bitching and swats to the back of my head when I did show up at nine a.m. The bitching and swatting was strangely comforting in a way. Maybe I was a monster killer and a masochist, and out there somewhere was a person with a leash and spiked collar with my name on it.

I hadn’t spent the time before nine sleeping, although my body would’ve preferred it. My body would’ve preferred I slept until noon from the way it and my brain complained when I rolled out of bed at seven. I showered, dressed in the same clothes that I’d washed again in more soap the housekeeper had left—I desperately needed to buy more clothes—and spent an hour and a half roaming the streets of the Landing looking for a car that seemed familiar. I’d lost my keys on the beach as well as my phone. Whatever I’d driven into town was a mystery. There was no key to give me a clue to make or model. I walked the town proper’s twelve streets—two more streets than I’d guessed the day before. I owed someone’s ass a kissing. There were only a few cars parked on the streets and none looked familiar or had a New York tag or anything but the standard South Carolina one.

When I reached the diner, I sat on the freshly painted green bench in front and let my hands dangle between my knees as I stared at the Victorian/plantation/some kind of big-ass old Southern house across the street. I wasn’t actually looking at it; it just happened to be in the way of my “What the hell do I do now?” gaze. The house, I didn’t really notice, and the house had the good manners not to notice me either. But the dog on the wraparound porch? It noticed me right off the bat.

As I heard the growl, I blinked and stopped my thoughts running through my brain in the panicked what? where? who? that was my life now. The dog was a German shepherd, big and mostly black with some russet on its legs and the same russet-colored eyes. It’d been curled up by a rocker, but now it was looking at me, its head up and lip peeled back to show its teeth. As far as I knew, I didn’t have anything against dogs. Why would I? Man’s best friend. “Woof,” I said, low and friendly.

The shepherd disagreed with me on the friendly part. It was up in a split second, hitting the large dog flap in the front door to disappear from sight. It left behind a trail of yellow urine on the white board porch. I could see it, just barely, but I could smell it, strong and acrid as if the dog had pissed on my shoe. I might not have a problem with dogs, but this one had a problem with me. I didn’t know who I was, what I was doing here, where I lived, what I did outside the monster thing, and other than keep hoping someone would volunteer that, sure, they’d seen me drive into town in a black 1964 Mustang convertible affectionately known as Fang, license plate XYZ-123, which was parked at the Old Goddamn Mill, I didn’t have any way of finding out. I didn’t know a damn thing about anything—oh yeah, except that the dog across the street didn’t like strangers.