Matt Cowper - The Clerk

“Six!” Vernon howled, as if no man had ever suffered such persecution. “Six! That’s it!”

“I don’t believe it! Thomas!” Yolanda hollered, motioning him over. “Do you believe this man when he says he’s only drunk six beers?”

“Well,” Thomas began, exaggeratedly pondering, “when I first got here, he said he’d drunk six or seven or eight beers…”

“Liar!” Vernon howled. His face was red and sweaty, and with his crouching stance and clenched fists, he looked like a particularly pugnacious Kris Kringle.

“Honey, I’ve never known Thomas to lie,” Yolanda said sharply.

“Uh… then he’s a traitor, if he ain’t a liar! There’s supposed to be a code between us men-folk. When the wife meddles, we got to stick together and knock her nagging aside!”

“You told me to watch out for you, Vernon,” Thomas said, chuckling. “Your words were ‘If you and Yolanda team up, maybe you both can keep me straight.’”

“Uh… well… if I said that, I take it back!”

“Oh, you’re something,” Yolanda said, grabbing her husband’s arm. “Come on, we’re going out to the car. You’re going to take off this Santa suit and get some fresh air. And then maybe I’ll let you come back in instead of tying you to the roof with bungee cords!”

“Leggo o’ me, woman! Why in the world should I take off my Santa suit? I still gots to get a few kissy-kisses from the ladies, and the suit makes it all possible! They may not want to kiss Vernon Oxendine, but they’ll kiss Santa Claus, sure enough!”

“That’s the main reason I want you to take it off! You’ve had enough fun with your mistletoe. You nearly tickled Carly’s throat with that last kiss…”

“I did not! She did that! She came at me like a bitch in heat! I’ve been trying all evening to get her, and then outta nowhere she nearly tackles me!”

“…but I also want you out of it because you’re about to sweat to death. Look at you! Don’t you want to cool off?”

“I do not!”

“Oh, you are something!” Yolanda wailed. “Get out here and take that suit off, before I slap some sense into you.”

“Slap sense into me ?” Vernon said as he let his wife drag him away. “Why, woman, in this marriage I’m the one’s got all the sense…”

Thomas watched the arguing couple leave the building. They were certainly two peas in a pod, as the saying went. Thomas had avoided marriage — or maybe marriage had avoided him — but seeing Vernon and Yolanda together made him wonder. If he could find a good woman like that, a woman who dealt with her man as he was…

“What a couple,” said Orianna. She’d appeared beside him at the Chamber’s reception area.

“Yes, they are,” Thomas replied, looking over at her. She seemed more lively than earlier; perhaps alcohol had something to do with her perkiness. “I’ve known them for years, and they’ve always been like this.”

“This may be awkward to ask, but they don’t have any kids, do they?”

“No, they don’t,” Thomas replied. “I don’t think Yolanda is… capable.”

“I see.”

A pause that lasted an age.

“So,” Orianna said finally. “Your beer.”

“Yes,” Thomas replied. “My beer. What about it?”

“I drank a few.”

“Ah. So it was you, you little thief.”

“Yeah, it was me,” she said, rocking back and forth on her feet. It was an unsteady rocking which happily confirmed her tipsiness. “Hope you don’t mind. Didn’t think you would.”

“Nah, I don’t mind.”

“I can pay you back if you want,” she said, grinning.

“Nah, that’s OK.”

Outside, at the Oxendine’s hubcap-less, peeling Pontiac mini-van, Yolanda had wrangled Vernon out of the Santa suit and had it draped over her arms. Vernon himself was somewhere within the bowels of the mini-van, while Yolanda stood on the asphalt and continued her remonstration.

“The party kind of loses its luster without him here,” Orianna said, nodding towards the mini-van.

“No, it doesn’t,” Thomas replied. “Listen to them in there.”

The noise rolling out from the conference room was as loud as ever, and the heat and convoluted smells snaked their way through the entire building. After all the Secret Santa gifts had been handed out and opened, the Party usually tapered off, but this year it seemed only a few people had left.

“Yeah, I guess,” Orianna said.

“What do you think of the Party?” Thomas asked, realizing he hadn’t gotten her thoughts on it. “It’s your first one, after all. And what’d you get from your Secret Santa?”

“Well, I think… I think I’d like to take a walk. Care to join me?”

“What, now? A walk where?”

“Just around here. Down by the docks, maybe.”

“Uh, sure. Let me get my jacket.”

“Yeah, I need mine too.”

The few seconds it took to get his jacket from his car gave Thomas a chance to process things. He was going to take a moonlit walk with a moon-touched young woman. Both of them had alcohol pulsing through them, and both of them were jubilant from the good fellowship they’d had all night. (Well, Thomas was, and while he was no mind-reader, he was pretty sure Orianna was, too.) Anything could happen. Sweat suddenly appeared on his forehead, and he wiped it away quickly.

Orianna was standing on the sidewalk, a few yards from the Chamber’s front steps, waiting for him. Even in her North Face coat, she looked thin and fragile, vulnerable to the cold night air. Thomas wondered if it would be too bold to hug her to him to keep her warm.

Before they took five steps, however, Vernon’s head poked out of the mini-van like a turtle alarmingly looking out of its shell.

“Where ya’ll goin’?” he barked.

“Vernon!” Yolanda chastised. “Quit bothering them and sit there and be quiet! They’re goin’ where they want to go!”

“Damn you, woman! Forty-plus years I’ve dealt with your nagging…”

“Forty-plus, huh? Do you know the exact number?”

“I know it’s been forty-plus years too many! Hey, now… where’d they go?”

Thomas and Orianna were indeed out of sight. They’d jogged away, turned a corner, and were now heading towards the docks.

The charter boats rocked back and forth in their moorings, sleek and powerful even though they were unmanned and silent. Their bows stabbed out towards the ocean, seemingly eager to slice through the water. Most had black tinted windows, making them look even more arrogant. Thomas, as always, was intrigued by their names: Feckless Reckless , Sandra Divine , The Fury , Wahooligan . He’d gone offshore fishing on Feckless Reckless years ago, when he was eight or nine, and gotten mildly seasick; he never threw up, but the rolling swell made him queasy the entire trip. He remembered the captain handling his boat with impossible ease and the young tanned mate whipping barefoot around the deck like a pirate of yesteryear. They’d caught a few dolphin, had a chance at a sailfish, and then, as the afternoon waned, they’d powered home through the great blue Atlantic.

Thomas thought of Reggie as well. His friend had been a hot-shot mate when he was young, but he’d had a falling out with his father and hadn’t mated since. Reggie sometimes spoke of those days with a wistfulness that almost embarrassed Thomas, since Reggie was a man who usually powered through the present, and let the past and future go fuck themselves.

Beside him, Orianna was humming a tune. She hadn’t said much since they’d left the Party.

“What’re you humming?” Thomas asked, more as a way to break the silence than out of genuine interest.