Brad Watson - The Heaven of Mercury

He’d talked for two hours, mostly about her. Floyd the engineer tapped on the glass. Finus looked up, nodded, signed off. Took the elevator down and walked back into the air, onto the street, the morning traffic chuffing by, idling at lights. Amazing, he was still somehow alive.

And Finus, because he was ravenous now, thought he’d stop at Schoenhof’s and treat himself to a rare breakfast of biscuits, bacon, and eggs before going in to work at the Comet .

HE MADE HIS way down past the two remaining banks, Citizens and Peoples, past the Feinberg’s fading clothing store, and into Schoenhof’s. Shorty hailed him from behind the counter and he took a stool, leaned backwards for a moment to check out the back room where just one couple sat drinking coffee beside the stuffed mule in the corner. The mule belonged to the original owner. Was said to have been sired by him with the old mare he lived with until his wife could join him from Arkansas. Said it looked like his wife. Well that don’t make sense. I know it. He ordered two eggs over medium with grits, whole wheat toast, and just two slices of streak-o-lean as Shorty stood with his square head — trimmed in a piece of Ivyloy’s most serious work, skin-tight on the sides and bristly black on top — thrown back, gazing at the ceiling. Then Shorty jerked into action.

— I got your eggs over medium, freshest eggs to ever touch a tooth, and here’s some hot coffee. He plunked a steaming cup before Finus and disappeared through the swinging doors to the kitchen. In five minutes he was back with a hot plate and clattered it down.

— See you got to write two today, Mr. Bates, he said.

Finus nodded. -Miss Birdie, he said.

— A fine woman, Shorty said with a grim snap of his head. -I remember Mr. Earl, used to come in here every morning before opening up his store. Hell of a gentleman. Finus nodded, studying his glistening eggs. Shorty shook out the white linen napkin he carried at all times and folded it back over his arm. -Hello, Mr. Mayor! he sang out then, and in a second Pearly Millens took the stool next to Finus.

— Morning, Finus said.

— Finus.

Shorty slid a cup of coffee before the mayor, who nodded, waved off anything else. Pearly brought the cup to his broad, red mouth, his flabby lips divining the steaming coffee like a horse’s lips seeking sugar in a palm, though his winged eyebrows, bony hooked nose, and bald head made him look more like a plucked owl. Finus turned his attention to his breakfast. He pricked the eggs with the tine of his fork and watched orange yolk trickle out onto the white. He cut a piece of the white and dipped it into the yolk and ate it with a bite of bacon and a bite of toast. Its deliciousness spread through him. He was lost in it for a long moment, eyes watering.

— What you into today? Pearly said.

— Not much, Finus said. -Got to write Birdie Urquhart’s obituary. She was my childhood sweetheart.

— So I heard you say on the radio this morning, Pearly said. -I didn’t know her too well, myself. Now I knew her son, Edsel. Did he die?

Finus nodded. -Down in Laurel. Bad heart, like his papa.

— I remember his papa Mr. Earl, now, Pearly said. -Sort of a distinguished old fellow.

Finus snorted. -Old. Didn’t live to be but fifty-five.

Pearly looked at him in astonishment, himself being sixty-two.

— Time does move on, he said after a moment.

Finus grunted, sipped his coffee.

— Rumor had it, as I recall, she did old Earl in herself, way back then, some kind of poison or something, Pearly murmured, sipping his own.

Finus slowly turned on his stool and stared at Pearly.

— Say what, now?

— I didn’t say it, I said people said it, back then. He looked sideways at Finus, then dropped his pop eyes back down to the coffee cup, mumbled, — Anything to it?

Finus glared at him a moment longer, then ate in near-silence, the light clattering of his fork against china, the gentle slurp of Pearly at his coffee. He swiped the plate with a wedge of toast, washed it down.

Pearly said, — Did they do an autopsy on him, then, on Mr. Earl?

Finus took up his napkin, wiped his lips hard, tossed it onto the counter next to his plate.

— Politicians can’t afford to be rumor mongers, Pearly, he said then, pulling out a five and dropping it onto the napkin. -Your realities are sordid enough. Mind your own business. Or the town’s, for a change.

Pearly looked back at him, winged eyebrows in flight.

— I’m going on, Finus said. -See you at the council meeting tomorrow night.

— You can skip this one, Pearly said.

— That’s when you’d pass a pay raise, Finus said, and walked out.

At the Comet building he opened the door and went on in. Lovie was there with the Mr. Coffee gurgling, typing the community columns. With her big pink ears she looked like a silver-haired elf.

— Who you got, Lovie?

— Spider Creek, she said in her hoarse quaver. She didn’t look up, focused on the computer screen. She’d wanted a computer since 1985 but Finus hadn’t given in until last year.

— What’s on Mrs. Chambliss’s mind?

— She’s down in the back and did all her snooping by phone this week. It’s a long one.

— She knows I cut her off at twenty-one inches.

— I guess we’ll see about that.

— I’m not giving in again. Twenty-one inches of Spider Creek is about all we need.

— I guess we’ll see.

The newspaper’s office was one large room that had been a tack and hardware store on the west edge of town in the early 1900s. The old press was in the back room, looking like some complex medieval torture machine for removing the bones by stages and flattening the body into figures for a ghastly tapestry.

He sat down in his own old wooden swivel armchair and made a couple of phone calls, then faced the heavy Underwood desktop manual he’d used since 1935, inserted a clean sheet of paper, and whacked out an obit on Midfield.

MIDFIELD WAGNER, 68

He once took two of his laying hens to the top of a water tower to show his boys that they could fly a little bit, but instead of gliding to the ground as expected the hens, apparently inspired by the view, caught a thermal and floated all the way across the creek into Claxton Swamp and were never seen again. Now wild, mischievous chickens are among the most mysterious of creatures in that low tangly stinking place, and their presence is suspected of being the resource fueling the resurgence of the swamp’s alligator population.

He worked twenty-two years at the Steam Feed Works and could do any job in the foundry, from casting to repairing machinery, spent twenty years before that with the telephone company, and in spite of what some say about his lifestyle he never missed a day of work with either concern in all that time except for one week when what we’d now call a microburst blew his barn down in 1976 and he reconstructed the whole thing from broken timbers and splayed lumber and bent tin, so that the result looked like the same barn been out on a three-day drunk, and some said that was fitting, anyway.

Although not a churchgoer himself he helped construct out of the kindness of his heart every one of the seven churches built in this area between 1963 and 1987. His wife was a Pentecostal but a gentle one, and he never succumbed, himself, to that spirit.

Midfield Wagner of Booker’s Creek Community died Sunday night about 9:30 as he was feeding his dogs in the pen out back of his house, or at least that’s when he had what was apparently a heart attack and fell down in the pen. He went out back with the dog food, his wife Althena heard the tinkling of the pellets into their pails, and then a funny sound. She went out there and that’s when she found him, the dogs kind of looking back and forth between him and the food in their pails.