Hangman's Game (35 page)

“This is a beautiful restaurant,” Jessica says. “He should be working here.”

Brenda shakes her head. “Not his thing. Willie thought Luke might join the business, and even brought him by about a month ago for dinner. But Luke wouldn't eat anything on the menu. He ended up having a bowl of rice without any gravy in it, and plain steamed carrots.”

“Luke is a vegetarian?” Jessica asks, as if she finds the notion hilarious.

“He's a vegan, I think,” Brenda says. “Whatever he is, it was news to his dad.”

I notice a mid-thirtyish African American man with a shaved head approach the bar. He is wearing a navy-blue shirt and a black vest with black pants that distinguishes his uniform from the regular staff, and his name tag is gold, whereas the others are black. He is stocking the bar's cooler with fresh beer bottles, but he also appears to be monitoring our conversation.

“So is Luke still kicking around Berry?” Jessica asks.

“Brenda!” the man says. “Could you bring some Bud Light from the stockroom, please? I'll cover the bar.”

Brenda hobbles into the back. The man, whose name tag reads Gordon, stands before Jessica and me.

“I'm the manager here,” Gordon says. “Can I help you folks with anything tonight?”

“Nope,” I say. “Think we're good.”

“I bet you all are from out of town,” he says.

“That we are,” I say.

“Whereabouts?”

I hesitate. Philadelphia seems like too revealing an answer.

“Philadelphia,” Jessica says.

“Really?” Gordon stiffens a little. “Our ribs are good, but that's a long way to come.”

He wears a plastic smile now, and he is studying my face.

“We're just road-tripping,” I say. “I'm a big football fan. This is our first stop on a pigskin odyssey.”

“Going to Canton?” Gordon asks.

“Oh, yes,” I say. “That's our end destination. This'll be my second time there.” I have in fact visited the Hall of Fame once, with Cecil. It's only a half-hour drive from his home. “Let's face it, Nick,” Cecil kidded me that day. “The only way you're getting into the Hall of Fame is if you buy a ticket.” As of 2009, no punter has ever been elected to the Hall of Fame; it is the only position in football without a single player enshrined.

“It's a great experience,” Gordon says. “All that history.”

“Eleven businessmen get together in 1920 in an auto showroom and decide to form a professional football league,” I say. “And now every fall…”

“… a nation of men becomes completely boring,” say Jessica with a cheeky smile. She rests her hand on my bicep. “But I indulge him. It's funny what love will make you do.”

“Enjoy your trip,” Gordon says with a slap on the bar. “And let me know if I can help you with anything.”

“Will do,” I say.

As soon as Gordon walks away, I pinch Jessica hard on the arm for the Philadelphia slip-up.

“Ouch!” she says. “What's that for—saying I loved you? Easy, Nick. I'm just playing a part.”

I want to explain, but Brenda is back with our wings, which are arrayed like flower petals around the edges of a yellow plate, with evenly cut strips of celery and carrots placed between them.

“Let me know if you need anything else,” she says. And she quickly moves to the other end of the bar.

Jessica and I each pick up a wing, and I eat, despite some lingering nausea. The sauce is light but has a kick. I rarely eat wings because they are deep-fried, but tonight I have a second. And a third.

“You know what the most interesting thing we've learned so far is?” Jessica asks, whispering conspiratorially.

“What's that?”

“Luke is a vegan. Here, in Berry. We're pretty much in Appalachia, right?”

I see her point. “I wonder where he might go to feel catered to,” I say. “There can't be too many options.”

“I'll ask those ladies over there,” she says.

Jessica picks up her Stella and heads toward two tanned bottle-blondes in jean shorts and white T-shirts. They look as if they are still drawing their fashion cues from early Britney Spears.

I hope Jessica will be quick with these women. I feel like we are inching closer to something, but I worry about the smallness of this town in which we are asking questions. It is about the size of where I grew up, and I know how news can sprint from one end of town to the other.

The women seem initially confused by Jessica's visit to their table, but within seconds they invite her to sit down. Soon they are all looking at me and suppressing giggles. Even with their laughter partially stifled, they are making enough noise to stand out among the dining room's thin population. I can see that Gordon, who has now positioned himself near the door, is taking notice.

Soon Jessica is back with me.

“Mike's Lube,” she says. “According to Brianna and Madison over there, it's where all the alternative types congregate, and its menu is all, as they put it, weird vegan shit.”

“How'd you win them over?”

“Once I explained to them that you are my fitness instructor cousin who recently realized he was gay and wanted to go on a road trip to experiment with his sexuality outside his hometown, they were more than ready to pitch in.”

I am annoyed, and not because of the gay reference. Jessica's explanation is inconsistent with what we told manager Gordon, should he decide to ask those girls what Jessica talked to them about.

“Mike's Lube,” I say. “Let's go. Now.” I toss a twenty-dollar bill on the bar and quickly strip one last chicken wing of its flesh, even though I can already feel the grease from those first three wings roiling up in my digestive tract.

*   *   *

Mike's Lube is maybe ten minutes from Wee Willie's, on an old two-lane state road leading out to the countryside. It is a former quickie oil-change place that has been transformed into a coffeehouse and lounge. The big sign still says
MIKE'S LUBE
, but the marquee lettering underneath—which once might have carried a message such as
PENNZOIL $19.99
—now simply reads
MIKE'S GONE
.

The lighting scheme is orange and purple and the former lube shop's garage doors are rolled all the way up, giving the club a tropical, open-air vibe. Couches and chairs are set up both inside and along the building's perimeter. It feels like an alternate reality from the rest of Hartsburg. As Jessica and I walk toward the entrance on this warm night, she clasps my hand, her fingers cool as they interlace with mine.

Inside, the pit where mechanics once worked on cars from underneath has been converted into a subterranean DJ booth; a wiry, pale, and shirtless man with a tattooed chest spins low-key electronica. In the lube shop's former waiting room is a café.

I look at the crowd, such as it is. Maybe eighteen people. Most are young. I see two fortyish women and a man who are together, but everyone else looks under thirty, probably under twenty-five. They wear T-shirts and plaid flannels and ripped jeans; if this group took its collective wardrobe to a secondhand shop, they'd be lucky to get twenty bucks for it.

It's funny. In the locker room, I can imagine myself to be a fringe figure, the alternative. Then I walk into a place like this and I feel like G.I. Joe.

“This is surprising, at least,” Jessica says.

“Don't say I never take you anywhere,” I say. “Find us a seat. I'll get us some food.”

I head back to the café counter. The menu, written on an old whiteboard in green marker, includes vegetarian sandwiches, tabbouleh salad, bean salad, cookies, and popcorn topped with nutritional yeast. For beverages they sell coffee, tea, juice smoothies, and natural sodas, but no booze. Leaflets pinned to the wall advertise crystal healing, massage, guitar lessons, and hand-crafted jewelry.

The counter is attended by a muscular young woman with pug-like features and black hair with a thin blond streak. She is wearing the T-shirt of a band called Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti.

“It's my first time here,” I say to her. “What do you recommend?”

“The kava tea is one of our most popular items,” she says. “We blend it ourselves.”

“I'll have that, then,” I say. “And to eat…” I re-scan their menu. “How about two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?”

“Great choice,” she says. “Those come with our homemade raw-food carrot cookies.”

“What's a raw-food cookie?”

“It's made through dehydration,” she says. “It never goes in an oven.”

Hmm. So they are ridding the world of the scourge of oven-baked cookies.

As the woman makes the sandwiches I ask, as casually as possible: “Say, does Luke Reckherd ever drop in? Someone over at his dad's place told me he hangs out here.”

She pauses, her knife in the jelly jar.

“Who wants to know?” she says.

“I'm a football fan,” I say.

“Ugh,” she says. “I hate football. What do you like most about it—the violence or the boredom?”

“The boredom,” I say.

“I once read this book, by a very good female athlete,” she says, putting down her knife. “The book was called
The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football.
The author said that men are so into football nowadays because it's their last refuge. A woman can do pretty much every job a man can, and they can play every sport a man does—except football. So men cling to it because it's the last place where quote-unquote manliness still matters.”

“Women actually can play football professionally,” I say. “If you count lingerie leagues.”

Her dark eyes bore in on me.

“But the book sounds interesting,” I say. “I'll check it out.”

She finishes her construction of two thin sandwiches and deposits a dehydrated cookie onto each plate. The brownish-orange disks land with a thud.

“Enjoy,” she says curtly. “Peace.”

I carry the teapot and our plates to Jessica, who has located us on a set of facing armchairs with a checkerboard tile table between them. Jessica's face is lit with a purple glow, her eyes cast to the distance. She looks both impatient and Wiccan.

“Any luck?” Jessica asks as I sit. The seat of my armchair is lumpy, and I would guess this piece of furniture spent a couple of decades in someone's basement before making its way here.

“I think Luke does come here,” I say. I look back at the counter, where the woman who made our sandwiches is now eyeing me through the glass. “But only because of the way the counter woman clammed up when I mentioned his name.”

I scope the club. Despite the languid beats of the electronica and the slouched postures of the tea-drinking customers, I feel like the people here will not be easy to chat up. We have inadvertently infiltrated a closed society, and such societies tend to guard against outsiders. It would be as if a friend of the team accountant sauntered into the Sentinels' locker room, and asked me if I could tell him, just between us, which players are on human growth hormone.

But we are here, and we came to try. I look around the room for a promising candidate. The DJ has a small placard announcing that we are listening to the sound styles of MC Lovelife.

“How about him?” I say to Jessica.

She pulls out her iPhone and does a search on Mr. Lovelife. She scrolls through a couple screens and says, “I can work with this.”

Jessica saunters over to the DJ, a little sway in her hips, and she waves and smiles at him as she approaches. The scrawny young man looks confused but still welcomes this woman in the tight skirt and sleeveless top as she kneels down to speak to him. At first I see only one-word answers but Jessica keeps at him, touches his bony elbow, and before long his words begin to flow.

His mind is only half on her, though, and half on the music. Every now and then, his attention shifts to his laptop and Jessica has to wait while he fiddles with his beat files. From out of the darkness, I see another car pull into the parking lot, a dark sedan, and I watch to see who gets out. It is two women in their early twenties, with lean builds and hair not much longer than your average Marine. Meanwhile, Jessica continues to wait. This is all taking too long, I can feel it.

I taste the kava tea. It is dull and bitter. I bite into the raw vegan cookie. It is hard against my incisor, and I put the cookie down. I do not need to chip a tooth eating something I never wanted in the first place. I wish this place had Oreos. I wish I could eat an Oreo without feeling like the fate of the universe was at stake.

I consider the customers at Mike's Lube. It is tempting to slap the “weirdo” label on many of these people but they seem, if nothing else, relaxed. I would guess that many, if not all, of them survived horrible upbringings and difficult childhoods. But they made it here, and they seem happy about it. I could use a place like this for myself, back in Philadelphia. The closest I have to that right now is my workplace—which is the reverse of how it should be. Maybe I needed to join a rowing club.

Or find a bar and take up drinking.

Jessica returns to me. “Just to warn you,” she says as she sits down, “we may be hit with some autograph requests.”

“Why?” I say. “Did you tell him who I was?”

“Like that would lead to autograph requests?” She smirks. “I told our DJ friend that I am the bass player for the Cherry Bangers. I reminded him that he and I met at the Ocean Grove New Music Festival last year.”

It is my cue to ask her if she found out anything about Luke Reckherd. But I say nothing.

“You were right,” Jessica volunteers. “Luke Reckherd does come here. But the DJ hasn't seen him in at least a couple weeks.”

I breathe deeply and process this information. “So, Luke hasn't been here since Samuel was shot.”

“The DJ also said that he thinks Luke is living with his dad,” Jessica says.