The rock I’d just thrown up sat in my hand.
It looked annoyed. The worst part? I couldn’t tell if its annoyance came from being inside me, or being outside me. It wasn’t like any rock I’d pick up from the side of the road, but it had just as little to say in words about itself as those other pebbles. Might have been a new species, or class, or however one divided up different rocks; I wasn’t a geologist or minerologist or whateverologist specialized in telling granite from marble, and to prove my point I had no idea what to even call that kind of person.
The rock sat there not participating in my argument.
It had a slightly odd texture under the slime it had picked up in my throat. In color, it had the quality of lichen: not brown, not green, not gray. Rolling it around confirmed how smooth it appeared, like an evil candy. It was about the size of a quarter pulled oblong. It weighed enough that I could probably have hurled it at speed and taken off a tiny bit of bark from a tree trunk on impact.
Of course, all this came in second place to the fact that this rock originated somewhere within my body.
“You’re not a kidney stone, I’m pretty sure,” I told it. “I remember that gallstones are… a thing – liver stones too, maybe?”
Funnily enough, my uncle had gotten himself in a gallstone way, long long ago when he wasn’t the sort of person that drove the sort of person like me to flee far and fast. My lens of the past picked out a small hospital room and the blur-faced chess pieces of my mother and brother. Uncle Oliver languished against the bedframe. The birth must have been hard, because he had a large amount of himself covered up, excusing no doubt a good deal of cutting and stitching. Presumably the hospital wouldn’t have done that if the thing had any chance of passing out of him without surgery.
Or maybe my memory was even worse than normal, or maybe that case was doubly exceptional besides the fact it intersected with my life.
“Ugh.”
I forearmed my face. No vomit had come up, but the feeling of my throat backpedaling made me shudder and try to throw distance between then and now. Still staring at the stone, I began to cock my arm back for a toss.
“No, hang on,” I mumbled. “If this means I’ve got a sickness then doctors might want to look at it – if I end up seeing any.”
I eyeballed the rock, hoping it might object. Eventually, it got wiped clean on some limp grass, then put in one of my pants pockets. It sat quietly and coldly.
After standing, the large road sign occupied my attention again.
I’d been forging my way eastward from Pittsburgh since the fall of the Roman empire, partly because of how few people picked me up. The year AD 2002 was not a good one for hitchhikers; who knew when you’d snag a perfectly innocent terrorist and they’d steal your car and blow up five or twenty or a thousand civilians? Being androgynous-looking didn’t help, since I didn’t so easily catch the eye of some traveler with ill intentions, but also made some people reconsider helping a somebody when they might have helped out a “nice wandering lady.”
Honestly, there were a couple days I’d have accepted a gingham dress and flashed some ankle for a drop-off at the next McDonald’s.
McDonald’s, though, was nowhere to be seen.
The shoulder of the road had a big two-pole metal sheet, with the green-on-white text of navigational signs in this neck of the country, and which had gotten a bit surreal since seeing the same white character with green backing style of Vermont license plates that I’d started passing a decent number of days behind me. This sign proclaimed its promised land lay half of a mile ahead, and that the name for the same was “Bezoarville.”
A smaller metal rectangle hunched below the name of the town. This one bore orange triangles with exclamation marks on either end, bracketed laminated letters warning of the presence of dangerous materials ahead. I can only remember that the wording had an ominous kind of vagueness, like if you ran into a red octagon that advised the wisdom of slowing down and becoming aware of your surroundings rather than giving you a four letter imperative.
I felt a small chill where my pocket’s new occupant sat near the skin, at the same time as a half-smile half-frown chiseled into my face.
“Well, isn’t that funny,” I said as I took a hundred steps to pass the official border of town, then kept on going. “Probably not many unwanted guests here.”
I went up the road into this ugly hospitable promised land.
Time to start coming up with names. It’d be fitting to call that long asphalt serpent Gorge Road, on account of how it moves across a big gash outside the town proper – might be a place where construction crews blasted through rock a bit too excitedly while making the route, or maybe they dropped a bunch of boulders into a convenient bit of terrain for municipal reasons. It’s the quintessential New England road; smooth most of its distance, most of the time, but with some spots tailor-made for knocking the skin off bicyclers who get too close to cars mid-migration, and a hundred places that frost heaves eventually turn into wheel predators’ mouths, every one waiting for new patches before the next year pulls them open again.
I followed Gorge Road up through a thinning wooded area, onto a hill, and up past low-mid quality housing. Past the midpoint of the hill’s downslope, the trees parted to show Little Avenue. It ran perpendicular to Gorge Road, sliding along the center of the town’s meaty core, starting with fragmented business and residential pockets that quickly abandoned “living quarters” in favor of “professional” – but always had a house or two to break up the pattern every so often.
It was coming up on sunset, and where large glass fronts of the offices peeked out of the lineup… well, it’s still my favorite sight of the settled part of town. Something about how the disco ball squares catch dusk, then throw it across half the town’s breadth, especially where Black Lake River crosses under and S-curves its way down the other side of the avenue. It’s like everywhere and nowhere.
I was interested in three things by that point. In decreasing order of importance, they were a place to eat, a place to sleep, and a place to ask questions. Fortunately, Patricia’s Diner sat right at the first major intersection before me, and it wasn’t closed. Sometimes that’s something you have to be careful about on Sundays. Before I chose to be a tramp on a mission, I’d have rarely thought about operating hours of a restaurant as anything besides an inconvenience. Now, the prospect was the difference between garbage cuisine and maybe getting something before it hit the bins. Bad food, too little food, food that costs you something dear – these each have their problems, but worst is no food.
When I started toward Patricia’s, it was with the hope of begging or a dishwashing type dine-and-make-up-the-bill-later deal. Stealing is sometimes your only way to fill your belly, and I’ve tried it a couple times. Notice that I said “tried.” It’s harder than it looks sometimes. More importantly, when a little help from strangers goes a long way, you learn to try and behave. If I stayed in the area more than a single day, and they fingered me as an undesirable, it’d be uncomfortable at best. That being the case, I wanted to make these people think I could at least pull my own weight, offer something in return if they didn’t feel the dew-touched hand of charity on their souls.
Thinking along those lines and worrying about empty stomach songs was probably why I didn’t notice anything odd about the girl I passed on the sidewalk, or the guy coming out of the diner with his relation or friend or whomever right behind him, or the several people inside as I entered.
The patrons got an eyeful of a short-breathed basket case when the door tinkled shut. Jacket over a shoulder, trash bag in one hand, backpack with a rip along its mesh cupholder pocket or whatever, not smelling like manure but also definitely not smelling like much good. Two shoes with about one and a half shoes’ worth of material combined, a stained tank top, pants hanging loose where starvation chic did wonderful things for waistline numbers. I was a method actor of a hitchhiker down to the backward baseball cap and the mud spot on my cheek. The only possible improvement would have been a tail-wagging grimy animal companion.
In return, I absorbed the staggering figure of Patricia herself behind the counter. Her hair was gorgeous, her expression was warty, and her whole body had the solidity of the Old Man in the Mountain (this was before the rock formation fell down, so it fit at the time). She looked at me and spotted trouble, and decided to give me a chance anyway. For that, Patricia Rumsford has gratitude I cannot put into easy words.
The big lady of as-yet-unknown identity panned up and down my figure, and said, “Well, you look like John Brown got hisself dug up a hundred years ripe.”
She moved her eyes and her lips and nothing else, and it sounded like she’d told people both better and worse. Her eyeliner and lipstick looked plastic-perfect. She had brunette hair and matching eyes, exactly the same color as her uniform. I imagined she’d been there twenty years ago with a cold cigarette in her mouth looking no different than she did now.
Behind her, a guy with a hair net on his blond beard and another on his blond dreads came from the kitchen’s swinging door, holding four plates and a pad of paper in his mouth, moving at speed that kind of terrified me. He dropped two plates in front of two occupants with a nod, spat the pad into his apron pocket while shifting the remaining food around, and stopped on a dime as he was cutting toward the other end of the diner. His stare took me in, judged me, and made me think he was going to either laugh or tell me to beat it.
Instead, he shouted, “Patricia, we want anything for the green sprout there?” like he was in a baseball stadium and the score was tied.
“Down a tad, Tommy,” Patricia said without looking back.
For the first time, she moved, lifting a hand with a large pair of rings on the middle finger and making a slight fending-off gesture in Tommy’s direction. The movement drew a high piping giggle from one of the people he’d just served; if it were an in-joke then I didn’t recognize it as such.
“Oh, sorry!” he said, in less of a bellow and more of a highly enthusiastic announcement.
“What you want, dear?” asked Patricia, slowly standing up a bit straighter.
“Me?” I asked, after turning to make sure there wasn’t a head floating over my shoulder.
“Yes, you. Little thing comes in here barely standing, that’s a good reason to getcha fed.”
I stared past her at the plates Tommy was still holding. Pancakes and sausage and eggs on one, which was a bit unusual for the hour, and something that could have been fish or chicken on the other. Tommy kept an eye on me, and also where he was going, so how he confirmed that the mother and kid at the counter each got what they wanted I’ll never know. The child immediately swallowed a whole sausage without chewing. It had a beautiful horror to it.
“Get a breakfast-for-dinner ready, and give it.”
Patricia’s tone went not so much stern as insistent.
I had several questions – several kinds of questions, actually – that I asked first chance that came along after reaching a new place. “Where’s a good place for X?” gets people talking and lets you dig into their worldviews from three or four directions. When you get there, you can decide if it’s actually suitable for your needs, and from there – well, that part’s up to you. Questions should be spent with direction rather than precision, if you get my meaning. Point rather than leading. This has several exceptions, like everything in life, and one of the most glaring and difficult-to-navigate is when you see something completely outside your expectations on a level that not only didn’t cross your mind, but you didn’t imagine could even reach the curb on the side of your mind.
Now, when several of those gremlins join forces, you’re really stuck with asking about the elephant in the room, because it’s hard enough to just convince yourself that such an oversized animal managed to make an appearance, let alone walk your words around it with tact and forethought.
As Tommy dipped back into the diner’s engine compartment, my ears perked up at the ding-a-ling I’d heard across a pretty good amount of the country. There’s a lot of use for bells, and any diner worth its salt will have at least two: one to let the door tell people that customers are coming and going, and one to draw the attention of the wait staff.
This ding-a-ling sounded a tad off, though. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see why after Tommy’s hip shoved the kitchen swing door open – namely, he had a bell at his waist, and it was one of those wooden handled brass things meant to bring farmhands in from the next county over or such, and that was the first of those gremlins. It sat in a loop, with a holster or something. My brain backtracked a bit, adding detail that I’d essentially disregarded from the last several moments. A similar bell accompanied each of the pair in the booth to my right, and it looked like Patricia had a rubberized grip peeking over the counter down by her middle as well. I couldn’t see a bell paired with every person present, but I also couldn’t see all of their midsections either. Slightly muffled clangs stabbed everywhere like watered-down honeybee stings.
That was a bit weird.
Rumbling faintly under the quiet caroling, I heard something else. Patricia had said something. She still was speaking as I started to turn back to her, a fluttery bundle of words that should have been legible but weren’t. My face began to get warm.
Fortunately, the second gremlin made itself known and interrupted me. If things had gone on waiting for my reaction, I’d have gotten stuck in the three-way intersection of asking her to repeat herself, and inquiring about the purpose or story behind all the hand bells, and checking whether she was alright with the tramp in her diner setting down a garbage bag somewhere to take a load off.
As it happened, a guy in that booth on my right suddenly stopped laughing and started spasming with a hand by his throat. He sort of bobbed up and down, fingers opening. He dropped a fork. His mouth pursed. Within two seconds his companion began shouting and carrying on, and ninety percent of the place’s hubbub got cut off with gardening shears. A couple people nearby rose and dashed or scooted closer. At least one figure slid away from the commotion, appearing a second later by the door of the diner.
Then the guy’s throat made all the noise and commotion stop as he pulled in a whistle-clacking breath. He gagged. He gagged again.
“AGAIN, Ahmed?” groaned Patricia.
The presumed Ahmed made a sound somewhere between a sneeze and a rolling pin hitting a slightly larger rolling pin. Out of his mouth fired an oval, the brownish red of an iron deposit exposed to rain. My guts lurched at the color. A shout rose from Ahmed’s companion.
Suddenly, the plate of mashed potatoes had a rock in it.
Patricia yelled something that I couldn’t make out, between the accent and the competing noise and the upset brain, and stomped out from her post toward the offender’s table. She held an object that looked like salad tongs and a whisk had a baby, brandishing it with menace and sweaty industry, her huge soles punishing the linoleum with a completely undeserved vigor.
“I say this deserves payment!” she barked.
The instrument descended on the mashed potatoes, and stole a fair amount of the pile along with the rock.
“You had fair warning!” she said, waving the thing at her victim and probably getting a bit of taters on his face. “You were just staring bug-eyed, pinky in the air!”
It was a mix of laughs held behind teeth and people hiding their faces with their hands, but I just sat there staring at that wire grabber Patricia was holding. Moist-ish rust showed through. It had a very different texture from the thing in my pocket.
She held the rock in the air as she marched back to her counter, slid a small hard plastic bowl next to where she’d been standing (though where she got it in the first place I couldn’t tell you), and slammed the implement down into it with a sports player’s arm. Her face looked a great deal like what I’d seen first thing coming through the door, only a bit sweatier and lips opened for heaving breaths. She glanced at me with a smile.
“Sorry, honey,” she said. “Sit wherever you’d like.”
Her voice had dropped the strong local flavor. I wasn’t sure if that meant she had a generic eastern-coast USA accent and she was putting on an act until now, or she was mustering some kind of different composure in the face of… I didn’t even know what to call what I’d just experienced.
“I… uh…”
Tommy emerged from the kitchen with food, and lots of it, somehow holding both a glass of milk and a glass of orange juice on his free palm. Maybe the incident had taken a lot more time than I’d thought, or maybe they were paying the cook staff to include some sort of stove witches.
His arm lowered the dish. He noticed the rock-potato bowl. He sidestepped. The aircraft landed.
“Enjoy!”
I turned my gaze to the lady whose name sat on the outside of the building.
“Well? Waiting for it to get cold?” she asked.
With less trepidation than I’d expected on arrival, I dropped my garbage bag behind the stool at the counter, loosened my backpack straps, and hunched onto the brown fake leather. I could feel the dirt sliding off the seat of my pants, and hoped it wouldn’t leave a visible smudge on the cushion.
“Thanks,” I half whispered, and then both glasses were empty and the plate had no more to give. An ant couldn’t have scavenged the surface.
“That’s a good sign in these parts, you’ll need an appetite to stay warm in the winter,” said Patricia.
I didn’t reach for my wallet yet. By scrimping and scavenging and panhandling and begging, I’d fed it with seventy three dollars and fifty nine cents, along with a few coupons that might stretch that sum ten or fifteen bucks further. That was my camel hump. Almost anything else should get touched before the cache. A few possessions could go toward cleaning up the bill if they were understanding and unconventional enough to accept barter. I hoped I could wash dishes for a few hours, though. Splitting and never showing my face again felt like a bad option, to the tune of taking up hard liquor or eating raw squirrel in the woods.
“My money situation isn’t the best,” was the opening salvo of my skirmish. “I’ve got a few things, a pair of good shoes that you’ll have-”
At this point, the rock from earlier in the day found its way to my hand seemingly of its own volition, sitting in a palm in a pocket in a pair of pants in a diner. The hand drew out quickly, gripping the thing firmly but without crushing force. It still felt weird, but not so gross.
Patricia caught the action, and one hundred percent of her interest flew to the odd rock.
“Ah! You took care of your bezoar already. Didn’t know if you had dealt with it, or were still going to, or you’d skip it until tomorrow. Appreciate that.”
She frowned at me.
“I’ll let you have today on credit, so long as you show up again tomorrow to talk it over – or I’ll take that as payment plus credit in your favor.”
“Bezoar… like the town?”
I looked at the rock, questions turning a carousel rapidly.
“Yeah, that’s how Bezoarville got named,” she said. “Little crushed-together bunches of matter from inside your body.”
I looked at the bowl she’d used, where it still sat close to my plate.
“What, you don’t think they’re gross?” I pressed.
“Oh, they’re gross, as well as potentially dangerous and distracting. If you choked that thing up in my restaurant, I’d have read you the riot act as well. They’ve got some value, though.”
She frowned again, this time the lines curling nearly to the bottom of her chin.
“It’s best if you leave the town, actually. Not this instant, but get back on the road tomorrow and head past the outer limits by afternoon.”
I couldn’t hang onto my whatever any more, some ball of idea meatloaf hovering between questions and demands and the desire to begin crying and the stupid contentment of a long-denied full stomach.
“What’s the deal with the bells? And are the, er, bezoars a common event?”
Patricia’s eyes turned spiny.
“What’s your name, honey?”
A question answered with a question. When the second question is rhetorical, or they’re asking something you’re obviously supposed to know, that often means you’re about to be told off or shown to the door; a distancing maneuver. When it’s something that they want to know, that’s the opposite. Since I looked like I’d followed a pickup truck for half an hour with my leg tied to the hitch with a rope, I thought it was less likely she hoped to get something by manipulating me or coming across as vulnerable.
“Fredericka Decimos,” I said, this being back before I started going by Mellencamp. “Freddy for short.”
“Well, Freddy for short, the bells are for drawing attention if you need help – but ONLY if you really need it. As for the rest? We try to shoo people along before that starts becoming a concern.”
This made me very attentive.
“Are you saying that most people don’t stay in town?”
Before she could respond, I rephrased according to my more honest interests and needs.
“I mean, do you generally… uh, discourage outsiders from setting up shop when they happen to run across Bezoarville?”
Tommy broke in with another glass of juice.
“Best to keep fires from breaking out rather than try extinguishing them later,” he said.
Just as quickly, he left.
“A bit oddly put, but he’s right,” sighed Patricia.
I thought, then asked, “Would it be accurate to say that someone hoping to harass a member of the town is going to find cold reception here?”
Patricia… flattened, would be the best word for it. Her expression didn’t shift, but it took on a different angle like grinding a glass knife to a straight edge on stone.
“As a general rule, most people who hope to do much beyond walking around the outside border will find a cold reception.”
The New England lather started foaming up her words again, though not quite as it had done before. Moving from forced control to forced pleasantry? Either way, I heard between the lines: You cannot be thinking what I believe you’re thinking.
“Well, you can probably hear that I’m not from around here,” I said.
“You sound like you’re from the wide open part of Michigan, maybe. I had a school friend who sounded a little similar, actually, and he grew up in farm country.”
“Pennsylvania in my case, nearish some of the Amish community. At least, ‘near’ if we’re talking highway through the sky. Had to leave, though, when someone close to me started getting out of hand. He wasn’t the sort that tolerated anything but fear and respect, in that order.”
I hesitated, then took a breath, asked myself why I was suddenly trusting this lady more than anyone since Rick and Mom, and pulled my sleeve up my right arm. The scar was kind of cool, if you didn’t mind questions while showing off your battle prowess.
“He had a taste for poison. Couldn’t stand the slightest challenge to his pride. I tried out smoking for the first time, and he got loud when he saw me. I called him a bully who didn’t have the bravery of a stupid little kid. He stabbed me with a broken bottle. That wasn’t the first time or the last that we Had Words.”
I covered up the rounded Glasgow smile, not looking at anyone.
“Never puffed on anything since either.”
That thought actually made me snort-laugh. It really had been years, hadn’t it?
“All told, he never was the sort that I could see going on a crusade, chasing ‘that stupid filly’ without even knowing for sure that I still sucked air. Even if he heard I had been encountered on the road, complete with street number and directions…”
I shrugged. Patricia didn’t have any of the expressions I’d feared she might put on, when I saw her from the corner of an eye.
“He’s the sort that’ll leave an evil, evil ghost when he dies, though. Wanting, hateful, and the most important man to be born with two legs and two arms. It’d let me sleep easy to be safe and not sorry.”
None of the customers had swung by my direction, and none of them paid me more attention than taking mental shots at what brought me to this neck of the woods with the clothes on my back and little else. The staff afforded me privacy. It felt… not terrible, really, to be partly out of others’ notice when that was what I wanted.
“Unless you want to run me out, I’ll see what this place is like,” I told Patricia with a tired arm-wave that reached past the diner’s walls. “Won’t bother anyone. If the… if Bezoarville isn’t what I want, I’ll be gone in less than a week at most. I’ve slept by the road before, so anything’s-”
The arm propping me up suddenly had a strong wide hand pushing it onto the counter.
“Little lady,” Patricia whispered, and this time her eyes made me more than just surprised.
When she cast a glare out the front door to the street, I followed its direction, but saw nothing. Still, little groups of shivers ran from my feet to my head. They all spelled “BAD” in Morse.
Patricia said, “I feel partly like I really ought to run you out of town, to be honest. That wouldn’t really fit the spirit of the place, though. We’re a refuge of sorts, with high walls and strange types that call our little burg ‘home.’ No matter what I think, in any case, you are not just walking out that door again.”
It could have come across as sinister, but the fact she started patting my arm instead of keeping it pinned longer somehow made it more ominous.
“For one, we’re almost at the new moon. You’re going to need watching for a few days.”
She leaned back.
“For another, you’re not sleeping outside. Outside’s not safe in the dark, and especially not alone.”