Cold City (Repairman Jack - the Early Years Trilogy) (44 page)

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Authors: F. Paul Wilson

BOOK: Cold City (Repairman Jack - the Early Years Trilogy)

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“So glum on such a festive day?”

Jack shook himself out of a reverie and looked at Abe, wedged into the other side of the diner booth. A steaming plate of sliced turkey, giblet gravy, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and green beans sat before each of them.

Jack shrugged. “First time I’ve ever spent Thanksgiving alone.”

“And I’m what? Chopped liver?”

Oh, hell.

“No, I didn’t mean
alone
alone. I meant without my family.”

“You’re sad and lonely? Maybe you should go back.”

“No way. I’m neither. Just seems strange, is all.”

Would have seemed even more strange at home – the first Thanksgiving ever without his mother. He couldn’t imagine the day without her. She’d always spent it in the background, bustling around the kitchen, with Kate acting as sous chef, while Jack and Tom and Dad watched football in the living room. Eventually Dad would get called away to carve the turkey. Then they’d gather around the loaded table and dig in.

A real Norman Rockwell scene.

He’d been trying to imagine what today was like in that house where he’d grown up. Had Kate taken over the cooking duties? Were tears flowing? Would they find cooking dinner without Mom too painful and not even bother? Were they hunched over turkey dinners in a Marlton restaurant, just like Jack was here at the Highwater Diner?

He realized with a start that this wasn’t just their first Thanksgiving ever without Mom, it was also their first T-Day ever without Jack. It bothered him that his absence probably magnified his father’s and Kate’s pain – he couldn’t see Tom giving a damn. Were they thinking of him as he was thinking of them?

Moments like this made him question the course he’d set for himself.

He shook it off.

“How about you? No family?”

Abe shrugged as he shifted his portly frame on the bench. “None to speak of.”

“What does that mean?”

“I should maybe say, None to speak
to
.” He began spooning the gravy off the mashed potatoes and into his mouth. “Uncle Jake was the last to speak to me and he’s gone.”

Jack’s old boss, Mr. Rosen. “Really? You know, when you think about it, it was his frail health started us on the twisty path to these two facing seats.”

“How so?”

“Well, when did we meet?”

“First meet? In my uncle’s shop, back in…”

“The fall of ’83 – October.”

”If you say so.”

“I do. Question is, why did you stop that particular day?”

Abe shrugged. “Let’s see… I was on my way back from Atlantic City.”

“Gambling?”

“I should gamble? Who has time? Send a check directly to Donald Trump would be better. Save us all a lot of effort. No, I was arranging the purchase of merchandise.”

Jack smiled. “Sporting goods?”

“What else?”

“What made you stop?”

“I was on the Atlantic City Expressway, heading for the parkway, when I remembered that if I kept on the Expressway I’d cross 206, and 206 led to my dear uncle Jake. I hadn’t seen him in a while and decided to drop in. Nothing ‘twisty’ about that.”

“Yeah, but your uncle was sick that day, so he wasn’t in the store. If he’d been in the store, he would have introduced me – ‘This is Jack’ – and left me at the counter while you two gabbed.”

“Instead I found you there alone.”

“And you tried to get me to cheat your uncle.”

Another shrug. “A test. You passed. Mazel tov. What’s the point?”

“The point is, if your uncle had been feeling better or I’d flunked the test, you wouldn’t have given me your card.”

“And you wouldn’t have looked me up.”

“And we wouldn’t be sitting here. Like I said: a twisty path.”

Abe glanced down at his plate. “Gevalt! What’s this? George!” he called, signaling to the owner who’d also served as their waiter – he and Abe apparently went back a ways. “A tragedy has befallen my mashed potatoes!”

Behind the chrome-trimmed Formica counter, George Kuropolis, fortyish, slender, turned their way. “What? You spill them? I swear, Abe–”

“No-no! Their gravy has disappeared and they’re verklempt.”

“Their gravy has – oh, I get it.”

Half a minute later he was at their booth with a gravy boat in one hand and a bottle of white wine in the other. He proceeded to cover Abe’s mound of mashed potatoes with another layer of gravy.

Abe beamed. “Such a mensch you are. They were waxing suicidal without their old friend, Gravy.”

“Wouldn’t want you eating waxy dead potatoes.” He placed the gravy boat on the table. “I’ll leave that here – to prevent another near tragedy.” He went to pour more wine into Abe’s glass but it was nearly full. “Hey, Abe – drink up. No charge. You buy the Thanksgiving platter, house wine is free.”

Abe shrugged. “Why for I should drink? It takes up valuable space that could be used for food.”

“I’ll take his,” Jack said.

George looked at Jack’s empty glass, then at Jack. “You sure you’re old enough to drink?”

“Barely,” Abe said as he began skimming the gravy off his potatoes again. “But he’s legal.”

“How do you like the wine?” George said as he refilled the glass.

Jack didn’t know wine but he knew terrible, and this stuff was it. He tried to get a look at the label. Really, was there a grape that tasted like Sour Patch Kids? But it contained alcohol and he needed some tonight.

“Very different. Did you make it yourself?”

He laughed. “Just a California Chablis I used to buy for my wife.”

“And you’re still married?” Abe said.

“I should say, my
ex
-wife.”

And now we know why, Jack thought.

As George wandered away, Jack looked at Abe. “You were saying something about your family not speaking to you?”

“I have a very small family. One daughter, really. She’s an academic and has no use for me. She speaks to me only when absolutely necessary and then very grudgingly. She lives in Queens, just across the river, but I haven’t seen her since 1986. I suppose if I am thankful for anything, it’s that.”

“Not speaking to her?”

“She’s a very unpleasant woman, a klogmuter, and we’ll probably both die alone.” Jack supposed he looked surprised because Abe shrugged and added, “You can’t choose your kinder.”

Jack was thinking that was how he felt about his brother Tom, and it was mutual – neither had any use for each other. But if Abe had a daughter, that meant he must have had –

“From finding a circumspect way to ask, I’ll save you: I am a widower.”

“Sorry.”

“So am I,” he said as he poured more gravy over his slowly shrinking mound of potato. “She was a beryah who kept guard over what landed on my plate, but she’s gone.”

“Can I ask how–?”

“She’s gone. That’s all that matters. A better subject is your twisty path. You want twisty? Twisty you’ll get. Never mind that I gave you my card. You never would have used it if you hadn’t moved to the city. And if a certain event hadn’t occurred, you’d be having Thanksgiving dinner tonight with your family – your
whole
family.”

Jack swallowed. “Yeah… ‘a certain event’…”

The cinder block through the window… which led to another event… killing Ed… Jack hadn’t told Abe that part.

“Which led to you dropping out of your old life and starting a new one here.”

“All because of a homicidal asshole named Ed.”

“This Ed? He was out to kill your mother?”

“No. It was random.”

“You’re so sure?”

“He was out to maim or kill somebody, anybody. My mother just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“But why should he choose that moment to drop the block?”

Jack’s turn to shrug. “No one was looking, I suppose.”

“Exactly!” Abe said, pointing his fork at Jack’s nose. “But what if someone had jogged by then, or walked their dachshund across the overpass then? He would have paused, and the block would have hit another car. Maybe our supposed jogger stopped to retie his shoe. If it hadn’t come loose he would have reached the overpass about the same time as your family car; Ed would have waited for him to pass and the block would have hit another car traveling behind yours.”

“Like I said – random victim.”

“No!” Another jab of the fork. “All cause and effect. If the jogger had tied his shoe properly the first time, your mother would be alive.”

Jack saw where he was going. “Or if Ed ran over a nail in the road and got a flat – same thing.”

“Yes. A better outcome for your family.”

“But maybe a car that cut him off on a traffic merge hit the nail and got the flat instead.”

“Allowing Ed to arrive on time to cause the tragic outcome.”

“Sounds like the theory about a butterfly flapping its wings in Ecuador–”

“–and causing a tornado in Kansas. The butterfly effect.”

Jack was losing his appetite. “I can’t go around wondering ‘What if?’ all the time.”

“Of course not. Meshugge it will make you. One thing you do know: Like it or not, it all led to this dinner.”

“And that’s a good thing. But here’s a thought: What if I’d lost your card? Seven years is a long time to keep a little piece of paper.”

“Yet keep it you did.”

“But if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have called you back in June, and therefore wouldn’t have met Bertel and gone to work for him.”

“And thus wouldn’t have been in a position to save those girls.”

The girls…Bonita…he wondered where they were,
how
they were. Back with their families yet? He hoped so.

“Talk about a butterfly effect: If some lady hadn’t called the ATF, I’d have made my usual cigarette run and the girls would have been delivered to those Arabs as slaves.”

“Well, the Mikulskis would still have been there.”

“But they wouldn’t have been able to prevent Reggie from backing one of the trucks into the harbor. Strange to think how I never would have wound up in the Duck house if she hadn’t made that call.” He remembered another piece of the picture. “Hey, wait – if some dog hadn’t run in front of the other truck that was supposed to ferry the girls, I would have driven away from the Duck house the next day no wiser about the girls.”

Abe’s eyebrows rose. “This dog was chasing a wing-flapping butterfly maybe?”

“Maybe. But as a result, I got dragooned into driving.”

“So, in a way, the girls owe their futures to a busybody biddy and a jaywalking dog.”

Jack thought of the attempted hijacking just days ago. “But you could also say that Tony’s dead and I’m in trouble with those Arabs because of the biddy and the dog.”

“Which brings us back already to Thanksgiving dinner together at the Highwater Diner.”

“All because you gave me a business card.”

“Which you saved instead of immediately throwing it away like any other teenager would do.”

Jack shook his head. “The things lives hinge on. Almost seems like there’s a plan.”

“There is,” Abe said, “but only the butterflies know what it is. They know just when to flap their wings. Unless you believe in God.” He looked at Jack. “Do you believe in God?”

The question seemed out of left field.

“Why do you ask?”

“It’s Thanksgiving. That is to whom we are supposed to be giving thanks.”

“I’ve always seen it as more of a family day – a time for relatives to gather.”

“It is. But that doesn’t answer the question.”

Jack thought about that cinderblock coming through the windshield and crushing the life out of his mother. He remembered the assassination he’d almost witnessed just a few weeks ago, and what was going on in the Middle East with the Iraqis shooting up Kuwait, and all the people out of work here…

“Well, if there’s a provident god, he seems asleep at the wheel.”

Abe nodded. “Indeed he does.”

“So can’t we just be thankful?”

“We can.”

Jack watched Abe attack the gravy again. With all the crap that had gone down this year, maybe he did have something to be thankful for: the guy across the table. Abe might not want to hear it, but Jack was thankful their lives had intersected. Thanksgiving was a family day and Abe just might be the first member of Jack’s brand new family.

He was also thankful that 1990 was edging to a close. What a crap year. He could only hope 1991 would be better. It couldn’t be worse. Could it?

The Secret History of the World

The preponderance of my work deals with a history of the world that remains undiscovered, unexplored, and unknown to most of humanity. Some of this secret history has been revealed in the Adversary Cycle, some in the Repairman Jack novels, and bits and pieces in other, seemingly unconnected works. Taken together, even these millions of words barely scratch the surface of what has been going on behind the scenes, hidden from the workaday world. I've listed them below in chronological order. (NB: “Year Zero” is the end of civilization as we know it; “Year Zero Minus One” is the year preceding it, etc.)

The Past