ocalypse (Book 10): Drawl (Duncan's Story) (3 page)

“Come on, Don,” Charlie exclaimed. “Where in the hell are
you?” He looked at his watch for the tenth time in as many minutes. His
replacement, as per usual, was late. A dozen minutes late.
Better be a good
reason
, he thought, wrapping a rubber band around an inch-thick stack of five-dollar
notes, partially obscuring Lincoln’s profile.

Charlie stowed the bundled fives in the deposit bag and, as
he started counting the singles, an insubordinate thought wheedled its way into
his sleep-deprived mind. Thought giving way to impulse, he set the night’s take
aside and grabbed blindly for the radio on the shelf by his knees. Without a
shred of doubt or remorse, he cast a glance at the black plastic dome housing the
nearby camera watching him and near everything in a hundred-foot-radius around
the booth. Throwing a mental one-fingered salute at the supervisor upstairs
currently manning the
all-seeing
eye, he hauled up the oversized boom
box and parked it on the counter to his fore. Amazingly, the eight D-cells
stuffed inside still had some juice and the Panasonic came alive with a burst
of white noise.

Between expectant glances toward the street level entry
splashing the ramp with a rectangle of stark white sunlight, Charlie extended
the rabbit ears and started his search for anything sounding like a sporting
event. Baseball, hopefully. The Seattle Mariners, preferably.

He scrolled past a couple of news stations on the way down
the dial, pausing at each one to listen to the announcers there talking about
yet another spate of terror attacks taking place elsewhere in the world. Then,
just missing out on the beginning of a recap of the incident taking place a few
short blocks south, two things happened. First he heard the announcer for the
Seattle Mariners state in his familiar baritone that Grammy-Award-winning
recording artist Keith Urban was set to sing the National Anthem. And just as
the first guitar chords filtered through the speakers, in his side vision he
saw his relief cast a long shadow on the ramp and begin to trundle slowly down
the decline from the sidewalk.

The sixty-year-old was bent at the waist to clear the
sprinkler heads and tangle of overhead pipes. With his long spindly legs and
incredible wingspan, the seven-foot former backup center for the Portland
Trailblazers’ backlit silhouette always reminded Charlie of the alien emerging
through the illuminated maw of the hulking spiny UFO in the movie
Close
Encounters of the Third Kind
. But this wasn’t Devil’s Tower. Looming
overhead was a forty-two-story building clad in mirrored glass and pink
granite. And the spidery figure walking down the ramp was no alien. He was a
note from the Governor suspending Charlie’s sentence … until tomorrow. And that
was alright with Charlie. With a booming brunch business in the City Grill,
Sundays were always busy and seemed to be over before they even began.

“Where the hell have you been, Don?” he called out.

The lumbering form said nothing.

Tapping his watch in an exaggerated fashion, Charlie leaned
further out the window and repeated his query.

Still no answer.

So Charlie reminded his relief of the current time and
started in on how much anguish the man’s late arrival had caused him. Truth be
told, like the woman in the Mercedes, Charlie was still having trouble
steadying
his
hands.
Nothing another quick belt of Old Crow can’t fix
,
he thought unashamedly, taking the flask from his pocket. In a move perfected
over the years, he spun the cap off, twisted away from Don and the black dome,
and drained the last few precious drops.

Oblivious to the self-medicating taking place a few feet to
his fore, Don continued on down the ramp in silence, his strides lengthening
and a slight limp showing in his naturally slow gait.

Charlie stowed the flask in his pocket and, with time to
spare, began readying the booth for his relief. He reached down between his
legs, depressed a lever affixed to the chair, and listened to the pneumatic
hiss it produced as it settled all the way down to the stops. He craned around
and grabbed the light windbreaker which he wouldn’t be needing once he
transited from the cool garage and into the July sun aboveground. Arthritic
knees popping like oversized corn kernels, he stood and slid the tiny pocket
door into its slotted recess.

“Take your time,” he chided, his voice echoing among the
static cars, some of which belonged to folks having lunch upstairs, the
majority, however, left in their usual stalls by those unfortunate enough to be
working on a beautiful Saturday in July. From one coat pocket he took a
crumpled navy blue Mariners ball cap—a survivor from the seventies emblazoned
with a gold upside-down trident—and crunched it on his head, not even bothering
to finesse it back into shape. With the engine sound of an approaching vehicle signaling
the start of Don’s shift and the end of his, Charlie flung the red windbreaker
over one shoulder and stepped into the exit lane.

“Seat’s lowered and warmed for you,” he quipped. “Figured
I’d set you up for success.” He looked toward the SUV then back to Don. “First
customer of the day.”

Don made no reply. Just issued a guttural grunt from the steamer-trunk-sized
breadbasket of his.

Still unable to make out his co-worker’s features on account
of the street-level glare, Charlie made a sweeping gesture toward both the
massive chrome grill on the SUV and the booth and open register drawer, the
cash in it awaiting a quick count. “She’s all yours. Double-counted your
starting change. Put last night’s revenue in the bag.”

“Not my fault I’m late,” Don said in passing. He folded his massive
frame into the booth sideways and sat down hard. “The protesters at the Square
are getting out of hand. They had traffic blocked until the police got their
reinforcements.”

Ignoring the idling SUV, Charlie paused and turned to face
the booth. “Reinforcements?” His brow furrowed. “What … like those military-looking
cops? The what’s it called”—he stared at the cement ceiling—“the SERT guys?”

Shaking his gigantic melon of a head back and forth, Don
said slowly, “Fully equipped soldiers started showing up in their Humvees just
as the Portland cops got our bus moving again. I remember watching the Seattle
WHO riots a couple of years ago.” There was a long pause as he removed the
bills from their slots and placed them on the counter. A neat little row: ones,
fives, tens, twenties. Still disregarding the customer in the idling SUV, he
added, “Hard to believe … but this mess was worse. The street kids—just a bunch
of agitators if you ask me—started in on the reporters then moved on the cops.
Just dog piled on them. Bloodied them up real good. Gotta give the boys in blue
credit, though … they kept their guns holstered and stayed with the Tasers and Billy
clubs and such.” He rubbed his eyes. Looking as if he hadn’t slept in days, they
were red-rimmed and puffy.

“You been crying?”

Don shook his head as he started counting the twenties. “Nope.
I caught a dose of whatever the cops were using on the anarchists. It seeped
into the bus as we were sitting there waiting for traffic to move. Hell, we
just sat there trapped and watching for thirty or forty minutes.” He picked up
the tens and nodded toward the entry where a white and orange MAX Light Rail
train was sliding by silent as a wraith. “There wasn’t a dry eye among us when
the driver finally let us out at the Ankeny stop.”

The Cadillac Escalade’s horn sounded. Not a courteous “Hey
guys I want to get going” toot. No, it was a ship-moving-through-a-fogbank-type
of wail. Long, sharp, and really, really loud in the low-ceilinged space. Then,
adding insult to auditory injury, the impatient driver flung his elbow up on
the window channel, poked his head out of the shiny black wall of metal and
chrome, and implored Charlie and Don to “Wrap up your
pow-wow
and get
the
eff
out of the way!
”

Which they did, but not without Charlie shooting the
Suit
from upstairs a death glare which he held while the SUV pulled forward and then
let linger through the entire transaction.

After the Cadillac cleared the gate and was up the ramp and
lost from sight, Charlie waded through the dissipating exhaust and took up
station in front of the sliding door. Even standing he found himself nearly eye
to eye with the former cager.

“So what I think I hear you saying is I should forget about
riding Tri-Met and find another way home.”

“That’s what I was getting at,” Don agreed. He continued
reconciling the till and deposit bag. Counted the big bills first, then the
coins, which were mostly quarters.

“Well shit,” Charlie finally said, his words nearly drowned
out by the rising and falling siren wail of a passing ambulance. “I better try
Duncan again.” He retrieved his phone, flicked it open, and punched the glowing
green key labeled Redial.

There was a period of silence then a series of clicks. A
tinny faraway-sounding ringtone buzzed in his ear. It went on for a couple of
beats then was replaced by the carrier’s stock slightly-robotic female voice he
knew all too well. It droned on in its oddly saccharine way, telling him to
leave
a message after the tone.
As far as Charlie was concerned, it may as well
have simply said:
Duncan never answers his phone. Stop wasting your minutes,
dumbass.

Six miles by crow southeast of the Unico Tower—aptly
nicknamed
Big Pink
long ago by Portlanders—Duncan ignored the sitar
chords emanating from his pocket. He’d recently switched his ringtone from
Fortunate
Son
by
Creedence Clearwater Revival
to
The End
by
The
Doors
, which he now thought fitting considering what was happening
downtown. The song intro ceased and he felt a subtle vibration signaling a
received voice mail—
Charlie again
—which he also ignored.

However, there was no way to ignore the man to his right
who, yet again, felt the need to butt in. “You gonna answer that
can and
string
of yours?” he asked, his voice boozy from mimosa intake.

Immediately following the quip, sparing the kid a number of
broken bones and the joint a couple of irreparable bar stools, the bartender did
two things: he watered down the antagonist’s drink with straight orange juice
(an age-old drink-slinger’s trick) and then rapped his knuckles on the bar top
directly in front of Duncan. “You want another three fingers of Jack, Mister
Winters?”

Instantly shrugging off the hurled barb, Duncan leveled his
gaze at the bartender. “If you want to keep my business you will
not
refer to me as
Mister
or
Sir
… ever again. I go by Duncan or
Dunc. If you need something easier to remember … D.W. will suffice. Are … we …
clear?”

“Crystal,” Chad replied. “My bad … I just keep forgetting.
Won’t happen again.” He stowed the O.J. and crossed his arms, awaiting a reply.

Again Duncan tapped the rim of his glass. He grabbed the
neck of his Bud, swirled the suds at the bottom, and gestured for another. As the
bartender went silently about his business, out of the corner of his eye Duncan
watched the more attractive half of the two to his right reach out and snatch
the remote control from behind the bar. When the bartender bent to retrieve the
Bud from the cooler, the girl pointed the remote at the main television,
changing the ongoing coverage of the black-clad dirtbags stirring things up in
downtown Portland to another channel, where a Major League baseball game looked
to be just getting underway. However, prior to the transition from the news channel
to the one devoted solely to America’s pastime—in which way too much scratching
and adjusting took place for Duncan’s liking—the original image abruptly split in
two, with the local coverage downsized and parked on the left, and a hazy
cityscape of mirrored glass buildings ringed by distant mountains that could
only be Las Vegas popping up on the right. In the long two-count before the MLB
Network feed materialized fully, Duncan made out the TRUMP tower and a couple
of other oddly shaped buildings he vaguely remembered from his frequent booze-soaked
trips there. And if he had a King James Bible nearby, he would have placed his
palm on it and sworn to anyone willing to listen that large swathes of Sin City
were burning.

“Looks like we got us another Nine-Eleven on our hands.” He
tossed down the Jack, chasing it with a swallow of Bud. “Maybe those desk
jockeys in Washington will relax the rules of engagement. Take the gloves off
our boys and let ‘em do what they’re there for.”

“I was in Iraq in oh-three and four,” said the bartender.

“Thanks for going.”

“Had to. It’s in my blood. Dad was in Gulf One. Gramps was
in Nam in sixty-eight. Great Grandpa served in Korea at the tail end of that
one. So … it only seemed right to join the Corps after those pricks brought
down the towers.”

“Check, please,” said the young woman.

The bartender raised a brow at Duncan. “Twenty bucks,” he
called over his shoulder. Then lowered his voice. “Millennials drive me crazy.
So effin entitled.”

Remembering his parents’ disdain for his generation and
feeling like a
gramps
now more than ever, Duncan just smiled at that.
“You in the Guard now? I bet they do another call up, way things are going
south over there.”

The couple pushed away from the bar, their stools making the
same racket Duncan’s had, the guy saying, “Keep the change.”

“No Guard for me,” Chad said as he watched the pair slip out
the side door and into the daylight. “I’m done for good. Rocking a
bionic
from the knee down. Humvee I was in took an IED broadside.”

Duncan finished his beer and pushed five of the twenties to
the kid. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Keep whatever’s left.”

“You’re a vet too … aren’t you?”

Pausing with one foot on the floor and halting the stool’s
noisy backward slide, Duncan nodded.

“Thank you, Duncan,” Chad said as he policed up the kid’s
money and empty champagne flutes.

“You’re the one who left a piece of you over there,” Duncan
acknowledged. “Thank
you
.” He folded his winnings in with his rent
money. Stuck the wad in a pocket, stood on shaky legs, and parked the stool against
the bar’s brass foot rail. He paused to look at the three screens filled up
with millionaires playing sports in front of tens of thousands of spectators
willing to pay hundreds of dollars for the privilege of being there. “You be
safe, Chad. This country of ours … she ain’t what she used to be.”