Chapter Text
This required a decision. He made one.
His hollowed cheeks were marred with angry razor burns, hair, dirty and cut into a god-awful mullet, now overgrown, plastered to his tan sweaty neck. His unfussy attire of baggy hand-me-down jeans, greasy sweatshirt, his bony fingers, every now and then fiddling with the wet drawstrings or picking on scrubs were unremarkable but gave him out, still, as who he was.
Finally, when the young man, a boy, really, began chewing the metal tips of the drawstrings especially loudly, Stan let out a weary old-man sigh. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a swaying gray spot coming to a halt with the thud of a rubber sole on vinyl.
“Whatcha looking at, pops?” The boy drew eagerly, his voice cracked and wet.
Stan did not turn.
“Not your da, kiddo.”
“Now, doesn’t that ring a bell, huh.”
Then Stan heard rather than saw — his eyes were still glued to his hands folded in his lap — as the boy leaned back against the wall and moved closer.
“You in 103?”
Did he always have this mole on his knuckle? And the spools. He should have trimmed the spools on his sweater. Stanford Pines would never have come here, of all places, in a sweater with spools. Certainly not a red one. Maroon, maybe. No, that did not seem right. Ford would have chosen a tweed jacket, a crisp shirt beneath, one starched and ironed down the back, so he’d have no shame in taking the jacket off. Had Stan even glanced at the tank top he threw on in a hurry this morning? Did it sport that pink spot left unattended after a rough night spent drenched in water and a buzzing bathroom light? Will they ask him to undress? Will they notice that ugly spot there? Will they say something?
“Yeah, I figured. You got that look…Tell anyone?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I didn’t. Not like it matters. But yours… bet they’d care. You got that kind of look, too.” He trailed off.
Stan didn’t want to say what he thought: they would very much not. Because, of course, in about forty-seven minutes, he would be able to say with absolute, unshakeable certainty that they had nothing to worry about whatsoever. And yet, when he did speak up, because it was a polite thing to do, his voice recognised itself at a grave pitch.
“You ought to tell them. As they say, when push comes to shove…” He took a deep breath again, catching himself thinking that he had been doing a lot of it lately “I’m just saying. Give them a chance to be on time. Doesn’t cost you nothin’, right?”
“Right. Yeah. That was not moody at all, Serge. At least he is talking!”
Annoyed, Stan turned to the boy.
“Not military either.”
“Well, it’s not like I know your name or anything.” He bounced out of the wall and with a sharp, jerky movement, extended his bony hand. “Mine’s Wallace Bower. Walt, for friends.”
Stan offered a firm handshake.
“And I’m an old man here, ha. Your parents hate you or what.”
“They didn’t choose that one, thank you very much.” Wallace snapped lightheartedly. He glanced sideways, biting his cheek. “’S after my gramps.”
“Stan.” After a moment he added: “Stan is fine.”
Wallace mindfully looked at him, but his hands were still fidgeting, thoroughly peeling off already bloody hangnails.
“Nah, not calling you that, pops. You look like pops, someone told you that? Bet you trained a little softball league and drew mum-mobile and whatsnot. It’s the glasses, you know.”
“In my age everyone wears glasses, you know.”
“Wow, so trendy. You sure know how to stay-”
“Number 91, to room 103, please. Number 91!” A woman's strong and clear voice rang out.
“Well, dude, duty calls.” he said with an apologetic wince, then turned with a theatrical bow and slouched off to room 103.
That awful, cursed room 103, which awaited Stan in some forty odd minutes. The room. The room, where they would, undoubtedly, ask him to put his ugly red sweater off, and would see his stained and worn-out wife-beater. And they would ask to take it off, too. Hold still. Now breathe in. A deep breath. Hold it. Those spots, what would they think of them? Would they even notice? He hoped not. He sat there, looking at tiny pills of wool.
No, he thought. Stanford Pines, of all people, would not have come here at all.
When he left the Providence Portland Medical Center, it was already a quarter past six. The rain was coming down hard and straight. In the short walk from the doorway to his car, he was soaked through, his tank-top stuck to his back, hair plastered to his forehead, water finding its way past the loose collar of his sweater.
He didn’t curse. He didn’t sigh this time, either. He just sat, feeling the damp seep into the seams of the upholstery. He was sitting there for a long time, his hands laying restlessly on the steering wheel. Every so often, his right hand would lift as if to adjust the sun visor. Then it would fall back, or sometimes move further, to rub the back of his neck, where the hair bleached by time and sorrow was cut especially short. By now he had worn it this way for much longer than he had ever got to let them grow flowing and shaggy. With time, it thinned and straightened, losing the loose, sea-drenched curls he used to coat in Brylcreem. He bought it with money from his first honest-to-God summer job, pumping gas and checking oil under the unyielding New Jersey sun, whose oblique rays set him off to the beach after each shift.
The wind rocked the sea's broad chest, and it sang. Through the crimsoning clouds, a golden light streamed onto the churning waves, as if the dome of a divine temple had opened. Stan wondered, idly, whether his hair would grow frizzy again under that salty wind.
When he finally hit the road, the thunder rumbling and grumbling in the east broke into a storm. White flashes, one after another, covered the forest. For a moment Stan thought that it was as light as day, as if some ill-omened sun had risen over the Pacific Northwest. The trees were burning; a cold and white flame raced along them, and the pines were immersed in this flame up to the middle of their trunks.
Wallace's familiar figure was trudging along the сurb, where the paved highway bit into the forest. He must have walked here by foot, all the way from room 103. Stan slowed as he drew near and shifted the gear to a full stop just before the boy, so as not to catch him by surprise. Still, the rearview mirror reflected how Wallace recoiled and looked around. He reluctantly walked up to the car, slapped the roof with his palm, and maybe even shouted something, but his voice was weak and muffled.
Stan had to lean towards the passenger door and palm the crank, wrestling it around before the glass reluctantly shuddered down. Relief washed over the boy’s face.
“You’ve scared the shit out of me just now, man. That’s some horror movie fuckery, no kidding.” He had to wipe his wet face with his sleeve. “And on this pimp-mobile! What are you, some kinda gangster? No, no, don't answer, don't wantcha be wrapped up as an accomplice in this… bumfuck nowhere shady drug deal.”
“Pim– She’s called Stanmobile, it’s on the plates!”
“Somehow that’s even more fucked up, dude.”
“T’was cool in the 70s, it is cool now. Kids these days have no style.” He said. “What are you waiting for, a kiss on the cheek?”
Wallace hopped in and slammed the door with such a concussive blast that it shook the entire car, making the passenger window tremble in its wake. Stan gripped the steering wheel and, as his mother said, “breathed in and out those words.”
“Show some respect to a lady, will you. She’s an old gal.” `Stan grumbled without heat. He glanced at Wallace out of the corner of his eyes.“Where am I dropping you off?”
Wallace didn't answer right away, too busy drying his head with soaked through sleeves.
“The next bus stop is fine, thanks.”
“In this weather? Well, you do you, I guess. Look out for the station then.”
“On it, cap.” Wallace said. His voice sounded like it came from a well. He slid down the seat, folded his knees on the dashboard, and dropped his head on his raised shoulder.
After a few minutes in a thin silence, Stan cleared his throat a tad harder than was necessary just to get attention, so Wallace sat up straighter, alarmed. Stan waved his hand.
“Something seasonal, huh. I’m planning to wait out the storm at the nearest roadhouse. So if we come across one sooner than the bus stop… I just think we’re both in dire need of a hot meal about three hours ago. They told me not to eat anything-” A deep sigh. “-before. So you too, right? Or whatever. I’ll drop you off at a bus stop, if you want. Whatever. Yeah.”
A sign flew by: they were leaving Portland.
“I think–” Wallace began cautiously in such a small voice it was barely audible through the loud metallic thuds on the car. “I think they delayed all rides anyway. ‘Cause of the weather. You know.”
Stan nodded. He knew.
They were driving through a rain pouring down 84 for quite some time. The storm over Portland seemed to have moved south and Stan found himself in a comforting ambience of a road. As the highway took him closer to home, mile by mile, he loosened his grip on the wheel. The radio humming static between dead stations (Wallace was fidgeting with it) finally caught Northwest Public Broadcasting in a burst of clear signal: “This is a test. This station is conducting a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. This is only a test. The broadcasters of your area in voluntary cooperation with Federal, State and Local-” Wallace mumbled something and, turning off the radio, leaned back in his seat.
After all, it was not a roadhouse. El Diablo’s tires crunched over gravel as he pulled into a parking lot of a seen-better-days diner.
A bell jingled over the door as they came in. For a moment, the diner’s rhythm stuttered. The waiter’s pencil hovered mid-order over her little notebook. Stan rushed Wallace toward a booth by the window.
Truth be told, Stan was not really hungry. He did not want to deal with food at all these days, and still, when a waitress came over, one glance across the table was enough for him to order a full belated breakfast. Wallace fumbled in his pocket for a very long time and asked for a breakfast special with a wolfish yellow grin. When the food was brought, he ate it like a starved man. Maybe he was. Wincing at every bite, he, nonetheless, shoved it into his mouth with quick jerky movements of a frighteningly narrow wrist.
“So, where are you going?” Wallace asked over a second cup of coffee. They did have free refills after all.
“Further east.”
Wallace looked at the untouched waffles and bacon pancakes, which Stan had been picking at for 20 minutes.
“And what’s there? Your home?”
“I live there.”
“And your family?”
“Who's where. Some in Cali, some back in New Jersey.” He pushed his plate away. “It tastes like wet cardboard.”
“You don’t mind, if I?...”
“Be my guest.”
“One man's trash…” Wallace murmured, digging in.
They were silent for a while longer.
“And where are you going?” asked Stan.
“I have a pal in The Dalles. Gonna crash there for a while. We used to go to school together. She’s a nurse now, but-” He wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “I was thinking. I have to find a new job, something over the table for once. With health insurance and everything. You know. The bills are gigantic for all those things. Maybe at a gas station or… And I’ll probably have to move to Portland. They have people there. You see. And equipment, man, did you see their equipment? Some NASA level shit. But.. I don’t-”
He choked.
“I don’t know what to do, man.”
“Yeah.” said Stan. “Me neither.”
“What did they tell you?” Wallace asked suddenly. His watery hazel eyes stared at Stan inquisitively. It suddenly hit Stan, that Wallace looked like a coyote, if it was human.
“I have to come back in a week for some kind of, eh, a sample test? They want to check some cells, whatever that means.”
He knew what it meant, and thought, quite reasonably, that Wallace knew he knew.
“Will you?”
“Huh?”
“Will you come? To Portland. For the test.”
Stan thought for a few seconds about the answer, which he hadn't come to even in the comfortable privacy of his own head. He didn't want to come. He didn't want to drive seven hours to Portland and back any more than he wanted to endure a lighted tube with a camera, as they explained, shoved down his throat. When he was sitting in an uncomfortable chair in an even more uncomfortable sweater – one Stanford Pines would never have worn in public – and listening about “prospects” and “forecasts” and “inconclusive scans” and about how at fifty six he ought to “hope for the best,” his life, as it was now and as it promised to be in the nearest future, appeared to him small and pitiful and, might as well admit it, frankly wasted.
And now, with his boots stuck to the floor of the diner and his hands glued to the table, he suddenly remembered the beach, and the sea air, and palms buried in warm white sand. He rarely thought about it; he tried not to think about it at all. And it felt strange to realize this was already the third time in a span of one day it had come to mind.
“I won’t,” He answered honestly.
He was lying, and he was beginning to suspect it himself.
If it were only his life at stake, he thought once more, it wouldn’t have been this sluggish existence in the godforsaken middle of nowhere. Had he been master of his own life, of his worthless body, he would have spent the last thirty years drifting from town to town somewhere in South America, in Colombia, deep inland or along the blue-blue sea, rocking on a damp and salt-bleached deck, or lying in the cozy warmth of John Doe’s grave like he used to as a child – in a cradle. Maybe, if luck had allowed, pulling seven sorry souls off a waitlist, making and pumping blood, saturating it with oxygen and holding, holding, that blood together in the confine of their bodies. Because that, too, in a way, was a life. And it would have been his choice to make.
“You should.” Said Wallace softly. There was always this wet edge to his voice. Stan knew that one too well since the winter of 1972. “I mean… what are you losing there, exactly?”
“Time.” And because it suddenly became very important for him to be understood, he hastily added. “You see, I’m not getting younger here. And there’s something I have to finish. It’s… You could say it's my life's work. And I have a very tight deadline. Every minute I spend doing something else is a minute I'm just… wasting.”
“I see.” Wallace looked out the window at the parking lot. Outside, it was already dark. “But. But isn’t it better – to have a full picture. To know when, exactly, is this ‘deadline’. You can die any minute now, sure, dino, but… Those people there, they will know for sure. I think they already know and just want to be on the safer side. I don’t know you, man, or your big ol’ life goal, or whatnot. But listen. I’m a total fucking disgrase. My life literally can’t be any worse at this point-”
It could and probably would. Every time Stan thought about himself like that, that's exactly what happened.
“But the more time I have, right? What I’m trying to say is that, if I had a life goal, and my life was coming to an end, I certainly would want to know what I'm working with here. And if I would have spent my whole life on something… I couldn’t call it off now, right? Because. If I did. It would just mean that I haven’t done anything, anything at all, for my entire life. Because that one goal… Maybe I did have only one job, and I failed at it, because I didn’t have enough time, because I didn’t want to have it, or because it was taken from me. Doesn’t matter. From the outside, universe, or god, or some other shit. I would have just failed. Plain and simple. And intentions, they don’t really matter, right? With nothing to back them up… it’s like I haven’t tried at all.”
After a bit of silence he carried on, more cheerfully.
“So. You should come. I want you to come actually. My biopsy is in a week too, I’ll be around. Might even find a roof by that point. And they say, after the procedure, you can’t just dance your way out of the hospital. Someone should pick you up and make sure you won’t crash into a tree or something. And you can’t drive, either. So. I can do it.”
“Crash into a tree?”
Wallace did not so much as blink.
“Sure, that too. But you’ll manage that one all by yourself, old man.”
“Huh-ha. You just want to drive around in my car.”
“Yep. You got me all figured out.” He became suddenly serious. “I mean it. No one should go through it alone.”
Stan didn't know who Wallace was referring to.
At the bus stop flooded with blue light Stan rummaged in the glove box and shoved a few bills into the boy’s hand, everything he had on him minus the cash for the trip back. Wallace shook his head.
“Nah, what is this, some deathbed charity case? Keep your cash, dude.” He said, pushing Stan’s hand away.
“Screw you too.” He grumbled lightly. “Just take it.”
He reluctantly did.
“But you know, what I might do with these bucks.” Said Wallace. “You know what I’ll probably buy with them. I know you've known since the hospital.”
Stan rubbed the back of his neck. There was not enough cash for it, it wouldn’t have been even in the 90s.
“Warm socks, food, some gas, maybe a motel room. Meds. Booze. It’s your choice. I don’t need some guarantees. You need them, they are yours now. Now hurry up, the checkout’s already getting crowded.”
Stan slapped him on the shoulder and had already opened the car, when Wallace called him.
“Your number.” he said. “I don’t have one. For the next week.”
“Huh. Eh. Sure.”
Stan handed him a business card, a stack of which he always had in his side door, and finally drove out of the parking lot. Wallace held it up to his face to read it in the dim light.
“What the fuck is ‘Mystery Shack’?” He asked no one. “What a dude.”
Wallace Bower plunged a hand down the neck of his sweatshirt to hide the card. After waiting a couple of minutes, he lit a cigarette, smoked half of it, and put the remainder back into the crumpled Lucky Strike pack. He stood a while longer, rocking on his heels. Finally, having seemingly waited long enough, he trudged back to the highway and spent a long time hitchhiking, because no long-haul trucks seemed to be coming by, and it was exactly what he needed. So when a Nevada Rolling Shutter semi finally washed over him with its high beams and pulled to a stop, Wallace climbed into the cab beside a lean, mustached man in his late forties.
The man looked him up and down and asked:
“So, what’ve you got?”
And once again that day, luck smiled on Wallace.
In the garden, beneath the apple trees, the sun casts tiger-striped, dappled shadows. Standing on his tiptoes, throwing his sun-pinked arms over his brother's shoulders, he laughs and lifts off the ground. His tennis shoe falls with a soft, damp thud into the grass. He dangles his legs. From here, it seems a tiny white speck of light.
He had never been this high before.
In the Wyoming Mall in Albuquerque, he leans back in his seat and props his feet on the row in front. His shirt sticks to him, and a trickle of cool sweat sends a shiver down his neck. He must have slept through half the movie, but he's seeing it for the second time, so it doesn't really matter. He has the day off. Lately almost every day is a day off — he's being called in to work less and less. He doesn't know what that means, and he tries not to think about it.
He drags his palm over his sweaty face, feeling it go numb. One sip, just to take the edge off. It's only two or three in the afternoon, but he's had a tough morning, okay? He waited until one because he promised himself no drinking before lunch (his mom said their neighbour was an alcoholic for starting right after breakfast).
His McDonald's paper cup holds seven ounces of a fifty-fifty gin and tonic. That's 3.5 ounces, or about 100 grams, of 76-proof alcohol. Today is Friday, the start of a new cycle in his three-day drinking window (he promised to drink only three days a week). No more than four beers or four hundred grams of hard alcohol per day. When he leaves the movie, he'll still have a quota of 300 grams for the evening, just to take the edge off.
He tilts his head back and finds himself on the deck of a ship, gently rocked by the waves. The screen's light falls across his pleasantly numb face, and for a second, it feels like he's back in his brother's arms.
Mr. Pines was acting strangely.
For the second time in two weeks, he closed up the shop early on Thursday (before 3 p.m.! And right in the middle of tourist season, no less), loaded some things into his car, and drove off to the city “on business.” This time, he reluctantly informed Soos and Wendy that they wouldn’t need to come back to work until Monday. He also told them not to call him, not even for the most urgent matters, since he wouldn’t be home.
Wendy was mostly upset about the three lost working days, and with them, about eighteen paid hours. That was a ticket to a local concert, a good winter sweater, or new textbooks for her younger brother she now might not be able to buy. August was coming to an end and quickly at that, and it was the best summer job she had ever had. She wasn’t even sure Stanford Pines really needed a shop assistant. Her duties were limited, reduced mostly to warming a stool behind the register and tending to that peculiar class of tasks she called “things no one’s gotten around to do.” Even at the counter, she mostly worked only when tourists came rushing in after the tour. In the moments of stillness she read, lazily flipping through magazines on particularly sweltering days, or studied inorganic chemistry. She was still bitter about the C she’d been given out of pity that year due to “family circumstances”. Mrs.‘If you don’t study in the summer, you'll fall behind’ Nelson had already begun haunting her dreams.
But summer was fading day by day, into rainy and desolate autumn. Wendy was fourteen, and she already knew: places like this survived season to season. The handful of regulars who wandered in, no matter how loyal, would never be enough to keep the place alive through the long, quiet nine months ahead.
Soos felt both uneasy and somewhat upset by the recent changes. In the nine years he’d worked there, such disruptions were rare and seldom ended well. Three “time off” days for him meant forty hours of Alan Wake, leftover pizza for breakfast and, although he loved his grandma dearly, the yard work he didn’t love at all. What troubled him more was Mr. Pines’ recent state. The man now came down for breakfast later, retired to bed earlier, and his once perfectly fitted suit seemed to billow loosely at the shoulders. Then, on the morning of August 2nd, Soos arrived early to look at the cranky washing machine and found a load of freshly cleaned sheets. He noted this with concern; in all these nine years, Mr. Pines had only ever done his laundry in the evening.
Walking through the woods with Wendy on their way home from work Soos couldn’t help but bring it up. Sharing his concerns (while counting off points on his fingers and punctuating each with “Fact,” just like the detectives did in his grandma’s telenovelas), he finally spread his hands and looked at his colleague intently. She blinked slowly, without breaking stride.
“He is getting older, dude,” said Wendy. “I don’t know him like you do, but it’s just an old man’s quirks to me.”
“He’s not just some old man, Wendy! He’s Mister Mystery!” Exclaimed Soos. “And he is in the prime of his life!”
“Sure.”
“And oh! He was looking through the ledger just before taking off! Don’t you find it suspicious?”
Wendy shrugged and thought for a moment, her eyes darted upwards.
“Maybe it really is a business trip? If something looks like a duck and quacks like a duck…”
“That's right, you never know if it's an ordinary duck or a Ducktective. And his business trips don’t ever end well. Listen, dude. I just know something’s up. He doesn’t even look like himself anymore. He’s so… plain and calm all the time. It’s scary.”
“He does look different.” Wendy nodded vigorously, as if remembering something. “But my grandpa did too, with age. A change of habits, and diet, he even took up exercises in the morning. Something about cholesterol levels and hip joints. It’s normal. And I haven’t seen him smoking for a while. At least that’s a good one!”
“Mr. Pines doesn’t smoke.” Soos objected too quickly and with too much fever.
“Duh. I saw him slip the cigarette into the desk drawer. He was still waving the smoke away when I walked in.”
“Sorry. He asked not to tell you.”
“Yeah, I figured. It’s actually really nice of him. My dad had never bothered about it being a bad influence on us. He is all ‘real man this’ and ‘real man that’.” She shaped her hands into chattering mouths. “But I’m sure Mr. Pines is fine. And since the summer is nearly over, maybe he’s stressing over money.”
“He does do all those side jobs occasionally.” Soos made a ‘huh’ sound and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I’ve never thought about it, but, you know, with Mystery Shack and other staff he actually earns enough to afford more. He can live a little larger, but doesn’t. That’s one more reason why I respect him so much.”
“That you do!” she laughed. “So maybe he really goes on business trips. Maybe he’s meeting up with people to decide where to invest all that money he’s saved. Where did he say he was going?”
“Uh. There was something about ‘port’. I can’t recall.”
“Newport?”
“Yes! That one.”
“It explains why he leaves for three days then, it’s one hell of a trip.” mused Wendy. “And hey, don’t they have lots of amusement parks there? Maybe he wants to open one down here, too?! That would have been so-so cool. I haven’t been in one for ages! It will be such a safety hazard, I already love it!”
“Or he’s planning on opening an aquarium?! With seals and sharks. I love seals.”
“That might work too! We don’t have an aquarium either. And it can be open all-year-round. And he would definitely smuggle in some rare illegal species.”
“Or a waterpark! Then–”
They chatted for a long time as they walked along the dusty road under the shade of sprawling pines, wondering what interesting scheme Stan was brewing, what curiosities he might bring back from the blue-blue waters of Newport. In their imaginations, Stan strolled leisurely along the harbor, met with men and women in smart attire for brunch by the bay, and stole the freshest crabs, laid out on cracked ice, right off the vendors’ stalls. He watched his cholesterol, exercised moderately, and washed his sheets in the morning because that’s when he felt most energized. He was opening an aquarium, an amusement park, an amusement park with an aquarium, a dolphinarium, and even sailed the open sea on a luxurious white yacht bought with the money saved from years of work, petty crimes and modest but adventurous living.
And while they chattered and indulged in the wildest guesses and fantasies, the real Stan of flesh and blood was driving down Highway 84 in his El Diablo. He hardly dreamed of anything.