Marilyn’s

The Heavenly Choir took a break from rehearsal and went out behind Marilyn’s Cafe to sit at the picnic tables under the willow trees. Pete Gilliam was a baritone even when he sat down, weighted heavy toward the bottom and letting out great grunty puffs of air as his butt hit the bench. He looked around for a hot dog, as though it should appear from somewhere. When it didn’t, he grabbed a pawful of potato chips. Millie Hardesty offered him a can of Hi-C. It was an old joke.

Marilyn operated the perfect truckstop cafe, the kind that all but disappeared after the high-powered truck depots opened at the Interstate ramps. She served up mostly simple American fare, though not entirely, and the tables were Formica-topped with metal edges. Grace, the waitress, poured coffee like she was delivering a sacrament. The Cafe sat back fifty feet off the dragstrip hunk of Business I-44, two lanes in each direction, separated by a dust and crabgrass median, all of it straight as a string and going nowhere in particular.

Marilyn was five-feet-five and tough as nails, but Grace was tougher. She lifted up a trucker once and threw him out the door onto the gravel. The funny thing was that the incident had embarrassed Grace. She apologized to Marilyn about ten times and promised never to do such a thing again, though everyone present agreed it had been justified.

Grace was also terrific with children because she watched what they were doing and made comments to their parents: “That girl will really be a thinker, I’ve never seen a child think like that,” or “Looks like he doesn’t like the booster seat, let me get him a phone book, some kids won’t put up with anything but a phone book.” She was the best worker the cafe had ever had and the longest-running, but something about her confused Marilyn.

Pete Gilliam had piles, which didn’t help a man with his shape sitting on a wooden bench. He shifted and looked around periodically for the hot dog. Potato chips by themselves gave him gas and gas gave him the farts, which aggravated his plies. It was a vicious cycle that developed because he wouldn’t ask people for things like hot dogs. Pete, despite his size and voice, was as shy as a young mouse. Millie, the lead soprano, had no idea he was in love with her.

The Heavenly Choir did not often sing in churches, but at town bandstands in summer and at school auditoriums in winter or wherever they might be hired to go. Now they were setting up for three dates. The main one would be Bach’s B Minor Mass for the Summer Religious Arts Festival at the opera house in Ascension on the third Sunday in June. But before that came the opening of a Julio’s in Nellway, down the highway, and, later, Ordwell Old Times Day.

Julio’s was a chain of Mexican restaurants that served metal trays full of gelatinous brown stuff that pulled away from the sides when it was thawed and warmed. No matter what you ordered, it looked and tasted the same, so everyone ordered a large pop to drown the flavor. Julio’s outlets had a consistent bell-shaped sales curve. The franchiser had it figured to a fare-thee-well. He would warn the local owner when he was about a third of the way down the right-hand slope and they’d close the place and move on to some other innocent town.

Pete drank the Hi-C slowly, as a tribute to Millie. He would have liked to bolt it, because he hated Hi-C, but he cupped it like a rare wine. He also wanted badly to get up from the table, but Millie was opposite him and it might seem disrespectful, as well as removing from his sight the Beatific Vision. Millie was a pleasant-faced woman of 29 with premature laugh wrinkles at the corners of her eyes that might make a man like Pete believe that goodness lay within reach.

Dr. Medley, the choirmaster, strolled back and forth under the willows. His doctorate was of obscure origin, possibly mail-order, though more likely from a minor liberal arts college scraping out existence in some clapboarded town by offering accelerated degrees. Presumably, it was in musicology, for that was his passion, though he earned his living as Habernine County assessor. He loved the Heavenly Choir like a dog loves a rawhide chew, and it was an act of restraint that he did not devour it whole. As it was, he took it in his teeth and ragged it until its constituent parts, the singers, threatened to pull apart. But somehow they never did, maybe because they were friends with other interests to discuss, maybe because Pete and Millie were the star soloists, and as long as Millie stayed, so, of course, would Pete.

Marilyn’s cook, Jasper Jensen, opened the back door, waved and dumped some garbage into the covered can. Marilyn had set the picnic tables far enough from the door and upwind so the garbage smell never bothered the people sitting at them.

Pete finally had to get up, and he hadn’t eaten enough. You don’t want to pack your stomach during a singing rehearsal, but you need to fuel the engine that will produce music for the next two and a half hours of Dr. Medley’s mule-skinner drive. Mal Petry, fortunately, waved a wiener at Pete, who accepted with the sort of grunt that meant “Thank you, much ‘bliged.” He turned away from where Millie might be looking so she wouldn’t see the way he wolfed it down, his knotted, almost terrified stomach always asking to be quieted with food.

A truck pulled up in the gravel lot. It had a word on its side partially painted over, but you could make out “ola” at the end. It was an old panel truck, from before the breed had metamorphosed into “vans.” The driver opened the door, staggered out and fell flat. Pete was looking that way and saw the blood, the back of the guy’s shirt soaked like red paint. Pete dropped the tiny end of his hot dog.

Dr. Medley, turning in his perambulations, also saw the dead man—for that’s what he turned out to be when they got to him—and his mouth formed the liquid circle he made to illustrate open tone. It was clear to Pete that the man had been shot clean through, for leaning in the open door he could see the blood-soaked hole in the back of the seat. It seemed inconceivable that anyone could have driven in that condition, pulled to a neat halt in a restaurant parking lot, then stepped out of his truck and died. He must have been shot as he sat, Pete saw, close range, because the windshield was not shattered.

The Heavenly Choir formed a semicircle around the corpse and said those inarticulate half sentences people seem destined to loose in uncharted circumstances. Pete said nothing. The red of all that blood, the liquid shirt that the man wore as though he might be trying out for a fish, reflected the calm sunlight in little glints when Pete shifted his feet. It was an image a baritone with piles might never expect to encounter in real life, and it made him wonder, but he could not have said what it made him wonder about.

Millie stood at his elbow, seeming smaller and more vulnerable than usual, and she asked, “Where did he come from?” It was a sensible question, though it had nothing to do with the fact of the moment. Pete nodded, then nodded again. Unlike the hot dog Pete had been looking for earlier, this man had suddenly appeared, though no one had requested or expected him.

Simpy Terlane, an alto, ran in to get Marilyn, who bustled out like there was a problem with dessert. She looked down at the man, then stomped back in and called the state police. Two more trucks had pulled in, and the drivers made it closer to a full circle. The blood was drying, turning dull. The flies that couldn’t get into the garbage can had made their table on the man’s back.

Dr. Medley coughed into his hand and announced that it was time to go back to rehearsal at the Elks Lodge, two doors down. He suppressed the urge to sing, to release the Credo from Verdi’s Requiem. It was almost as hard to hold this in as to keep from destroying the Heavenly Choir through his transcendent need.

Millie touched Pete’s elbow, her middle fingers resting on the knob of bone. Pete felt a single tear roll down his nose.

*****

After rehearsal, Millie and Pete started home together, as they always did, because their route ran together for the first three blocks. After that, Millie turned off to the left, then Pete went two more blocks and to the right, onto Main Street. He wished many a time he could have turned left.

“Tomorrow I have a very strange case,” said Millie. “I have to go down to Ordwell and meet a man who has been released from a mental institution out-of-state, and I have to take him to his uncle, who’s a farmer by Wanita. I don’t think, from the records, they’ve ever met. It’s peculiar they would send someone who needs to recover to a man he hardly knows.”

“Parents?”

“It doesn’t say. It’s very sketchy. If they’re alive, certainly you would think...”

They had reached the corner where Millie would turn. Pete stopped and stood, as always, like a tree. His love for Millie was his leaves, which rustled, but no one would see anything but trunk. His roots grew under her, and his branches protected her, but she could be standing on an open plain for all she knew. “Night,” he said, and when he turned away it was like a great wind blowing him from his rightful place.