The morning light gave the scene a certain clarity, and the distant sound of traffic running along 11 mile burbled and honked. Down the street a dog barked, and while I am fairly certain it was not directed at Gail, I felt the canine sentiment was apropos. Here, indeed, was a person who simply didn’t belong here.
I stood in my front door and a frosty current of air blew past; the bottom of my bathrobe flapped against my rapidly chilling and slightly damp flesh, goosebumps did the wave across the stadium seating of my upper thighs, and Boba Fett nodded knowingly from my hand as Gail climbed from her Furd Paladin pickup truck, sporting a sardonic grin and a lighted cigarette. My head ached.
I had never seen her outside of the plant and its immediate environs, so the overstuffed down coat that had replaced the usual Carharrt jacket surprised me; its puffy round shape stood in stark contrast to her whip thin legs . In fact, it gave rise to involuntary comparisons with the sorts of small lolly-pops children are always disappointed to find in their candy sacks come holloween.
Puffs of steam wafted out of my gaping maw and up past my flushed cheeks. I hadn’t yet absorbed the unsettling presence of Boba Fett’s corrugated paper face into my throbbing brain, and now Gail Sayer, stopping to stand at my front stoop, had been added to the mix of crap I really didn’t have the means to assimilate. Her thin, cracked lips pursed around her current cancer stick and she took a fast drag.
One of her eyes seemed to wander up and down the length of my robed form before steadying on my blue cookie monster slippers. The other eye, just as yellow and just as sunken beneath her skeletal brow, briefly took in Boba Fett and then met my dumbfounded stare. I cleared my throat as she tapped her ashes into the shrubs framing my front stoop.
“I want to see it,” she said, and punctuated her statement with another pull on the cigarette.
“Y-you want to see what?” I have never been a good liar, and this occasion was no exception. I found that I could not maintain eye contact in the lead up to that subterfuge, instead looking down to her legs; as ashes drifted past my line of sight I noted that her limbs were soo thin that the balls of her knees represented the two widest points below her waist.
“Right,” she said, and I looked up to see Gail’s grin renewed, exposing her discolored mouthful of teeth. Flesh, unaccustomed to smiling, parted to make hideous lines around her eyes and mouth, her pale skin creasing and cracking like the desert after a storm. She held the nearly spent cigarette in front of her face and contemplated its lit end. After two or three seconds her smile faded somewhat.
“You made pretty good time at the ‘lab,’ huh?”
“The lab?”
Still looking at the stump of her cig, the corner of her mouth now drew back into a triumphant sneer. Oh, crap, I thought, was I supposed to have gone to a lab for some reason? I couldn’t remember.
Flicking the butt into the bushes with those gray fingernails of hers, she nodded once, saying “thought so,” and pushed me backwards into my house. I almost let go of my laminated bounty hunter’s head but, by grabbing at it hurriedly, I held on to Boba despite being jostled by the artificially puffy form of my jacketed, nicotine-junky visitor; she shoved past me into the living room of my humble bungalow. She stood there for a moment, her head wiggling like a bobble-head dashboard virgin Mary as she quickly cast about the room.
”So where is it?” She strode toward the hallway, unzipping her jacket and throwing it onto my aged recliner where it landed with a puff of cigarette ash; ashes settled into the fibers of the chair and smothered millions of dust mites who suddenly found themselves in their own Laz-E-Boy Pompeii.
In so doing she had revealed herself to be wearing a tank-top beneath the pillowy coat; before this day I’d never actually seen Gail outside of her Furd factory uniform. Therefore this was my first glimpse of her boney, sporadically pimpled shoulders and back. With those blades she could fight a ninja backwards, and now she was halfway into the kitchen–by my calculations that’s two thirds of the way to the basement stairs. Chuck’s hiding place. I followed hastily after her.
“Really, Gail, I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I’m really sorry but I’m busy as hell, so…”
“Fuck, yes!” She had stopped suddenly, one step into the kitchen, with a fist in her mouth and a hand on her heart, and gazed toward the back stair. Both the expletive and the shuddering halt took me by surprise and I nearly stumbled into her, instead slipping on the tiles and falling halfway to the floor, catching myself on the counter and barking my elbow painfully. Boba Fett fell to the floor, the ache in my head flared up to a nice new intensity and I felt slightly nauseous.
A whip thin arm, lined with a series of nicotine patches, snaked under my armpit and helped me to my feet. I hastily rearranged my partially open bathrobe and turned to see Gail and what she had been looking at. On the floor in front of her was the sticky red shirt I’d taken off on my way to the shower but beyond that, of course, was the coffee pot which still stood exactly where I left it.
“Joe, quit messing around. You’re such a weasel, I can’t believe you came up with this on your own.”
“Wha-,” I looked from her to the electric coffee urn and began to get an inkling of what she was going on about.
“What are you waiting for? Make me some,” she confirmed my suspicions.
Her good eye smoldered with an intensity which made me feel far more naked than my breezy terry cloth robe ever could, and her lazy eye appeared to look steadily at my crotch. I had the urge to try to hide behind something, or cover myself with the paper towels hanging from the roll under the cabinet. She put one hand on her hips so suddenly that her finger bones cracked and she cocked her head to the side; the intense expression had a hysterical edge to it and her eyes widened to the point that I saw the yellows of her eye completely surrounding her quivering pupil.
“I helped you get this thing home, Joe. You will share it with me.” Ah, so to her this was all about the commercial sized, electric coffee pot I’d ‘borrowed’ from the millwrights union. The tension in my back which had built up since Gail arrived began to lessen, and I suddenly felt even more tired than I had prior to her arrival. Paradoxically, the headache intensified yet again. Screaming agony beat against the inside of my skull and pushed at the back of my eyeballs; I needed sleep.
“Gail, I know you think I-” she stopped my current attempt to dissemble with a single horny index finger to my lips. I smelled the tobacco reserves she’d effectively stored under the cracked fingernails and my nostrils flared involuntarily. Her other hand pointed to the electric pot on the floor.
“You know, Joe, I’m not all that interested in talking.” I lowered my head in defeat and found myself looking straight into the heart of the twisted forest of tattoos which precisely defined the points on her arm where the nicotine patches were affixed. The dancing, climbing teddy bears and helmeted men on ATVs caromed up the leathery length of the arm, cavorting among the thorns and vines outlining the patches; as they approached the undiscovered country of her recently exposed shoulder they were shown to be in mortal conflict. Wrecked ATVs at the summit of her clavicle lay next to their teddy-bear mauled drivers and at least one bear had wrested control of a four-wheeler and had run its previous occupant over. Gail spoke again.
“Earth to fucking Joe!” she said urgently, “If I don’t see some coffee brewing soon I might get bored and accidentally call work with a little tip to the Millwrights Local 68.”
“No, no, I’m going,” I said, stepping away from Gail and picking up the coffee pot, kicking my sticky shirt under the kitchen table with my fuzzy blue Cookie Monsters. Hastily moving to comply with her demands, my mind raced trying to think of what I could do. On the bright side, as long as she was fixated on the pot, she would probably never know about poor Chuck, currently oozing his sweet goo into the floor drain behind my furnace. I carried the pot to the sink and quickly began cleaning it by hand. Gail voiced no concern, and as I squeezed dish soap onto the steel surface I glanced over my shoulder to see that Gail was no longer directly paying attention to me.
Instead, she had carefully removed the topmost patch on her arm, directly atop the ball of her shoulder. The flesh beneath the patch was bright pink, soft and almost raw looking compared to the dusty leather color of the rest of her skin. I wondered how long it had been since it had spent any appreciable time without cover. Crumpling the old patch into a ball, she nonchalantly pitched it into the corner of the kitchen next to the back steps and produced a new patch from her pants pocket. It was but a second before the new patch was lovingly patted into place amongst the warring parties on her extreme upper arm and at that point she noticed my scrutiny. She smiled bitterly.
“Get a good look, you fuck. You have no idea, you won’t never have one, and you still aren’t brewing us some coffee!”
I turned back to the running water in the sink and quickly rinsed the bottom portion of the coffee service, setting it next to the sink while giving the lid a cursory bath of scalding hot water. I heard the snick of a butane lighter and spared a quick look to see that, yes, Gail had lit another cigarette. But, more disturbingly, she was staring hard at me with one eye while the other darted around the shiny, clean union-issue electric coffee pot standing next to me. Shaken a bit, I turned back to my work, toweling off the stainless steel with a paper towel. The awkwardness of the situation combined with the fiery pain in my head and I struggled to contain the shaking in my hands.
I dug through a cabinet and withdrew my coffee grinder and then fished my bag of java beans from beneath the counter. Nervously going through the motions of grinding enough coffee to do the pot justice, I occasionally peeked at Gail. She seemed to be studying my every move, and I felt vulnerable and embarassed. As I filled the filter basket with the ground-up beans, I even spotted her holding her burning cigarette several inches away from her mouth, razor thin lips parted slightly and leaning against the kitchen table, her free hand stroking her neck as she breathed deeply.
I felt as if I were performing some elaborate strip tease, and cold sweat began beading on my brow. Having filled the cistern with water, I finally plugged the enormous coffee making machine into the wall next to the sink.
“Jesus, its so big,” Gail now sounded almost dreamy, “You could please a dozen people at once with that damn thing.” She unselfconsciously brushed her free hand down her stomach and across one bone-thin, denim encapsulated thigh. Slowly, she licked her lips
