A Coincidental Encounter Between Two Pleasant People

I

A man is driving to Portland. The view on his left, blurred by the rain and the fruitless struggling of his windshield wipers, is consumed by bulbous mountains that tumble towards the sky. Wreathes of fog like cotton wind through an ocean of pines. The road ahead declines and curves around the mountain before being consumed by forest. On the right, a muddy shore that ends too soon into a yawning gorge, the river wide and flat.  Across the river there are more mountains held at bay by the water, and a railway, and another highway counterpart to his own with cars like ants. There are buildings ahead, nestled uncomfortably between the twisting highway and the gorge. Behind them sulks the wide behemoth of a dam, its wet concrete a shade darker than usual under the pooling sky. A tugboat drifts sluggishly downstream.

The man flicks on his blinkers and careens into the right lane. He takes the exits towards the buildings and the dam, onto a ramp and then a busy road filled with travelers like himself. He idles behind a burnt-orange station wagon with a COEXIST bumper sticker and a back window clogged with suitcases. He looks over to his right, and there’s a McDonald’s and its promise of grease and screaming children and comfort food. He looks a long time. It has a pleasant, tiled patio for eating under brown-patterned umbrellas, and a gurgling fountain, and a few potted flowers loitering outside the windows. On the right side of the building there is a massive glass room enclosing a jumbled playpen in bright colors, like a tumor built from Legos. When he finally moves, the lights are reflecting green in his eyes and the van behind him is laying on the horn. He drives straight and turns left, down a ramp, under the highway, and that is where he pulls to the side and parks his car.

He leaves it idling under the overpass, gasoline dripping and mixing with filthy rainwater over asphalt, the constant rumbling of cars overhead, the click click click click of his hazard lights as they beat in rhythmic orange. The car door opens. Avoiding a puddle just under the lip of the open door, he steps out and walks to the back. He leans against the trunk and focuses on his breathing and takes in the scenery. Beyond the dark tunnel on either side is muffled sunlight, the world gray and rainy, and then a shock of green foliage. Rain batters down leaves and pools and drips from the mossy branches that creep towards the road, tracing and enveloping the pavement. The canopy seems intent on devouring the sky. One of the man’s hands dives into the right pocket of his wrinkled dress pants and surfaces with a crumpled pack of cigarettes. He lifts one to his lips but doesn’t light it. He works it between his gums in the space where he doesn’t have any teeth.

Farther away, over the top of the trees, there is a scarcely visible curve of bright yellow: the golden arches of a neon “M.”

The man kneads the cigarette with his gums. His mind moves to the interior of the car, and then to the glove box, listing its contents in his mind. There’s a pair of green rubber gloves still wrapped in plastic. There’s a packet of gum. There’s a hatchet. There’s a sandwich bag filled with teeth. At the very bottom of the glove box is a gun.

He breathes in the rain-chilled air and breathes out condensation. He debates himself. He could decide not to – another time, another place. Or maybe this is the place. Yes. Has to be. This is the time. He returns to the waiting door of his car and his arms tremble so violently that it’s hard to open the glove box. The car makes a U-turn over the yellow line and swerves back around in the direction of the McDonald’s.

II

Mrs. Curtice sits in a rocking chair and listens to the rain tap at the roof of her one-story house, her hands fumbling over a half-formed quilt with a needle. She loves the way it makes her feel, the way it conforms to the stereotype. The rocking chair doesn’t move because she’s placed books underneath the base: a thesaurus, a Spanish-to-English dictionary, a cheap romance, and a Harry Potter book (she doesn’t know which.) She’s busy undoing the quilt. At eighty-three years old, she has never learned how to knit, so she spends her time tearing the frayed fabric to pieces, undoing the stitching piece by piece. Sometimes she’ll hook some thread through her needle and poke it through the fabric until she’s made a meandering line down the quilt, and then she’ll go back through and tear it out so she can start all over again. Her fingers are no good for knitting. They shake when she gets excited.

Her fingers are shaking now, as she waits for the guest. Daffodil House Bed and Breakfast. That’s the name, although Mrs. Curtice doesn’t know a daffodil from a dandelion. She paid a boy $20 to make her a Facebook page, and her address is in the phone book alongside all the other bed-and-breakfasts, cordoned off from the corporate hotels by a solid ink line. How very genuine it all feels. She doesn’t get too many guests, but when she does, she gets excited.

Her fingers slip. She jabs the needle into her thumb. Thick blood wells out.

"Oh dear," she says.

She stands up abruptly and stalks to the door. She walks with her legs wide and unbent, like a spider in dusty wrappings. It hurts her knees less if she doesn’t bend them. She’s waiting for a man. He wouldn’t say where he was from except that he had a long drive and wanted to stop in Portland for the night before he continued his journey. He had a quiet voice on the phone. Very well-mannered. Mrs. Curtice uses a gnarled hand to peel a gap in the blinds. She looks out onto the street. The quiet-voiced man isn’t expected to arrive for another two hours, but she looks anyway. Just in case.

Her lawn is short and bare, the path leading from her front door to her sidewalk cracked and molding. A plastic square hanging from a thin metal wire like a realty sign advertises her business. It’s not a large house that she lives in, and it’s not pretty, and it’s not comfortable. It’s an O.K. neighborhood. No – she hates it, if she’s honest with herself. But it’s cheap, and she’s in too deep to change locations now.

She imagines the man parked in front of her house now, stepping from his car, holding a slim suitcase over his face to protect against the downpour. The imaginary man glances from the sign to the low brick house with the dead flowers by the path, considering the place. He might shrug a little, then tell himself: it’s only for one night. Moths seek out lights thick with webs.

Mrs. Curtice pulls up the blinds and slinks into the kitchen. She’s got tea going – a moldy radish she’s been boiling in a pot of water for half an hour. It came from her neighbor’s compost pile but it’s only just begun to stink. Soon she’ll throw it in the garbage and mix the flavored water with some of the pills in her medicine cabinet and serve it to her guest as tea. Sometimes they drink all of it, just to be polite. She shuts off the kitchen light and walks to the closet. Inside, beneath the old coats and cobwebs, is a stained cardboard box filled with perfect, rattling bones. She pulls one out – a finger bone, maybe? – and strokes it. She always does this before a guest arrives. It brings her good luck.

III

The man’s name is Hugh Pope. Mrs. Curtice has had plenty of time to study him. He’s heavy-set with thick lips and moist eyes and excessively hairy arms. Hunched over his own lap, blinking dumbly, with his fingers wriggling and sampling the air like antenna, he resembles some sort of insect. He has not risked more than a polite sip of his tea. Now he is staring at the still-brimming cup. His eyes follow the almost imperceptible wisps of steam that coil from its surface. Perhaps he is tired. It’s still raining, and now darkness is drifting in. The day is evaporating without fanfare. Any hope of a pleasing sunset has already been smothered by clouds.

“We’re just down the block from a nice restaurant,” says Mrs. Curtice, pretending to knit.

Her show has no audience; the man is clearly not interested. His eyes don’t leave the table.

“Also,” she says, “There is a park nearby if you would like to go for a walk. My grandson is very fond of the swing-set there.”

She doesn’t have a grandson. The man looks up, rotates a little in the sofa so that he can look out at the rain falling clear under the streetlights, at the night pooling in the corners and in the alley between the houses opposite. He looks back at the old woman, gives her a faintly curious expression, and then his attention is gone again. She sips her tea.

“Mr. Pope,” she says, and she pronounces his name very clearly so that their eyes meet in the space after the last syllable. “What do you do for a living?”

Hugh Pope stares at the wallpaper behind his body and flits his tongue through the gap in his teeth. His cheek bulges.

“McDonald’s,” he says.

“Oh. My. Are you in the role of manager?”

She can see a saliva bubble form as air slips out from between his lips. She has always prided herself on her eyesight. To notice such small details, even in old age, is a gift. In fact, she had noticed the flecks of red on the man’s wrists when they first shook hands. It looked like dried barbecue sauce.

“Yes,” answers the man finally. “I am a manager. It’s a very nice job. Do you have a television?”

“I don’t.”

“You don’t watch the news?”

“Every week or so I might turn on the radio for a little while as I knit. But I don’t like the news. Everything is so dreadful these days. I try not to listen to it.”

“That’s good,” he says. “That’s really good.”

Mrs. Curtice is silent; both of them are silent, for a long while. At last, she stands up and sets her knitting on the chair.

“Would you like some apple pie? It’s warm, just from the oven,” she says, and her yellowed smile splits her face into two clear halves.

Mr. Pope starts to wave her off and then seems to think better of it.

“Ok. I could do with some of that apple pie. I skipped lunch,” he says.

She stalks into the kitchen. Her smile evaporates. She pulls an expired, store-bought apple pie out of the fridge and sets it on the counter. Then she reaches into the cabinet above the stove and, almost reverently, retrieves a bottle of clear liquid. The faint scent of bitter almonds twists through the room.

IV

Hugh leaves through the front door the moment Mrs. Curtice disappears into the light of the kitchen. The tea was garbage. Horrible. Seemed spiked with something. His heart is pounding a little too fast against his ribs. Anticipation. He turns on the light in his car and crawls into the passenger’s seat. The night is black and viscous at the windows. At a distant street corner, an orange-ish streetlight flickers unconvincingly. Hugh pushes through the other objects in the glove box and pulls out the gun, which he immediately shoves into the pocket of his pants. It’s cold and reassuring against his thigh, heavy with purpose. He then grabs the hatchet, which won’t fit into his pocket, and tests its weight in his hands.

There’s no need to do this, really, but a need is nothing next to an urge, and he’s hanging onto the tail-end of an urge that found its outlet around the back of a McDonald’s that’s probably been cordoned off by crime scene tape. It’s like being a kid stealing candy at Christmas. You promise yourself: just this one piece. And then you peel the crinkling wrapper off and plunge the chocolate into your mouth and immediately that voice crops in your head, asking: Why stop at one? Why not two, or three, or four? This has been coming for a long time. He didn’t just stumble into it – the tension simply burst. He had been playing it slow. Too tentative, here and there, don’t get caught. Cowardly. Now his teeth are deep in the meat and he is ravenous. This, he decides, will be the start of his spree. He’ll be in newspapers for this.

He licks his lips and kicks out into the night, back towards the glow of the Daffodil House Bed and Breakfast. It will be best if he can do it without a gunshot. Before dinner. Or possibly after. He swings the hatchet merrily between his hands.

In the house, the woman is nowhere to be seen. The living room is golden in the light of antique lamps, and the coffee table is now topped with a warm-looking pie. There are two sky-blue porcelain plates, one for each of them, and his tea has been filled back up to the top. It almost looks good. At the perimeter of the room, he takes a moment just to think, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Left foot, right foot. Perhaps he’ll humor her. He can do the job after she goes to bed. Less struggling that way. Left foot, right foot, left foot, right. Or maybe he’ll just split her skull while she’s still eating. Who knows? Hugh cracks something resembling a human grin and crosses the room and sits down on the sofa with the hatchet behind his back. He pushes it into the space between the cushions with his fingers, then rearranges his hands in his lap and tries to surround himself in an air of casual disinterest. A minute or two passes before the old woman staggers out of the kitchen in a queer stride and lowers herself into the rocking chair across from him.

“Looks good. Looks really good,” he says. He grins again.

She returns every inch of his smile and then some. Her fingers are trembling. Arthritis, probably.

“I know you’ll enjoy it,” she says. “Please, dig in.”

Hugh winks cheerfully and picks up his fork, and in his head he can already imagine what color her blood will be. He frees a hefty slice from the pie and sets it on his plate. There's a sort of bitter, nutty scent to it, just under the cloying sweetness of the apple. He can feel the hatchet pressing hard into the small of his back. He looks up to the old woman, judging the distance between them. Their eyes meet, and he nods.

“Don’t mind if I do.”