“Are you in or out?” Gretchen said.
ON NORTH HIGGINS, next to a saloon that had not closed its doors since 1891, was a newsstand and tobacco store that carried pulps and tabloids and magazines of every stripe. A man wearing two-tone shoes and a rain hat and aviator glasses and a loose-fitting tan suit and an open-collar blue shirt with white stripes came through the front door and began looking at the magazines on the rack, flipping through a few pages and replacing the magazine sloppily on the rack when he found nothing of interest in it. Or he simply let it fall to the fl
oor, the pages splaying by his foot, while he reached for another magazine.
Two teenage girls with blond hair that was almost gold had gotten out of his SUV to watch a street guitarist playing on the corner. Then they window-shopped and walked out of the clerk’s line of sight, but the man in the tan suit seemed to pay little attention to them. He had the air of a beachcomber or a quasi-dissolute figure prowling the backstreet dens of an Oriental city in a 1940s film noir. He picked up a copy of Hustler, occasionally wetting a finger as he turned the pages, tilting the magazine sideways to get a better view of the artwork inside.
The clerk was a zit-faced kid whose skinny arms were tattooed from wrist to armpit with images of snakes and skeletal heads and bloody knives. He was sitting on a stool behind the counter, eyeballing the customer in the tan suit, a matchstick flipping up and down between his teeth. “I just started this job. I’d like to keep it,” he said.
“Yeah?” the customer said.
“How about not wrecking the magazine rack?”
“Why do you carry this trash?”
“Because horny old geeks come in here and buy it?”
“I like that new way of talking you kids have. You end every sentence like it’s a question.”
“I don’t think you get it. I’m not the issue.”
The customer went on reading, his eyes crinkling at the corners.
“How about picking up the magazines off the floor, man?” the clerk said.
“You shouldn’t sell this junk.”
“Then why are you looking at it?”
The customer kept reading, never raising his eyes. “What’s your name?”
The clerk hesitated before he spoke. “Seymour Little.”
“That’s perfect.”
The clerk made a snuffing sound down in his nose. “You step in dog shit or something?”
The customer lifted his eyes from the magazine. “Repeat that?”
“There’s a funny smell in the air.”
“You’re saying the funny smell is me?”
“No, I was just wondering.”
“But you were wondering if it was me that smelled like dog shit?”
“No, I lost my job at the motel. I’m just trying to get a fresh start.”
“Yeah, you worked at a fleabag on West Broadway, didn’t you? You got fired because you dragged somebody’s Harley down the street.”
“How’d you know that?”
“You made some ink. You’re a celebrity.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I say you did. But you should take your mind off world events, Seymour. You think you can do that?”