by Paul Johnson
The excerpt below is reprinted posthumously with the permission of the author’s publisher, The Wessex Collective. Presales of the late author’s last book, City of Kings, will go toward the cost of the initial printing. Contact TWC about pre-purchasing their latest title.
[chapter one]
Time: 4:27 p.m. EST, Wednesday, March 16, 1988.
Place: a wind-scoured frozen hilltop under a tarnished pewter sky, almost exactly dead center in Ellicott Township in the southeast corner of Chautauqua County, which lies at the westernmost tip of New York State, over where the boundaries blur between Northeast and Midwest.
If the weather had been clear, and if darkness at that time of year hadn’t been already nearly total, legions of similar gaunt hills, all white-streaked dun and burnt ocher, could have been seen sweeping out for thirty miles in most directions. Toward the southwest, there would have been silvery glimpses of a long, narrow lake, Chautauqua by name. However, the sun already did shine in this locality for two whole hours as recently as the morning of March 10th and wasn’t due to show its naked face again until March 19th, so all that could be seen at the moment was an unremarkable glass and concrete structure of no great size, surrounded by long broad strips of asphalt from which all snow and ice had recently been scraped.
Also visible, but only when the wind momentarily stopped recycling the previous night’s powdery snowfall, two much larger, barn-like buildings stood farther out in the bellowing gloom. A faint but subtly growing hum in the sky provided further evidence that this was a small commercial airport. That hum soon became a roar, and a blue and white twin-engine Cessna appeared overhead. It half-circled the hilltop, landed noisily out of sight, and eventually taxied to within fifty yards of the nearest building.
Steps were pushed into place, the passenger door opened, and four people descended unsteadily, three of them hugging themselves to keep the wind from ripping their unbuttoned overcoats off their backs. This trio trotted quickly away in the direction of the car lot, while the fourth traveller shuffled uncertainly across the tarmac, lugging a much-patched orange canvas rucksack, an even more beat-up dufflebag, and an over-sized cowhide briefcase freshly mended with yellow electricians’ tape.
His name was Carl Larson and he was tall, blond, and bony, with slate-blue eyes behind big gold-framed bifocals on a long sun-leathered face above a full but scissored-short beard. His age could have been anywhere between a hard-bitten forty and a well-preserved sixty; it was actually fifty-three. His height was four inches beyond six feet, but that was also difficult to tell, hunched over as he now was. His feet, in drooping gray socks and scuffed black leather running shoes, were size thirteen and looked it. His ungloved hands were commensurately large but well-shaped, and if examined very closely, would have revealed traces of several different colors of both latex and oil-based paints. The insides of the last joints of index and middle fingers on both hands were stained orange-brown by tobacco. Dog-eared Bandaids covered a scraped knuckle and a torn cuticle. He wore rumpled chinos, a frayed pink button-down oxford shirt, a cheap yellow cable-stitched cotton sweater, and a fiber-filled, navy-blue, made-in-Hong-Kong parka which, like the sweater, was plenty roomy in the body but scarcely long enough in the sleeves. The over-sized hood blew off his head before he reached the tarmac, and he didn’t bother to replace it. By local standards, he was long overdue for a haircut.
Finally reaching the glass door, Carl pushed it inward with his knee and the dufflebag at the precise moment that a final malicious gust deposited its payload of ice crystals deep inside his shirt collar, causing his head to retract between his already hunched shoulders like a spooked turtle’s. He entered awkwardly, shivering and cursing under his breath, oblivious to the spectacle he presented. He crossed that threshold still gripped by the irritating fact that he hadn’t wanted to fly here. He’d tried it once, three decades earlier, at the end of a four-day drunk, poured aboard at LaGuardia by companions in his cups and waking eventually in Cleveland, inclement weather having precluded all prior scheduled landings. But the bus, as he’d learned yesterday, took sixteen hours including a layover in Buffalo, and Amtrak would only get him as close as Dunkirk, missing the once-a-day Trailways connection by eighty minutes.
The airport lounge Carl found himself in was so tiny it seemed more like a Little-Theater set than the real thing, but it was real enough, so the first rule concerning airport lounges still applied: nowhere else compares for inducing intense cogitation at a furious rate on a dozen subjects at once. One subject Carl wasn’t thinking about at the moment, though, was why he’d come here now. He didn’t want to deal with that until he had to—it was hard enough just being back here again.
But he couldn’t avoid the acute attack of Rip-van-Winkle-ism that had set in just before landing, as soon as he’d glanced beyond the dipping wing and seen those uniquely bleak contours swooping up at him. Nor could he avoid the depressing catalog it provoked, of all the afflictions that hadn’t yet befallen him when he was last here: recurrent problems with his vision and hearing, thinning hair already advanced to the point of a quarter-sized bald spot on the back of his head where he could only see it with a pair of mirrors, and those liver spots and bulging blue veins on the backs of his hands. Not to mention the network of wrinkles at the back of his neck that felt just the way his grandfather’s had looked, or the scaly, itchy stretches of skin that came and went mysteriously in all sorts of places and were probably the onset of psoriasis, or the dull ache two-thirds of the way down his spine—all the recent ladder work made that worse than usual, but it never went away entirely anymore. Or the scorching need to take a leak twenty times a day, not every day perhaps, but this seemed to be one of them…finally, he spotted the door marked MEN, and lunged toward it.
He dropped his luggage on the tiled floor. He’d spent much of his life in the Third World and the past three weeks in New York City, so this snug white facility dazzled him with its cleanliness. He poked his pelvis into the nearer urinal for a briefly urgent spurt—¿Nada mas? ¿Que jodido? He’d first heard those plaintive queries a quarter-century ago, as he stood at the end of a row of men all pissing into an open sewer behind a bar in Veracruz, but he could still see the bewildered face of the drunk who’d whined those words, wagging his verga to no effect while his buddies chortled, “Too much trago, amigo—corrodes your plumbing!”
That was part of Carl’s problem now, he was sure. Meanwhile, the list of afflictions spooled on in his mind, until he reached the question of whether he’d become a certifiable post-sexual, having gone fourteen months so far without getting laid. There had certainly been other lengthy dry spells, but never that long, not since he’d first lost his innocence in this highly unlikely part of the world. He had to stop and do the arithmetic: just two months shy of thirty-five years ago. —O, O, Olivia, he keened inwardly, where O where and what O what might you be now?
He managed to rinse his hands and splash some water on his face without glancing even once at himself in the wrap-around mirror. Then he spun around, finally blotting himself with his sweater sleeves while cursing the inventor of hot-air blowers. Ah, where were the paper towel dispensers of yesteryear, the linen rolls of his distant youth?
While he was at it, he sluiced his glasses under the faucet, then yanked enough of his shirttail through his fly to wipe them. This helped dramatically when he returned to the lobby. He could now see what those foot-high letters spelled out across the room. Shouldering his pack and briefcase but dragging the duffle this time, Carl steered a course toward
A L L E G H E N Y
Void Magazine 