Brubaker looked at the thirty-buck watch his dad gave him a few years ago. The bank should be opening the doors any minute now. He stuffed the damp paper back into a garbage bin and got on the bike to go up the hill to his branch. Stepping out of the door this morning, the first thing to assail him was a smell like burning electrical components. He checked the cars, then inside and behind the garage. He couldn’t locate the source. It must obviously be somewhere upwind, but other than that, who knew? Finally giving up, he mounted the bike and headed uptown.
After a short time, one forgot about it, or got used to it.
Standing in the lineup, in front of him were individuals he recognized from countless end of the month cheque-cashing trips. At the head of the line, there stood a mentally-retarded man. Next it was the guy with no upper lip. Or maybe it was more like an unusually long nose. It came down the upper lip about a half inch more than was normal. Then it was the blind guy; along with his adult son. This individual was a slight bearded man, brown hair falling over his eyes. The son was as much a dependent as a caregiver. The younger man remained outside of the silken ropes of the actual lineup; but came up to proffer his dad a cup of coffee from the courtesy urn by the window.
One guy at the counter was paying every bill he ever had in his life.
All just routine, for Brubaker.
Nothing surprised him. When another customer came in the door, and said, ‘Hi, Davy,’ to the retarded man at the head of the line, it was really a kind of déjà vu.
“I’ve been here before…”
Charles felt like a fly stuck in Vaseline, sometimes.
Yes, I’ve been here before. Many, many times.
A voice in his head said; “Fight for them.”
Fight for them, Brubaker.
It was an interminable wait. He studied everything that came into his sight; for Brubaker had a curious streak in him; and loved his fellow man more than he let on sometimes. Finally, he got his turn.
The teller, a girl named Mindy, was sniffling as she put away the papers from the previous transaction. She closed the drawer, the same drawer she would open again in thirty seconds or so.
“Do you suffer from hay fever?” he asked rather diffidently, as he was pretty shy around young women.
She always had a rock on her finger the size of a pea; and she had really big bazoombas. Big, beautiful bazoombas. They were not droopy or saggy, but perky, and upright. They were cone-shaped, like rocket nose-cones. Big Frank, who also banked here, had noticed them as well. Brubaker told his dad they were implants.
‘They’re the new helium implants, that’s why they stand up like so,’ he said, jamming two fists up inside his T-shirt.
Moving them around like closed circuit cameras and going, ‘booop-booop-boop…’
Perish the thought.
Let the lady have her dignity. And you have yours as well…came that voice in his head again.
“No,” she said in some disarray, putting the Kleenex into a waste-basket. “I don’t know what’s going on. My whole family is going nuts.”
“It feels itchy…scratchy…tickly…” she said; updating his bankbook.
He withdrew fifty bucks and then withdrew to the outside world, still thinking about them tits…
(‘Boo-boo-boo-boop…’ and he imagined the bristling radar nose cones follow him out.)
Every Thursday since time immemorial…
Every Thursday since time immemorial, journalists from the local media gathered at what they called, ‘the Hot L.’ That’s because the letter ‘e’ in the neon sign was burnt out on the Lennox Hotel, and it never got replaced. Thursdays, it was the roast beef special. They alternated between Schmedleyville and Lennox. Every second Thursday; it was either the roast beef; or a good old standby like the toasted clubhouse or a western sandwich.
Some of them, the ones from Titusville or Oil Wells, complained about the drive.
They didn’t have to come. They were also in the minority, and couldn’t deny there were no good specials in their necks of the proverbial woods. Barnes was into his third beer, uncharacteristically for him. He belched, enjoying the flavour of cole-slaw a second, or was it the third time around?
“This frickin’ Brubaker has scooped us; by his own lights, a time or two. Deep in the turgid, diseased recesses of his pathetic little diseased mind,” he was telling them.
Glances were exchanged all around.
“Editors in the smaller markets tend to be cautious and conservative types,” grumbled Barnes.
The others listened with eyebrows raised.
“Brubaker!” he grunted in derision. “Well, what does he expect?”
The question hung in the air. Barnes went on.
“It’s bad enough he sends these insane letters. There was this one time, he said he went to the beer store and asked for, ‘six Ex.’ The guy behind the counter said, ‘Ooh, hoo, hoo-hoo.’”
Fred made his wrist go limp when he said it.
Someone at the end of the table sounded it out: “Sick…sex…?”
Barnes nodded.
“‘So now I have to find a new beer store,’ and crazy shit like that,” noted Fred as all the reporters chuckled.
This included the crew from CIBS. FM guys, (no one could ever remember their names,) people from outlying local weeklies, and the stringer from the TV network(s) who eked out a living shooting cutaways and tying to scoop Jan Eakes on caulking and stuff.
They all laughed.
The stringer was big on triple-pane windows and proper drainage. His biggest thrill in life was to video-tape strikers on a picket line.
“He told me once, ‘you could be holding snakes and speaking in tongues for all I care, I know I’m right…’ what a son of a bitch,” stated Barnes through tightly-clenched teeth.
“One time he told me, ‘a short, fat, pudgy-faced, baldy-headed, four-eyed, buck-toothed son of a bitch like you should have more confidence,’” quoted O’Keefe with a pained smile. “You have to admit, he’s pretty good!”
“You just have to shake your head sometimes,” allowed Ryebaum.
“Now this police budget. The man’s been smashing away at us for a couple of years now. Why not call the Mayor? Why not call a councilor?”
Barnes was peeved, they could all see that.
“It will all be in tonight’s paper, and we’ll get a blast of shit from him tomorrow,” confirmed O’Keefe.
“Why do you guys hate him so much?” asked one of the FM guys, the crew-cut, bleach-blonde type in some kind of Donald-Duck voice.
Apparently he was the one with all the allegedly funny voices. Which might be fine for radio; in real life, day-to-day situations, it just made him look like an idiot.
“I wouldn’t say I hate him, exactly. This one time he wrote about gun control…”
Barnes sat back, contemplating a beer rapidly nearing the empty mark.
O’Keefe, more used to concise reporting, not just editing, picked up the story.
“He was in favour of gun registration. Figures it’s a tool for solving crimes, right?”
He picked at some cold French fries.
“Well, every responsible gun owner with a computer or a typewriter wanted a piece of him. We published a few of their letters. All of a sudden Brubaker comes back; all off the record of course, ‘I can’t believe you guys published their correct names and towns…’”
“Oh, shit,” someone said.
“Uh, oh,’ acknowledged O’Keefe.
Barnes sat up.
“That’s exactly right! Less than two weeks later, somebody broke into a house, the home of one of our contributors; and stole ah, three or four long guns…”
?
??And this Brubaker?” queried Neal Robertson, from the Lennox This Week flyer, a mailbox stuffer, a ‘newsmagazine.’
Neal was a new guy. He’d only been in town a couple of months since the sale and purchase of the company by a Finnish consortium.
“So he’s like a criminal type? How bold,” said Neal, but Barnes was shaking his head vehemently.
“No! You don’t get it. He thinks he’s a fuckin’ writer!” said Barnes, and they all grinned.
“Just an asshole,” concluded O’Keefe. “Still, he thinks he’s pretty smart. How smart do you have to be to read a letter to the editor and then pick up a phone book? No smarter than a thief.”
“That was the one where the thieves stole a lock box. They ripped it right out of the wall with the guns still in it. They put it on a dolly and were last seen going down the street two or three blocks away,” Ryebaum clarified for the edification of the TV and FM-radio characters.
Since the radio only carried five minutes of news a day, he figured they probably didn’t know.
“I remember that,” someone at the end of the table mentioned. “In broad daylight.”
They had three or four tables pushed together for the weekly media get-together, a little tradition. No one could remember who originally started it, but it was sacred. You might miss one once in a while, but sooner or later you had to come back. The tradition went on, even though the membership changed. Ryebaum missed three weeks in a row once; and all of a sudden some chick he didn’t even remember called him up and asked if he was coming out next Thursday! He still didn’t know who she was, eyeing the faces up and down the table.
Ryebaum knew he was bad with names.
He figured that’s why they wrote ‘em down.
That’s why we have notebooks, in his opinion.
“Still, one gets tired of his snarky attitude,” noted Robertson, who had also gotten a few letters over the last couple of months.
Now that he thought about it.
“Snarky? Hah! He likes you then,” quipped Schwartzie.
The whole gang broke up in laughs again.
A few beers helped.
Chapter Seventeen
Police budget shoots up nineteen percent…