“Do you think he’s dead?” Manny asked.
“Dead? Carl?”
“Carl, yes.”
“Carl, dead? No. What? Of course not.”
They stood shoulder-to-shoulder, Hootie and Manny, looking at the truck—Carl’s truck, parked on the side of the road, just a stone’s throw from the bar. Rain was being blown through the doorway, coating them in a cold mist, seeping through Hootie’s sneakers and being mopped up by her socks.
“He left almost an hour ago. If his truck stalled, he would’ve come back inside.”
“Maybe he walked,” Hootie said. “Maybe he walked back to Penny. It’s not that far.”
“Hootie…”
Hootie pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes. Why was that part of the hand called the heel? Couldn’t it have its own name? Why did everything have to be repeated, recycled, used again and again? Why couldn’t something just be itself? Heels of bread, Heel, dog! And wasn’t there something nautical, too? The boat was heeling six degrees starboard…
“Hootie,” Manny said again. “I think something bad happened.”
“Is happening.”
“What?”
“He’s not dead.” Hootie said, but did not believe it. He was dead! He was! Carl was dead just over there, inside his truck. The truth of it was in her chest. In a dream, you can sense when a monster, a murderer, something dreadful is on the other side of a door, can’t you? But the dream continues anyway.
Manny looked to be on the verge of tears. “Should we check?”
“No.”
Hootie thought about Anita sometimes. She thought about Dan, about her dead father, about her mother who may be alive but who also may be dead. At the end of shifts, or at the bar before the first customers pushed open the door, she would think on the past. She thought about what she had wanted for her life, once. About what she still wanted. About the impossible burden of time passing. But just as these thoughts began to take root, to scratch at the back of her mind, to spur some need for change, a custom- er would order a gin and tonic… Carl would ask her to unload the grocery truck… Someone would vomit… A glass would be shattered… Someone would call her name, and she would be reminded that her name was now Hootie.
Carl was dead. With Hootie a step behind, Manny opened the car door, flashlight in hand, to discover the body of Carl McFadden. He lay slumped over the dashboard, one hand loose around the steering wheel, the other hanging like a haunch of meat at the butcher. His eyes were opened, shot through with burst, bloodied veins, two bulbous protrusions. Hootie screamed. Manny cried, muttered prayers and crossed his chest. The storm raged on.
Manny covered Carl’s head with the small white dish towel tucked into his pocket, now soaked through, and closed the car door behind him. Hootie dashed back to the bar, the frigid wetness settling into her bones, making her teeth clack together. She felt ill. She would throw up. Carl! This wasn’t real.
“Do you think it was a heart attack?” Manny asked. The bar door swung shut behind him. A claustrophobic rush of damp warmth. Manny wiped a mollusk’s trail of tears and snot from his chin.
It was far more than a heart attack, Hootie wanted to say. Fate was battering their desert sanctuary, the last checkpoint of humanity. Soon they would both go the way of Carl. Wouldn’t they? It was time.
Hootie said: “Probably a heart attack.”