Chapter 1 #2
If I’d known what the future held for me, I certainly would have gone up to see her. I might even have given her the kiss that had been flirting in the air between us for the last couple of months. But of course I didn’t know. Life turns on a dime.
3
Al’s Diner was housed in a silver trailer across the tracks from Main Street, in the shadow of the old Worumbo mill.
Places like that can look tacky, but Al had disguised the concrete blocks upon which his establishment stood with pretty beds of flowers.
There was even a neat square of lawn, which he barbered himself with an old push-type lawn mower.
The lawn mower was as well tended as the flowers and the lawn; not a speck of rust on the whirring, brightly painted blades.
It might have been purchased at the local Western Auto store the week before…
if there had still been a Western Auto in The Falls, that was.
There was once, but it fell victim to the big-box stores back around the turn of the century.
I went up the paved walk, up the steps, then paused, frowning. The sign reading WELCOME TO AL’S DINER, HOME OF THE FATBURGER! was gone. In its place was a square of cardboard reading CLOSED the chrome on the stools gleamed; the coffee urn was polished to a high gloss; the sign reading IF YOU DON’T LIKE OUR TOWN, LOOK FOR A TIMETABLE was in its accustomed place by the Sweda register.
The only thing missing was the customers.
Well, and the cook-proprietor, of course. Al Templeton had been replaced by an elderly, ailing ghost. When he turned the door’s thumb-latch, locking us in, the sound was very loud.
4
“Lung cancer,” he said matter-of-factly, after leading us to a booth at the far end of the diner.
He tapped the pocket of his shirt, and I saw it was empty.
The ever-present pack of Camel straights was gone.
“No big surprise. I started when I was eleven, and smoked right up to the day I got the diagnosis. Over fifty damn years. Three packs a day until the price went way up in ’07.
Then I made a sacrifice and cut back to two a day. ” He laughed wheezily.
I thought of telling him that his math had to be wrong, because I knew his actual age.
When I’d come in one day in the late winter and asked him why he was working the grill with a kid’s birthday hat on, he’d said Because today I’m fifty-seven, buddy.
Which makes me an official Heinz. But he’d asked me not to ask questions unless I absolutely had to, and I assumed the request included not butting in to make corrections.
“If I were you—and I wish I was, although I’d never wish being me on you, not in my current situation—I’d be thinking, ‘Something’s screwy here, nobody gets advanced lung cancer overnight.’ Is that about right?”
I nodded. That was exactly right.
“The answer is simple enough. It wasn’t overnight. I started coughing my brains out about seven months ago, back in May.”
This was news to me; if he’d been doing any coughing, it hadn’t been while I was around. Also, he was doing that bad-math thing again. “Al, hello? It’s June. Seven months ago it was December.”
He waved a hand at me—the fingers thin, his Marine Corps ring hanging on a digit that used to clasp it cozily—as if to say Pass that by for now, just pass it.
“At first I thought I just had a bad cold. But there was no fever, and instead of going away, the cough got worse. Then I started losing weight. Well, I ain’t stupid, buddy, and I always knew the big C might be in the cards for me…
although my father and mother smoked like goddam chimneys and lived into their eighties.
I guess we always find excuses to keep on with our bad habits, don’t we? ”
He started coughing again, and pulled out the handkerchief.
When the hacking subsided, he said: “I can’t get off on a sidetrack, but I’ve been doing it my whole life and it’s hard to stop.
Harder than stopping with the cigarettes, actually.
Next time I start wandering off-course, just kind of saw a finger across your throat, would you? ”
“Okay,” I said, agreeably enough. It had occurred to me by then that I was dreaming all of this. If so, it was an extremely vivid dream, right down to the shadows thrown by the revolving ceiling fan, marching across the place mats reading OUR MOST VALUABLE ASSET IS YOU!
“Long story short, I went to a doctor and got an X-ray, and there they were, big as billy-be-damned. Two tumors. Advanced necrosis. Inoperable.”
An X-ray, I thought—did they still use those to diagnose cancer?
“I hung in for awhile, but in the end I had to come back.”
“From where? Lewiston? Central Maine General?”
“From my vacation.” His eyes looked fixedly at me from the dark hollows into which they were disappearing. “Except it was no vacation.”
“Al, none of this makes any sense to me. Yesterday you were here and you were fine.”
“Take a good close look at my face. Start with my hair and work your way down. Try to ignore what the cancer’s doing to me—it plays hell with a person’s looks, no doubt about that—and then tell me I’m the same man you saw yesterday.”
“Well, you obviously washed the dye out—”
“Never used any. I won’t bother directing your attention to the teeth I lost while I was… away. I know you saw those. You think an X-ray machine did that? Or strontium-90 in the milk? I don’t even drink milk, except for a splash in my last cup of coffee of the day.”
“Strontium what?”
“Never mind. Get in touch with your, you know, feminine side. Look at me the way women look at other women when they’re judging age.”