The town is in the middle of absolutely fucking nowhere. It's all mountains and pine forests and crystal-clear air and trickling mountain streams for hours in all directions, plus a road, and the town's on the road. Lumber mill, couple of stores, a diner, a garage, a tiny library and a school. Houses, where the sawmill's workers live; a sad, slowly growing handful of them now given over to AirBnB and the hope that rich techbros from flatter places might want country vacations in places with fuck-all bandwidth.
I slam the truck door with maybe excessive force. Big shiny truck with the windows tinted impenetrable black; conspicuous like a bikini in a nunnery. Maybe any passers-by will assume I'm here for one of the rentals. I should be done and gone before the small-town gossip machine gets round to comprehensively checking that angle out.
There's a piece of shit car gently decaying on the garage forecourt, with some flannel-grease-and-biceps type upended in the engine. The presumable driver sits behind the wheel, obediently trying things when yelled at.
The car, in response, does nothing.
I adjust my grip on my cane and the paper grocery bag in my other hand, and trudge up.
The mechanic type, muffled by being upside-down in the corpse of a machine, hears my footsteps crunch, and — reasonably enough — assumes I'm somebody useful. "Screwdriver!" they yell out at me.
"If you're sure you don't need her for a few hours," I call back.
Their head thunks off the underside of the hood at the same time as the driver bolts out of the car, unfolding into a tall, startled blonde. I barely hear the mechanic's sputtered, reflexive apology, attention taken up by the junker's hapless owner.
Crucible.
She's doing an amazing job of looking inconspicuous, for someone who's spent her life on TV, in glossy magazines, as posters on the walls of millions of teenagers. A haircut, deepening crow's feet outside her eyes, and a diner waitress's uniform: voilà, just someone tired, with shit of her own to deal with.
Well. She always was that, secretly; aren't we all?
"Trust you to find somewhere like this," I tell her. "Fuckin' — Hallmark channel. Picturesque. What, are you discovering the true meaning of Christmas with an unthreateningly macho lumberjack?"
She laughs, liquid joy, eyes sparkling at the sight of me.
I turn my attention abruptly to the mechanic, wiping her hands on a rag and looking wary. "Guess that makes me the hard-nosed soulless business ex from The City," I tell her. "Third act, all yelling into my cellphone and demanding to know when she's coming back to asset-strip orphanages with me. Can you spare her for a minute?"
"Sure — "
I smack the bag down on the car roof, and extract a 25-year single barrel whiskey and a pack of paper cups plastered with Disney characters.
"Hard-nosed business ex," Cruce murmurs, as if I'm funny. "So is this business or pleasure?"
I slop a couple of fingers into each of a couple of cups, shove one at her, and take a stiff gulp.
"Due diligence," I say, and watch her expression, like mine, drop to something much more serious. "You know the name Harvey Stone?"
She very much knows the name Harvey Stone.
"What kind of ethical duty could you possibly be crossing Ts on, regarding Harvey? He died before you were born." She takes a sip, appreciation blunted by cautiously watching me over the top of it.
If only.
"Harvey Stone died seven weeks ago," I say heavily.
She sucks in a breath, looks at me closely. Picks up the bottle, and carefully puts another couple of fingers in each cup.
I take another swallow, and wait.
"Well," she says finally, and raises her booze like a toast. "Good riddance — I think." She picks up the bottle. "Excuse us, Toni," she adds to the grease monkey.
"You know she's just trying to impress you," I tell Cruce as I follow her long strides away. "We all know that piece of shit car is dead."
"Harvey," she shoots back crisply. "You do mean — ?"
Harvey Stone: Metaman. The dude, the myth, the asshole.
"Yeah. Are you seriously taking me — "
She stalks across the road, into a charming little childrens' playground near the school, full of ancient deathtrap play equipment and empty of kids. And yes, she seriously perches on a swing, arm wrapped round one chain, bottle dangling from her hand.
"How?" she says.
Ah, that's the question, isn't it? Metaman: middle-aged when she was starting her career, down as KIA longer than I've been alive, lost saving the world from an unpleasant end. Record scratch, freeze frame; how the hell did we all end up here?
any new Quiescence content is a good day for me
