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CHAPTER 3
1
The gnome did indeed have a flag, but not an American one. Not even the Maine flag with the moose
on it. The one the gnome was holding had a vertical blue stripe and two fat horizontal stripes, the top
one white and the bottom one red. It also had a single star. I gave the gnome a pat on his pointy hat as
I went past and mounted the front steps of Al’s little house on Vining Street, thinking about an
amusing song by Ray Wylie Hubbard: “Screw You, We’re from Texas.”
The door opened before I could ring the bell. Al was wearing a bathrobe over pajamas, and his
newly white hair was in corkscrew tangles—a serious case of bedhead if I’d ever seen one. But the sleep
(and the painkillers, of course) had done him some good. He still looked sick, but the lines around his
mouth weren’t so deep and his gait, as he led me down the short stub of a hall and into his living
room, seemed surer. He was no longer pressing his right hand into his left armpit, as if trying to hold
himself together.
“Look a little more like my old self, do I?” he asked in his gravelly voice as he sat down in the easy
chair in front of the TV. Only he didn’t really sit, just kind of positioned himself and dropped.
“You do. What have the doctors told you?”
“The one I saw in Portland says there’s no hope, not even with chemo and radiation. Exactly what
the doc I saw in Dallas said. In 1962, that was. Nice to think some things don’t change, don’t you
think?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Sometimes there’s nothing to say. Sometimes you’re just
stumped.
“No sense beating around the bush about it,” he said. “I know death’s embarrassing to folks,
especially when the one dying has nothing but his own bad habits to blame, but I can’t waste time
being delicate. I’ll be in the hospital soon enough, if for no other reason than I won’t be able to get
back and forth to the bathroom on my own. I’ll be damned if I’ll sit around coughing my brains out
and hip deep in my own shit.”
“What happens to the diner?”
“The diner’s finished, buddy. Even if I was healthy as a horse, it would be gone by the end of this
month. You know I always just rented that space, don’t you?”
I didn’t, but it made sense. Although Worumbo was still called Worumbo, it was now your basic
trendy shopping center, so that meant Al had been paying rent to some corporation.
“My lease is up for renewal, and Mill Associates wants that space to put in something called—
you’re going to love this—an L.L. Bean Express. Besides, they say my little Aluminaire’s an eyesore.”
“That’s ridiculous!” I said, and with such genuine indignation that Al chuckled. The chuckles tried
to morph into a coughing fit and he stifled them. Here in the privacy of his own home, he wasn’t
using tissues, handkerchiefs, or napkins to deal with that cough; there was a box of maxi pads on the
table beside his chair. My eyes kept straying to them. I’d urge them away, perhaps to look at the
photo on the wall of Al with his arm around a good-looking woman, then find them straying back.
Here is one of the great truths of the human condition: when you need Stayfree Maxi Pads to absorb
the expectorants produced by your insulted body, you are in serious fucking trouble.
“Thanks for saying that, buddy. We could have a drink on it. My alcohol days are over, but there’s
iced tea in the fridge. Maybe you’d do the honors.”