The Pumpkin Man

CHAPTER

TEN

Sometimes it was really hard to be Jennica Murphy’s best friend.

Kirstin loved Jenn; she’d felt instantly close to her since the first day they met. It had been back at the student union in college. Kirstin was sitting in a big, cushy red-leather chair, surreptitiously spiking a paper cup of Mountain Dew with vodka, but just as she tipped her flask under the cup lid, a couple jocks ran through and banged into the back of the chair, nearly toppling her to the floor. She’d spilled the entire cup down her shirt.

“Son of a motherfuckin’ bitch!”

A dark-haired girl sat near her, feet tucked under her butt, oblivious to everyone else. The girl was actually studying—serious about it. Only then had she looked up. “What happened?”

She’d had the meekest of voices, but Kirstin had answered with a bellow that everyone in the union—and probably out on the quad—could hear. “Those fuckwads just spilled pop all over me!”

“Hang on a minute,” the girl had said, setting her book to the side and reaching into a gym bag. “I have a towel.”

The next few minutes were spent patting down Kirstin’s shirt. But from the most awkward moments come amazing friendships.

They were opposites: that was clear from the start. But Kirstin had been attracted by Jenn’s selfless streak, and Jenn was no doubt inspired by Kirstin’s wildness. They balanced, each admiring qualities in the other that were lacking in themselves. Jenn’s restrained nature reined in Kirstin’s party girl—at least enough for her to graduate. Which was why it was funny for Kirstin to find herself now in the position of being Jenn’s compass.

Kirstin’s cure for bad feelings was to go out and talk to people. To drink a little. To laugh a lot. Okay, maybe drink a lot, too. Jenn could never keep up with her in either department, but it was the trying that counted. And right now, her friend was sitting in the front room of her dead aunt’s house, reading old musty books about magic spells and secret potions.

Kirstin grinned and shook her head. “Uh-uh,” she said to the empty bedroom. “This ends now. Tonight, we rock!”

Strolling idly into the family room, she asked, “Whatcha doing?”

Jenn looked almost like she had on the day Kirstin first met her: legs tucked up beneath her, curled up with a book. “What’s it look like?” she answered, stifling a yawn with a fist. “Trying to bone up for the How to Turn a Jilted Lover into a Toad test.”

“Oh, that one’s easy.” Kirstin grinned. “Just set them up on a blind date with Bernice Kunz. She’ll give them warts just by looking at them.”

“Ha ha.” Jenn smiled, closing the book. “What’s up?”

“I was thinking maybe we could head downtown for dinner tonight,” Kirstin offered. “Maybe try that bar that the grocery guy mentioned. Casey’s?”

Jenn shrugged. “Guess we could, but how do we know they even have a kitchen?”

“Because I learned from my roommate a long time ago . . .” Kirstin answered, pulling her cell phone out of her pocket. “Phone first!”

“Wow,” Jenn said. “I actually taught you something?”

Kirstin nodded. “Yep. And they even have calamari.”

“I’m not eating squid from a bar,” Jenn pronounced.

“Even a bar near the ocean?”

“No.”

It was a neighborhood place: there was no more apt description. As they walked in an hour later, a hush fell over the room. The girls stood at the door, taking in the lay of the land. Tables with hunched and shadowy figures sat to the left, while a handful of other patrons leaned along a long, narrow wooden bar to the right, nursing tall glasses that glimmered amber even in the garish red and yellow light. The walls were cluttered with posters and plaques and neon beer lights of decades gone by. Kirstin grinned when she saw there was even a Hamm’s 3-D illuminated clock of a bear and the North Woods. It was like stepping back in time.

After the door closed behind them, the conversations began to slowly build again.

The girls staked out a tall round table and hiked their way up onto the bar stools. A gnarled, painfully thin and middle-aged waitress dropped two paper photocopies of a menu on the table as soon as they sat down.

“Getcha something to drink?” she asked. “Bud’s on special, buck-fifty ’til ten.”

“Great,” Kirstin said. “We’ll take two.”

The woman picked up a handful of glasses on her way to the bar; then she disappeared through a set of saloon doors to the back and presumably the kitchen.

“You know what?” Kirstin asked.

“Hmmm?”

“I think you’re probably smart not to order the calamari.”

Jenn nodded. “Meat. Burned to sterility, if possible.”

The waitress eventually returned with their beer, delivering two open bottles to the small and sticky table with a slam. “You want something from the kitchen?”

Jenn eschewed the squid and chose a cheeseburger.

After they ordered, the woman looked at the two girls as if to be sure of something. “You just visiting?” she asked finally.

“Might be staying,” Jenn answered. “Not sure. I just inherited my aunt’s place, so we came out to stay for the summer.”

“Do tell,” the waitress said, raising an eyebrow. “Who was your aunt?”

“Meredith Perenais.”

The woman looked as if someone had punched her in the gut.

“Don’t say,” she answered. Then, with a curt nod, she took their stained menus and walked quickly back to the bar. Moments later Kirstin saw her talking animatedly into the ear of the brunette bartender, and by the time the woman went in the back to get their food, she’d made it a point to stop at five other tables, bend over and whisper, and not so secretly point at the girls.

“I keep getting the feeling your aunt wasn’t the most popular person in River’s End,” Kirstin suggested, halfway through her Bud.

When the waitress set down their plates, she didn’t say a word. She pulled a jug of ketchup from a holster on her apron and slapped it on the table, then was gone.

“Make sure she didn’t spit on it,” Jenn suggested, lifting the bun of her burger to look at the blackened meat. “At least the chef understands his job. He’s working hard to prevent the health hazards of uncooked meat.”

“I thought that’s what you wanted,” Kirstin said, dousing hers with ketchup before shoving it between her lips. “And I don’t care. I’m starved.”

It took until their third beer before anyone besides the waitress talked to them. Then, it was only for a moment. One of the men from the bar slipped off his stool and away from his conversation to walk slowly to their table and tap a finger to the brim of his Giants cap. Kirstin noted that the bar talk diminished as he approached.

“Evening, ladies,” he said. “My name’s Paul.”

Jenn flashed a faint smile and introduced herself, and Kirstin did the same.

“You’re thinking of staying here a bit,” he stated, clearly looking for a response. When the girls didn’t react, he raised a hand and sliced his finger through something in the air above the table. “You might want to think twice about that. People get cut up here. Like pumpkins,” he said. All the while his hand flicked back and forth, creating invisible triangles.

“Are you the welcome wagon?” Kirstin asked.

He ignored that, instead saying, “I hear you’re living up in the old Perenais place.”

Jenn and Kirstin didn’t respond.

“Are y’all Satan worshippers?”

Kirstin couldn’t resist. “Nah, we worship Beelzebub. He’s got a cooler name.”

Jenn joined in. “We can invite you to our demonic Tupperware parties if you’re interested.”

The man’s brow creased, a lightning bolt of anger. But he only nodded with disgusted resignation. “You be careful about what you put your pretty fingers in up there,” he said. “Sometimes that stuff that looks like chocolate? Well, it’s really just shit.” And with that he turned and walked back to the bar.

Jenn and Kirstin looked at each other, eyes wide, struggling not to laugh.

The man whispered first to his friend, then to the waitress, then to two others sitting at the bar. Kirstin heard snickers coming from them, and for a short time the waitress disappeared into the back. When she returned, she strode straight to their table. She carried a serving platter, on top of it a plate covered by a pot lid. She set it down.

“We didn’t order anything,” Jennica explained, but the waitress only grinned, showing a set of tobacco-browned lower teeth.

“This one’s from the boys at the bar,” she said. “They said that you’d enjoy it.”

She lifted the lid and smirked before turning quickly on her heel. On the plate lay the carcass of a long—very long—gray rat. Its lifeless tail curled pink and off the plate.

The girls pushed back from the table in disgust.

“We’d enjoy a dead rat?” Jenn whispered. “What the hell does that mean?”

Kirstin quickly scanned the bar and noted that all eyes were on them. “The better question,” she said, “is how they got this so fast. I don’t think we want to eat here much.”

“Make that ever,” Jenn agreed.

“That’s on the house,” one of the men called from the bar. “But feel free to leave a tip. Just so long as it’s not some pumpkin pieces that your aunt left you. We don’t need any more gifts like that around here.”

“I could be wrong,” Kirstin said. “But I think we ought to stop telling people you’re related to Meredith.”

“Maybe,” Jenn said, forcing down a piece of burger that seemed intent on coming back up. “But it looks like she scored us a free dinner.”

Kirstin snorted. “Like we’re really that desperate. Let’s get out of here.”

They pushed away from their table and walked to the door. Everyone was silent. As the door closed behind them, though, laughter sounded. Kirstin didn’t think she’d ever felt so sick upon exiting a bar. And she’d barfed in plenty of parking lots.

“I’m sorry I brought you here,” she said.

Jenn only shrugged. “People suck,” she answered. “They like to mind everybody’s business but their own. Let’s go home.”