“The same, Donald,” she responded, after dropping his keys into an empty goldfish bowl at the back of the bar.
While getting his beer Fischer clocked the eye-roll. The dough-faced man in the jean jacket and the Steelers cap was a regular, and an unliked one.
All Fischer had to do was buy a roll of quarters from the bartender, then go over to the pool table. After shooting a little by himself, the man came over, introduced himself as Donald Bennett, made a few suggestions on how Fischer should hold his stick, then asked to play a game. By the time they’d played seven times, and Fischer had bought Donald three beers and two shots, they were best friends. Fischer had told Donald that he was from New Hampshire, that he’d just driven down to check out some property for sale, that he was thinking about opening up a paint gun place. Donald didn’t know much about that—he repaired the netting on lobster traps for a living—but he did know that if Fischer was looking for some poontang he’d come to the wrong goddamn bar. Then he’d laughed like a hyena, revealing a row of teeth that looked like rotten stumps. If he was in a movie, Fischer thought, he’d be a cliché that would make his wife groan and talk back at the screen.
“You live around here, huh?” Fischer said.
Donald told him that even though he lived less than a mile away, Teri, the bartender, always took his keys when he came in.
“Like you couldn’t drive one fucking mile after a few beers,” Fischer said, incredulously.
“Right. That fucking bitch.” He looked toward the bar to make sure she hadn’t heard him.
Fischer drove Donald back to his place that night, a small farmhouse he’d inherited from his parents after they were both dead. Inside, there was wallpaper peeling off the walls, and it smelled like cigarette smoke and rotting flesh. They drank fireballs, and Fischer said, “I lied to you, good buddy, about why I’m here in Maine.”
“Oh, yeah?” Donald lit a cigarette, then flicked the spent match onto the floor. The chair that Fischer sat in was covered in some kind of plaid synthetic material, and there were several darkened, rippled patches in the upholstery where a match had been left to smolder. He was amazed that Donald Bennet had somehow gone this long without burning himself to death in his own house.
“Look, I’m only telling you because you’re a good guy, and maybe you can help,” Fischer said. “I can even pay you, man, I’m flush right now. My girlfriend’s living down here in Port Clyde. She dumped me about three months ago and took about fifty thousand of my money with her.”
“What the fuck, man,” Donald said, waving the tip of his cigarette.
“Yeah, no shit. Thing is, she might have spotted me, and she knows my car, and now I’m wondering—”
“You want some help getting that money back from her because I’ll help you do that.”
Fischer, who’d really just wanted a place to sleep for the night, and maybe a different car to drive tomorrow, thought about what Donald had said. Maybe this waste of a human being could be more helpful than he’d originally thought.
“Why’d she take your money, man?” Donald said, his voice high, and genuinely curious, as though he couldn’t quite fathom how anyone would want to hurt his new best friend.
Fischer was thinking and didn’t immediately answer. And when he moved his eyes from the Styrofoam drop ceiling back down to Donald Bennett, he wasn’t surprised that his new friend had passed out, still sitting up, cigarette smoldering between his fingers. Fischer put out the man’s cigarette, then draped an old granny square afghan around his sleeping form and went to check out the rest of the house.
As he poked around, careful not to leave his fingerprints on any hard surfaces, he thought some more about possibilities for the following day, and the ways in which Donald Bennett might be helpful. The house had three small bedrooms on the second floor. One had clearly been the master bedroom, where Donald’s parents had slept, and it looked unchanged, the windows covered by heavy brown drapes, the bed covered in a chenille bedspread, and another homemade afghan comforter. A thin layer of dust had attached itself to everything in the room.
Donald was clearly sleeping in his own childhood room, unchanged, apparently, as well. There was a Nickelback poster on the wall, and a futon mattress without a sheet on it. Next to the mattress was an overflowing ashtray and several wadded-up tissues. The third upstairs room was the source of the house’s bad smell. It was entirely filled with bags of garbage, some of them split open and leaking. Fischer stepped inside enough to quickly flip the light switch and heard the scurry of some kind of rodent finding a place to hide. Who had started to bring the trash upstairs? He assumed it had been whichever parent had survived the other. Donald seemed just bright enough to know where trash went, but he’d yet to clear out this room.