To Jenna, Heckie would always be the man made of river rock, even though all he did now was hang around the Pin n’Cue like a fat Buddha in a baseball jacket and shoot eight-ball now and then, his belly hanging out and blocking the pockets, or else sit in the diner part and eat those frosted crullers they called Lead Bellies. Then doze off right in the booth. Oh once in a while he bowled a string but it did nothing to change his new shape, which was more like a bloated duckpin than the man-mountain he was of old, when Jenna used to send him to all her customers, and they were a long, long list. Why a man made of river rock would melt like the cheese on an English muffin was a mystery Jenna didn’t even try to solve. Rock was rock was rock. So went the laws of nature. It was beyond her, as in beyond-this-world beyond, and when it started to really panic her she began glomming onto every supermarket tabloid that trumpeted the dangers of radioactive scanning of food - and even those common warming stations on restaurant counters gave her a freak. A freak over pink light. She wouldn’t take a dinner if she saw it sitting there under beams of pink light.
Pink light was something Jenna no longer considered an option, even when the colors of the room or the natural surroundings called for it. The subject was off the table, period, end, over and out, even if the customers begged for it. But it did rile her so much that Heckie wouldn’t get his Velveeta torso out of the Pin n’Cue. If he wouldn’t help himself, who would? There he’d sit, shoving in his crullers, melting and melting, and all of it started by her. Just because she’d done so well they gave her the Flying Carpet Award.
It was no accident Jenna had come in first, took the prize and got sent to McCormick Place for the Decorator’s Show. She knew how to slide it in there with the customers – the old soft sell – she was a master at it. A nice, fat bonus was in the package too – enough to give Heckie a Chicago vacation and one side of the king size bed. Open his eyes a little. All his life, child and adult, he hadn’t budged out of the Thunderhead Valley. He’d been as stuck as one of those rocks in the shallows of the Thunderhead River.
Heckie and the river rocks. Nobody could work those ancient stones like he used to. He was something to see. The flat ones he’d skip a country mile, scaring the trout. The round ones, cannon-ball size minimum, he’d scoop out and haul in armfuls and work with the grout he mixed and colored himself. Heckie made fireplaces so spectacular everyone wanted them. One or two became towers forty feet high. But not everyone could afford them, with Jenna repping and pricing him. Hardly. She aimed him right at those Google billionaires, that tribe of pioneers crossing the Thunderhead in search of the next Promised Land of western living, Aspen now being old-hat. Fish in a barrel, they were. Powerless in the face of Jenna’s renowned soft sell.
Jenna: Now what do you think of that vegetable-dyed Tibetan, the way it just lays there under the Charlie Russell and picks up the colors of those willows off your porch?
Google billionaire: I don’t think so.
Soft-sell Jenna: Oh, I didn’t think so either.
Google billionaire: Then again…
When Jenna and Heckie became a real couple she took him to a tattoo artist, the only one in The Valley. She sat him down and had the artist do the mountain lion, best as she could recall it over the blur of years. Heckie put forth his chest and then one of his big arms, but Jenna chose the back, so she could have the lion bounding from shoulder blade to shoulder blade. In those days, Heckie’s man-mountain days, his was a back to behold, a canvas like no other. “What does it feel like?” she asked, as the needle drilled away. Heckie looked up and answered, “Cat scratches.”
Heckie was over-affected by Chicago right off the bat. But you couldn’t say Chicago didn’t feed the flame. After all, the award was The Flying Carpet, not the Oscar or the Grammy, so the hotel was not the Ritz or the Four Seasons by any stretch. Jenna laughed that it wasn’t even the Three Seasons. But the laugh shot off her face in a hurry when they opened the door to their room and found something even darker than the alley-view darkness, a shape at the end of the bed. Not until it slipped by them, weaving like an otter, did they realize it had been a male human, half-clad, feeding on the remains of their room service tray. Jenna fumbled to the phone and screamed into the mouthpiece, but Heckie just stood there, a tower of stone, as though he had turned into one of his own fireplaces.
Over at McCormick Place, the trade folk told Jenna she’d be a fool to leave Chicago without an Oak Park stop. There they have the Frank Lloyd Wright residential architecture, even Wright’s own house and studio. You never know, the trade folk said. Could be the coming wave for the Thunderhead Googlers, soon as they weary of their McLogs and McCabins.
So off they went on the Lakeside EL, a mass-transit first for Heckie, and a day so frozen Chicago could have used a river rock fireplace tall as the Sears tower. They were dogged from the start by tramp-men plying scams with the turnstile cards, and stunned to see the vast squalid neighborhoods, so unlike the Valley, flying by beneath the hurtling train. For Jenna, it was worth it – just to stand in the Wright house and behold the master’s stylings of glass and natural light, marketable in the Valley indeed. But Heckie seemed cornered by all the small nooks, like a stallion in a trailer, and couldn’t wait to return to the EL.
There on the platform they stood waiting in the early arctic dark, thinking they were alone. But a man came upon them – so suddenly he seemed to have risen from the tracks. He was brownish all over. His face, his worn, torn overcoat. It looked like he had been in the matted coat so long it had become part of him, like an animal’s coat.
The man stalked them like a big dog, like a Rottweiler or a Mastiff, but a big dog who wanted to play. “Talk to me, man,” he said to Heckie. “I don’t bite. All I want to do is get a bite. Can you help me out?”
Jenna tugged at Heckie’s sleeve, but the man caught something in Heckie’s eyes – a glint of pity, and he kept dogging. “You’ll get your train. They come every seven minutes. I ride them up and down, back and forth, just to keep warm. Sometimes I go to the library. But they don’t like me in no library.”
Heckie’s hand went into the pocket that held his wallet.
“Come over here and get warm. You’ll get warm in here. You don’t have to freeze…”
The man waved them towards one of those heated shelters where people wait for trains. In the frigid dark it had an eerie pink glow. It was open and empty and gleaming. Jenna thought of a yawning monster mouth, felt panic all over and dug in her heels.
“Come over here. I just want to get a bite. That’s all.”
Heckie’s wallet was out and he followed, leaving Jenna behind him on the open platform. Jenna watched the two of them disappear into the gleaming pink mouth. The light was so pink and radiant Jenna thought she saw it ripple, as though it were emitting its pinkness in waves and beams. Then came a roar, Heckie’s voice, a roar of sudden pain and rage. She caught a glimpse of Heckie’s leg, kicking outside the shelter then twisting and kicking back in. Next she caught a shot of Heckie’s right arm, raised high and coming down fast. She expected a sound like a sledge-hammer landing but at that instant a train screamed by on the other side.
Jenna ran to Heckie, entered the pink, throbbing light and felt she had stepped into a crematorium. An oven with a body cooking in it. She and Heckie fell to their knees, flailing like a single dervish with four hands. Quick as they could, they worked the motionless man’s position so the blood wasn’t apparent. Angled him so it seemed he had only collapsed into a drunken sleep. They pulled the collar and the lapel of the brownish overcoat up around the brownish, bleeding face.
Then they paced and waited interminably for the train that comes every seven minutes. Eight went by and the man didn’t stir. Not a quiver from his nostrils or lips.
“What did he do?” Jenna demanded. “What did he do to you?”
From the man-mountain there was only panting and pacing, and an occasional sound that couldn’t be called human language.
When Heckie finally said something it was in the gray of the next morning, back in the hotel room. At first the words were garbled and wild. He was like a man speaking in tongues. The actual English language came back to him in time, but it settled onto his lips the way a huge summer rain cloud settles over the Valley. Heckie said nothing of the night before. He used all his words to complain of an enormous bloat, saying he’d awoken “fat with sleep.” There was so much sleep in him, he claimed, that he could feel it swelling in every limb, organ and vein – as though he had been embalmed with it. So much sleep he could never sleep it off. He described the sleep as a bottomless lake inside him, glacial and black. Monsters of the deep were down at the bottom of it, swirling, and sleep became his principle state of being for so many seasons afterwards Jenna grew to see him in a brand new way – not as the real Heckie but a mutation, a species that didn’t so much as live but exist. Fattening then hibernating then fattening.
Eventually, the Google billionaires tired of the Thunderhead and set off elsewhere. Their departure sent Jenna back among the regular people to acquire new customers. Every day she’d let Heckie off at the Pin n’ Cue, then hunt around Home Depot to pick out the bull-nose for their backsplashes and cabinets for their kitchens. In a dream one icy night she saw the mountain lion, just as she had on that silver night ages before Heckie. After hours of homework she had crossed to the icicled window and stood on a schoolbook, staring through the veil of frost. Long as a train it looked, the creature loping across the snowy crest of the mountain, casting a shadow that soon swallowed everything, even the window. Just before the dream broke into daylight, Jenna heard the Home Depot public address system call her name. It asked her, in an accusing tone that issued from the last crags of the mountain, why she had ever believed she could find home in a depot.