Apex Hides the Hurt Read Free Page B

That thing they thought was a baby fish nuzzling their thighs in the surf? It was his lost little brown toe, roaming the seas in restless search of its joint.
    They say you can get used to losing a toe. And he had to agree, it was not up there on the list of truly terrible injuries. Of course his socks looked funny to him. Balance-wise, the toe is not that essential and it had been brought to his attention that his limp was psychosomatic. But there he was limping.
    .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
    He lingered in the bar after the mayor and the magnate left. They hadn’t yet agreed to his stipulations so he wasn’t officially on the job, and this comforted him. He lingered over his beer. For a time, cobwebby foam in thin tendrils along the inside of the pint glass was entertainment enough. No one else came in. At one point he heard sounds from the registration area, luggage wheels losing the silence of carpet as they hit the wooden floor, and elevator doors opening and closing. Then silence again.
    Wednesday, he thought. Two days. He forced himself to admit that he was a bit relieved. It was the first assignment he’d taken since his misfortune and he didn’t know how things would play out once he started working again. He had this suspicion that all he had inside himself now were Frankenstein names, lumbering creatures stitched together from glottal stops and sibilants, angry unspellable misfits suitable only for the monstrous. Names that were now kin.
    The bartender ran his cloth across nonexistent stains on glasses, lipstick that had not remained and specks that had not lingered. A streak of gray started at his forehead and fanned out into his Afro in a curly wedge, an ancient and hardwired pattern, in his genes. He watched the man wipe glass, hold up glass to the light to consider his handiwork. The day the bartender discovered that white spray in the mirror, as he was about to perform the daily trimming of his muttonchops, he knew he had become his grandfather, that he was truly his father’s son beyond what the surname said. It was hard not to notice that the bartender had some old-school muttonchops, real daguerreotype shit, something to aspire to. He went up for a refill and the bartender spoke for the first time since Regina and Lucky had left. The bartender said, “You come down here to clean up this mess?”
    “I’m here to check things out and lend a hand if I can,” he answered. He sat down on one of the stools.
    “What kind of business do you do?”
    “Consulting.”
    “
Con-sulting
,” the bartender repeated, as if his customer had added some new perversity to the catalog of known and dependable perversities.
    “I’m a nomenclature consultant. I name things, like—”
    “Hell kind of job is that?” The bartender put both his palms down on the bar. He looked like he was preparing to vault over it and throttle him.
    He fell into his standard explanation without thinking. Just like old times. “I name things like new detergents and medicines and stuff like that so that they sound catchy,” he said. “You have some kind of pill to put people to sleep or make them less depressed so they can accept the world. Well you need a reassuring name that will make them believe in the pill. Or you have a new diaper. Now who would want to buy a brand of diaper called
Barnacle
? No one would buy that. So I think up good names for things.”
    “People pay you for that shit?”
    He was at a loss. He’d kept up a good front for Regina and Lucky, but he couldn’t muster the necessary reserves at that moment. His foot throbbed in phantom pain.
    Muttonchops looked him over. Finally, the bartender said, “This is my home.”
    “Oh, I know that, people live here. They called me in for a helping hand,” he said. Already this job was different. Time was, you christened something, broke the bottle across the bow, and gave a little good-luck wave as it drifted away. You never saw the passengers. But there were