Practical Demonkeeping Read Free Page B

night before, never once letting their ignorance of what had happened interfere with a good bull session.
    A new, four-wheel-drive pickup pulled into the small parking lot, and Augustus Brine crawled out, jangling his huge key ring as if it were a talisman of power sent down by the janitor god. He was a big man, sixty years old, white haired and bearded, with shoulders like a mountain gorilla. People alternately compared him to Santa Claus and the Norse god Odin.
    “Morning, boys,” Brine grumbled to the old men, who gathered behind him as he unlocked the door and let them into the dark interior of Brine’s Bait, Tackle, and Fine Wines. As he switched on the lights and started brewing the first two pots of his special, secret, dark-roast coffee, Brine was assaulted by a salvo of questions.
    “Gus, did you hear the dogs last night?”
    “We heard a tree went down on your hill. You hear anything about it?”
    “Can you brew some decaf? Doctor says I’ve got to cut the caffeine.”
    “Bill thinks it was a bitch in heat started the barking, but it was all over town.”
    “Did you get any sleep? I couldn’t get back to sleep.”
    Brine raised a big paw to signal that he was going to speak, and the old men fell silent. It was like that every morning: Brine arrived in the middle of a discussion and was immediately elected to the role of expert and mediator.
    “Gentlemen, the coffee’s on. In regard to the events of last night, I must claim ignorance.”
    “You mean it didn’t wake you up?” Jim Whatley asked from under the brim of a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap.
    “I retired early last night with two lovely teenage bottles of cabernet, Jim. Anything that happened after that did so without my knowledge or consent.”
    Jim was miffed with Brine’s detachment. “Well, every goddamn dog in town started barking last night like the end of the world was coming.”
    “Dogs bark,” Brine stated. He left off the “big deal”—it was understood from his tone.
    “Not every dog in town. Not all at once. George thinks it’s supernatural or something.”
    Brine raised a white eyebrow toward George Peters, who stood by the coffee machine sporting a dazzling denture grin. “And what, George, leads you to the conclusion that the cause of this disturbance was supernatural?”
    “Woke up with a hard-on for the first time in twenty years. It got me right up. I thought I’d rolled over on the flashlight I keep by the bed for midnight emergencies.”
    “How were the batteries, Georgie ?” someone interjected.
    “I tried to wake up the wife. Whacked her on the leg with it just to get her attention. I told her the bear was charging and I have one bullet left.”
    “And?” Brine filled the pause.
    “She told me to put some ice on it to make the swelling go down.”
    “Well,” Brine said, stroking his beard, “that certainly sounds like a supernatural experience to me.” He turned to the rest of the group and announced his judgment. “Gents, I agree with George. As with Lazarus rising from the dead, this unexplained erection is hard evidence of the supernatural at work. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have cash customers to attend to.”
    The last remark was not meant as a dig toward the old men, whom Brine allowed to drink coffee all day free of charge. Augustus Brine had long ago won their loyalty, and it would have been absurd for any one of them to think of going anywhere else to purchase wine, or cheese, or bait, or gasoline, even though Brine’s prices were a good thirty percent higher than the Thrifty-Mart down the street.
    Could the pimple-faced clerks at the Thrifty-Mart give advice on which bait was best for rock cod, a recipe for an elegant dill sauce for that same fish, recommend a fine wine to complement the meal, and at the same time ask after the well-being of every family member for three generations by name? They could not! And therein lay the secret of Augustus Brine’s ability to run a successful