Heathcliff - Barry Rachin (summer reads txt) 📗

The forest ranger in the pea-green uniform sauntered into Ryan’s Diner as she did most workdays around six-thirty in the morning. She took a stool at the counter away from the other customers and sat staring at her raggedy fingernails. Seventeen year old Shawn Mariano, who worked weekends during high school and an occasional evening shift when one of the regular waiters called out sick, eyeballed the woman. Flaxen hair fell down over her forehead in tight, curlicue ringlets. The nose was broad and fleshy but not offensively so; the lips—thick and shapeless—eased quite naturally into an earthy, ever-so-slightly vulgar smile. The alabaster skin, perhaps her most disarming feature, was flawless with a translucent sheen. Strikingly beautiful or physically repulsive – which was it? Maybe a little of both.
“This one’s yours,” Trudy Falcone, a forty year old brunette who normally worked the counter and booths near the front entrance, muttered under her breath and disappeared abruptly into the kitchen. The twosome, Trudy and the ranger, had exchanged words earlier in the week and the waitress, who had a reputation for being a foulmouthed, practical jokester, had come away on the short end of the stick. Since the verbal altercation, she treated the ranger like she had a terminal case of leprosy.
The day of the incident, the lithe blond-haired woman ate breakfast quietly enough. But then as she was paying the tab she whispered something in Trudy’s ear causing the waitress to alternately flush scarlet then blanch a ghostlike chalky white. Still trembling noticeably, Trudy got the woman’s change and laid it on the counter. The forest ranger leisurely sipped at her coffee for a good ten minutes longer before scooping the money up, every penny, leaving no tip. “Stinking little bitch!” Trudy hissed as soon as the ranger was out of earshot. “Rotten, scummy whore!”
When one of the other girls tried to comfort her, Trudy became hysterical, ran off and barricaded herself in the bathroom. It was never made clear what the blond-haired girl with the squat nose and platinum, Shirley Temple curls said or why the normally staid, middle-aged waitress blew a mental gasket.

“Can I help you?” Shawn asked.
“Cup of coffee and the breakfast special.”
“How do you want your eggs?”
“Over easy. Whole wheat toast.” She raised her eyes but only slightly, never quite making eye contact. Shawn scribbled the order down and went off to get the coffee.
The diner was three-quarters full with townies and local merchants. They could get raucous and rowdy even this early in the morning, but when the food came the ranger ignored the local yokels, eating hunched over her plate. Ten minutes later, she paid her bill, swept all the loose change off the counter and disappeared out the door like a mirage.
“That weirdo gone?” Trudy had emerged from hiding. Shawn shook his head up and down. “What did Mrs. Rockefeller leave for a tip?”
“What she always leaves,” he replied.
“It figures.”
“Do you think she’s attractive?’”
“Her?” The heavyset waitress gawked at him as though the teenage boy had lost his mind. “That woman’s ugly as sin!” She spewed the words out like a vulgar epithet.
“Don’t you think that’s a bit extreme?”
Trudy’s lips twitched derisively. “If you’re into dykes or the unisex, Peter Pan look, she’s the real deal.”

* * * * *

The following Saturday morning the blonde forest ranger shuffled into the diner and eased down on a stool. As if on cue, Trudy ran off to make small talk with a waitress working the main dining room. “Coffee black. Eggs over easy and whole wheat toast,” Shawn said, repeating from memory her previous order.
She tilted her head to one side and studied him with a humorless expression. “Yeah, that’ll do.”
He went off to retrieve the coffee. “You work for the forestry department?” Shawn arranged a napkin and place setting on the counter.
“Down in Pemberton.”
“What do you do exactly?”
Her eyes grazed his face like he was an inanimate object - part of the Ryan’s Diner bucolic décor. She sipped at the hot liquid tentatively then added a spoonful of sugar. “Keep tabs on Mother Nature.” The terse reply - it wasn’t intended as a joke. Shawn didn’t know what to make of the odd creature.
When the food arrived, the girl never looked up. She ate with a focused intensity, pushed the plate away as soon as she was finished and reached for her wallet. “The Pemberton Wild Life Preserve,” she said when Shawn returned with the change, “is where I work. There’s a slatted walkway that extends three hundred feet out into the wetlands sanctuary with beaver dams, turtles, fox and small game, if you ever care to visit.” She swept the change off the counter and disappeared back out into the dusky, early morning light.
No, Shawn didn’t think he would care to visit. Not now, not ever. The woman creeped him out in the worse way – made his skin crawl the way she talked in that flat-as-a-pancake, gravelly monotone. Her pretty-ugly face never offered up a shred of emotional warmth or human sympathy. As long as that woman was caretaker of the Pemberton Nature Preserve, he wouldn’t be visiting any time soon.

“I seen you commiserating with Pearl,” Hugh Duffy, the short order chef remarked when Shawn took a break around ten o’clock after the breakfast crowd had petered away. In response to the boy’s blank expression, Hugh added, “The knuckle-dragging Forest Ranger.”
“Where do you know her from?”
“Went to high school together.” Hugh sprinkled a generous dusting of paprika on a pile of home fries simmering on the grille. “Pearl’s father ran off when she was just a kid. The family lived in a ramshackle, sardine can of a house over by the railroad tracks - just her and the old lady. The mother dropped dead a few years back so now Pearl resides there all by her lonesome.” The cook cracked a couple of eggs onto the grille and reached for a slab of Canadian ham.
“What was she like in high school?” Shawn asked.
“Same as present. Kept to herself. Didn’t hardly talk to no one, which was no great loss.” He chuckled evilly. “I don’t think the girl ever owned a bar of soap. Her junior year, as I remember, they sent her home one day, cause she smelled like a sanitation truck in late August.”
“Trudy can’t stand her.”
Hugh flipped the eggs and checked the ham which was browning nicely. “Don’t know nothing about that,” he returned, “but I do know the woman’s got a wicked temper.” He shifted the eggs to a plate and spread a generous dollop of butter on two slices of cinnamon raisin toast. Stacking the toast together, he cut at a diagonal. “You’ll want to steer clear of that wild woman,” the cook cautioned. “Nothing good can come of it.”
“Thanks,” Shawn mumbled weakly and went back to his position at the counter.

Before his shift ended, Shawn stopped by the kitchen. “What’s Pearl’s last name?”
Hugh looked up from the hot surface. “Singleton. Pearl Singleton.”
“Did she have a boy friend in high school?”
The cook rolled his eyes and made a dramatic flourish with the chrome spatula. “Couple guys asked her out, but she wouldn’t have anything to do with the opposite sex. Probably a lesbian, judging by the woman’s edgy disposition.”
Shawn rubbed his jaw. “You think she’s good looking?”
Hugh paused to rub the sweat from his face with the front of his soiled apron. “Pearl Singleton’s no Marilyn Monroe, but, yeah, she’s wicked cute in a slutty sort of way.” The cook’s head bobbed up and down and he smirked at his clever choice of words. “Not that it does us horny heathens any good,” he tittered.

* * * * *

The third week in September, Shawn’s mother brought him to the men’s department at Macy’s to buy a new suit. “You need to look good for your college interviews.”
“Decisions regarding admission are based on high school transcripts and SAT scores,” Shawn reminded her, “not how much money you spent on a stupid sports jacket.”
“We’re not in the market for sports jackets, stupid or otherwise,” Mrs. Mariano corrected. She pulled a wool-blend pin-striped suit off the rack then turned to a salesman with a cloth tape measure draped around his neck. “Do you have this in a thirty-two waist and twenty-nine inseam?”
After settling on the suit, Mrs. Mariano dragged Shawn several aisles over. “You still take a fifteen in the neck?” She was rifling through a bin full of long sleeve shirts. Before he could answer, she held a pale pink designer original up against his chest. ”This silky material’s nice. What do you think?” Without waiting for a reply Mrs. Mariano tossed the shirt back in the bin. When the dust settled, Shawn emerged from the dressing room with an eggshell white, sateen Christian Dior dress shirt, a silk tie and a gray suit. “Are you thoroughly satisfied?” Shawn grumbled.
Mrs. Mariano ignored the not-so-veiled sarcasm. “You got one chance to make a good impression. Don’t blow it.”

* * * * *

One Tuesday morning in early December, Shawn went off to an interview at Boston College. Rather than drive into the city, he took an MBTA train to Park Street near the state house and rode the green line trolley out to the Chestnut Hill campus. Mr. Templeton, dean of admissions, met with him in a cramped office just off the library. The short man rubbed his brown beard with a nicotine-stained thumb and forefinger as he sifted through Shawn’s transcripts “It’s noted in the application that you plan to major in English.”
Shawn smoothed the front of his new suit. “The teaching program,” Shawn replied.
“Any favorite authors?” The dean leaned back in his chair. He had draped his coat over the backrest and pulled his tie away from the throat at an angle. The man’s affable, easygoing manner set Shawn at ease.
“I like the Russians – Chekhov, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Turgenev ...”
“What have you read by Solzhenitsyn?”
“The First Circle and Cancer Ward.”
“What about A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich?”
“Yes, that too,” Shawn replied.
The man shifted in his seat. “I visited Russia several years ago during an academic forum. As we were passing through a suburb of Moscow, the Russian interpreter I was traveling with pointed out a brick building twenty storied tall. The woman said, ‘That public housing unit was built by forced labor following the Second World War. It’s rumored that Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the famous author, was one of the prisoners assigned to the construction crew.’”
The dean rose, went and stood by the window with his hands clasped behind his back. “You haven’t said anything about contemporary American fiction. What about Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oats or Toni Morrison?”
Was it a trick question? Answer wrongly and a trap door in the floor released catapulting you into a tank full of ravenous alligators? Shawn stared uncertainly at the man’s backside. “I don’t like any of them.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.” The boy wriggled uncomfortable in his new suit, wishing he wished he could loosen the top button and pull the tie away like Dean Templeton.
“But all three novelists are popular as hell,” the dean shot back.
“Popularity isn’t a prerequisite for good writing.”
“What is then?”
Shawn paused just long enough to consider the question. “When I read Chekhov,” he spoke earnestly, “I know I’m in the presence