Rhymes With Nothing (pt 1).

Lee waits in his rental car until the breakfast rush of men in hard hats clears out of the diner, drinking from a pile of airplane-sized bottles of vodka in his lap and tossing the empties into another on the floor mat. He drinks until he gags and gets out, standing unsteadily, holding on to the car door as if he would fly right off the planet if he let go.

The diner is ugly, made from volcanic rock and vinyl siding and an adobe roof as if the builders changed their minds during its construction; the place is empty except for the waitress at the end of the counter thumbing a magazine and a kid collecting breakfast dishes in a bin balanced on his hip. The waitress comes to where Lee sits resentfully; her name tag says FAYE in block letters. Coffee? she asks him with an accent of some kind and pours him the last of a pot, and sets it in front of him; she studies him, tapping the counter with heavy silver and quartz rings that look handmade.

You must be here for the casino, she says. That Arrowhead place. You’re not local.

Arroway, he corrects her. But yeah, I thought we should have called it what you said.

I never thought I’d see some big city gambling place around here, Faye says. They got things on riverboats in St. Louis, but not, like anything real. Not, like, Vegas, you know?

A fly buzzes near his hand and he slaps at it, surprised when he kills it.

Our church folks aren’t happy with you, she says, snickering. They’ve been having meetings in here every week about the wages of sin and praying for the Lord to send us another flood to chase your company away. Everybody tells them to shut up and be glad the men have work.

She waits for him to say something. We appreciate that, he tries.

Dissatisfied, Faye retreats to her magazine.

There’s a notebook at the end of the counter, waterlogged and folded open. Lee slides over and sees that the pages are filled with cartoons done in pen of men in safety vests conking each other with comically oversized wrenches and birds spinning around their heads. The kid is watching him from nearby, absently wiping at a table with a dirty rag, his shoulders hunched as he works and his hair hiding most of his face. There’s a thick, ragged scar across the side of his throat and face – something split his head damned near in half from the look of it.

As the kid is hauling his dishes to the back, he catches his foot on something and trips, crashing to the floor and sending broken bits of crockery dancing across the tile.

Butterfingers, Faye says, not looking up from her reading.

Lee reaches to help him but the kid is already up and wiping blood on his apron. He is absolutely gorgeous; his eyes are like blue pinwheels that spin and spin.

Don’t mind him, Faye says. Our Jan lives is in his own little world.

She comes closer, lowering her voice in conspiracy, her accent thickening. His parents got killed by a truck last year. She leans on the counter. We took him in. Nice, yah?

Lee can see too much down her blouse. A sweating man in a track suit comes shoving through the double steel doors, groaning when he sees the mess. He tripped, Faye says to him but the man ignores her, talking to the kid the way people talk to foreigners and dogs. BE-MORE-CAREFUL, he says. Got it? MORE-CAREFUL.

The man disappears back through the doors; the kid finishes cleaning up.

Lee can’t take his eyes off of him.

Take a picture, it’ll last longer, Faye says, an oily smile spreading across her face.

He gets up, dropping a five on the counter. All things considered he thinks he does very well, making it all the way back to his rental before being sick into one of the old bags of fast food trash that was piling up in the back. Gasping for breath, he thinks he can feel her eyes on him from behind the diner’s mirrored windows that throw sunrise in his face like boiling water. He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes, relishing in the pain. The waitress called the kid Jan but his name is actually January Hurricane Rhodes, according to what records Lee could get his hands on; around these parts he was also known as Choke due to that scar he got in the accident that killed his family and Lee’s boyfriend who was driving the other car.

Lee presses harder into his eyes, the pain white hot now. And as far as everybody knows, the kid died, too. He’d been to the cemetery just that morning and seen the stone himself, one of the cheap ones the county pays to stick on pauper graves.

He unscrews the cap and drinks. I just want to know how you did it, he says.