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Once upon a time, Blair had had too many jobs, too many deadlines, too many students, way too many professors. Too many enemies, too many friends, too many dates, too many funerals.
Then some seriously odd shit had followed other seriously odd shit, the former involving parasitic space aliens. The upshot of which was that Jim had been recruited to Defend The Planet. And… well, Blair’d found that he just couldn’t let Jim go do that solo.
So Blair’d decided to take a break from Cascade and everything it represented, follow Jim to Colorado Springs, and, well, maybe, just maybe, REST.
But when you’re resting, you still have to DO something, so most days since they’d moved, Blair had walked down to the closest (and only walkable) Starbucks, nursed a cup of tea, and people-watched. Because, at heart, he was still, and would probably always be, an anthropologist, even if he never did get the PhD.
Blair’d arrived early enough today that the nine-to-six crowd had still been picking up their morning doses of caffeine, the line travelling out the door. But soon the yuppies had slowed to a trickle, replaced by harried post-preschool-dropoff moms-with-babes-in-arms and better-groomed, recently-retired church people. The mid-shift cops had yet to show; but, in the mean time, the church people had, as usual, moved tables together and, today, had managed to block Blair’s favorite trashcan.
God help him, he now had a favorite trashcan. Maybe the cops (who were running late) would swoop in and rescue it.
There was nothing about the moms and the graying Bible Study crowd to draw Blair’s attention today – nothing that he hadn’t observed during the previous two weeks and three days – but the Scottish guy looking at the coffeemakers, he seemed kind of interesting, in a semi-malevolent fish-out-of-water kind of way. The guy was obviously in nobody’s Air Force; he could have been a college instructor of some sort, but probably not at the Academy, not with that shoulder-length hair and the five-day-old beard. His movements, though, were quick and precise; mountain-climber or hiker, maybe?
And… wow, he was about to steal a coffee grinder.
Probably not on purpose. He’d gotten himself a tall coffee (his accent being obvious in the process), but had set it down over by the travel mugs so that he could use both hands to pick up boxes and study the information thereon. Finally finding a grinder (plug-in electric, so not a hiker) that seemed to suit him, he’d looked at his watch, startled visibly, and cast around wildly for his drink; then, finally finding it amongst the travel mugs, he’d grabbed it and charged for the door.
“Hey, dude!” Blair shouted, jumping up. “You’d better…”
The guy was past him, and in an instant they were both out on the sidewalk.
There was a commotion as a barista and a manager-type materialized; and, hey, here were today’s mid-shift-coffee-run cops! Not the usual guys (Saul from Denver, Troy the semi-pro bassoonist), however…
Which is how Blair found himself face-down on blue, green, and salmon-speckled mid-scale stripmall pavers next to a Scottish guy who had, it turned out, an impressive vocabulary.
“The worst part is, my wife is going to kill me,” Scottish guy, now Nick, said as they bounced along in the back of the black-and-white. “She may leave me in the slammer until tomorrow you know. Teach me a lesson. She’ll say this sort of thing happens too bloody often, but she just doesn’t understand.”
“What happens too often, shoplifting?” Blair asked.
“’Twasn’t done with intent,” said Nick. “I was distracted. If they’d just stopped me and asked nicely none ‘o this would have happened.”
“So it’s Starbucks’ fault,” said Blair.
“In a way.” Nick snapped his head back, looking up at the roof of the sedan. “And now, I’m going to miss my appointment.”
“Maybe do your shoplifting last thing in the day?”
“Comedian, are you?”
“Hardly,” said Blair. “Unemployed hanger-on. You?”
“Mathematician. On sabbatical from Berkeley.”
“Impressive,” said Blair. “I got kicked out of grad school this past May.”
“Impressive,” said Nick. “Probably for the best.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I’m having a rubbish day.”
- - - - - -
It took surprisingly little time, once they’d reached the nearby police station and run into a couple of the cops who sometimes did the Starbucks run (Mocha Margo and Double-Shot Joe), for Blair to convince everyone that he’d had nothing to do with the Great Coffee Grinder Heist. And only a couple of words from Blair on Nick’s behalf managed to get the mathematician released from detention as well.
“Low friends in high places, man, that’s the key to a happy life,” Blair said as they exited the station into a small parking area.
“I have never found that to be the case,” said Nick, squinting his eyes and looking around.
“Riiiight.” Blair bet Nick was a load of fun at parties.
Actually, he probably was a pretty decent guy to hang around with, if conditions were right, Blair mused. Maybe a little grumpy, but the morning they’d had was enough to make anyone fractious; and it wasn’t like Blair didn’t have experience with the easily pissed-off. All in all, Nick had taken things pretty well, though now he seemed restless, like he didn’t quite know what to do with himself.
“So, do want to split a cab back to your car?” Blair asked. “Near Starbucks, I presume?”
Nick looked at his watch for about the fiftieth time and scowled. “I’m far too late - this day is shot to hell,” he said. “I need to clear my head a little. I’ll walk back. It can’t be more than two kilometers.”
“Mind if I join you?”
“Sure, why not?”
For a few minutes, they trudged in silence along the narrow, beaten-down dirt path that seemed to be all the sidewalk Colorado Springs saw fit to give this stretch of road, as vehicles whipped past inches from them. At the first light, Nick, who was in the lead, turned and said, “This is horrible. Care to explore?”
Blair peered left. Houses, trees. SIDEWALK. “Sure, I’ll live a little,” he said.
“I’m cheating,” said Nick after a moment of walking, side by side now, along the side street. “The wife and I have done a little house-hunting hereabouts, I know this cuts through to where we want to be. Might even decrease our walk by about half a kilometer.”
“I thought you were just on sabbatical?”
“One never knows. And Gloria likes looking at how you people live, so sometimes we house-hunt.”
“So do you think you’ll stay in Colorado after your sabbatical ends?”
“No,” said Nick. “It’s tempting, but no. The time’s not quite right.”
“Gloria doesn’t mind not putting down roots?”
“She’s picked up a few violin students through covering a maternity break, they keep her occupied enough I think. Roots? No, we’re not bloody plants.”
“If the concept of interconnectedness wasn’t relevant to the human experience, we wouldn’t have it,” said Blair.
“So what about you, Mr. Unemployed Grad School Dropout. You finding those roots of yours adequate for nitrogen fixation or whatever the hell it is plants do?”
Blair choked out a laugh. “Not really, man. Before three weeks ago, I lived in Cascade, Washington – had been there for decades, except for a few summers in the field. My mom kind of landed there when I was a kid, and when she left, I didn’t.”
“Abandoned, were you?”
“Man, you’re cheery! No, nothing like that. In fact, I think my mom uses our condo as her permanent address.”
“Our condo? Who’s ‘our’?”
“Actually, my buddy owns it. I told you, I’m a hanger-on. He got a job offer here that he couldn’t refuse. To make a long story short. So, anyway, I tagged along.”
“This buddy have a name?” Nick asked.
“Jim.”
“Following a friend across the country isn’t standard behavior, now, is it?” Nick asked, continuing quickly, “No… sorry, don’t answer that, you were looking for a walking partner, not an interrogation.”
“Hey, I don’t mind,” said Blair. “Jim’s a cop, I’m used to getting the third degree.”
“A cop? And you didn’t play that card immediately and save yourself a bit of trouble?”
That actually hadn’t occurred to him. “He’s a Cascade cop,” said Blair. “The local job’s in – well, a different field, I guess you could say.”
“Narcotics trafficking?”
“God, no!”
“Just, you seem so secretive about it. Kind of against your usual grain, as I’ve discerned it.”
“It’s with the Air Force,” said Blair. “So, yeah, it’s classified.” So much for ‘no more secrets, no more lies,’ Blair realized; just like old times, only now with the possibility of space travel and killer alien parasites.
Time to change the subject. “So, why the interest in roots, if you eschew them?”
“Well… maybe we’re more plantlike than I’ve let on. Or Gloria is. Recently some things have come up… let’s just say she’s feeling a need for some mates, and leave it at that.”
“And the metaphorical soil is better in California?”
“The soil SUCKS in California. Her family and friends are in Glasgow and environs. “
“So, why don’t you go back?”
“It would kill me to do that. Absolutely. That life – those people….”
“What’s wrong with them?”
“NOTHING. Well, everything. The whole range of human existence, and if I’m going to work, if I’m going to get anywhere, I can’t… I can’t be talking to old friends about the weather and potholes and shit that doesn’t matter.”
“Man,” said Blair, “I’m glad I don’t live in your head.”
“You’d rather be so bored that you treat being arrested…”
“Detained,” Blair corrected.
“Detained as… I don’t know, not even an inconvenience, just something to do…”
“You’re extrapolating from very little data, Nick,” said Blair. How many times had he been shot, shot at, punched, drowned, and otherwise generally abused over the past four years? How many times had he been flippin’ kidnapped??
“Oh, am I?” asked Nick, clearly set in his impression of Blair.
And there wasn’t a thing Blair could do about it. In Cascade, people knew what a roller-coaster life with Jim was. Most hadn’t known about Jim’s abilities, of course, until Blair’s dissertation had been leaked, and maybe some had taken Blair’s retraction at face value. But even the people who thought that Blair was a bit of a charlatan when it came to the diss, well, they knew about the cases, how personal things got and the toll everything had to have been taking on them, even though both he and Jim were pretty good at hiding the scars.
On the other hand – was it so bad to be anonymous?
Honestly, Blair was inclined to say, yeah, it was bad. He hadn’t started college at sixteen because he was underendowed in ambition. He hadn’t taken on the constant challenge that was Jim Ellison because he wanted a calm, undisturbed life.
But, maybe he should give the current set-up more than three weeks before throwing in the towel.
But, also, maybe his days should consist of more than people-watching at Starbucks and starting conversations with vaguely-misanthropic mathematicians.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be insulting,” said Nick.
“What, no, that’s okay,” said Blair, “I was just thinking, I need a hobby.”
“Or a job.”
“Don’t get too crazy, man.”
The road broadened, and soon ended at another through street, which Blair immediately recognized.
“Starbucks is few hundred meters that way,” said Nick, gesturing left.
“Yeah, and I’m across the road and two blocks back,” said Blair. “So I’m just going to head home.” He dug in a pocket and pulled out a pen and scrap of paper, on which he scribbled his name and number. “Jim and I are having a cookout tomorrow night,” he said. “You wouldn’t be the only academic there. See if Gloria’s interested, give me a call if you can make it.”
Nick folded the paper with a promising amount of care. “Thanks, Blair,” he said. “Stay out of trouble, will you?”
“I’ll give it a try,” he said.
* * * THE END * * *