“How much rent do you need a month, Dad?” For the moment, Hazel decided to pretend things were as easy as going out and finding a job, that her husband wouldn’t absolutely have her abducted at whatever place of employment she chose once he tired of waiting for her to come to him.
“Five hundred. That’ll be a decent monthly payment on my second lady.”
“Okay then.” Hazel didn’t see how she was going to make this happen, but she wanted to feign confidence. “I’ll get right to work becoming gainfully employed.” She gave her father a cheerful smile, and he smiled back, but he looked tired, or maybe just really disappointed. “I’ll go hit the pavement right now and see what I can find.”
Which meant she’d go to the bar and pretend to be hitting the pavement.
“Hazel,” he said. His voice was quiet with discouraged resignation. “You’re wearing a towel.” She watched him motor the Rascal into the dark path of the hallway, then disappear.
HAZEL RETURNED TO THE SPOTTED ROSE TO FIND BLACK SMOKE pouring from the front door and emergency personnel wandering in and out. Her heart began racing—had Byron done something to the place? But there was no crime-scene tape across the entrance, and she watched a civilian walk into the flood of dark smog, then another; when neither reemerged after a few minutes, she decided to try going in herself.
Getting on all fours was the only way to manage. The smoke did seem to thin around a foot or so from the ground, so she trench-crawled in the direction of the bar. When her head bumped into the bottom of an empty stool, Hazel felt her way up it and took a seat.
“What’s your poison?” the bartender asked. Hazel opened her eyes but couldn’t see anything so she closed them again.
“Whatever’s strong,” Hazel said. “The air’s a little thick today.”
“Grease fire in the kitchen,” a man next to her replied. She recognized the voice.
“Liver?”
“Hello there.” A hand from behind the bar grabbed Hazel’s fingertips, guided them down to the drink in front of her and placed them firmly around it.
It was nice to hear someone familiar. “How have you been?” Hazel cleared her throat. “So I need to start networking a little, as they say. Do you have the phone number of anyone who might be looking to hire some help?”
“I don’t have a phone,” Liver answered.
Hazel felt her pulse speed up.
“No phone? Of any kind?” Her voice was nearly cracking with excitement. “So how do people get ahold of you? Your family? Your friends?”
“I’ve succumbed to neither affliction,” he answered.
“What about women?” she asked, admittedly changing her voice to be a little flirtatious. Hazel decided she’d misjudged him. Anyone getting through life without a phone had skills she wanted to acquire. Rare capabilities that attracted the New Hazel.
“I just meet women in this bar. Mainly they use me to help them reach bottom. I’m like a brick they grab onto midair. Sleeping with me helps them admit their lives have become unmanageable. They realize they want and deserve something more, and then their recovery process can begin. I get laid in the meantime. Win-win.”
“Do you have a phone at your job?”
“No.”
She chugged the rest of her drink and wiped her mouth on her arm. “Do you have a job?”
“Yep.” She didn’t know whether it was the alcohol or the lack of oxygen, but Hazel was beginning to feel very drowsy. She started to rest her head on the bar, but fingers found the back of her shirt and pulled upward. “Wouldn’t fall asleep in here if I were you,” Liver said.
“Yeah. Probably smart. So what do you do?” As soon as she asked, an involuntary yawn overtook her. It caused Hazel to inhale a bit too much smoke. She began coughing and continued to do so for about ten minutes.
“Let’s continue the conversation elsewhere,” Liver suggested. Hazel dismounted the stool and crawled toward the dim crack of light she could see. It was hard to crawl and cough at the same time but she managed. When she made it out to the sidewalk, Hazel collapsed in the sunlight, breathing in deep, rapid breaths of clear oxygen.
She looked up to see Liver walking out of the billowing soot. It seemed like he was exiting a time machine that had gone up in a blaze. His clothes were made entirely of leather: hat, vest, pants, boots. He was also wearing a necklace of assorted animal teeth.
“Shall we?” he asked.
SUBSEQUENT CLUES CONFIRMED THAT LIVER WOULD INDEED BE A good mentor for shirking technology, like how all the windows were broken out of his truck. He was a “maverick.”
When they turned off the main road onto a long drive with a sizable ranch house, Hazel began to question whether Liver was as nontraditional as she’d assumed. But they passed the house and continued quite a ways into a wooded area until he drove the pickup into the base of a large tree to park it. A few leaves fell through where the truck’s windshield should’ve been and landed on Hazel’s lap. “We walk the rest of the way,” he explained. Then he took a long rifle out from under the driver’s seat.
“This is still a date, right?” He wasn’t secretly an eccentric acquaintance of Byron’s who was now about to hunt her for sport?
“If that’s what you’re into,” he said.
She wanted to tell him everything: that her worst fears had come true, that her husband had managed to place a surveillance device into her mind, the whole story. But she didn’t want to seem crazy. This was shitty because the truth was crazy, not her. There had been a tagline of a TV show, The truth is out there, that Hazel had initially misinterpreted and felt comforted by. That is for sure! she’d thought, the truth was the most far-out thing possible. Hazel had always felt this—when she learned about periods and sex, when she learned about death, when she learned about the impossible living conditions of the other planets in the solar system and the manufacturing of processed meats. Almost always, the truth was way more bizarre and gross than she would’ve imagined. Then one night she commented on this to a friend and was told, No, dumbass, the show is saying that the truth will be discovered. Like how aliens are real and the U.S. government knows it.
Hazel did not want Liver to discover her truth. But she did want advice. “So if someone were hypothetically able to read your mind, what would you do about it?”
“If someone got inside my head,” Liver answered, “they’d voluntarily show themselves right back out. I guarantee you.”