Empire Falls

the paper tomorrow morning,” he admitted. “You were AWOL quite a while. What’s wrong with your eye?”
    This was only the most obvious of the many questions Miles might’ve asked. Buster was pale, emaciated, filthy and looked dispirited, embarrassed and sick as a dog. Moreover, his eye was swollen shut and oozing pus at the corner. Miles felt certain that any number of stories were in the offing by way of explaining his sorry condition. He made a mental note not to let Buster and Max work the same shift until the former had a chance to put himself back together. The sight of either man would give anybody misgivings about the food, but the two of them together would send people running for the parking lot.
    “Spider bite,” Buster said, gingerly daubing pus onto the corner of a napkin. Miles had to look away. His stomach was never that great in the morning. “There’s a weird-looking boy standing outside,” Buster said. “Claims he works here.”
    Miles went around the counter to the front door, where John Voss stood motionless on the steps, hands in his pockets. Yesterday afternoon’s warmth seemed a distant memory. This morning it was winter in the air. The boy glanced up when he heard the lock turn in the door, then quickly back at the ground.
    “He does work here,” Miles told Buster, as he returned to the counter. “He’s our new busboy.”
    “Looks more like a damn serial killer.”
    “You’re the one who looks like a serial killer,” Miles pointed out. “He’s on the quiet side, but so far he seems like a pretty good worker.”
    Both men looked over at the door, aware that John Voss had not come in, perhaps, Miles surmised, because he hadn’t been specifically told to. Sure enough, when he returned to the door, John Voss was right where Miles had left him, apparently awaiting an invitation. “You can come in,” Miles told him.
    The boy nodded, scurrying inside with surprising speed. Miles followed him into the back room. “You can start on the pots,” he said, pointing at the large stack left over from the night before. They’d been understaffed again, and Miles had said just to leave them soaking, knowing the new boy was coming in early. Besides, Sunday was a short day. The restaurant opened only for breakfast, though so few showed up it was hardly worth the effort. With Friday and Saturday nights doing so well, it made sense to close and give everyone a day off. That would also allow him to attend Sunday-morning Mass, which he missed. Most weeks he found a way to slip out long enough to catch the five-thirty on Saturday afternoon, but for an old altar boy, that wasn’t quite the same. Yesterday, thanks to his late-afternoon cemetery tour with Cindy Whiting, he’d missed Mass entirely, leaving him feeling slightly unmoored this morning.
    Recalling Horace’s strange warning on Friday night, as well as Otto Meyer’s gratitude for his having given the boy a job, Miles studied John Voss as he filled the sink and began work, trying to imagine what the rest of this strange boy’s life would be like. He was off to such a poor start that, to Miles, he seemed destined to become the subject of a future query. Does anybody know the boy in this photograph? That is, if he ever made it into a photo. It was the Zack Mintys who got into the newspapers. On the other hand, who knew? The boy might turn out to be the next Bill Gates. “Congratulations, by the way,” Miles said. When the boy stopped scrubbing but didn’t look up: “I heard you had a painting selected for the art show.”
    “Tick, too,” he said, still without looking up, though Miles could see his eyes darting nervously, as if fearful that volunteering so much information all at once might have dire consequences.
    Out front again, Miles flipped the rows of bacon. He always cooked it about three quarters in advance of actual orders, then crisped it to suit his customers. While his stomach was feeling better, the odd feeling of standing on railroad tracks, awaiting an approaching train, was still there—the result, perhaps, of another largely sleepless night. He and David had closed up at ten-thirty, and Miles, exhausted, had gone upstairs and fallen asleep with his clothes on, television remote in hand, before he could even turn the set on. He’d awakened with a start from a nightmare in which he’d been searching for Cindy Whiting’s cane beneath the Empire Field bleachers, but instead he found Tick, curled up asleep