Practical Demonkeeping

thousand miles from home, a failure at nineteen. As he left the store, one of the cashiers, a pretty redhead about his age, who was coming in to open the store, stopped him.
    “Your name is Robert, isn’t it?”
    “Yes,” he said.
    “You’re the photographer, aren’t you?”
    “I was.” Robert was in no mood to chat.
    “Well, I hope you don’t mind,” she said, “but I saw your portfolio sitting in the break room one morning and I looked at it. You’re very good.”
    “I don’t do it anymore.”
    “Oh, that’s too bad. I have a friend who’s getting married on Saturday, and she needs a photographer.”
    “Look,” Robert said, “I appreciate the thought, but I just got fired and I’m going home to get hammered. Besides, I hocked my cameras.”
    The girl smiled, she had incredible blue eyes. “You were wasting your talent here. How much would it cost to get your cameras out of hock?”
    Her name was Jennifer. She paid to get his cameras out of hock and showered him with praise and encouragement. Robert began to make money picking up weddings and Bar Mitzvahs, but it wasn’t enough to make rent. There were too many good photographers competing in Santa Barbara.
    He moved into her tiny studio apartment.
    After a few months of living together they were married and they moved north to Pine Cove, where Robert would find less competition for photography jobs.
    Once again, Robert had sunk to a lifetime low, and once again Dame Fate had provided him with a miraculous rescue. The sharp edges of Robert’s world were rounded by Jennifer’s love and dedication. Life had been good, until now.
    Robert’s world was dropping out from under him like a trapdoor and he found himself in a disoriented free-fall. Trying to control things by design would only delay his inevitable rescue. The sooner he hit bottom, he reasoned, the sooner his life would improve.
    Each time this had happened before, things had gotten a little worse only to get a little better. One day the good times had to keep on rolling, and all of life’s horseshit would turn to circuses. Robert had faith that it would happen. But to rise from the ashes you had to crash and burn first. With that in mind, he took his last ten dollars and headed down the street to the Head of the Slug Saloon.

9
THE HEAD OF THE SLUG
    Mavis Sand, the owner of the Head of the Slug Saloon, had lived so long with the Specter of Death hanging over her shoulders that she had started to think of him as one might regard a comfortable old sweater. She had made her peace with Death a long time ago, and Death, in return, had agreed to whittle away at Mavis rather than take her all at once.
    In her seventy years, Death had taken her right lung, her gall bladder, her appendix, and the lenses of both eyes, complete with cataracts. Death had her aortic heart valve, and Mavis had in its place a steel and plastic gizmo that opened and closed like the automatic doors at the Thrifty Mart. Death had most of Mavis’s hair, and Mavis had a polyester wig that irritated her scalp.
    She had also lost most of her hearing, all of her teeth, and her complete collection of Liberty dimes. (Although she suspected a ne’er-do-well nephew rather than Death in the disappearance of the dimes.)
    Thirty years ago she had lost her uterus, but that was at a time when doctors were yanking them so frequently that it seemed as if they were competing for a prize, so she didn’t blame Death for that.
    With the loss of her uterus Mavis grew a mustache that she shaved every morning before leaving to open the saloon. At the Slug she ambled around behind the bar on a pair of stainless steel ball and sockets, as Death had taken her hips, but not before she had offered them up to a legion of cowboys and construction workers.
    Over the years Death had taken so much of Mavis that when her time finally came to pass into the next world, she felt it would be like slipping slowly into a steaming-hot bath. She was afraid of nothing.
    When Robert walked into the Head of the Slug, Mavis was perched on her stool behind the bar smoking a Taryton extra-long, lording over the saloon like the quintessential queen of the lipstick lizards. After each few drags on her cigarette she applied a thick paste of fire-engine-red lipstick, actually getting a large percentage of it where it was supposed to go. Each time she butted a Taryton she sprayed her abysmal cleavage and behind her ears with a shot of Midnight Seduction from an