Practical Demonkeeping

Hadn’t he let Robert move into his trailer, rent free, when his old lady threw him out? Didn’t he help Robert put a new head gasket in his truck? Hadn’t he always played square—let people try the product before buying? Didn’t he advance his regulars a quarter-ounce until payday? In a business that was supposed to be fast and loose, wasn’t he a pillar of virtue? Right as rain? Straight as an arrow….
    A car pulled up twenty yards behind him and hit the brights . He didn’t turn. Years of experience told him that anyone using that approach was only offering a ride to one place, the Iron-bar Hotel. The Breeze walked on, as if he didn’t notice the car. He shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his surf shorts, as if fighting the cold, found the cocaine and slipped it into his mouth, paper and all. Instantly his tongue went numb. He raised his hands in surrender and turned, expecting to see the flashing reds and blues of a county sheriff cruiser.
    But it wasn’t a cop. It was just two guys in an old Chevy, playing games. He could make out their figures past the headlights. The Breeze swallowed the paper the cocaine had been wrapped in. Taken by a burning anger, fueled by blow and blood-lust, he stormed toward the Chevy.
    “C’mon out, you fucking clowns.”
    Someone crawled out of the passenger side. It looked like a child—no, thicker—a dwarf.
    The Breeze blew on. “Bring a tire iron, you little shit. You’ll need it.”
    “Wrong,” said the dwarf, the voice was low and gravely.
    The Breeze pulled up and squinted into the headlights. It wasn’t a dwarf, it was a big dude, a giant. Huge, getting bigger as it moved toward him. Too fast. The Breeze turned and started to run. He got three steps before the jaws clamped over his head and shoulders, crunching through his bones as if they were peppermint sticks.
     
    When the Chevy pulled back onto the highway, the only thing left of The Breeze was a single fluorescent-yellow deck shoe. It would be a fleeting mystery to passers-by for two days until a hungry crow carried it away. No one would notice that there was still a foot inside.

Part 2
SUNDAY
All mystical experience is coincidence;
    and vice versa, of course.
    —Tom Stoppard, Jumpers
    2
PINE COVE
    The
village
of
Pine Cove
lay in a coastal pine forest just south of the great Big Sur wilderness area, on a small natural harbor. The village was established in the 1880s by a dairy farmer from
Ohio
who found verdant hills around the cove provided perfect fodder for his cows. The settlement, such as it was—two families and a hundred cows—went nameless until the 1890s, when the whalers came to town and christened it Harpooner’s Cove.
    With a cove to shelter their small whaling boats and the hills from which they could sight the migrating gray whales far out to sea, the whalers prospered and the village grew. For thirty years a greasy haze of death blew overhead from the five-hundred-gallon rendering pots where thousands of whales were boiled down to oil.
    When the whale population dwindled and electricity and kerosene became an alternative to whale oil, the whalers abandoned Harpooner’s Cove, leaving behind mountains of whale bone and the rusting hulks of their rendering kettles. To this day many of the town’s driveways are lined with the bleached arches of whale ribs, and even now, when the great gray whales pass, they rise out of the water a bit and cast a suspicious eye toward the little cove, as if expecting the slaughter to begin again.
    After the whalers left, the village survived on cattle ranching and the mining of mercury, which had been discovered in the nearby hills. The mercury ran out about the same time the coastal highway was completed through Big Sur , and Harpooner’s Cove became a tourist town.
    Passers-through who wanted a little piece of California’s burgeoning tourist industry but didn’t want to deal with the stress of life in San Francisco or Los Angeles, stopped and built motels, souvenir shops, restaurants, and real estate offices. The hills around Pine Cove were subdivided. Pine forests and pastures became ocean-view lots, sold for a song to tourists from
California
’s central valley who wanted to retire on the coast.
    Again the village grew, populated by retirees and young couples who eschewed the hustle of the city to raise their children in a quiet coastal town. Harpooner’s Cove became a village of the newly wed and the nearly dead.
    In the 1960s the