The sunrise in a little town is special. The light creeps carefully through the chilly air, conscious that somebody might be watching, waiting to start the word around. Bad gas, and all that. It’s improper to be seen in public at terribly early hours, and knowing one has been seen in flagrante does render happy serendipitous encounters at the grocery somewhat awkward.
So, as I say, the light slinks into town, appropriately concerned with damaging reputation.
Since communal insanity set in around 1986, there has been one social group immune from this terror of temporal impropriety: walkers. Those who are inappropriately healthy may rise with the sun and, dissheveled but clad in expensive gladrags, prowl the pavements full to bursting with green-and-chunky, banana-scented goo. They raise loud haloos between them, hooting about benefits to their collective circulation and digestion, calling to the birds who also rise early and sing and who must, it follows, have urges aligned with the walkers’. Scientists may believe the birds sing for blood and love but the walkers know, birdsongs before noon praise the great and fibrous goddess Spirulina.
It was into this wholesome bedlam that my friend, whom I shall clepe Morris—although that is not his truthful name—invited me this shame-faced spring morning for what he interchangeably called “breakfast” or “coffee.”
I am a man of urban tastes, I should clarify, having been transplanted from this civil pocket of small-townery and gone entirely feral in the paved wilds of Big Cities. Now scooped back into the arms of enforced miniature civility, the only custom that had snagged my heart entirely was that of sleeping until the sun was fairly looming over the horizon (along with its sister habit of ensconcing behind locked doors when it has dipped obverse).
But, in the name of my friendship with Morris, I withstood the buffets and attacks of the spiked tail of night, bathed and dressed, and faced a day still beginning.
I walked along the darkened and silent streets, feeling every inch the criminal, an intruder into my own community, passing the blocks between my front door that that of the pan-cakery near downtown. I arrived mere moments before the sun broke the stalemate of night and the soaring harp-chord of scorn began to sing out from the neighborhood scolds, why-oh-why is that kid awake at this heaven-forsaken hour?
And there, outside the door of the joint as I closed the last few feet, was Morris.
He greeted me, not particularly warmly, and held the door open. We walked into the dim, empty diner where a small woman in a tornado of movement sped us out to a table on a patio and snatched our drink orders before the reality of the moment set in. The sun had begun, but not managed, to warm the seats and the table. We sat and dumbly held our menus perpendicular to the ground for a bare second that felt like an hour.
The patio looked out across a wide street and a strip of retail stores.
“This,” said Morris, pointing with a spoon that dripped day-old rebrewed coffee that had materialized before us apparently without the woman’s intervention, “is the Dunham Accountancy Firm. In its storied walls are thirty of the busiest accountants in the county. The outside, here, which you can see, is pebbled in a veneir that was, fifty years ago, impressively expensive. Note how the stone is still intact, unlike the other buildings with similar fronts around town.” He indicated the old Rice Grocery store, which still had scraps of stone clinging by ragged nails to its exterior.
I took my first sip of the coffee, having found the fulcrum and balanced the cream substitute to create a perfect void of flavor.
“This, however,” he indicated a point in roughly the middle of the table, “is a city of 22,000 persons, and they aren’t the only game in town. How do you suppose our little metro-pop-up can host such a powerhouse of tabulation, let alone one that can afford to keep up its exterior? Particularly when they have such stiff competition. Can they be as successful as they appear?”
He drank a spoonful of coffee to test the ratio of sugar to slop and held me with his gaze. I thought he needed encouragement, so I shrugged elaborately.
“There,” he pointed with the spoon along the strip and up the block, “is the La Tourneau school of some eccentric martial art. The man who runs that school, I have it on good authority, is the brother of the landlord who owns the strip, and he, the master of combat, is starving. A place that teaches children how to battle is starving. They have no business at all.”
“How can you tell?” He didn’t like to be interrupted, but I didn’t like to be absent entirely from the conversation.
“See the posters on the front? They’re years old. See the doormat? See the pavement through it? If you looked inside, everything there is shabby in much the same way. The desparation is writ large on every surface.”
I took a moment to try to look appreciative, even though I had no idea why this mattered more than pancakes.
“And finally, lodged between the two, sits the Wreck Center, a rage room.”
“I suppose it’s doing fine.”
“Fine enough. New carpeting, clean windows, a place for everything and everything in its place. Any idea why?”
I’d had enough, so I thought I’d pretend I was at the table with Morris. “Sure. People like to break stuff.”
“No, friend. You can see it from here, what they stock. Monitors. Old computer towers. Printers of that unearthly desert cream that has only ever been the color that technology fades into. They stay in business because”—he dramatically swung his spoon back down the block—“of the accountants. And what does that tell us?”
“The accountants are working hard?”
“They are. And they are stressing about something. Something very illegal. The kind of something illegal that would keep an accountancy firm of their calibur open and humming- still humming, mind you- at”—he checked his watch—“Seven Twenty Two in the morning.”
Morris raised an eyebrow and, by doing so, told a story about love and corruption that I could not fathom.
“That, my little pal,” he said, speaking to me but looking at his spoon, “is why you’ll never make a good cop.”
“I’m not a cop, Morris.”
“Neither am I,” Morris waggled his eyebrows and grinned. Then, just as the small woman walked up to the table, he disappeared in a puff of smarm.
“You gonna want some breakfast, or just water?” She asked it like she knew what she wanted the answer to be, so I just threw a five on the table and gave her a nasty look. What else do you do at such an obscene hour?