“No chance is what I’m hearing,” Streeter said. “So I guess the chemo is just… I don’t know…”
“Knee-jerk triage?”
Streeter laughed. “That’s it exactly.”
“Maybe you ought to consider trading the chemo for extra painkillers. Or, you could do a little business with me.”
“As I started to say, I can’t really be a prospect until I know what you’re selling.”
“Oh, well, most people would call it snake-oil,” Elvid said, smiling and bouncing on the balls of his feet behind his table. Streeter noted with some fascination that, although George Elvid was pudgy, his shadow was as thin and sick-looking as Streeter’s own. He supposed everyone’s shadow started to look sick as sunset approached, especially in August, when the end of the day was long and lingering and somehow not quite pleasant.
“I don’t see the bottles,” Streeter said.
Elvid tented his fingers on the table and leaned over them, looking suddenly businesslike. “I sell extensions,” he said.
“Which makes the name of this particular road fortuitous.”
“Never thought of it that way, but I suppose you’re right. Although sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a coincidence is just a coincidence. Everyone wants an extension, Mr. Streeter. If you were a young woman with a love of shopping, I’d offer you a credit extension. If you were a man with a small penis—genetics can be so cruel—I’d offer you a dick extension.”
Streeter was amazed and amused by the baldness of it. For the first time in a month—since the diagnosis—he forgot he was suffering from an aggressive and extremely fast-moving form of cancer. “You’re kidding.”
“Oh, I’m a great kidder, but I never joke about business. I’ve sold dozens of dick extensions in my time, and was for awhile known in Arizona as El Pene Grande. I’m being totally honest, but, fortunately for me, I neither require nor expect you to believe it. Short men frequently want a height extension. If you did want more hair, Mr. Streeter, I’d be happy to sell you a hair extension.”
“Could a man with a big nose—you know, like Jimmy Durante—get a smaller one?”
Elvid shook his head, smiling. “Now you’re the one who’s kidding. The answer is no. If you need a reduction, you have to go somewhere else. I specialize only in extensions, a very American product. I’ve sold love extensions, sometimes called potions, to the lovelorn, loan extensions to the cash-strapped—plenty of those in this economy-time extensions to those under some sort of deadline, and once an eye extension to a fellow who wanted to become an Air Force pilot and knew he couldn’t pass the vision test.”
Streeter was grinning, having fun. He would have said having fun was now out of reach, but life was full of surprises.
Elvid was also grinning, as if they were sharing an excellent joke. “And once,” he said, “I swung a reality extension for a painter—very talented man—who was slipping into paranoid schizophrenia. That was expensive.”
“How much? Dare I ask?”
“One of the fellow’s paintings, which now graces my home. You’d know the name; famous in the Italian Renaissance. You probably studied him if you took an art appreciation course in college.”
Streeter continued to grin, but he took a step back, just to be on the safe side. He had accepted the fact that he was going to die, but that didn’t mean he wanted to do so today, at the hands of a possible escapee from the Juniper Hill asylum for the criminally insane in Augusta. “So what are we saying? That you’re kind of… I don’t know… immortal?”
“Very long-lived, certainly,” Elvid said. “Which brings us to what I can do for you, I believe. You’d probably like a life extension.”
“Can’t be done, I suppose?” Streeter asked. Mentally he was calculating the distance back to his car, and how long it would take him to get there.
“Of course it can… for a price.”
Streeter, who had played his share of Scrabble in his time, had already imagined the letters of Elvid’s name on tiles and rearranged them. “Money? Or are we talking about my soul?”
Elvid flapped his hand and accompanied the gesture with a roguish roll of his eyes. “I wouldn’t, as the saying goes, know a soul if it bit me on the buttocks. No, money’s the answer, as it usually is. Fifteen percent of your income over the next fifteen years should do it. An agenting fee, you could call it.”
“That’s the length of my extension?” Streeter contemplated the idea of fifteen years with wistful greed. It seemed like a very long time, especially when he stacked it next to what actually lay ahead: six months of vomiting, increasing pain, coma, death. Plus an obituary that would undoubtedly include the phrase “after a long and courageous battle with cancer.” Yada-yada, as they said on Seinfeld.
Elvid lifted his hands to his shoulders in an expansive who-knows gesture. “Might be twenty. Can’t say for sure; this is not rocket science. But if you’re expecting immortality, fuggeddaboudit. All I sell is fair extension. Best I can do.”
“Works for me,” Streeter said. The guy had cheered him up, and if he needed a straight man, Streeter was willing to oblige. Up to a point, anyway. Still smiling, he extended his hand across the card table. “Fifteen percent, fifteen years. Although I have to tell you, fifteen percent of an assistant bank manager’s salary won’t exactly put you behind the wheel of a Rolls-Royce. A Geo, maybe, but—”
“That’s not quite all,” Elvid said.
“Of course it isn’t,” Streeter said. He sighed and withdrew his hand. “Mr. Elvid, it’s been very nice talking to you, you’ve put a shine on my evening, which I would have thought was impossible, and I hope you get help with your mental prob—”
“Hush, you stupid man,” Elvid said, and although he was still smiling, there was nothing pleasant about it now. He suddenly seemed taller—at least three inches taller—and not so pudgy.
It’s the light, Streeter thought. Sunset light is tricky. And the unpleasant smell he suddenly noticed was probably nothing but burnt aviation fuel, carried to this little graveled square outside the Cyclone fence by an errant puff of wind. It all made sense… but he hushed as instructed.
“Why does a man or woman need an extension? Have you ever asked yourself that?”
“Of course I have,” Streeter said with a touch of asperity. “I work in a bank, Mr. Elvid—Derry Savings. People ask me for loan extensions all the time.”
“Then you know that people need extensions to compensate for shortfalls—short credit, short dick, short sight, et cetera.”
“Yeah, it’s a short—ass world,” Streeter said.
“Just so. But even things not there have weight. Negative weight, which is the worst kind. Weight lifted from you must go somewhere else. It’s simple physics. Psychic physics, we could say.”
Streeter studied Elvid with fascination. That momentary impression that the man was taller (and that there were too many teeth inside his smile) had gone. This was just a short, rotund fellow who probably had a green outpatient card in his wallet—if not from Juniper Hill, then from Acadia Mental Health in Bangor. If he had a wallet. He certainly had an extremely well-developed delusional geography, and that made him a fascinating study.
“Can I cut to the chase, Mr. Streeter?”
“Please.”
“You have to transfer the weight. In words of one syllable, you have to do the dirty to someone else if the dirty is to be lifted from you.”
“I see.” And he did. Elvid was back on message, and the message was a classic.
“But it can’t be just anyone. The old anonymous sacrifice has been tried, and it doesn’t work. It has to be someone you hate. Is there someone you hate, Mr. Streeter?”
“I’m not too crazy about Kim Jong-il,” Streeter said. “And I think jail’s way too good for the evil bastards who blew up the USS Cole, but I don’t suppose they’ll ever—”
“Be serious or begone,” Elvid said, and once again he seemed taller. Streeter wondered if this could be some peculiar side-effect of the medications he was taking.
“If you mean in my personal life, I don’t hate anyone. There are people I don’t like—Mrs. Denbrough next door puts out her garbage cans without the lids, and if a wind is blowing, crap ends up all over my law—”
“If I may misquote the late Dino Martino, Mr. Streeter, everybody hates somebody sometime.”
“Will Rogers said—”
“He was a rope-twirling fabricator who wore his hat down around his eyes like a little kid playing cowboy. Besides, if you really hate nobody, we can’t do business.”
Streeter thought it over. He looked down at his shoes and spoke in a small voice he hardly recognized as his own. “I suppose I hate Tom Goodhugh.”
“Who is he in your life?”
Streeter sighed. “My best friend since grammar school.”