Read Online The Methuselah Gene by Jonathan Lowe - Free Book Online Page B

pulled up, freezing me like a deer in its headlight beam.   I squinted once more, and put up my hand, something a deer couldn’t do.   Just shoot me, I thought, dully.   But after the two truck doors slammed in unison, and the “ Howdi ” came, I knew it wasn’t Wally and the Sheriff.   Instinctively, I moved out of the light before Edie could eyeball me from the Slow Poke.   Then I looked back to see two more hog farmers, one of them carrying a sheaf of letters, the smell of one or both of the geezers wafting outward like the electric tang of a cherry bomb.
    From the darkness of the street fronting the closed hardware store, I counted the few lights visible amid this block of red brick buildings, which were surrounded in all directions by farmland.   Inside the barber shop a luminous clock cast a blue pallor over two sheeted chairs, like corpses in a morgue.   Thanks to a banker’s lamp atop a hidden desk, the tiny branch bank glowed green inside.   The town hall that doubled as the Zion Baptist Church bore a fluorescent sign next to its one stained glass window.   The sign advertised bingo, an antiques auction on Thursday, and a sermon by Pastor Felsen on II Peter 2:9 and the nature of temptation.   The lawyer’s office next door—also lettered to be a notary and tax service—was as dark as sin except for a pasteboard poster lit in front by a small Tiffany lamp, advertising real estate in ten acre parcels.   The only other light visible from where I stood was the one next to the brighter Slow Poke.   This was Zion Drug, a narrow frontage with a deep interior, like the old oblong drug stores seen in sepia black and white photographs from the turn of the last century.
    I approached the drugstore from the left, out of view of Edie’s window, and then peered through the yellowed plate glass toward a partly open door in back.   Toward the sliver of light that had attracted me.   In that brighter back room I could see a bed and a sink.   A shadow played across the white sheets on the bed as something or someone moved between it and the light source.   There was another light source back there, too, but the second seemed to vacillate, and for whatever odd reason the words lava lamp came to mind.   Meanwhile, the only light within the store itself emanated from the flickering glass display case containing, from what I could tell, cigars, film, electric razors and women’s compacts.   Despite the dimness, I was certain there was no pharmacy here, only racks of nonprescription remedies, and sundries like rubbing alcohol, peroxide, vitamins, rental videos, and processed junk food snacks.   Stacked in one corner were cases of various soft drinks and beers.   In another corner, an ancient Pepsi cooler abutted the end of the display case.   It was the kind of cooler that weighed a ton, requiring you to pull your bottle up through a metal gate.   Frozen overhead were three dust-caked fans, their long aluminum blades as motionless as petrified bat wings.
    I had just started to turn away when the sole resident of the back room suddenly appeared in the doorway.   He saw me immediately, and momentarily arrested himself in place.   Framed in the light as the door swung wider behind him, his silhouette revealed the man to be tall, muscular, perhaps in his late thirties, wearing a tank top tee shirt and cutoff blue jeans with frayed bottoms.   For a full three seconds we both stood transfixed, looking at each other.   But then his body language changed, and I sensed he regarded me with only casual curiosity, as though observing an undersized Mako behind the Plexiglas of a holding tank.   On the television now visible behind him at the foot of the bed, a pornographic movie utilized a swimming pool setting for an orgy scene.
    I lifted my hand in a stoic wave, and then watched as this back room tenant seemed to work the stiffness