Jimmy’s Gone or The Scrapbook

As I walked into the diner the first person I saw was Dean, directly facing me from the other side of the nearest table. There were two others with him, both seated by the windows, and Dean pushed the fourth chair out with his foot as a way of inviting me to sit down. I did. I was actually looking for my brother Jimmy, and though I knew there wasn’t much chance of learning anything from Dean and Co. I didn’t have a whole lot else to go on at the time.

“This is David,” said Dean, introducing us, “and his brother Kiernan”

“Hmm.” I answered. “That’s funny; I’m looking for Jimmy.”

“Jimmy’s his brother,” said Dean to his two buddies. “Haven’t seen him,” he said to me. “Didn’t even know he was out. He’s out?”

“Yeah,” I said, “couple of weeks now.” David and Kiernan nodded thoughtfully.

“Well, he always turns up,” said Dean. Maybe a little too genially.

A waitress turned up at my side, asking me what I wanted. I didn’t like the looks of the plates in front of the other three at the table. Watery traces of eggs still on the plates, dingy looking forks with the tines all bent out of shape, and partial pieces of what looked like burnt bacon. Cloudy glasses filled with tepid looking water. The whole place smelled like old food. Greasy.

“Coffee and toast,” I said. “No butter.” I was thinking it’d just be more grease.

“That all you want?” asked the waitress, tapping her pad with the eraser end of the pencil.

“Yeah, that’s it”

She wrote it down on the ticket, nodding, and then left without saying anything else.

“He ain’t a big eater,” said Dean to his friends, “or maybe he doesn’t like the looks of the food.”

“It’s good food,” said Kiernan. “I eat here all the time.”

“He usually likes things a little more upscale,” said Dean, laughing as he nodded towards me. “Not like Jimmy.”

I didn’t like that, but let it pass. I wanted to hear what else he might have to say. The waitress brought me a cup and then poured the coffee at the table.

Dean and I talked for a little while; or rather I sat there and listened to Dean. I thought he might know something; he usually did. He’s also a big talker. Usually it wasn’t much worth listening too, or it was more than I wanted to hear, but he was good at keeping himself informed and right then it was information I wanted. So he talked, going on and on about how bad business was lately, about which I only wondered how he could spend so much time sitting on his ass in a grubby diner shoved in between a warehouse and an old taxidermy shop. I didn’t say anything about that, of course; I was hoping he’d get back around to Jimmy.

The waitress brought my toast. I pushed it off to my left.

When Dean saw how bored I was getting, all of a sudden it was ‘Jimmy this’ and ‘Jimmy that’, but it was all old news, stuff that happened twenty years ago and was of absolutely no use to anybody now. David and Kiernan listened, but then they looked like they were used to listening. Dean was about to start in on another story about school when a gal from a nearby booth walked up and stood next to our table.

“You’re talking about Jimmy?” she asked.

“Yeah, that’s right,” said Dean. “His brother,” he added, nodding at me.

“This is Meghan,” he said to me.

“I worked with Jimmy,” she said, naming a place over on Fourth Avenue South. “He didn’t show up last week. Didn’t call, either. Nobody knows.”

“Isn’t that--” started David, but Dean came in a little louder.

“You’re Jimmy’s type, aren’t you?” he croaked, looking her up and down.

He was right: she had long, dark hair. Big chest. Maybe a little too short, but it wasn’t as if Jimmy was all that particular. This could mean something.

“Yeah, well, he was mine. And yeah, we saw each other a bit. He’d already had some trouble with a girl named Val, who also thought she was his type. But she wasn’t. Val didn’t like finding that out.” Meghan sounded like she was trying to put the mark on this woman Val, but it was she herself who sounded bitter.

“What else you got?” asked Dean, beating me to it. Though when it came right down to it, I still thought Dean knew something himself. From what he wasn’t saying.

“I’m working on a graphic novel about us,” she said.

“A what?” asked Kiernan.

“It’s like a comic book,” I said. “For grown-ups.” As if that’s why he wouldn’t know. “What do mean by ‘us’?” I asked her. “You and Jimmy?”

“More than a comic book,” said Meghan, and reached over to her booth and grabbed a thick pile of construction paper. It was all held together in one of those binders we used to use for school reports. She pulled over a chair from another table and sat down next to me at the end of ours.

“You gonna eat that toast?” asked David.

“Nope.” I answered. “Have at it.” He reached for the jelly.

Opening up her book, I could see that she’d put quite a bit of work into it. Not that it looked all that great. It was more like a scrapbook than anything else. There were polaroids and pencil sketches on thin tracing paper falling out all over the place, and when she opened it up she needed to put her hand over the entire page to keep it all in place. Some of the drawings were in color, some were in black and white. Maybe half of each page was pictures, the other half was dialogue, usually in a seven or eight word column at the bottom center of the page. From the page we spent most of our time with, I couldn’t tell whether the pictures were meant to illustrate the text, or whether the text was meant to describe the pictures, or really even what was supposed to go with what.

I looked at the clock on the wall above our table. The hour and minute hands were attached to the nose of a cartoon lion, as if they were whiskers. A few hours earlier they would have been in the right place, although other lines had been drawn on the face to give you the right idea. It occurred to me then that the clock was a kind of mask - that in fact all clocks look a little like masks. I was so stuck on this idea that when I turned back to Meghan and her scrapbook I realized I’d forgotten to take note of the time.

Oh yeah – ‘a few hours earlier’. It was 11:15.

The scrapbook wasn’t all about Jimmy, or even her and Jimmy. In fact, I don’t remember any pictures of him at all. Maybe he was in some of the dialogue, but I hadn’t taken the time to read that. The whole book seemed dedicated to her own various obsessions, which meant mostly herself. There was one big picture of her that stands out, really dark, so that it was hard to tell where her own black hair ended and the darkness of the surrounding background began. Her face was a little out of focus, but that looked like it was intended. You could tell she was looking down, as if she were sad. Featured so prominently, it seemed to me the image she liked best. Below it were some lines of a poem. But there were other pictures on other pages, some of them in color and a whole lot brighter. There was one, a tall, thin rectangular crop that made her look like she was standing in a doorway. Then I realized she was actually lying on her back. She was covered in seashells and flower petals, artfully arranged. Looking at one stretch of skin below that chest I had to guess she was naked underneath. Shells covered her breasts, but there was what looked to be a rose bud as well. Or was it the edge of her left areola? Maybe even the nipple itself, I really couldn’t tell. Was she trying to reveal something, or was she hiding? And there was so much stuff here; it was enough to drive anyone crazy. No wonder Jimmy left.

I pushed the book back towards her. Not that there was much room left at the table. Dean, David, and Kiernan all looked towards the window. Suspicious.

“I didn’t have time for the words. Nice pictures.”

“Thanks”

“But you haven’t seen him?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“And there's no real reason to lie now, is there?”

“No, I guess not.”

“You think he might be with this other gal?”

“Yeah, maybe.”