A Dinner of the Hours

by Miriam Trujillo

Part 1 appears in this issue

conclusion

He had bought himself a sailing boat and used to go out onto the sea, One day, an October day like this, he sailed out under a clear blue sky, and a sudden storm came up. Only I knew he was out there, so no distress signal was sent. The authorities finally figured out he'd drowned after he didn't come to work the next day and never did again.

With the money, I was able to buy the finest house in Nome.

The man moved down to the seat beside me. Soundlessly. He sat erect as if he didn't need the chair to keep him in place.

“What others?” I asked again, rather peevishly. “Why must we wait? How many others”

The man gave me a sidelong, amused glance that made my blood run cold.

“Many others,” he said, drumming the ring on the table with a great clang. “But they will come by and by.” He reached over and began to put food onto my plate. Not his at all. Just mine.

I stared in a bit of awe at the food. It looked rich and varied, and not at all like the kind you usually find in town. “Now this was the way it was supposed to be!” I thought. “If you are going to drag me out into the tundra, this was the hospitality you were supposed to show!” I smiled expansively and started to eat all that wonderful food. The others would have to wait.

Halfway into a bite of the most delicious lobster dish I’d ever had, I got distracted. Another man had come up. I nearly choked, even though it shouldn't have been so much of a surprise this time. This man, too, looked exactly like me.

He was older. Just a little bit older than the first man, and he carried himself with more confidence. I remembered holding my head up like that after I bought my house and began to court the wealthiest in Nome. Gravely, he shook my hand: “I've waited long to see you,” he said in my voice.

“What can you mean? How would you know?” I said, beginning to get rather angry. “I don't know you people at all.”

“I know you,” he said as if that was all that mattered. Then he lapsed into silence and walked to a farther chair to sit down. My gaze couldn't help but slide down to his feet.

Yes, they were there. Just like I didn't want them to be: those beautiful beaded, lavishly furred boots.

She had made them for me. It would have been decades ago, but all those decades just slid away when I saw them again.

Her name was Agnakluwak or something like that. I always just called her Becca. She'd fallen in love with me. I found her gorgeous, so I made sure she stuck around. It was annoying, though, the way she wished to be with me all the time and talk to me, but oh! Those piercing black eyes, long hair, and beautiful figure! She wasn't going anywhere.

She made me those boots, or mukluks she called them, the way she'd been taught by her people. She made them as a gift when our love was newest and strongest. She'd come to my house, under cover of night during the darkest part of the winter. The whole town thought we were going to get married, but they never knew about those night visits.

She was a village girl. She'd come up from her village for some short errand but stayed when she met me. We carried on for a while until I grew tired of her. I paid her off, but by that time it was too late. It was clear what she had done and everyone knew. I'll never forget the burned-up look in her eyes when her aunts carried her away as the whole street howled.

She went back to her village, and I never heard from her again.

Her family wanted to kill me. I wasn't afraid of them, though. And in time they realized they couldn't intimidate me, and just grew sullen throughout the years.

I looked at the man who had sat down at the table again. He carried himself the way I fancied I carried myself back then: strong, full of confidence. The way a man should when he owns the finest house in town and has all people of influence courting him. He had a coldness in his eyes, though, that I didn't recognize. Surely my eyes never looked so hard back then.

The next guest came up from behind me. I didn't even start this time to see the same fair hair and enviable features all over again. This time, he looked a little bit older, more in manner than anything else. This one barely gave me a curt nod, but it was a nod with such a piercing glance, as if he too was saying he had waited a long time for this. When he sat down, he pulled out a notebook and devoted the rest of the dinner to writing in it.

I remembered that notebook well. I had gotten it at the shops for a dollar. It was a good, cheap time to be alive. Or at least, it was, if you had your wits about you. Men owed me money by the time I had amassed my empire, and I was the sort of man who would collect. I'd keep careful count in that notebook of who was short, whose interest was amassing, and who needed an eviction notice. I'm sure there was some grumbling about me among the inebriates and the like, but I didn't grow poorer. I was popular among the folk in town who mattered. The more I collected, the more they would court me and come to my parties.

As I thought these thoughts, the guests at this strange dinner party started coming so thick and fast to take seats around the table. Over and over again, it was variations of the same man, and I was the oldest variation of the lot. Some of the guests came older, grimmer. They looked like they'd been through a hard time, poor chaps. Some were younger, and had that air of reckless abandonment that I so admired in myself sixty-seven years ago.

But they, one and all, made me uneasy. Without fail, each version of myself brought up memories that I'd learned to suppress; memories that would have spoiled my gain if I had dwelt on them for more than an instant. With a surge of anger, I realized what was going on.

“This is an ambush!” I cried, springing up with a bottle in my hand. I don't know who was behind this or how much money they paid to assault me so, but I wasn't having it anymore.

The instant I stood up, every single one of them stood as well. Down that long long table, fading out into the tundra, every single pair of blue eyes looked at me: not angry, not happy, .just an empty, hollow, searching stare.

For a second I was breathless: caught and pinned down by all those airy blue nails. But then my better judgment, which never failed me for long, returned. I backed away from that table, waving my ridiculous bottle.

“I'll have you thrown in prison, any man who dares to come near me, hear? Cited and thrown in prison! Damn your tricks! Damn your lies! Damnation to all of you!” My words faded on the tundra wind as if there were nobody to hear them.

That song! That song again! Before it was just a tune, now it was a whole orchestra, blaring in my ears, with sepulchral voices singing words I suddenly understand.

“Don Giovanni! A cenar teco...”

I knew the words, I knew the context, and I knew what came next.

“No!” I shouted, my voice as strong and virile as ever. “No! Never! Damn you! Damn you all!”

Those eyes, those rows and rows of dead blue eyes, they weren't looking at me, they were looking behind me. I turned around.

There was one more copy of me. He was old. He seemed so much bigger, but in truth he was shrunken. His eyes had lost all light. His skin was grey. His breath was stopped. He was dead!

“Damn you all!” I screamed again. I broke out into a run, intending to leap over the side of the dredge and return to my car. But the rows and rows of blue eyes were walking now, and they clustered around me.

* * *

As the sun set that night, a group of kids, the kinds who were always climbing and exploring where they shouldn't, came back to town quite shaken. Old Man Simons was dead, they said. His body was out on the old dredge, which was random, they said. And he had the most horrible expression on his face.

Everyone in Nome drew a collective sigh of relief. It was high time the old bastard was dead, they all said to each other. It was high time he met his maker.

Proceed to Challenge 1000...