Harvestman Lodge by Cameron Judd

store in Knoxville, and had nowhere to write my book except the kitchen table in my apartment. An office is a luxury. Pretty much any office. This is fine. Yeah, I like it.”
    “You wrote a book. Yeah, I heard that. Huh! I’d sooner take a beating than try to write a book,” Jimbo said, faking a shudder. “I’d rather go back into the state pen than have to put that many words on paper.”
    State pen … go back? A dozen questions leaped to Eli’s mind. Courtesy demanded he not ask them.
    Jimbo read his thoughts and grinned. “Don’t you worry, young man, my killing days are long past me.”
    Killing. “You joking with me, Jimbo?”
    Jimbo chuckled. “If I hollered boo right now you’d jump right through that wall.”
    “I might.”
    “Don’t you be worrying about none of this. I kilt three men in my life. Two of them in Korea, so that don’t count. The other one we ain’t going to talk about. All I’ll say is he was about to kill me when I killed him first. But I couldn’t get off for self-defense. I had the wrong skin color for that, y’see, and he had the right one. I ain’t killed no man since, nor had no ambition to.”
    “I’ll take you at your word.” Something to ask Jake Lundy about.
    “Your bathroom’s there,” Jimbo said, pointing toward a nearby door. Eli checked it out. Toilet, sink, and to his surprise, a cubicle tub-style shower with a basic white plastic curtain hanging on rings.
    “Stone tile on the floor,” Jimbo said, tapping his workboot on the tile. “None of that imitation stuff. Good tile like this is will hold up forever, just about.”
    “It’s great,” Eli said, trying the sink. The faucets turned on and off easily, no drips. He flipped a wall switch. The ventilation fan worked.
    “Your water heater is in the closet on the other side of this wall,” Jimbo said. “It’s a little one, but it’ll give you what you need.”
    “I like it, Jimbo. If I sleep through my alarm, I can still get to work on time and take my shower right here at the office.”
    The old man grinned and offered a handshake. “That’s good, young man,” he said. “You’ll do fine here. And if anything quits working or starts dripping or whatever, you got old Jimbo here to take care of you.”
    Eli grinned back and shook Jimbo’s hand and felt he’d made his first real friend in this town.
     
    DRIVING AWAY FROM THE STATE’S ugliest and strangest office complex, Eli stopped at a phone booth on Railroad Street and called Allison with his news, wondering why he even bothered. The chance to be whatever they might have become together was certainly gone, as Allison was always ready to tell him whenever they talked.
    And yet the talking went on.
    He tried to keep the conversation focused on the new job. “My office building is a mulligan stew,” he said. “Just a bunch of separate structures boxed in together without any real obvious design. There’s a story behind that I’ll tell you sometime. My office itself, though, isn’t bad. About the size of a dormitory room, bathroom off to the side. The bathroom even has a shower in it … which will be handy, I guess, if I somehow manage to work up a raging sweat one day typing stories about the heritage of Kincheloe County and Tylerville.”
    “Will you have an assistant, a secretary?”
    “No. Just me alone in that office with my word processor. There’s no full front-end system here yet, just individual terminals that save to floppy disks. You take the floppies in to the paper for editing and transfer into the typesetting system. And of course I’ve got an office phone. I’ll give you the direct-dial number as soon as I know it. They are also going to tie me in to the newspaper’s main switchboard so that Ruby, the lady who answers the phones at the paper, can transfer calls to me when she needs to.”
    “Ruby. Some little part-time floozy coed from the nearest college, I suppose?”
    Eli laughed. “Not even close. Think big hair,