Free Dark Mondays by Kage Baker Page A

three little beach towns, and sold them like hotcakes. Two of the towns vanished like hotcakes at a Grange Breakfast, too; one was buried in a sandstorm and the other washed out to sea during the first winter flood.
    But Nunas Beach remained, somehow, and for a brief season there were ice cream parlors and photographers’ studios, clam stands, Ferris wheels, drug stores and holiday cottages. Then, for no single reason, people began to leave. Some of the shops burned down; some of the cottages dwindled into shanties. Willow thickets and sand encroached on the edges. What was left rusted where it stood, with sand drifting along its three streets, yet somehow did not die.
    People found their way there, now and then, especially after the wars. It was a cheap place to lie in the sun while your wounds healed and your shell-shock faded away. Some people stayed.
    Pegasus Bright, who had had both his legs blown off by a land mine, had stayed, and opened the Chowder Palace. He was unpleasant when he drank and, for that matter, when he didn’t, but he could cook. The Chowder Palace was a long, low place on a street corner. It wasn’t well lit, its linoleum tiles were cracked and grubby, its windows dim with grease. Still, it was the only restaurant in town. Therefore all the locals ate at the Chowder Palace, and so, too, did those few vacationers who came to Nunas Beach.
    Mr. Bright bullied a staff of illegal immigrants who worked for him as waiters and busboys; at closing time they faded like ghosts back to homeless camps in the willow thickets behind the dunes, and he rolled himself back to his cot in the rear of the Palace, and slept with a tire iron under his pillow.
* * *
    One Monday morning the regulars were lined up on the row of stools at the counter, and Mr. Bright was pushing himself along the row topping up their mugs of coffee, when Charlie Cansanary said:
    “I hear somebody’s bought the Hi-Ho Lounge.”
    “No they ain’t, you stupid bastard,” said Mr. Bright. He disliked Charlie because Charlie had lost his right leg to a shark while surfing, instead of in service to his country.
    “That’s what I heard too,” said Tom Avila, who was the town’s mayor.
    “Why would anybody buy that place?” demanded Mr. Bright. “
Look
at it!”
    They all swiveled on their stools and looked out the window at the Hi-Ho Lounge, which sat right across the street on the opposite corner. It was a windowless stucco place painted gray, with martini glasses picked out in mosaic tile on either side of the blind slab of a door. On the roof was a rusting neon sign portraying another martini glass whose neon olive had once glowed like a green star against the sunset. But not in years; the Hi-Ho Lounge had never been open in living memory.
    “Maybe somebody wants to open a bar,” said Leon Silva, wiping egg yolk out of his mustache. “It might be kind of nice to have a place to drink.”
    “You can get drinks here,” said Mr. Bright quickly, stung.
    “Yeah, but I mean legally. And in glasses and all,” said Leon.
    “Well, if you want to go to
those
kinds of places and spend an arm and a leg—” said Mr. Bright contemptuously, and then stopped himself, for Leon, having had an accident on a fishing trawler, only had one arm. Since he’d lost it while earning a paycheck rather than in pursuit of frivolous sport, however, he was less a target for Mr. Bright’s scorn. Mr. Bright continued: “Anyway it’ll never happen. Who’s going to buy an old firetrap like that place?”
    “Those guys,” said Charlie smugly, pointing to the pair of business-suited men who had just stepped out of a new car and were standing on the sidewalk in front of the Hi-Ho Lounge.
    Mr. Bright set down the coffee pot. Scowling, he wheeled himself from behind the counter and up to the window.
    “Developers,” he said. He watched as they walked around the Hi-Ho Lounge, talking to each other and shaking their heads. One took a key from an envelope and