...but not for a beer. He's looking for a piece of pie. It's been a long night, he's had enough beer for the week, and all he wants is a good piece of pie. There's a sandwichboard outside the establishment listing the edible fare, and at the bottom of the blackboard is a crude triangular drawing of a slice of steaming pie, chalk squiggles off the top denoting the steam from chalk hashes advertising a latticed crust. He sits down at a table in the dark, brickwalled room, waiting for the lone waitress in the joint to register his presence. There is one other customer at the only other table, a swarthy, bearded man in a filthy brown caftan and torn cutoffs, hunched over the beer he's nursing in a solitary corner across the empty room. After a minute or two of Tom Waits singing of a bad night in Copenhagen, the jukebox clicks and shuffles to the next record. Only then does the waitress open her eyes, revived from her reverie. She extinguishes her cigarette, burnt to the filter and no longer smoking, and walks our boy's way."One slice of pie, please."
"What kindja want? We got bloobry, strawbry, apple and chess."
"Blueberry, please. Thanks."
The waitress registers his order without expression, turns on her flat heel, heads to the kitchen from whence comes the violent sound of shouting in languages known to no natives of the region. She returns a moment later, one male voice still grumbling in the kitchen, one slice of steaming blueberry pie on a cracked plate held between her nicotine-stained fingers. She places it in front of our boy and he closes his eyes, fork in hand, savoring for a brief moment the tang of steaming berry coming from his plate, the homey smell of fresh crust made with lard, the welcome, oppressive smolder of the sugar burnt atop the bluechecked lattice.
When our boy opens his eyes, the swarthy man has left his beer across the room and is sitting across the table, an appraising look on his face. "So you've come for the pie, y'have." Our boy doesn't know if this is a question or the end result of the appraising look on the man's face. He nods assent, but before he can reply in the affirmative the swarthy man cuts him off: "They've a good bloobry pie here, lad, but there's far better where I've been."
The smells of pie have colonized our boy's stomach by this point, encouraging the rebel glands at the core of his being to begin digesting naked aroma in anticipation of the real thing. Still he waits, intrigued by the stranger across his table. "And where is this better pie," he asks.
"Not just pie, lad. Bloobry pie, mind. And it's a far way from here, a far way and a dangerous journey." There is a pause, another appraising glare, and only after a disconcerting stare directly into our boy's eyes does the swarthy man continue. "But you don't look the sort who cares for a better pie. Nah," he says with a squint, "you've the look of a dilettante about yeh."
Vaguely offended, still hungry, our boy ignores his fast-cooling pie and bites instead at the line offered him. "I don't know what I've the look of, sir, but I enjoy a slice of blueberry pie as much as the next guy."
The wiresparks from a tram passing outside light the swarthy man's face with a flicker of yellow-white light that delineates a host of scars about his eyes, one milky, dead, the other glistening with beer or intent. "That may be, son, but do you love a slice of bloobry pie more than the next man, or more than the next hundred, thousand, million souls who've gone in search of it? And failed?" A thunderclap provides punctuation for the stranger's next words, "And died?"
Just as curiousity can lead a man to try any sort of offal on a menu, so can it lead a man to forget the beautiful food in front of him as he eyes the scarred stranger who only now breaks into a smile, showing two pink rows of gum where his teeth once lived, upon a time, long ago. "Yeah," says our boy. "I love blueberry pie. Where should I go that's not this heap?"
"Well, lad, allow me to tell you..."
Forty minutes later our boy emerges back into the sodium glare of the streetlamps, raises his collar against the cold, stuffs his hands in his empty coat pockets, looks both ways up and down the empty cobbled street, and begins walking east. In the bar, at his table, a swarthy, half-blind stranger cackles over a cold slice of blueberry pie, taking another bite and laughing open-mouthed, his head thrown back, his naked gums painted purple with fruit.
Two days later our boy is aboard a cargo plane, in the hold, hanging onto the buckle at the end of a canvas strap and trying desperately not to vomit. His face white with exertion and green with the effects of the storm raging outside at 30,000 feet, he calms himself with the image of perfect serenity that is the Perfect Slice Of Blueberry Pie. Suddenly the pilot, parachute already on his back, lurches out of the cockpit into the juddering fuselage, shouts an inaudible farewell and opens the hatch leading outside, jumping into the blackness. Every piece of paper, every hair on our boy's head, indeed the very legs on which he stands, rush toward the open door. The engines whine and fail, the deafening suck of the vacuum wrapping our boy in its velvety omnipresence as the plane begins its nosedive, falling from the sky just as quickly as one would expect of an overloaded cargo plane, but with the silent grace--when viewed from a distance--of a ski jumper returning to earth along his ballistic path.
Swimming clear of the flaming, sizzling wreckage, having miraculously survived, our boy paddles the entire night, treading water, thrashing against the bumping, nibbling jaws of unseen fish stirred from the deep by the crashing plane. As dawn breaks redhot and orangebright over the horizon, he spies the twin smokestacks of an ocean liner puffing closer into view, until the entire horizon is that ship and the men a hundred feet above him are shouting excitedly and pointing in his direction. He blacks out finally, exhausted, as he is pulled to the deck, closing his eyes against the blinding sunlight reflected off his life preserver, whiter than white.
He comes to hours? days? weeks? later to the sound of a klaxon blaring in his tiny metal room. By the only light in the room, a flashing red strobe, he clambers into his pants and through the small metal door, where a stream of small, brown sailors is rushing past him in one direction. He falls in at the end of this line as he feels the boat list to port, finding a new sense of purpose in his legs after he peels himself off the whitewashed wall of the narrow hallway. Arriving on deck, he sees the entire bow engulfed in flames, a company of the small brown sailors attempting to combat the blaze before it reaches the barrels of fuel oil stored just meters away. He is blown clear of the deck when the barrels go off, landing far enough away to watch the boat quickly sinking beneath the midocean swells, the flames onboard extinguished by the onrushing seawater. Finding a man-sized slab of buoyant wreckage nearby, he crawls aboard and promptly returns to the nothingness he had inhabited until only minutes earlier.
Morning. Sand. Sand and ocean. One way our boy looks there's nothing but blue, blue sea. The other, nothing but fiery sand melting into the horizon in great ripples of heat. He thinks for a moment that he might be standing square on the border of heaven and hell, until he notices the bright sky overhead, dotted with birds of prey circling against the sun. Squinting once more toward the horizon, he sees the faint, shimmering outline of a mountain in the far distance. This must be it, he tells himself. And even if it's not, it's somewhere else and I'm still here... He starts to walk inland.
He finds shelter where he can: in the scrawny shadow of a twisted, dead tree; behind a single, house-sized boulder that seems more lost, in all that sand, than he is. Days pass and he finds himself on a vast, dry mudflat, the ground cracked as if it were made of paving stones. The heat is taking its toll. His lips are as parched and cracked as his surroundings, but the mountain is closer than it was yesterday, closer still than the day before, a wavy line of green hills standing between him and salvation. At the end of the next day, delirious with heatstroke, he imagines he's stepping from the cracked flat into a field of waist-high grass. This is it, he tells himself, but hell was back there, so it could be worse... He sinks to slumber in the tall grass, the sky swirling to black overhead.
He awakens to rain pouring down, flattening the grass, wetting his lips and replenishing his spirits. Turning his face to the sky, he opens his mouth and laughs between choking gurgles of pure, fresh rain. Drenched but happy, he charges off at the mountain before him at full speed, guided by the occasional crack of lightning.
Near 2000 meters, the rain turns to snow. The day had broken hours before, but it brought only grey skies, no sun. Advancing upward against the puffy flakes, our boy continues climbing--3000, 4000, 5000--over rocks and crevasses, through snowfield and up jagged ice walls, his destination finally in reach after such a journey, after so many scrapes with death. His feet numb, his teeth chattering, barefoot and half-naked, he stumbles to the threshold of the hut the old stranger had told him about so many weeks ago. Opening the door, he is preceded by a kamikaze windburst of snow rushing toward its death inside the cozy, warm room. A coal fire rages against the cold outside. The wind howls, inflating and deflating the greased-hide windows set into small frames high in the walls. A small, hunched figure steps out from the kitchen, trailing steam and the most inviting aromas our boy has ever experienced. He has a start as he recognizes something in her face, in the way the deep lines in her face converge to highlight one dead, milky eye. But it passes when she smiles, smiles with her whole browned face, the sweetest, only smile he's seen in how long?
"Whatchoo wan'?" she asks our boy, laying her stout, wrinkled hand on his and patting, patting.
"I've t-traveled a long way, ma'am, on the word of a f-friend who told me I might find the best b-blueberry pie in the world right here." He pauses, waiting to see if his words register. "Do you have b-blueberry pie?"
The woman's face maintains its beatific smile as she informs him, "No bloobry. Only goat blood. You wan'?"
"Well," our boy responds. "In that case, just a coffee."
