Chapter 5

So anyway, back to the story. I stood at the open front door with my case of Southpaws, listening for the customary racket, and heard nothing. Adam was usually the only person home at this time of day anyway, since he didn’t have a job and rarely went to class, but dead silence was a rare occurrence at the 1022. I went on inside and headed for the kitchen, expertly tearing an opening in the top of the case and grabbing a beer as I walked. I fridged the beers and popped my top and went in search for some sign of life.

I headed back to the living room first to see if I had missed Adam napping on the dingy old beach-house couch, which he often did in the afternoon. No sign of him, but I noticed that the giant hole in the wall next to the front door was missing its guitar. That guitar had been in its hole-home since the first day we moved in, and it was weird that it was missing. The guitar had no strings, so there was no way anyone had taken it out to play a tune or two. Curiouser and Curiouser.

The hole in the wall, or as the residents called it, “The Guitar Hole,” was caused by Britt and Mike, another one of our roommates . Mike was a funny guy. The day that the lease was signed, neither of them had to work, so they went ahead and got the key and were going to start moving furniture and sundries in. As the story goes, they pulled into the driveway in Mike’s truck and decided to go in without furniture first to check the layout. Britt unlocked the door, walked inside, and stopped. “This is perfect,” he thought, just as Mike tackled him from behind. There ensued an impromptu wrestling match of the likes I can’t even imagine, mostly owing to the fact that I wasn’t there. As I was told, there was a scuffle of Clash of the Titans proportions, ending with Mike throwing Britt into the wall next to the front door. This finishing move created the Guitar Hole, and once Britt had extricated himself from the wall, both of the dumbasses gazed speechlessly at the insurance deposit-shattering travesty they had committed. I think it was Mike’s idea to stick his acoustic guitar in the hole, in the hopes that no one would notice this giant fucking chasm in the wall. This kind of worked out for the best, because whenever any roommate needed a replacement for a broken guitar string, they could just get the string from the Guitar Hole guitar. This worked for exactly six times. After that it was just a stringless guitar in a gaping hole in the wall. We could worry about it when we moved out, and it actually added some original ambience to the living room.

Anyway, the front door was almost never locked, so someone could’ve just peeked inside, grabbed the currently useless piece of wood out of the wall, and taken it to the pawn shop down the street. I needed more clues. I was putting off checking his room; Adam was not the most discriminating of people, and he might’ve found a new lady-friend walking the street and taken her home. I went behind the bar to the bartender’s spot, mostly to relish in the inexplicable feeling of power it gives and I noticed that Adam’s new bait knife was gone. There was a long two-by-four holding the back part of the bar together, and the bait knife was almost always stuck into the wood between where someone had written “EAT KING DOO DOO” and “Button Masher Fucks Your Mamma” with a black magic marker. This was really getting weird; I felt like a Private Investigator, now fervently searching for clues and causes, when I usually pretty much don’t give a shit about anything.

The bait knife was Adam’s new pride and joy. He had found it for only 94 cents at one of the seedy little general goods establishments he liked to frequent, and he was always showing it off to anyone who would look and listen. Lord knows what he thought he’d use it for; he never went fishing and he was a pretty nonviolent person. His dad, on the other hand, was pretty much the opposite. Mr. Howell actually enjoyed dealing out punishments, and he didn’t only inflict it upon the offender in question. Anyone even remotely related to the transgressor was subject to his wrath.

I decided it was time to stop beating around the bush and to start gathering some real information about the Disappearance of Adam. I headed to the fridge for another beer and went to Adam’s bedroom door, steeling myself for the possibility of catching a glimpse of some naked fugbot in his bed. I gave the door a tentative knock and waited; nothing. I knocked again, a little harder this time, and I heard a faint groan. Oh Christ, was it really worth it? I chugged the rest of my beer and went back to the fridge for a refill to give me time to bolster my courage and make up my mind. I decided to grab another for Adam, in case he was just taking the rare nap in his own bed. He always appreciated a beer right when he woke up, and I was already feeling pretty generous at this point. I cracked open one of the beers, took a healthy swig, and slowly and quietly turned the knob on his bedroom door. I wasn’t expecting what happened next.