Gargantuan by Maggie Estep

glowing red against the gray day.
    As I hopped into the truck, I saw Mrs. O’Rourke come tromping onto her porch to see what the honking was about. The matron tolerated honking about as well as marital separation. I think she shouted something at me but Sal’s window was down and the music was blisteringly loud. It was some sort of opera and it drowned out whatever recriminations were issuing from Mrs. O’Rourke.
    I got into the truck and settled into the passenger seat.
    “Thanks, Sal,” I shouted over the music.
    “No problem,” he shouted back.
    He drove.
    We made it to Surf Avenue in no time at all. The Cyclone roller coaster stood steely gray against the matching sky. Sal found a parking spot right in front of the museum entrance. He checked in his rearview mirror, presumably scanning for hit men. He craned his thick neck and looked all around the vehicle.
    “I’ll come up with you for a while,” he told me.
    We climbed the dark narrow stairs leading to the museum. The place smelled musty and a little salty. The paint was peeling like sunburned skin off the ancient walls of the hall.
    The sight of Ruby gave me an electrical charge. She was an ember in the museum’s dimness. She was wearing her red fake fur coat thrown over her shoulders and her hair was spilling down wildly. As she stood up to throw her arms around me, I noticed that her lower half was gorgeously packed into a tight-fitting black skirt.
    I held on to her until we both started to feel self-conscious. It was only then that I noticed another woman sitting there on a stool behind the dark little counter.
    “This is Jane, my best friend,” Ruby said, making me think of a little kid the way she said
best friend
.
    “Jane, this is Attila.”
    Jane offered a smile. She wasn’t your femme fatale type by any stretch and she was too slender and elegantly boned to be called handsome. Her black curls were cropped close to her head and she wore no makeup. Ruby had referred to her as a natural beauty and I concurred.
    Sal and Jane knew each other but there didn’t seem to be any great love going on there. As I gave Ruby details of what had happened on the track this morning—Sal of course had immediately called in a report to Ruby—Jane and Sal seemed to pointedly ignore each other. Just as I was wondering if I should tell Sal and Ruby about the mysterious knock on my door, a strange-looking man came up the stairs hauling two big laundry bags.
    He frowned at the lot of us.
    “Hi, Bob,” Ruby said nonchalantly. “Attila, this is my boss, Bob,” she said.
    Bob shook my hand. He looked like a diabolical clown. He was bald on top and wore the rest of his hair long. He was sporting pink-tinted eyeglasses, bright green pants, and an orange sweatshirt.
    “Anybody come in?” he asked Ruby.
    Ruby had told me that the Coney Island Museum wasn’texactly a thriving emporium. During winter, sometimes only three or four people came in all day and usually just to use the bathroom—for which Ruby charged them a dollar. Ruby brought in her laptop and whiled away the hours working on her notes for the book she and Bob were thinking of writing about the history of Coney Island. The only existing histories were dated and one of them was out of print. And both Bob and Ruby were passionate about their seedy home’s history.
    “Two German guys from Berlin,” she told Bob now. “We did all right,” she said, opening the cash drawer and showing him a little stack of twenties, “they bought three copies of
Sodom by the Sea
and a shitload of mugs and T-shirts.”
    “Nice,” Bob beamed at her, revealing a row of irregular but white teeth.
    “I’m going to throw my wash in,” he said, picking his bags back up and heading to the front of the place. I knew he lived somewhere in the building. He’d bought the beautiful old structure fifteen years earlier for a song. He’d offered Ruby one of the empty floors, but the walls were full of holes and there was no way