by Joe Derkacht
#
As if fluorescent orange was not insult enough, someone had newly splashed white paint over the tavern’s wooden Indian, the better to show off their command of four-letter obscenities done in a broad-tipped black marker. Upon closer examination, I discovered someone had used a pen knife to carve two names into one shoulder, too, names entwined with hearts and arrows. It seemed Sheila loved Jen. That was followed in black marker by Sheila loves Sally, then Sheila loves Sheila, an apropos sign of the times, I guessed.
When I pushed my way in through the front door, I found Claude sitting at the bar, both elbows on the counter, reading the sports page from the Oregonian. A glass of beer was at his left elbow and a cigarette smoldered in his right hand. Besides him, I saw two other persons in the room: a solitary, long-haired man played pool at a far table, muttering curses about a bad shot, while a chunky, butch-cut blonde stood at the Art Deco jukebox. Sheila? I wondered vaguely. In a moment, mournful Country Western music floated through the air.
Intent upon his newspaper, Claude didn’t seem to notice I had sat down beside him, giving me opportunity to examine his profile for changes. His nose was more pockmarked than ever, his face redder, his hair thinner and grayer than I remembered.
“What do you want?” He asked, seemingly without a flicker of interest in my direction.
“I hear you have great service here,” I said.
“Yeah, well don’t believe everything you hear.”
Never tell a joke while you’re stuttering—unless it’s a joke about a stutterer.
“No baskets of chicken?” I tried, wondering if the chicken fryer was on the fritz again.
He swung toward me, rolled his eyes and at last folded the paper and laid it down.
“You been back to the funny farm?”
I shrugged, at the same time shaking my head in a no.
“I ain’t had chicken in here for a year and a half.” He said, his eyes narrowing suspiciously. “Not since Linda burned herself on the deep fryer and the aliens came down and took her away.”
“Came down?” I asked, completely bewildered. “Aliens? As in Canadians, you mean?”
“No no no,” he said, pointing toward the ceiling. “Aliens. You know, from outer space.” He spun his finger in the air and whistled crazily.
“Woman was nuttier than you,” he said, finally explaining himself. He picked up the newspaper again, opened it and snapped it between his hands to straighten the fold. He scanned the pages while he talked, interrupting himself every few moments for a drag on his cigarette. “Probably from the LSD and booze. She started young, you know.”
Linda was the hostile barmaid. I could not recall anything about her and LSD, or about her and booze, for that matter, other than what she drew from the taps behind the bar for customers. He might be making it all up, or none of it. I wasn’t sure. I also wasn’t sure of his point.
“About like Lulu,” he muttered, now addressing me by glancing toward our reflection in the mirror behind the bar. “Traipsing off to Africa for Jeezuss. Crazy, crazy, crazeee, man.”
Off to Africa? His sister Lulu? For Jesus? He must have seen my astonishment, because he was staring even harder at the mirror, incredulity written all over his face.
“You’ve done it again, haven’t you?” He demanded, slamming the paper down on the bar. He cursed, his beer glass falling over, spilling its contents.
“You here to get me saved again, tell me all about Jesus? Is that why you’re here?”
Confused, I nearly fell off my bar stool, stammering out an answer that was unintelligible even to me. I had decided on the walk from my house to offer to refurbish his poor, abused wooden Indian. What was this about Jesus? Who was I to get him saved?
“It’s bad enough you told Lulu about getting saved and she went off to be a missionary,” he muttered, swinging up the countertop gate to fetch a bar towel. He threw it over the spreading beer. “Don’t know why I put up with people like you.”
He carefully swabbed the countertop before throwing the towel into the sink and reaching for another.
“What did Jesus ever do for you?” He demanded, turning his attention back to me. “Most people think you’re retarded, Jack, if they don’t already know you’re crazy.”
I was still too astonished by his outburst to speak. I was trying to form words in my brain, words that were a long time in coming, as usual.
“You really don’t remember nothin’, do you?”
It wasn’t true. Because of my journals, I remembered mostly everything about my past, even if it did seem like a story about someone else. It certainly wasn’t any revelation to me that people often thought I was retarded or crazy, or both. I’d heard it all my life!
“After every time you have one of your episodes, it’s not long before you come in here to talk to me about Jesus.”
I shook my head. “I wondered if you wanted me to do something about my Indian.” At last I’d gotten out what I wanted to say.
“Oh,” he said, looking deflated. “Like repair it, dude? Is that what you mean? You serious?”
I nodded solemnly.
“Well,” he said, brightening. “That’s different. For free, you mean, right?”
I glanced around the room. If anything, the place looked dingier and shabbier than I remembered. The lunch-hour crowd wasn’t indicative, I figured, but it looked as though business hadn’t been good for him for a long time. I guessed I could do the work for free. I wasn’t doing anything else for the moment; as things stood, the Indian’s condition certainly wasn’t a good advertisement for my work. I started to nod my head in assent.
“Oh forget it,” he said, throwing his hands up in defeat. “You can’t blame me for trying, can you? Make it an even $500, we got ourselves a deal, dude.”
This time he let me nod. He came out from behind the bar and slapped me on the back.
“All right!” He said. “Got you on that one, didn’t I? And some fools think I don’t know nothin’ about business.”
Five hundred dollars was probably just about right, for me. But to deal with the vandalism problem, the Indian should be brought indoors. A mahogany base and lighted glass case were what he really needed. That would cost him another five hundred or more. What I was really thinking about, as we went outside to again examine the damage, was his sister Lulu. What did he mean about her being a missionary?
After satisfying him with details of what needed to be done and letting him know I would pick up the Indian tomorrow to begin the work, he slapped me jovially on the back. About to slap me again, he held back, eyes narrowing with some new concern evidently crossing his mind.
“You still working with that hypocrite?” He asked.
“Zell?” I asked, startled by the thought.
“The old broad?” He laughed, equally startled. “Tryg, I mean, you nitwit.” At my dumbfounded nod, he said, “Just remember I don’t want him touching anything of mine. You got that? Nothin’!”
“Nothin’—” I said, jolted by a wild dance of neurons firing in my brain. I was suddenly riding up Old Baldy in a rusty old Datsun 510 with the passenger window down. A young Tryg told me about harvesting weed on the mountain. A business partner and me, we’re growing it up off the road that goes to the repeater station.
Tryg the “hypocrite.” Tryg who refused to rat on his mysterious business partner and had spent over five years in jail while the other man got off Scot free.
“You!” I blurted, drawing up to within inches of his face.
Fear registered in his eyes, as if the knowledge of his guilt had sparked across the gap between our two brains. He shoved me, both hands against my chest, momentarily rocking me back on my heels. His jaw dropped, fear again widening his eyes, this time because I hadn’t fallen down as he expected. Stepping back, he set his feet and ran at me. Head down, he didn’t see me react, the pivot aside or the foot stuck out to trip him, some
thing that seemed to come naturally to me, as if I’d had to do the same thing many times before.
He went sprawling across the sidewalk, and didn’t come up nearly as fast as he’d fallen. On his knees, he stared down at his hands, at the blood that was beginning to seep from newly shredded skin.
“I’ll kill you for that,” he said coldly.
“I’ll let Blackie know,” I said, strangely calm and speaking as clearly as I’d ever spoken.
“I’ll get my gun. I’ll blow your brains out!”
I reached out, offering to help him back to his feet, but he slapped my hand away and hissed suddenly from the pain of contact. Shrugging, I walked past him and didn’t turn around to acknowledge any more of his threats. The last thing I heard him scream was that I could forget about the five hundred dollars, something I’d done even before tripping him. As for his threats, I realized I’d heard them plenty of times in my life. They were maybe the real reason Tryg had never ratted him out. He probably just hadn’t realized his “business” partner’s memory was as beer soaked as his brain.