3 Women Walk Into A Bar

by Linda Sands

  Since he had arrived in Syracuse and slipped into his new life as James John Smith, reformed poker player and pub owner, he’d seen that most men his age were also struggling with their identities. It wasn’t far-fetched to claim a midlife crisis as the reason behind their choices, but when you were legitimately two different people—but not psychotic—you had to be careful every step along the way.

  There were nights where he just wanted to let his hair down, wanted to invite some people over and get high and play board games and listen to music and tell stories, but he was afraid he’d tell the wrong story, that he’d let something slip, that a piece of who he really was would be revealed.

  Not that he was 100 percent sure that hadn’t already happened. Quite a few nights, after they’d turned up the lights and kicked everyone out, Jimbo drank with the girls. The kitchen help was mostly Spanish-speaking and eager to get home, so after they closed the doors behind them, he’d dim the lights again, enter the special code on the jukebox that made the CDs play for free, and they’d drink whatever weird concoction Roxie came up with. Cress would dance for them in a way that both thrilled and frightened Jimbo. She reminded him of his wife when they first met, a tough broad in an angel’s body, someone he’d never be good enough for.

  Chamonix would be the first to go, leaving with a simple wave at the door. The others wanted hugs or cheek kisses. She never said she was going to the same place twice; Jimbo knew she was hiding something. It attracted him, that part of her, in the way a hunter stalks the lame animal lingering at the rear of the pack.

  One night after they had closed he invited them to his apartment, or maybe it had been Roxie’s idea.

  “I’ll bet James has some Hendrix upstairs, don’t you?” she said.

  They’d been discussing the most wrongly sung lyrics in the world and Hendrix had come up, along with Elton John and several metal bands.

  “I’ll bet he has more than just music up there,” Cress said, holding a pinched thumb and forefinger to her lips and inhaling.

  It was the first time they had included him in their party talk and Jimbo, hungry for companionship, gave it up quickly by saying, “You wanna find out?”

  Cress pranced past him, singing, “Purple haze was in my eyes, don’t know if it was day or night . . .”

  Roxie joined in, dragging Chamonix behind her as they chased Cress up the back stairs.

  Jimbo laughed, then yelled, “Hey, what about me?”

  “Nice place,” Chamonix had said, turning in a slow circle in the living room. “I love the minimalist approach.”

  “See?” Cress said, sprawling on the couch. “I told you he wasn’t gay.”

  “Thanks,” Jimbo said, adding, “I think,” then tossing a throw pillow at Cress.

  “Material possessions are so overrated,” Roxie added, heading to the fridge. She reached in, moved some stuff around, and then came up with a bottle of white wine. “Anyone?”

  There was a chorus of yeses.

  Jimbo scrolled through his phone, then docked it in the stereo and sat next to Cress on the couch. Hendrix filled the room and Chamonix surprised everyone with a wild air guitar solo, complete with tongue play. Jimbo fired up a small blue bowl and passed it around.

  Roxie poured the wine into the only cups she could find—vintage burger-joint glasses that seemed too large. Interestingly, the more they smoked the more perfect they became.

  “Let’s play a game,” Cress suggested.

  “Like what?” Chamonix asked. “Charades?”

  “Okay. What am I thinking?’

  “That’s not charades, Cress.”

  “No?”

  “What is it?”

  “Psycho,” Chamonix said. They all busted up laughing as Jimbo poured the rest of the wine.

  “I know. How about cards?” Roxie asked, digging through her purse.

  Cress snorted. “You carry a deck of cards?

  “Not usually, but last week—”

  “Whatever. Deal,” Chamonix said, crossing her legs and dropping to the floor in front of the coffee table.

  “The game is five-card draw,” Roxie said. “Nothing’s wild.”

  “Except me,” said Cress.

  “Raarrrh,” Jimbo said, fake-clawing the air, which made Cress giggle.

  “Oh shit.” Roxie looked at her cards, then slapped them down on the table. “I am a fucking idiot.”

  “And so . . ?” Chamonix said.

  “No you’re not,” Cress said, leaning over Jimbo’s lap to try and hug Roxie, who wriggled out of her reach.

  “Yes, I am,” she said. “Here I am suggesting we play cards with a shark. A real live pro! Doh.”

  Jimbo sang, “Oh when the shark bites with his teeth, dear . . .” He started laughing first. Then he realized Roxie was talking about him. He put on a serious face. “I’ll play dumb. I promise.”

  It wasn’t hard to do, as wasted as he was. Besides, he had never been into poker as much as the real James Smith. He held his cards in a tight fan, unsure what he was looking for. He hated games with rules, worse yet ones that had a time limit and people watching your every move. He switched the cards around in his hand, grouping them first by color, then by numerical order.

  Chamonix said, “What are we playing for anyway?”

  “Fun,” said Cress.

  “Money,” said Roxie.

  “But no one ante-ed up,” Chamonix pointed out.

  Clothes, Jimbo thought, chuckling to himself.

  “What’s so funny?” Cress asked. “Do you have a royal house or something?”

  Chamonix laughed. “A royal house? What the hell is that?”

  “I think the technical term would be castle,” Roxie said, making them all laugh.

  Jimbo said, “I don’t have shit. I’m out.” He got up to open another bottle of wine.

  Later, Chamonix would be the one to point out that James hadn’t seemed to know even the basic rules of the game. For starters, he’d claimed that two pair trumped three of a kind. The girls thought she was being picky about the whole thing and told her she shouldn’t judge anyone too harshly after midnight. And after all, they had been pretty stoned. Chamonix knew she had made some really bad judgment calls herself after midnight, so she dropped the subject. But it never sat right with her.

  She wasn’t the only one with doubts about her boss. Roxie had been the one to say James didn’t seem like the gambling type, and that she could have sworn he’d told her that he was married. So where was the wife? And what kind of guy doesn’t own at least one vehicle?

  When the three girls left that night, they closed the door on an apartment that was a lot like a hotel room—clean and presentable with all the amenities, but lacking warmth or true personality. Cress had once described the sober James John Smith the same way.

  “On the outside, he seems put together, on top of things to do with money and business. But if you ask him something that veers off course, something personal, there’s a hesitation, not like he’s a private person and I’m intruding, more like he’s fact-checking. I get the feeling if we were playing the telephone game, by the time his story got back to him all screwed up and wrong, it would be the one he’d start believing.”

  Chapter 35

  MAKING A SNOW ANGEL 101

  Angel had to admit there was something to that idea about everything happening for a reason. Hitting that dog had slowed her down, perfecting her timing, even giving her a prop/weapon she could use to her advantage.

  She remembered reading some trite poem sent by a friend who’d recently gone through therapy after a suicide attempt. The woman had become the kind of person who thought she was being helpful with her unsolicited advice, the kind of person who believed you needed her to share her thoughts and feelings, the kind of person Angel began to wish had been bright enough to know exactly how many pills to swallow in the first place.

  That said, parts of the poem had stuck with her. It said someone might come into your life at a cer
tain time to serve a purpose—good or bad—but only temporarily. And how other people were only passing through during a particular season of your life: to share, to teach, to comfort, to change. And only some people, a very select few, would be with you for a lifetime, teaching you lessons in all areas of your life to make you a better person.

  Angel also believed in karma, that what you put out there in the universe would come back at you. It could be in the form of a man, an awesome business deal, or perhaps a mangy mutt running away from home. At any rate, Angel was so far down the pike now, she figured she was totally fucked. So why not take it the rest of the way?

  It was pure luck that she found the road that led to the big Victorian in the woods. She was lost, with no GPS signal and a map that she could barely read. She was about to say “screw it” and turn around when she saw a wood-paneled station wagon with chained tires delivering mail.

  The music filtering out of the open window of the car sounded like “The Best of Elvis” on an 8-track player. The way the guy drove suggested he’d had so much to drink that even if he did talk to Angel, he wouldn’t remember a damn thing. Still, she heard Marshall’s voice in her head and remembered what he’d taught her. She dropped back and slowed to a crawl, following far enough behind to not look obvious.

  It was easy enough to scoop the mail out of the box. A tire store offer was addressed “Mr. James Smith or Current Resident.” She waited until the mailman was well out of sight, then backtracked down the road to find a place to hide her car. She returned to the driveway on foot and made a path around to the rear of the Smith house, walking under the eaves on compacted snow and ice, leaving no prints. She was pleasantly surprised to see that the fake stone house key holder looked exactly like a fake stone house key holder.

  It was warm inside. Angel locked the door and stripped out of her coat and boots, transferring the gun to her waistband. She was tired and still hungry, but she was certainly not going to pull a Goldilocks.

  “Hello? Anyone home?” she said.

  No answer.

  She took a circuitous route from the mudroom through the kitchen and into the living room, where the TV was on.

  She reached for the remote and turned up the volume. It was another Jimbo-style film. All black-and-white, with somebody mad about some injustice, a broad crying about a guy, and some crap-ass music letting you know when the bad thing was going to happen.

  She left it playing and started up the stairs.

  The place was nice. Nothing like what she and Jimbo had in Virginia. Nothing like what she’d imagined her husband would run off to. It felt off. Too neat, too put-together for a man who rarely made the bed. She couldn’t put her finger on why the idea of Jimbo living like this now bothered her, but maybe it was like when your boyfriend moves on and you meet again years later only to find out that he has fixed all his issues that bugged you so much, all the things you told him he should do he’s done, and now he has the balls to stand there and give credit to the ditzy new girlfriend for helping him see the light.

  “Assholes,” Angel muttered as she made her way down the hall, pushing open doors to more perfect rooms, more clean and uncluttered spaces. She was pretty sure she hated the fucking little homemaker that Jimbo was shacking up with.

  She crossed the room and stared out the window, at woods and snow and nothingness, trying to make sense of things. It might have been for a minute. It might have been an hour. The sight of three people walking up the driveway jarred her back to reality. Angel hurried down the stairs, taking them two at a time, grabbed her gear from the mudroom, and slipped out through the garage.

  Chapter 36

  TEDESCO, WHO SHOULDA, COULDA, WOULDA

  It was supposed to be a fun road trip, the three of us singing songs, telling jokes, playing the car games of our youth. Problem was if you were the only one who hadn’t been drinking—by default the designated driver—your passengers were only fun until the booze ran out and they fell asleep.

  I was crossing the Massachusetts state line when Tommy woke up.

  “Where are we?”

  “Guess,” I said, watching him rub his eyes, stretch, and yawn. It was obvious the guy was part cat. “And thanks for doing your part.”

  “What was my part, again?”

  “Navigation,” I said.

  “Oh. Right.” He sat up, shook all over, and smacked his lips. I wanted to smack him.

  “Better?” I asked.

  “Yeah, thanks.” He looked at me looking at him in the rearview mirror. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Hey look, Tedesco.” He pointed to the road sign that read: welcome to new hampshire. “Cool.”

  I glanced at the sleeping lump in the backseat, then pulled over. “Yeah. Cool.”

  Stepping out into the cold air, I took three deep breaths. As if I could clear my lungs of a decade of dying, industrialized Central New York by living with a few gulps of clean New Hampshire air. On the fourth breath, I started coughing and hacked up a thick wad of Syracuse that I spit in the road before I climbed in the back seat, switching places with Tommy.

  I said, “Directions are on that yellow paper. Stop at all the stop signs, don’t speed, and don’t wake me until we’re there.”

  “Okay, okay,” Tommy said. “Sheesh, you’re a Grumpy Gus.”

  I watched Tommy put on his seat belt and adjust the mirrors, then I laid my head on Barbara’s soft ass and passed out.

  It might have been the yelp of the dog that woke me, but probably it was the thump.

  I sat up to see Tommy banging his hands on the steering wheel and praying or cursing or offering up some combination of the two. “Shit. Oh, Jesus. Oh, Sweet Jesus.”

  I said, “If that thump was what I think it was, Jesus isn’t going to help you.” I leaned over the seat. “Last I heard, He was real good at raising sinners, but not so much in the dog department, though I could be wrong. I pretty much stopped reading after the Old Testament. It seemed to all go downhill after Sodom and Gomorrah.”

  The removal of my face from Barbara’s warm ass must have been what woke her. She pushed herself upright and looked around, blinking, as if she expected her surroundings to change. To find herself home in the suburbs under her down comforter with the “Today” show coming at her live from some small European village.

  Tommy made a frenzied escape from the car after wrestling with the seat belt. He stood in the road, his hands in fists, eyes squinted as tight as a child making a wish on a birthday cake.

  I couldn’t stand it.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” I said, getting out of the car and zipping up my jacket. I walked around the front of the car and saw a yellow dog, kind of like a mini Old Yeller, but this scrawny mutt had nothing regal about him. No one was writing him a hero role, probably no sad boy was even home on the farm pining for him to return either.

  “Is it bad?” Tommy asked.

  “For him it is,” I said.

  “No, no, no,” Tommy wailed.

  “What’s the matter?” Barbara asked, joining us.

  Before I could say, “Don’t. He might not be friendly,” she ran to the dog, knelt by his side, and cradled his hairy little head.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she said, running a thumb up the ridge between his glassy eyes.

  I saw the blood on his mouth, his twisted lower half and thought, No, it’s not. Why are you lying to a dog?

  Tommy sat on the ground next to Barbara. He reached out and timidly stroked the dog’s pinkish belly. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t even see him lying there.”

  I watched, feeling like I should do something but having no idea what that something could be.

  Barbara inspected the dog. “No collar, no tags. He’s been abused, maybe even living outside for a long time from the looks of his coat and paws.”

  I almost took offense at her comments. I was supposed to be the observant one here. That was my job. I was close to wise-cracking a few comebacks. Like what wa
s she, some kind of psychic tracker? Was she going to smell his breath and tell us what he ate for dinner or which side of the road he was headed for when Tommy changed his little doggie plans forever? But when I saw the tears welling up and heard her voice go thick, I knew that for Barbara this was more than a mangy dog dying in the middle of the road.

  She wiped her eyes and stroked his bloody muzzle and his dirty, matted coat. She whispered to him, easing his pain as if she could make up for other times, other people, other mistakes.

  Tommy laid his hands on the dog’s head like an old-timey preacher.

  Low and soft, I started to sing “We Are Going Down the Valley,” the song the choir had sung at my father’s funeral, a song that made my mother cry. I thought the dog would like that. As I got to the last verse, his little body went limp and as I held the last note, he closed his eyes. In one stuttering exhale, he was gone.

  We buried him in a ditch off the road. Tommy added a forked branch that sort of looked like a cross if you used your imagination. Barbara cried more than you ought to for a dog no one knew, and we let her.

  We drove away in silence without looking back. By the time we reached the dirt road with the mailbox stenciled “Smith,” we were ready for a distraction.

  Barbara said, “So tell me again how a part-time stripper and real estate agent found this house?”

  Tommy said, “Candy, I mean Susan, was great. She input the Smith name, James, John in the database, then looked for a place in these mountains over a lake, or near one of the three lakes in New Hampshire that are home to the common loon, the bird—not duck—as identified on the tape. The rest was merely using a computer program to sort it all out.”

  “I see,” she said.

  I could tell she didn’t, but also that she wasn’t listening very hard. If all she understood was that this seemed too easy, then maybe she wouldn’t think I was worth what I was charging her. Now that I had to cut Candy in for a piece of the action, I needed Barbara to see a little more.