by C. T. Wente
The older man seemed to weigh the thought for a moment before shaking his head. “I say he’s too busy to have an opinion of you just yet.”
“You’re probably right,” Tom replied as he studied the man next to him. He looked to be in his late fifties, with wavy, gray-streaked hair and a rugged-looking face that gave him the incongruous look of both outdoor adventurer and philosophy professor. Despite his age, he appeared to be remarkably fit, and something about his demeanor told Tom that the man was still quite capable of handling himself. Given his relaxed manner, Tom also sensed the man was a regular at Joe’s.
“So, is it usually like this around here?” Tom asked, slightly out of curiosity and mostly just to kill time.
“No,” the older man replied, his eyes still scanning the paper. “Today is a uniquely busy day.”
“Any particular reason why?” Tom pressed.
The older man looked up from the paper and drained the final drops of his beer. With a quick gesture of his hand he caught the attention of the bartender, who wordlessly nodded and smiled before immediately bringing a fresh replacement. Tom knew without trying that he could not replicate that response.
“There’s always a reason my friend.” The old man turned and stared at Tom with a stern, empty expression. “Whether you can know it or not, whether you can see it or not, whether you can understand it or not, the reason is always right there in front of you.”
Tom stared back at the old man, trying to decide if they were still talking about the same thing, when the older man suddenly smiled. “By the way, my name’s Chip,” he said, extending his large hand. Tom nodded and shook the older man’s hand, surprised by his strength. “I’m Tom. Nice to meet you, Chip.”
“Nice to meet you, Tom,” Chip replied, extending his arm and sweeping it theatrically around the room. “And welcome to gay and lesbian night at Joe’s Last Stand Saloon.”
Tom froze for a moment as the words sunk in, then nodded as he reached for his beer. He glanced quickly at the couple kissing next to him as he took a drink, trying to catch a glimpse of their sex. The one furthest from him was definitely a woman, and a good looking one at that. Although he couldn’t see her partner’s face, by all accounts it appeared to be a man with short cropped hair in an oversized flannel shirt. Unfortunately, Tom knew that description also matched the look of every bull-dike in northern Arizona. He sat his drink back onto the bar and sighed heavily.
This was turning into a total fucking disaster of a day.
“You okay there, Tom?” Chip asked next to him.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Tom muttered, stealing a few more quick glances at the crowd before smiling at the older man. “I just didn’t know it was a homo– I mean, I didn’t know Joe’s was a–”
“I’m just kidding you, Tom,” Chip said as he slapped him on the shoulder. “You just looked like a homophobe, and I couldn’t resist.”
“Right, got it,” Tom said, forcing a weak laugh at the joke. He wasn’t a homophobe, he thought defensively. He just didn’t go out of his way to hang out with queers.
Chip pushed the newspaper towards him and tapped on the story at the bottom. “Here’s the real reason for tonight’s little party,” he said, staring at Tom with a wry smile. “In case you didn’t already know.”
Tom leaned forward and read the headline.
“Local Bartender Romanced by International Mystery Man”
He pointed his finger at the heavyset bartender behind the counter and glanced at Chip. “Him?” he asked with a disbelieving look.
Chip considered the question for a moment, watching Tom’s expression for any hint of humor before realizing he was serious. “No Tom, not him. As I said, this isn’t a gay bar.”
“At least not yet,” Tom muttered cynically, shaking his head. “The way these young people are nowadays, you just never know.” He scanned the first few sentences of the article. Before now, Tom had never bothered to read the local college paper. He’d always assumed that if it were anything like the people he saw walking around campus, it was a useless expression of naïve liberal viewpoints written by people who’d never stuck their heads out of the ass of Academia long enough to see how the real world really works. Based on the subject matter in front of him, his opinion wasn’t changed. He took another drink of his beer.
Reading further, Tom realized the bartender mentioned in the story had to be the good-looking woman who’d served him the last time he was here. He vaguely remembered the heated discussion she was having with her friend. A hot flash of anger passed through him as he recalled the way her bitchy blonde friend had dismissed him when he’d tried to speak to her. I should have shown that bitch who’s boss he thought with a shrug. He finished the article and ordered another beer.
“So let me get this straight,” he said, turning to Chip. “Some kind of James Bond wannabe is sending letters to a female bartender with a hot piece of ass, and the story makes the college paper?”
“Apparently it does,” Chip replied, focusing his blue eyes on Tom. “By the way, the bartender with a hot piece of ass is a friend of mine, so please mind what you say about her.”
“Oh... my apologies,” Tom replied. “I didn’t mean to offend... just making conversation.” He silently scolded himself for his lack of judgment. The old man was a regular. Of course he’d be friends with her.
Chip’s expression softened into a wide smile, but his stare remained ice cold. “I’m sure you didn’t.”
The bartender returned and dropped a fresh pint in front of Tom. Both men drank in silence for a few minutes as Tom studied the interior of Joe’s. Despite the untold number of dive bars he’d frequented in his younger years, Tom still marveled at the predictability of their features. The morose collections of decaying pictures and cob-webbed debris that cluttered the walls under the dull incandescent light. The sturdy, ass-worn barstools and stained, gummed, knife-carved tables. The amalgamated scents of tobacco, mildew, perfume and breath. And most importantly, the bar counter itself – ancient and coffee-black, shellacked and relentlessly wiped like a revered altar until it gleamed with a waxy pallor that was both dull and brilliant at the same time. All were the requisite features of Joe’s Last Stand Saloon and its dive-bar kin; this ubiquitous archetype that, as its name implied, sat lowest on the social scale. As Tom glanced around the room, he surmised that whatever glory ever dwelled in this ancient saloon sitting alongside old Route 66 had long since vanished, its remnants entombed beneath the thick layers of varnish on the counter where his beer now rested.
“They’re over there,” Chip said suddenly, his finger pointing towards the far wall of the bar, “In case you’re interested.”
“What’s that?” Tom asked, glancing over his shoulder.
“The letters that he wrote her, they’re posted on that wall,” Chip replied as he stared into the dark amber of his beer. “The photos are there too.”
Tom looked towards the far wall but could see nothing beyond the huddle of people that stood in the muted light. He considered getting up to have a closer look, then decided against it. It would be better to wait until he was buzzed enough to manage the germ-filled congestion of humanity he would have to deal with. He turned to Chip instead. “So all this started a few months ago, huh?” he asked. To his own surprise, Tom realized that he was beginning to relax. The beer was soaking in, the din of the crowd was beginning to fade into the background, and the conversation with the friendly older man named Chip sitting next to him was beginning to get interesting.
“The first letter arrived a little over a month ago,” Chip replied matter-of-factly. “I was actually sitting here when Jeri opened it.”
“And what was your take?” Tom asked.
Chip rubbed his stubbly beard for a moment while his eyes darted quickly around the bar, as if his mind was assembling the answer to a long, complicated mathematical equation.
“Well, I thought it was all very interesting,” he said thoughtfully, his pale eyes flas
hing at Tom before settling back on his beer. “But then, everything is interesting to me. I mean, come on… why else would I sit here for hours on end if I wasn’t fascinated by the mundane and trivial?” The hint of a smile curled the edges of Chip’s mouth. “Christ, I could sit here all day watching someone eat corn nuts without getting bored.”
Tom smiled at the older man. While he’d never admit it, he could empathize with Chip’s condition. That simple ability to find interest in the smallest of details sat right at the core of his own personality. He took another swallow of beer, enjoying its cold, bitter taste. “And you’re telling me nobody knows anything about this guy? Who he is, what he does, or…” Tom paused as the image of Jeri’s face, almond-shaped and beautiful in the soft light of the bar flashed through his mind. “Or what his intentions are?”
Chip shook his head. “No. And if anyone does, they’re not talking,” he replied laconically. “Of course, every idiot who walks in here and reads the letters seems to have a theory or a hunch. And I’ve heard just about all of them.”
“Care to repeat a few?”
“Oh god, you name it,” Chip muttered, his hands drawing wide arcs in the air. “There’s the obvious ones – he’s a hippie in the Peace Corps, he’s a hungry young reporter on some shitty-gritty assignment, he’s a good-doing doctor selflessly fighting disease in the worst places on earth. Then there’s the creative ones – he’s a location scout for a reality TV show, he’s a recruiter for an off-shore development firm, he’s a buyer of rare antiquities and artifacts.” He paused to take a drink before continuing. “And then there’s the cryptic ones, like the guy tonight who swore if you traced the locations of the letter’s origins in chronological order on a world map, you’d see that it forms the shape of a pentagram. There was even a cute little red-head sitting on that barstool earlier who was convinced the names of the letters’ origins were some form of anagram. She must’ve sat there for two hours trying to patch the letters together…” Chip’s baritone voice trailed off suddenly, leaving a flagrant question lingering in the musty-warm air of the saloon.
“So… did she come up with something?” Tom asked.
“Only if your definition of ‘something’ includes total gibberish,” Chip replied, shaking his head. “I tell you, if the kids I listened to tonight are any indication of the level of intellect we’re producing these days, this country is in serious trouble.” He smiled a quick thanks to the bartender as the portly man dropped off another pint. “So anyway, that’s the story,” he said quietly, taking a long drink as if to punctuate his sentence.
Tom nodded slowly. He could tell that the older man was done with the topic, but his interest was too aroused to let it drop just yet. He figured he had an even chance at asking one more question before Chip gave him a dismissive wave of the hand.
“You seem to be pretty good at reading people, Chip… so what do you think this guy’s up to?”
Chip’s expression softened for a moment as he glanced around the saloon, his gaze scanning over the faces of the patrons and briefly on the wall of letters before settling on Tom. His blue eyes seemed to hold a turbulent wash of ideas, swirling and colliding as they were drawn inward, like leaves drawn into a deep whirlpool. “What I think this guy is up to is a game that could be very innocent or very serious, and we won’t know which until he chooses to show us. Either way, he’s got the advantage. We know nothing about him, and yet he knows something, perhaps a great deal, about Jeri and this place. He could be sitting next to you right now, or sitting on the other side of the world. None of us have a clue.”
He paused for a moment, examining the pint of beer in front of him as if seeing it for the first time. A smile dimpled the edges of his handsome face. “As to what he is, well… all I can say is that I’ve lived long enough to know that a person who’s after something never really reveals what or who they are until they have it. And as much as I hate to say it, I’ve learned from long personal experience that the best endings come from planning for the worst possibilities.”
Tom nodded his head. “So if I’m hearing you right, and applying your reverse logic, we should assume that the funny, romantic, and seemingly harmless guy who’s writing these letters is–”
“Anything but harmless,” Chip replied, finishing Tom’s sentence as he held him with his stare. “Until I know otherwise, I think it’s safe to assume this guy could be capable of anything.” His mouth curled into a wry grin. “Hell, for all we know, he could be an international terrorist.”
Tom considered the older man’s statement before smiling back at him.
“I suppose he could.”
An hour later, sufficiently drunk enough to wade through the crowd, Tom shuffled his way to the corner of the room where the shrine of letters and pictures were hung. He stared with fascination at the various sheets of exotic hotel stationary and read every one of the odd, neatly scripted letters, all of them signed by the Mysterious Joe’s Last Stand Guy. He examined the Polaroid photos and smiled at the clever obscurity of the writer’s face in each one.
Then, for reasons even he wasn’t quite sure of, Tom pulled a pen and sheet of notepad paper from his pocket and began slowly writing down the dates and origins of each letter.
19.
Jeri sat under the heavy flannel-covered comforter of her bed and stared silently at the cover of the book that sat on her lap. The bottle of red wine she’d opened moments after getting home now sat half-empty on the nightstand, perched precariously on a stack of books along with an empty wine glass. Outside her bedroom window, light wisps of snow fell with lethargic effort against the frost-covered panes of glass.
Her mind was now reasonably calm, the wine having successfully dulled the edge of anger she’d felt since leaving the saloon an hour before. She once again picked up the romance novel Allie had given her and started to read. Two pages into it, she reminded herself how much she hated fiction – romance novels even more so – and resignedly tossed the book onto the already overburdened nightstand next to her. With nothing left to distract her, Jeri sank deeply into the thick pillows of the bed and sulked. Her thoughts drifted randomly for several minutes before inevitably settling on the events from earlier that evening. The image of a packed room of people watching her move through the bar filled her mind, causing a tinge of nausea in her stomach. She shook her head to dislodge the thought, desperately searching her mind for something else to concentrate on. As she closed her eyes and breathed deeply, a favorite memory slowly drifted into her thoughts. Jeri focused her mind on the memory, and within seconds she was asleep.
They were hiking.
The morning sun filtered through the emerald-green leaves of the aspen trees and fell in beautiful, shadow-wrapped patterns around her as she walked. The mid-summer air was already warm, filled with the orchestra of countless buzzing insects as they whirled and zagged around her. She brushed a nagging fly away from her face and looked up. Ahead of her, the thin trail along the Coconino National Forest’s Inner Basin turned and disappeared within the green underbrush of the forest. Jeri sighed loudly. She knew from the map she’d studied during their pre-dawn drive into the park that the trail continued towards the peaks of the San Francisco mountains in the distance; a long and grueling hike that her dad was convinced would be a piece of cake. She looked back at him and frowned.
“What’s up, buttercup?” her father asked. His large brown eyes peered down at her from his tall, thin frame with an ever-present glint of curiosity and humor.
“I don’t feel like dying in the mountains today,” she replied grumpily. “And please stop calling me buttercup.”
Her father replied with a deep rolling laugh that echoed through the forest, forcing Jeri’s frown upward into a smile. She loved her father’s laugh, loved the way its low, staccato rhythm surrounded and embraced her like a comforting hug. Even her nascent sense of teenage independence was no match for its disarming warmth. She swatted at the tall blooming stalks of yellow columbine
in front of her and continued walking.
“Anything you want to talk about, honey bunny?”
“Dad!” her fourteen-year-old voice screamed as she turned and shot him a venomous look.
“What? I didn’t call you buttercup, did I?” He smiled at her with his handsome face, his dark brown hair held back from his forehead by a tightly wrapped bandana. “Besides, we’re ten miles from everything… you don’t have to worry about me embarrassing you in front of anyone out here, Jer-bear.”
Jeri shook her head and stomped up the trail as her father’s deep laughter embraced her again. She brushed a lock of hair from her already sweaty face and listened to the chorus of birds and insects around her. She didn’t feel much like talking. In a few days her father would again be leaving on a long trip, and Jeri knew no amount of questions – or his infuriatingly vague answers – could take away the impending sense of loneliness she would feel when he was gone. All she wanted now was as much time with him as she could get before he left – and to make him feel endlessly guilty for dumping her once again on Aunt Patricia and her mothball-smelling house.
“How long will you be gone for this time?” she asked sullenly as she plodded ahead of her father along the overgrown trail.
“Two weeks, give or take a few days,” he replied quickly. “Not too long.”
Jeri grunted. “And where will you be?”
“New York City… conferences and meetings… boring stuff.”
Jeri nodded her head. Her father always had a knack for making his business trips sound like nothing short of pure torture, but she knew for a fact he loved his work. An economist and business analyst, her father was a ridiculously intelligent man who in the last few years had become highly sought-after as a business consultant to large corporations. After years of barely scraping by, the results of his new-found fame had been mixed; more money for their little two-person family, but less time together to enjoy it. For the first time ever, Jeri had all of the material things her school peers had – fashionable new clothes, a brand new bicycle, and best of all, all the books and music she could get her hands on. But what she wanted more than anything was the same commodity that was in great and growing demand– her father’s warm, brilliant, and always laughing presence.