Volume Ten

by Volume 10 (retail) (epub)

  Here’s what I can do: I can call the cops, let them treat this place like part of a crime scene, not that it is a crime scene. It’s a crime scene aftermath. Technicalities and all that. I can leave it or I can clean up.

  The cops’ll come here anyway. Mercy General will have to run a rape kit. Rick’ll insist on it, and because he’s there, he’ll file, as an EMT on the scene. Whether or not the new guy presses charges, well, that’s up to him.

  Considering how he was sitting for so long in so much pain, considering how he didn’t want a doctor in the first place, considering that suit, that condescending tone, he’s not going to want cops involved. Hell, women don’t want cops involved, and it’s quote-unquote normal for a woman to get raped.

  Guys, well, they’ve got even more stigma to overcome. Not just with the cops, but in their own head.

  I go to the back, grab the fluids bucket, the oldest mop, and some bleach. At least three times a month, I clean blood off my floor. I’m damn good at it, after thirty years.

  I can make anything disappear.

  Except the memory of what came before.

  That memory never leaves.

  * * *

  —

  “He won!”

  Confetti, balloons, hotel grand ballroom doing double-duty—half a party for the Reagan-Bush Reelection Campaign, the other half for Senator Dwight Corbin. Red, white, blue, the posters with their exclamation points and patriotic lettering lining the walls, including the stupid one, the one that always stopped me short—Ronald Wilson Reagan painted to look decades younger despite the wrinkles on his face, almost Norman Rockwell, an American flag behind him, an unrecognizable George H.W. Bush looking off to the side, and the slogan “Bringing America Back!” which always, always made me ask, “Bringing America back to what?”

  If I’d been working national campaign instead of state campaign, I’d’ve advised against the slogan. I mean, after all, hadn’t Ronald Reagan been president for four years already? Bringing America back from the brink? Because we felt like we were on the brink: I just didn’t trust Mondale to do anything except flap his gums.

  I was a great operator back then, a better operator for Reagan than Senator Corbin, although Corbin’s campaign shared me once everyone figured out just how well I could handle the press. Didn’t need a lot of press for the reelection campaign—they’d send their flunkies in when the president came to town, which ended up being all of three times. Needed lots of press for Corbin because he was young, because he was new, and because he was dumb as rocks.

  I wasn’t really grooming him for a national senate seat or even governor once he finished with his state term. I was grooming me for the day when women in politics became more than a curiosity or a curious screw-up, like Mondale’s veep Ferraro, whose husband cocked everything up, the way husbands always do.

  So celebrating, drinking, confetti in my hair—hell, confetti everywhere, including my hoo-ha when it was all said and done. I still don’t see confetti as anything but evil, even now.

  The rest of the memory gets lost in campaign Sousa marches and cheers of “He won!” and laughter, lots of laughter. The laughter bleeds into everything, like clown laughter in a bad horror film, and then the lights get dim, and there’s a bed involved, one of those pasty hotel beds in one of those gold upscale rooms, and I’m holding champagne, and then I’m not, and I stand in the bathroom, aching everywhere, pulling confetti out of my hair and wondering if my lips look bruised.

  I paste myself back together, adjust the suit coat, leave the stupid bowtie undone (who thought of bowties for women, anyway?), finger-comb my blond curls, wash off my face, and ignore my shaking hands.

  Then I walk out the door, go back before it closes, grab my purse, leave again, and look at the elevator, think: maybe he’s in the elevator. Think: Maybe people’ll wonder why I’m in the elevator. Think: They’ll want me back in the ballroom. Think: Screw the ballroom, and walk to the stairs, conscious that I’m limping a little.

  I blame the shoes. Even in my memory, I blame the shoes—too high, too pointed, too tottery. But really, that year, I lived in extra-high-heels, showing off my calves, my thighs, my ass, because you could go miles with the male operatives if you distracted them with some cleavage and a hint of sex.

  That’s what I was thinking as I walked down the steps. My fault. Cleavage, hint of sex, only a matter of time. Reached the lobby, didn’t go out that way, went down one more flight to the parking garage, only it wasn’t a parking garage, it was the basement, a nearly empty function space that I hadn’t seen, and a door marked EXIT that I walked through to an alley that meandered like I was, until I found our street, this bar, one drink, and Bancroft saying I don’t think you’re going to find peace tonight.

  But I did. Peace and oblivion, not in bottles, like Bancroft those first six years. But in the work. The mindless work. I cleaned up after him, tended bar when he couldn’t, slept in the back room because, hand to God, I didn’t want to walk outside again, and I didn’t, not that I noticed anyway, until someone (Bancroft?) told me the hotel’d gone bankrupt and the building was empty, and it was the last bastion of the Great Downtown, and it was finally, finally going away.

  Thought of torching it myself. Instead, meandered up that alley, stared at the broken windows, the steel door, the now-faded glory, thought: Serves you right, you bitch, and wasn’t sure if I was talking to the hotel, or to me, or to the world in general.

  Then turned around and headed back to the bar, but first, stopped in the barbershop half a block away, and when they wouldn’t shave my head, grabbed the electric razor and started it myself. Lots of screaming, lots of Don’t do it, honey, and I was wondering where the hell they were years before, when someone should’ve screamed (me, maybe?) and someone should’ve said Don’t do it, honey (me again?) and someone should’ve yanked his hand away, like they yanked the razor out of mine. But Gus, the barber, finished the shave, told me to go buy a wig, said, At least you got one of them perfect skulls, and I looked in the mirror, liked what I saw, none of that you’re-too-cute-to-work-in-politics-sweetheart, not anymore. Looked more like a Star Trek alien than the girl next door.

  Took another year to get the tattoos. By then, the extra fifty I carried took away the cute as effectively as the hair. Stopped watching the news, stopped voting, stopped thinking about politics at all. Mostly listened to my drunks repeat the same stories over and over, finding comfort in their miserable little lives, happy that those lives weren’t mine, happy that I had a place and some usefulness and that sense I belonged, even if daylight had become foreign and the stench of stale beer normal.

  I’da kept going, too, if the blood didn’t remind me, if the blood didn’t—

  * * *

  —

  Ah, hell, it wasn’t the blood. It was the look on the new guy’s face, that shell-shocked, not-me look I’d seen in the mirror too many times, the dirt (blood) under the fingernails, the way he jumped when my hand got too close.

  His wallet sits on the bar, drenched in whiskey, and I pick it up, wrap it in a towel, and put it in the safe. And I think about it, through the long normal night, like the wallet’s a talisman, thinking, thinking as Ma Kettle expounds drunkenly on her latest theory about tollways and city streets, as Screwy Marcus and the Donster argue about next year’s playoffs, and as five guys, fresh from their weekly basketball game, stop in on their way home.

  Rick never comes back, though, and I wonder if tonight’s the night he finally gets clean. Then I wonder if the new guy died and Rick couldn’t deal. And then I wonder why I should care about either of them.

  But the wallet…It calls me and calls me and calls me, and I know I can’t keep it forever. I wait until closing, when the Donster does his chivalric thing and offers (like he does every night) to walk Ma Kettle home, and she refuses, and he does it anyway, an
d they pretend like it’s something new.

  I lock the door, open the safe, and pull out the wallet.

  It’s calf leather, black, and stained now, not just from the whiskey, but probably from blood. That doesn’t gross me out. After tending bar for thirty-some years, nothing grosses me out, although behaviors often disgust me.

  I take the wallet to the office, which has better lighting, and turn on the overhead, along with the gooseneck lamp that probably curved over the desk since the bar’s founding. I set the wallet on a wad of paper towels, even though I know I’m going to clean up the desk anyway. Bleach is a marvelous thing.

  I flip the wallet open, see gold cards, platinum cards, and at least five hundred dollars in cash. Tucked in both sides of the cash flap are business cards, two wads of them, one white and one a light blue. I pull out the business cards first, expecting to see that he had organized a pile of them.

  Instead, I see two different cards for the same man: A. D. “Andy” Santiago. One card, the blue one, with somewhat archaic type, lists his job as “consultant,” along with an email address and a phone number.

  The white card has a red-white-and-blue logo on the front. The logo’s for the Jeff Davis for Senate campaign, and I damn near drop the card. I don’t like coincidence. Politics and rape and this bar. Thirty years apart, but still.

  I glance at the driver’s license. Yep. A. D. Santiago is the owner of the wallet, the guy who stumbled into my bar, the man who looked like I did all those years ago.

  Only we got him to the hospital. Bancroft never took me.

  I make myself cling tighter to the white card, bending it slightly, and I focus on it. I focus on the now. In the lower left, the card reads “Andy Santiago, Media Relations,” along with a different phone number and a different email address from the other card.

  This one’s newer, but I would have known that just from the campaign itself. Jeff Davis is in a dead heat with some other candidate whose name I can’t recall. The only reason I know Davis’s name is because of the billboards plastered on the expressway, accusing him of living up to his namesake Jefferson Davis, former president of the Confederacy.

  WANT TO GO BACK TO 1861? the billboards ask. They have a Confederate flag as a backdrop. VOTE JEFF DAVIS FOR SENATE.

  Every once in a while, my old calling catches me, and I have thoughts I can’t bury. Like who the hell thought that was a good campaign slogan? It doesn’t even name the candidate running opposite Jeff Davis, although, in fairness, who would want her name on a billboard like that?

  I shake myself from the reverie, know I mentally walked that way because of the shock of seeing that poor A. D. “Andy” Santiago is a political operative just like I was.

  And then he ended up here.

  I slip both cards into my back pocket, clench my fist to stop my hand from shaking, and dig through the wallet a little more. The address on Santiago’s driver’s license is eight blocks from here, on a street that was gentrified ten years ago.

  The money’s coming back to the neighborhood, as I mentioned to Bancroft a while ago. At some point, we’re going to have upscale the bar or sell it. He doesn’t want to sell it: Bancroft doesn’t like change. But that was when he gave me permission to remodel the place.

  Bancroft isn’t the only one who doesn’t like change.

  And I force my mind back to the wallet. I recognize the way my thoughts wander when there’s something in front of me that brings up my past. Only now, I want to face it, and I’m finding that as hard as running away from it.

  I write the address down, then fold the wallet back up and carry it, wrapped in paper towels, back to the bar. I pull out a plastic sandwich bag from the stack I use for leftover garnish, and slip the wallet inside.

  Then I sigh. Crunch time.

  I can keep it here until someone comes for it. I can take it to the police. Or I can take it to the hospital.

  I glance at the ancient clock emblazoned with the Christmas Budweiser Clydesdales in the snow. It’s quarter past eleven. We don’t stay open past midnight on weeknights: There’s no point.

  It’s past visiting hours at the hospital, not that I want to look in on this guy. But it’s still early enough that someone on the staff with half a brain would be there, who would be able to trace the John Doe that Rick Winters brought in.

  If Santiago registered as a John Doe. He seemed pretty out of it when Rick carried him out of here, but Santiago had been conscious. He might’ve used his name.

  I slip the wallet in its baggy in the canvas tote I call a purse, grab my leather jacket, toss them both over a chair, and go through my lock-up routine. I have to follow the same routine, day in and day out, or I forget something.

  When you do the same thing for decades, you zone out as you do it, and I’m no exception. Books balanced. Pour count entered. Cash in the safe in my office, receipts printed and tallied. Computers shut down. Lights dimmed. Bar gleaming.

  Purse and jacket over my arm, check to see if the front door’s locked. Yep. Make sure the window bars are secure. Yep. Head to the back, set the alarm, let myself out, and lock up.

  Alley smells of vomit again, with a bit of piss mixed in. Supposed to rain tonight, so the smell should be gone by morning. I step gingerly past any puddles, note that the garbage is particularly rancid as well, happy that the pickup arrives before I do tomorrow.

  I slip my purse over my shoulder, my jacket over the entire thing, keys in hand, heart pounding like it always does—as if I expect some sex-crazed asshole to jump me in the twenty feet between the bar’s back door and the parking lot. Me, round and muscled. Me, who took so many self-defense courses that I can lay out a two-hundred-fifty-pound drunk with a well-placed shove to the chest. Me, who hasn’t had anyone look at her sideways in maybe fifteen years.

  But every night, sure as I lock up, I also talk myself down from the panic, remind myself just how safe I am, remind myself that the asshole who changed the course of my life wasn’t some random sex-crazed idiot with a hard-on, he was one of the best-known politicians in the state, and goddamn if I shouldn’t’ve enjoyed his attentions because, after all, he spent some of his precious time with me.

  That’s why I’m shaking. He’s still well known. Hell, he’s better known. And he’s not just in the legislature. He’s running it.

  And he’s hoping to fill it with men like Jeff Davis, hoping to bring the world back to 1861. Just because I think the slogan’s bad politics for the opposition doesn’t mean I think the slogan’s wrong.

  My vehicle’s the last one in the parking lot, just as it always is. Usually, I look at my black F-150 and smile, thinking Built Ford Tough, because damned if I don’t need a vehicle that’s tough and protective, since I’m still on my own.

  But this night, I scan the perimeter, like I always do, then I unlock the truck and get inside, locking back up immediately. I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel unsafe. I feel jangly, a little outside my own body, as if I’m not in complete control.

  Maybe the fact that I’m not in complete control is how I ended up at Jeff Davis’s campaign headquarters. I realized I was driving there halfway down a side street I don’t normally drive on.

  Campaign headquarters are never on the beaten path. They’re not places voters go to. Campaign headquarters are places to keep voters out of.

  I expected this one to have one light burning and a few die-hard true believers, all under the age of twenty-five, to be shuffling papers and manning the phones. Shows how 1980s my campaign memories are, because when I pull up, the entire place is lit up. Yellow light, not pasty fluorescents, illuminates everything behind the glass windows, initially designed for a long-dead retail establishment.

  Inside, people talk, exchange papers, lots of papers, and stare at computer screens, which adds even more ambient light. And yes, everyon
e seems to be under twenty-five—and well dressed. No hoodies and ripped jeans, no T-shirts and old jeans, no jeans at all. Open-collar dress shirts, suit coats on the backs of chairs, matching pants that fit well—and everyone thin, or at least thinner than the average American.

  Enthusiastic, well dressed, thin—Jeez, it looks more like a movie set than an actual campaign headquarters.

  I can’t help myself. I pull the truck over, park behind a Prius, and feel tempted to go all Monster Truck on its ass. I ignore the thought and what it means (okay, yeah, I’m pissed, but I’m generally pissed, so what’s it matter?), grab my giant purse, and let myself out.

  I can’t do innocent anymore, although I’m tempted. I almost revert to Girl Operator, the one who died, along with her blond curls and her innocence.

  Instead, I square my shoulders and take a deep breath. No Girl Operator. Instead, Badass Bartender. Or, maybe, Concerned Friend.

  As I walk down the sidewalk, I try on Concerned Friend for good measure. Won’t work. Everyone in the headquarters knows Andy Santiago, and I don’t. Can’t do Badass Bartender, either. Don’t have my bar, blocking me from the fighting customers. Don’t have my baseball bat for minor scuffles. Don’t have my gun for major ones.

  Just me, short, squat, bald, and tattooed. Big, and muscled, and unexpectedly female.

  That should surprise the little shits working to take us back to 1861.

  I pull open the campaign office door and, of all things, a bell jingles above me. Conversation ceases. Everyone looks up, a sea of white surprised faces. I remember this now from my years in campaign headquarters:

  Alert! Stranger in our midst! Reporter? Spy? Civilian? Volunteer?

  Only it’s nearly midnight. Who the hell comes into a campaign headquarters at midnight?

  I let the door bang behind me. No one approaches me, although someone should. There should be some flunky in charge, even this late at night.