Volume Ten
Page 20
I wonder what made Laney want to return to 1861. She fits into my bar—Bancroft’s bar—better than I do, and she doesn’t even know it.
I wind through a couple of side streets and find the run-down apartment complex where she lives.
She looks at me for a moment, as if she wants to say something. Then she opens the passenger-side door.
“Thanks for the lift,” she says, as if we’re old friends.
She gets out, slams the door, and half runs, half walks to the building. She doesn’t look both ways to see if anyone is lurking in the shadows. She doesn’t look back, either.
I watch her fumble with her keys, open the main door, and head inside.
I don’t know why I expect her to do the right thing, when the only person in this entire situation who has done the right thing wasn’t me. It was Rick. And he did it without hesitation.
I sigh, pull away from the curb, and drive away.
Eventually, I head home, because I can’t think of anywhere else to go.
* * *
—
Home isn’t much. It’s a condo only because I bought the entire building a few years ago, when I realized it was better to control who I had as neighbors than it was to suffer through another loud drunken party two floors below me.
I have the entire top floor, which sounds more impressive than it is. Living room with a view of the street, good-size kitchen with a view of nothing, a dining room that serves as a storehouse for mail that I forget to sort, and a large bedroom complete with TV and reading chair, and two windows, both locked and shaded. I installed air-conditioning and a good heating system, and if you came inside with me (which you never would) you’d think that the windows hadn’t been opened since the last century, and you’d be right.
Fresh air is for suckers, baby. And people who trust other people.
My kitchen table is always spotless. I hang my purse over one of the chairs, open the fridge, and take out the sub I bought that morning. I usually have something ready when I get home so I don’t have to think about food.
I unwrap the sub. The bread’s soggy from the oil and vinegar dressing I splurged on, but I don’t care. I eat a few bites, listen to the green pepper crunch, let the pepperoni bite my tongue, and start shaking again.
It’s hard to eat. My throat has closed up like it did in those first weeks after I met Bancroft. I trained myself to eat after that—too well, some would say—and I force myself to take a few more bites now.
No regression, no regrets. Just move forward.
Only that’s not really working for me right now. I know something. Laney knows something. And neither of us have taken any steps forward.
I cut the rest of the sub in half, and put the good half in the fridge for tomorrow—if I can eat tomorrow. I make myself finish the other half, chase it with some cold water, and head to the bedroom.
The queen-size bed doesn’t even look inviting. The entire room seems like a foreign place. I go to my living room, don’t turn on any lights, and sit on the couch, surveying the neighborhood.
Or so I tell myself. Part of me knows I’m reverting to the scared woman I’d been thirty years ago.
And part of me doesn’t care.
* * *
—
I wake up with my head jammed against the arm and back of the sofa, a crick in my neck so profound that I moan as I move. The light falling into the room is unfamiliar, and I have awakened much earlier than usual.
I get up, and as I make some much-needed coffee, I look at the clock on the microwave. It’s seven-thirty a.m.
Even though I don’t have to be at the bar until eleven, I know I can’t go back to sleep. My dreams were filled with confetti and laughter and cries of He won! I’m not going back there just to get a few more hours’ rest.
I shower, dress, manage to shove some Raisin Bran into my mouth, and chase the meal with coffee. Then, without really thinking about it, I let myself out of the condo.
Mercy General is fifteen minutes away on back roads in rush-hour traffic. I get there just as visiting hours open.
I’m not sure if I want to see Andy Santiago. My stomach is as twisted as my neck was this morning, the coffee mixing badly with the cereal. I ask for Santiago’s room, and receive the number with no fuss.
Apparently, he was able to tell them who he was.
Hospitals have the same smell—the sour scent of sickness overlaid by disinfectant and cafeteria gravy, with a hint of very bad coffee. I take the elevator to the fourteenth floor, wondering what, exactly, I’m about.
But I don’t turn around.
His room is halfway down the hall from the elevator. I pass rooms with moaning patients, beeping equipment, and loud televisions. The room number is displayed prominently on the blond wood.
Santiago’s door stands open. I slip inside, surprised to see that the room is private. It has a bathroom near the door and a bed in the center. Windows cover the outside wall, letting in sunlight.
Andy Santiago looks nothing like the man who came into my bar. His face is gray with pain and that bruise on his chin is five times the size it was yesterday afternoon. He’s smaller than I thought, and he wears a hospital gown instead of an expensive suit.
“Mr. Santiago?” I sit on the edge of the chair next to his bed. I don’t want to tower over him. In my experience, looming is as threatening as leaning in.
He opens one eye and slowly moves his head in my direction.
“You,” he says, his voice raspy with disuse.
I nod. I reach into my purse and remove the plastic bag with his wallet.
“I found your wallet.” I set it on the nightstand, near the TV remote. That’s when I realize the television is off.
“Thank you,” he mouths and closes his eyes again.
I wait a minute, just to see if he’ll talk to me. I start to get up, feeling very awkward.
You’d think I would know how to talk to someone in a situation like this. You’d think I would know what’s right and what’s wrong, how to pressure, how to comfort.
But I don’t. I don’t know any of it.
I don’t even say, I’m sorry for what happened to you, because even though the words aren’t empty, they sound empty.
I walk out of the room, feeling like I should have done more, but not sure what more actually is. I can’t tell him to go to the police; I never did. And I can’t offer him the comfort of some support group, because I never found them comforting.
I’m most of the way to my truck when I realize that all the things I would offer a friend, all the commonsense things people do for one another in times of crisis, all the ways our society says we should take care of crime and one another, I have done none of them for myself. Ever.
Coffee-flavored acid rises in my gorge and I swallow, hard. I lean on the truck for a moment.
Then I climb inside and drive to work, two hours early and thirty years too late.
* * *
—
I clean the front top to bottom in those two hours, and I keep cleaning through the slow arrival of the lunch drinkers. Ma Kettle finds her booth around one, and I give her the usual vodka tonic. A twenty-something couple walks in about one-thirty, looks around, and then gives me a sheepish look before leaving again.
I’m amazed they got inside at all.
I’m clock-watching, waiting for Rick. I’m not sure what I want to talk to him about; I just want to talk.
Then, at three-thirty-five, he arrives, like he always has. Only he doesn’t bang the door closed and he doesn’t seem quite as angry.
He also doesn’t sit at his usual spot at the bar.
He glances at everything, as if memorizing it. I’ve seen this from regulars before. They’re saying goodbye.
I hea
d over, but I don’t grab the Heineken. I won’t, unless he asks.
“Hey,” I say. “I took that guy his wallet.”
Rick nods. “He’s pretty messed up.”
“Yeah,” I say.
“They used something—bottle, bat, I don’t know,” he says. “I didn’t ask. But he was hemorrhaging. If we hadn’t brought him in, he would’ve died.”
Jesus. In my bar. Right in front of me.
“If you hadn’t brought him in,” I say.
“What?” Rick asks.
“You did it, not me,” I say. “If I had been here by myself—”
“You’d’ve called nine-one-one,” Rick says. He looks longingly at the bar stool. I can feel him wavering. “Those bastards. He wouldn’t tell me who did it.”
“Guys he worked with,” I say.
“He told you?” Rick asks.
I shake my head. I don’t want to tell him about the campaign office—it’s too close, too personal, but…
Rick’s staring at me. “What, D?”
“Debra,” I say, surprising myself. “I’m Debra.”
And then I burst into tears.
* * *
—
Oh, I’d love to tell you everything’s hunky-dory now, and my life is perfect, and that big-name politician isn’t sitting like a slug at the statehouse. He is, and my life is still my life, and nothing’s hunky-dory.
But Rick knew the detective handling Santiago’s case, and Rick made me tell the detective about the campaign headquarters and the Log Cabin Republican comments and the sheer hostility.
They found Laney, and, it turns out, she was scared not just because she figured out what happened. Right after I had said Santiago was raped, just as she was going to tell me with all her naïve passion that raping a man wasn’t possible, a memory hit her, and made the sentence die in her throat.
She had seen the bloody dowel Jordy and his friends used, part of a broken towel rack someone placed near the back to take out with the recycling. She’d seen it, and, better yet, she helped the police find it.
Those four guys who used it to teach A. D. Santiago a lesson are going to learn some lessons themselves.
If this were one of those happy feel-good all’s-well-that-ends-well kinda of stories, I’d tell you that Santiago and I have become friends or that we bonded at our support group. I’d tell you this incident derailed the Jeff Davis campaign.
But none of that happened.
I’m still here, still tending bar, still wondering what to do with my afternoons.
Something’s different, though. I’m trying to figure out how to update the bar, so that we’re not the neighborhood eyesore as the gentrification continues. I’ve decided that I like what we are—that wayside, that haven, for the folks whose lives are in the crapper.
There’re plenty of trendy bars. I don’t like them much.
I prefer places where strangers wander in rarely, and when they do, they tend to stick around until they cross back over to the trendy-bar side of life.
I imagine that’s where Rick is. Or he’s in that same place Bancroft is, the one that knows about the reality of dive bars and the camaraderie of people hanging at the end of their ropes.
About a week ago, Santiago came back, he says, because he owes me. But I keep saying he owes Rick. Santiago doesn’t owe me anything.
But Santiago does know that I used to do his job, back in the day, the job he doesn’t do any more either, and he knows I once sat on the same bar stool with the same disillusionment.
I don’t know if that means anything to him. I’m not sure it means much to me.
I do know that, for the time being, he’s finding comfort here.
And who can argue with that?
About the Editors
RICHARD CHIZMAR is the founder and publisher/editor of Cemetery Dance magazine and the Cemetery Dance Publications book imprint. He has edited more than a dozen anthologies, including The Best of Cemetery Dance, The Earth Strikes Back, Night Visions 10, October Dreams (with Robert Morrish), and the Shivers series.
richardchizmar.com
Facebook.com/richardchizmar
Twitter: @RichardChizmar
BRIAN JAMES FREEMAN is the managing editor of Cemetery Dance Publications and the author of several novels and novellas, along with four short-story collections, including an eBook-only exclusive that hit #1 on Amazon.com in the United States, the UK, Germany, Spain, and France in the short-story categories.
brianjamesfreeman.com
Facebook.com/BrianJamesFreeman
Twitter: @BrianFreeman
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