by Tom Bouman
At Wilson Street I pulled into an empty lot bordered by Clinton to the north, and trees along the train tracks south of me at the other end. Sunbeams slanted east across the city street, catching the face of a three-story building, Kostis’s address. The air was full. On the other side of Wilson, two black kids, a boy and a girl, tore along the sidewalk on scooters, never getting too far from a laundry-mat doorway where a woman sat talking on a cell phone. I took her to be the mother. A poplar branch reaching over the fence from the lot next door did nothing to disguise me, and I took out my own cell phone and pretended to be on it while I watched the apartment building. I didn’t look at her so she wouldn’t look at me. Eventually the kids crossed Clinton to where I was, and did some off-roading where the pavement gave way to dirt, piled in hard-packed mounds here and there.
The spidered glass door to the apartment building opened and a dark-haired, ax-faced white man with beard trotted down the steps. His hair was gathered in a bun on top of his head. He had a potbelly and carried a duffel bag. I let him bounce a good way down the street before I put the truck in gear and crawled along after him. He walked six blocks and stepped into a barroom marked by a sign that read EXCELSIOR and had to have been from the sixties at least.
I pulled alongside the bar and went inside. Chicken wings and batter fried in dirty oil, unwashed dishrags. Odors that had worked deep into the fixtures and walls, a fuzz of grease dimming the shine on a row of glasses hanging above the bar. The sign identified it as a hotel bar, but I doubted the rooms above us were occupied, and just as well, because if they had been, the building might well have crumbled under the weight, taking with it the three smoke-cured witches bent over the bar and four slender black men in oversized clothes playing doubles pool. I took a seat at the bar and ordered a cheap beer and looked around. No Kostis. But eventually the bartender, a stern, overweight woman, made her way back to the kitchen door and propped it open while she spoke with someone inside. It took a moment, but eventually I saw Kostis’s head lean into view, his hair under a white painter’s cap, an apron strap over his shoulder. Knowing now I had a shift to wait through, I stood and left. There was more to see.
The front door to the building on the corner of Clinton and Wilson was unlocked. I stepped past a small pile of coupon circulars in plastic bags in the foyer and onto a colorless carpet worn down to an acrylic hide. The place smelled unclean. I climbed two flights of stairs and stood before Kostis’s apartment door and knocked. There was no answer, so I waited, knocked again. With each knock, the door shuddered in its frame. I took out my wallet and carded the lock in less than five seconds. The narrow apartment was set up not unlike a trailer, no room that you could get to except by moving through another room. A small television hooked up to cable in the front, windows looking out over the street. I heard a bus drive past. A mattress in the windowless bedroom and a layout of men’s clothes, neatly folded on the floor. Styrofoam take-out boxes in the kitchen, and nothing of a woman’s anywhere, not in the bathroom, nowhere. There was no place to hide anything and nothing hidden. I closed the apartment door behind me, made sure it was locked, and moved on.
Stingy Jack’s was the lone business on a residential block in the neighborhood between Binghamton and Johnson City. On either side, rubble-strewn spaces flanked the bar, serving both as parking lots and garbage dumps. I parked my truck with the other cars at the dark end of an empty lot and walked to the door. On my left, apartment buildings talked to the night. At an intersection just two blocks away, Main Street traffic plodded along, while overhead, cars rushed nonstop on a high overpass that connected with highways and routes in every direction out of town. It gave me a lonely feeling.
I don’t really enjoy a tavern atmosphere. My barroom experience was limited to the two quiet saloons Polly and I adopted back in our Big Piney, Wyoming, days. And we saw the occasional country show at the Corral. I had tried not to drink too much after she died because it led me down a path. The occasional IPA did seem to have a healthy effect on me, though. I wasn’t above it.
The bar had Flower Power on tap and I get that wherever I find it. The bartender who took my money was pretty, and couldn’t have been twenty-five years old. I noted her cat eyes and clean rippling arms, and tried not to ogle. The owner had a type he liked behind the bar, I guessed, for the other bartender was also attractive and birdish in her black tank top. Both of them called Penny Pellings to mind. I ambled over to the jukebox. Flipping through, I used the reflection in the machine’s glass to scan the room. Aside from the few ragged old-timers slouching at the bar, the crowd was a mix of young people and burly men with tan lines around their eyes. It had been some time since I had been in one room with so many attractive young women. There was also more than the average amount of dyed hair, ear tunnels, and secondhand clothing. I was beginning to like the place in spite of myself. I mean, the kids in there, trying so hard. They’d only grow up to be the next Pats and Kellies, hanging on to a long-gone town, telling themselves it was good enough for their kids. Why not pretend something else until then?
I found a place to stand near the front door, and finished my first pint too quickly with an elbow on a counter, seeming to gaze out the front window but actually scanning the reflection.
I couldn’t just stand there with nothing to drink, and soon I was face-to-face with the bartender again, with a sweaty ten-spot clutched in my paw, when the front door opened and something in the atmosphere tilted. I looked over and saw two young black men taking empty stools at the bar, oblivious to any chill they had brought in with them. One had long braids and weak chin; neither looked happy. The bartenders ignored them until they couldn’t, then took their drink orders.
The music on the jukebox changed abruptly, mid-song, from upbeat pop to a shrill, thudding traditional Irish tune played in a hard rock style. A large, sunburned man wearing a too-large Hawaiian shirt and several copper bracelets on his wrists had moved behind the bar, and took up a post facing the two black men, his chin resting innocently on one hand, a remote in front of him. Yet another man, white, with a long ponytail and hair thinning on top, appeared at the bar, placed a drink in front of himself, didn’t drink it, and took occasional glances at the black men sitting on the opposite end. And at me. As soon as the song was finished it began all over again, and the man behind the bar peered at the remote, picked it up, knocked at it once or twice, and said;
“Shit. The jukebox is broken.”
It only took one more repeat before the men left without a word.
The man turned his gaze to me and said, “Them people can’t stand Irish music.”
“Guess not.”
“John Blaine,” the man said, extending a hand across the bar. I took it. “I run this place.” He had a balding buzz cut, a careful goatee, and no eyebrows.
“Good for you,” I said. “Been here long?”
He snorted. “Where you from?”
“Pennsylvania.”
“Oh, yeah? I just got a place down Airy Township. So you know, we’ve been here since back in the day. Maybe your old man came in on the sly?” I shrugged, and he gave me a knowing smile. “Sure he didn’t.” Blaine managed a curious expression even without eyebrows. Curious and not altogether friendly. “Closed years until we reopened last spring,” he said. “Used to be dancers in the back room. Old-school ladies. We re-created all the original signage, the interior . . . some of this Naugahyde we salvaged from a place out in Youngstown. Never got your name?”
“Henry. Farrell.”
Blaine winked. “Now you know,” he said. “Tell your friends.” He turned to leave.
“Hey, man, I’m looking for someone.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“Penny Pellings.”
Blaine returned to his former perch, but said nothing.
“From down in Holebrook,” I continued. “It’s been a while. Thought I’d stop in and see her.”
“I had her behind the bar,” he said, and shook his head. “She
was a better customer than an employee. She don’t work here no more.”
“But you haven’t seen her.”
“Let me tell you a joke,” he said, smiling but cold. “A cop stops a guy on the street, says, ‘You look a little drunk, pal, you okay?’ The guy says, ‘Man, am I glad you came along, Officer. Somebody has stolen my car.’ So the cop says, ‘Where was it last you saw it?’ Drunk holds up his hand, there’s a set of keys. ‘Right at the end of this key.’ The cop, he looks at the drunk, looks at the key, says, ‘Go down to the station house and report it.’ The drunk starts heading for the station, and the cop says, ‘Hey, buddy, before you go anywhere, zip up that fly.’ The drunk looks down at his pants and says, ‘Oh, man, they got my girl too.’
“You know what Kevin O’Keeffe is. He’s a drunk, he don’t see things clearly. And no, I haven’t seen Penny.” Blaine spun a drink token in front of me and left the bar, disappearing behind what I took to be an office door. The man with the ponytail at the other end of the bar looked at me a second too long, then returned to his glass.
I retreated into the night and slipped through a group of smokers hee-hawing by the steps. A man pissed like a garden hose behind a car. As I pulled out onto Main Street, I stopped for a red light and watched a group of teenagers pace the street, aimless and ready for war. The light changed.
After a certain hour, the desperate gather on Clinton to buy and sell sex, drugs, or both, but it didn’t seem to be time for that yet. I parked a block away from the Excelsior and went back inside. A couple dozen people had descended on the bar since I’d last been there, bringing nightlife and noise with them. Only one lonely Rotarian-looking man stood out to me, seated at the trivia machine, the whirring colors of its screen dancing in his eyeglasses and across his bald pate. The jukebox insisted on seventies crap-rock and the lights were low.
I stepped to the bar and ordered a beer. When half of it was gone, I leaned in and quietly asked the bartender if Dizzy was in the kitchen.
“Was,” she replied. “You just missed him, babydoll. What you want him for?”
“Nothing, just to say hello.”
“You another old friend?”
“Yes.”
“Well, at least you can afford a drink. Look around you, baby. You think we’re hiring here? Ain’t they got somebody to help you get back to the world where you’re coming from?”
She meant prison. I nodded slowly, recognizing her mistake and playing off it. “It’s all shoveling shit,” I said.
The bartender laughed. “It’s all we got here, too. What do you think Mr. Dizzy does for us? Sorry I can’t help, hon.”
“Well, you know where I can find him now? I came all this way.”
“I don’t know what he does. But he ain’t gone too long yet.”
I excused myself and stepped out into the night. As I walked, I passed the site of a demolished department store. Waist-high weeds had tufted up amid the rubble, and fireflies drifted from grassy island to island, their blinking a kind of grace. Several cars slowed as they passed, ordinary sedans with ordinary guys behind their wheels and alone, looking to tamp down some need. Slowing down and rolling away again.
I arrived at the door of the Georgian and entered. The barstools were mosaics of pleather and beige packing tape. A young man with spiked hair and a gold cross around his neck sloshed drinks in front of about a dozen patrons. I took a stool and ordered and had a look around. A line of low booths reached to the back wall and a red exit sign, pitchers and empty glasses and pizza trays littering them. A group of people were playing cricket on the dartboard. A stereo blasted and the bar noise was high.
It was not long before a thickly built woman with frosted hair slumped into me and excused herself. She asked my name and I gave it, and from then on I was on a tightrope between outright rudeness and trying not to encourage her. Somewhere in the middle of a long, spiraling story about her sister-in-law, I became aware of a mountainous cook in a paper hat and a stained white apron standing in the kitchen doorway, talking to a man in street clothes. But for the light spilling out of the kitchen they were in the shadowy back of the bar. The smaller man had black hair gathered into a topknot and a pencil-line beard.
“Excuse me,” I told my lady companion, half standing, “I see somebody I know.”
She looked confused, then hurt, then angry. She left, waving a hand behind her head in dismissal. From my vantage point at the bar, I watched as the cook disappeared into the kitchen and the other man made his rounds. He seemed to know a fair amount of people in that place, and passed right by me without a look. To keep up appearances I had a beer. The woman who’d been talking to me sent over a shot, a gesture of something, I don’t know, but I couldn’t leave it there. Another beer. My reality was beginning to turn fluid, my memory sinking into dark currents and surfacing again, my speech loose. Was that the same Rotarian-looking grandpa from the Excelsior now sitting across from me at the Georgian’s bar? Did it matter? The woman with frosted hair was back. Before long, I stood outside in a grassless holding pen of a backyard, hemmed in by a sagging wooden fence, not quite remembering how I’d gotten there. The man in the topknot was already out there, making quick work of a cigarette.
“Greetings,” he said.
“Hey, there,” said I, barely nodding.
I took a closer look at Dizzy. While his samurai hairdo gave him a youthful quality, his face was lined and his voice sounded old. Peeking out from behind his Cuban shirt open at the neck was part of a tattoo of Dorothy Gale, just her head facing down as if draped on his shoulder, the pigtails, a scrap of blue gingham, her eyes closed, expression ecstatic. Two ruby-slippered feet splayed wide onto his arm below the hem of his short sleeve. I didn’t want to know.
“Never seen you before. Of all the shitholes in this town you could end up in . . .”
I shrugged. “This a shithole?”
He ground out his cigarette and produced what I first thought was another, until he gripped it up between his middle and ring knuckles, sealing it to his mouth, and lit it. A one-hitter. He passed it to me. I dutifully hit it and blew a cloud of smoke, along with my good sense, into the night air. “Good,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “Call me Dizzy. Dizzy.”
“Ah,” said I. “Henry.”
Dizzy looked at my scuffed work boots and worn clothes and smiled. “Country.”
“I got a quarry going up to Sidney?” I said. “I cut stone, I split stone, I haul it, sell it. Make good money, all on my own, no bosses for the first time in, oh, sixteen fuckin years. I earn it all, I keep it all. Come to town, I want to spend it. My wife left, so I don’t know.”
“Yeah, yeah. My girl, she’s got my boys? They lived over to Johnson City? The other week I get up to see them, landlord says she moved out of there. Moved to fuckin Florida, not a word to me. You believe that?”
I shook my head.
“I found a new girl. Get high, get strange. Life ain’t any more simpler than that.”
“I hear you.”
“Oh, yeah, you do?” Dizzy moved closer.
He reached into a pocket and pulled out a cell phone. After pressing some keys, he held the thing in front of him, and we were looking at a photograph of a topless girl on her knees and elbows, shot from the back, a thong her only defense against the world. Pimples dotted her rear. A mess of dark hair covered her face where it would’ve been exposed to the lens. “Here she is. She’ll fuck the shit out of you,” Dizzy said. “You will literally shit yourself.”
The girl looked young enough that I sobered up by half. It could have been Penny, but I guessed it wasn’t. Penny was a young woman, and small, but the girl in the photo looked like a teenage kid. Dizzy noticed a change in me, but read it wrong. “Yeah, her face ain’t too good but the pussy is nice. Guaranteed.”
“Eh,” I said. “Nice. She got a name?”
Dizzy put away his phone. “Come find out.”
A wicked thrill moved through me, much again
st my heart. I’m not the kind of man, but this is how it would be. To become something less than a man. My synapses were firing like black cat fireworks, slow and obvious. “How much?” I heard myself say.
There was silence. “Hey, now,” said Dizzy.
He played it angry, but he understood that he was in the process of making a sale. And he’d turn it to his advantage, make me weak to raise the girl’s price. I guessed rightly that there’d be no more discussion of her unless he brought it up again. We shot the shit for a minute longer and he went back inside.
I waited a moment and pulled the Georgian’s door open, only to come face-to-face with the Rotarian. He didn’t startle. By this time I figured him for a cruiser. I slipped past him and re-settled myself at the bar. Dizzy circled, avoiding me. I waited. At long last, I stood to leave. As soon as I was out in the city night, the door opened once again and there stood Dizzy.
“Country,” he said. “Want to come over?”
“Where you parked?” I asked.
“Ain’t far. We’ll walk.”
Dizzy led me in the direction of the empty lot I’d passed earlier, stopped at a tear in a chain-link fence, then ducked inside. “Shortcut,” he said.
I followed, slipping down an asphalt bank and into the urban wild. We picked our way through broken brick and tall grass. Looking down, I saw empties, a child’s sock, black trash bags tied shut, and several shits large enough to be from a person.
I looked about me and saw a man-sized shadow back near Clinton Street. Dizzy forged ahead. I took a few steps and looked again. The shadow moved with us. At the far end of the lot, another slope up and a chain-link fence marked where a railroad cut through the First Ward, hidden by a line of trees. Following Mr. Dizzy, I scaled the chain-link fence and dropped into the brush. We pushed through the scrub and emerged into a kind of tunnel formed by trees, with some tall grass forcing its way through the stone on the railbed. The city disappeared. Looking up and down the track, I saw the dark was shattered by thousands of fireflies, their light pulsing off the tangle of branches surrounding us. I eased the .40’s safety off.