The Last of the Smoking Bartenders

by C. J. Howell

  How do you recommend?

  Recommend? Eggs?

  Yeah.

  The girl looked out at the flawless blue sky and the freeway with traffic moving at ninety miles an hour.

  Scrambled, I guess.

  Frank smiled wider and his neck oozed watery puss.

  Scrambled is good.

  A few minutes later the waitress filled his white ceramic mug with coffee from an orange plastic football-shaped coffee pot. She was careful not to look at him. When the food came, he took a bite of the eggs but couldn’t swallow them. He held them in his mouth for a long time, but he couldn’t make his throat work. He took the mug of coffee and walked out into the parking lot and spat out the eggs.

  He took a slug of coffee and spat that out too for good measure.

  Chapter 25

  Walking past the entrance to the parking garage of the Embassy Suites, Hailey smelled weed. The smell was unmistakable. She followed the smell around a concrete pylon. The concierge, with the same polished hair but now changed into street clothes, was holding a joint and talking to a friend. He smiled when he saw her.

  Hey FBI, wanna hit this?

  He held the joint out to her. The friend, a college-aged kid with expensive slacks, an unbuttoned and untucked French cuffed shirt, and a trimmed beard, also smiled and held out his arms like her table awaited.

  Jesus, not very subtle are you?

  She walked over but held up her hand, passing on the joint.

  You don’t know if you don’t ask.

  I mean you’re not too worried about getting caught.

  He passed the joint to his friend who took a hit.

  What, we’re not breaking any laws?

  Actually, I think you are.

  Well, not any that are important.

  The friend eyed the Christian Louboutin bag.

  Very nice.

  She smoothed an errant strand of blonde hair behind her ear.

  I couldn’t resist.

  Is she really FBI? The friend exhaled a funnel of smoke.

  Yup.

  Cool.

  Yup.

  She’s one cool lady.

  I’m really not that cool.

  She’s one sorta cool lady.

  She turned to the friend.

  You work here too?

  He laughed and shook his head, smoke venting from side to side as he did so.

  He doesn’t work, said the concierge.

  But you do.

  Yup. I do all kinds of work.

  I bet you do. Jesus, did I just said that?

  I’m off work now, do you want to go to a party?

  She shrugged.

  Apparently I have nothing better to do.

  She got in the back seat of an ageless Honda Civic. The friend with clothes more expensive than the car offered her the front seat, but she let him have it. She was oddly comfortable in the backseat. The car rode a few inches off the ground. She liked being a passenger for a change. The back windows were tinted, and she relaxed into the seat cushion, no idea where they were off to.

  The streets were wide. The sky was burnt orange. At speed the city itself seemed like a scenic highway. Large saguaros and mesquite lined driveways. Glass office buildings and shopping malls. The city’s skyline was mesmerizing; she’d seen it countless times before, but now the city’s skyscrapers seemed as alien and as beautiful as the scattered rock formations in the desert canyon lands.

  They didn’t talk much, couldn’t talk much over the music the concierge played, some impossibly new band in an impossibly new genre, afro-beat techno if she had to give it a name, the type of band or genre that Hailey couldn’t keep up with because she would never know where to look for it again, even though she was enjoying it.

  Scottsdale, Moon Valley, Peoria, Glendale, the city was suburbs and the suburbs were the city. The streets were wide. The new football stadium hovered over the west valley like a spaceship, its base obscured by a dusty haze. Built as an homage to the barrel cactus, it looked more like a metallic mushroom landing on top of suburbia, squashing the citizenry below.

  They entered a subdivision of faux adobe single family homes with identical red tile roofs and floor plans. Young palm trees no more than ten feet in height were interspersed one to a house. The Civic saddled up to the curb in front of a house with the door propped open. A jeep and two new pickups were in the driveway. Several cars were parked haphazardly on the street, one on the lawn.

  The concierge clenched her fist in his and helped her out of the backseat. They went through the open door and another genre of music that she couldn’t name took over and again she liked it. They said hi to a few people in the kitchen and went though the sliding glass patio doors to the backyard where a few girls caught the last orange-red rays of sun by the pool and a cluster of guys manned a grill billowing with smoke.

  The concierge handed her a Corona with a lime and then disappeared for a while. She chatted with a few of the something somethings. Two girls in bikinis said hi. Nobody ignored her but nobody paid her much attention either and that was fine. She kicked off her sandals and dangled her feet in the pool. She was glad she wore her cute yellow sundress. Nobody was partying hard, no crack pipes or needles, just beers and burgers. She felt relaxed and realized it had been a while since she’d done anything like this. She figured this was a pre-party for the dozen or so something somethings before they hit the town. Even just sipping beer, she knew she wouldn’t last until the real partying began and that was fine. It had been a long day and this was a nice turn. And then she looked up and the sky was black and the stars left little traces when she moved. Her bare feet felt good in the backyard grass. The pool shimmered an iridescent blue. Still, it might have been midnight when she sat on a kitchen counter and watched through a haze of cigarette smoke as the friend kissed a brown skinned brunette and whispered something in her ear and she laughed and punched him in the chest, at least a dozen something somethings crowded in the kitchen and the concierge by her side whose name was Tony although most folks called him ZPak, and she casually wondered if it was a reference to herpes or some other STD, not the STD but rather the antibiotic cocktail that cured it, although his real name was Antonio which surprised her because he hadn’t looked Hispanic until she stared closely at him now and could see it; it was in his dark eyes and stubbled jawline, and it somehow made him suddenly more attractive. She smiled at him then, and he smiled back at her and then looked away, satisfied with something. She held the kitchen counter with her palms and swung her legs playfully and they both watched the crowd.

  The drive back to Scottsdale was fast this time of night. The sky was black, the streetlights, white and orange, floated by like tails of comets. The drive felt ethereal, hard to tell where the road ended and the sky began, quiet but loud with the stereo at the same time.

  The streets were wide. The Civic skated across the empty lanes effortlessly. The Embassy Suites rose like a glass beacon, a luminescent green E emblazoned in a white pyramid cast down on the dark city below. She thought of the Wizard of Oz, like they had traveled long to reach the Emerald City, and wondered if this too were a marketing ploy.

  He took her up the service elevator to her room on the eleventh floor. They made love, and it was not at all like she had expected it to be, drunken hook up and all, sweat and bad breath and pawing. Instead it was nice. Slow, only a little awkward, and that made it kind of sweet in a way.

  When she woke in the morning he was gone. She was relieved in a way, but she didn’t quite know what to do with the day and thought it odd that he could be working the front desk at that moment—at the very least he was probably somewhere in the hotel. She took her black government laptop out of the safe and powered it up. The Dell blinked once and flashed the FBI logo and seal across a blue screen. She had a moment of panic when she couldn’t find her secure ID token, a pager sized device that gave her a passcode that changed every ninety seconds. She rooted through her bag and found it amid a bramble of
spare keys, sugarless gum wrappers, and outdated gym memberships and coffee shop punch cards. She logged in with five seconds to spare before her computer would have locked her out and she’d have to call the IT administrator in Salt Lake City. Once into her computer, she logged in to her government email account. It usually had several hundred unread messages, and she was surprised to see fewer than fifty. Not a good sign. Maybe they’d actually started to forget about her. She scrolled through her inbox looking for anything urgent or that would give a clear indication that her services at the FBI were no longer welcome. A dozen of the messages were from one thread from her dwindling group of work friends. The chain began with a message with a YouTube video labeled WTF, isn’t this your neck of the woods Hailey? The video was dated from yesterday and already had over one hundred thousand hits. She clicked the link to the video, and a grainy black and white security gas station camera freeze frame came to life. It was night. The sky was black. Everything was an overexposed white. The screen was split in four, each quadrant showing the view from a different security camera. The upper left quadrant showed a well-muscled man in a tank top with what looked like an arrow sticking straight out of his chest cross a parking lot and enter a gas station convenience store. In the upper right quadrant, the man in profile now, with a projectile clearly heaving up and down with the pulse of his breathing, raised a large caliber handgun and splattered the clerk’s head across a wall of cigarette cartons. But it was the bottom right quadrant that made Hailey say holy shit. Barely in the frame was the back half of an ancient model Chevy Malibu with the gas pump handle fully depressed and buried inside the car’s orifice, the lower half of a man in jeans shuffling from one foot to the other, except that one foot was encased in a dingy and apparently decomposing cast.

  Chapter 26

  State Route 89, outside of Kaibab, Arizona.

  Tom sat in the middle of a dirt parking lot next to a gas station. The sun beat down. His arms over his knees, he hunched motionless staring at the scrub hills beyond the blacktop. An RV towing a small car blew by on 89 spawning a mini dust devil that spun across the parking lot and through the gas pumps and barbed wire fencing over a rambling ephemeral wash and into a thousand miles of desert. The tattered remains of the wool coat covered his head and shoulders like a shawl shading his eyes. He spat dust, a drab of spittle stuck to a desiccated lip, cracked, bled, dried, and calloused.

  The Great Hoover Dam was some hundred and fifty miles northwest. He looked that way and then looked south at the empty stretch of highway. A few birds circled a patch of roadkill a mile back. He looked at his hands. They were clean. He pushed up his sleeve and ran his hand up his arm, which should have been coated to the armpit in blood from the gut of the guy he’d stabbed. Had his sweat washed off the blood, or had it ever happened? He felt like he was waking up from a dream. He felt suddenly elated. Unmoored. He hadn’t killed anyone. Or he had. I didn’t kill anyone. Had any of it ever happened? He looked back in the direction of the dam. Was there a terrorist attack he was supposed to stop? If so, how? The signs had stopped coming. Or he’d misread them. Why couldn’t the instructions come from a Blackberry—a Blackberry wouldn’t lie. Unless it was hacked by the Network. The last sign he had seen told him to set fire to a mine with someone inside, or was it the sign that told him to push someone off a cliff? Or he hadn’t. I didn’t do it. Maybe he was just a homicidal maniac. That made him laugh. A dry cough. He looked straight at the sun. It was barely moving, muted by a gray sky.

  He looked at his hands. His hands were clean except for the permanent black rings under his fingernails. He held his hands up to the sky and stretched out his fingers, the black fingernails like claws, and pulled apart the gray sky to reveal a dazzling blue sky and yellow sun smiling down on the world as it was supposed to be. He was reborn. As if he’d pulled himself out from a gray cobwebbed womb to a fresh new world. He stood up and pulled the wool coat off from his head and flung it behind him in the dirt. He shook his head free and felt the air in his pores and started walking.

  He walked past the single pump gas station, ramshackle houses, and scattered trailers and followed the highway north out of town, the possibilities opening up to him like the endless desert in front of him. Money. In this new world he could carry bills like anyone else. No one was tracking him through embedded biosensors in the watermarks. It was preposterous! What was I thinking? It was crazy to live without money. I was seriously fucked up there for a while, huh? The highway had no shoulder, and he walked on the sun-bleached weeds blown down, trampled, and half-drowning in sand. Cars blew by him but he barely noticed. How can I get money? Day labor maybe, enough for a hotel room so he could clean up and apply for something minimum wage. Without the wool coat there was nothing to contain his smell, a ten-foot halo of air gone sour, like his body had turned bad, been salted, spiced, and seasoned and then died and turned bad again, fetid and rotten, even outdoors and in the wind. A tractor-trailer barreled past, blasting him with powdered earth that stuck to his sweat and invaded the crevices of his dried and cracked lips. Maybe the coating of dirt would damp down the stench. Earlier today you squatted in an irrigation ditch and blew Taco Bell out of your ass. There’s shit splatter on your pants. Even day labor may be out of the question for the time being. He didn’t care. There were possibilities now. He walked. The sky mellowed into pink and orange. The sound of the wind traversing the desert was thrilling. Panhandling. Enough for a cheap hotel room was possible now that he didn’t have to reject the dollar bills and only accept coins. Or a homeless shelter. He had no qualms about that. But a city big enough for a homeless shelter was at least two hundred miles away. He crested a slow rolling rise and saw the lights of the interstate crossing the desert below. He stopped to take it in, picking up the faint din of traffic reflected off the land. By the time he closed the distance it was night. He was drawn to the lights along a frontage road, hoping for a good place to sparechange, sit with a cup outstretched and reap the rewards of a generous society, let it trickle down in ones and hopefully even fives, be the change dish of civilization, or maybe it’s pool filter.

  The first gathering of lights and palm trees turned out to be a hotel. There were more lights a mile or so down, which he thought might be better harvesting grounds, when something stopped him dead in his tracks. His stomach jumped straight to his throat, and the edges of his new universe pulsated inwards. Parked in the hotel’s white crushed quartz horseshoe parking lot in front of a red painted hitching post was a Chevy Malibu Tom knew very well.

  Chapter 27

  Another vodka tonic?

  The blonde at the bar smiled faintly to herself, staring at nothing like she was somewhere else trying to grasp something that kept slipping away. She shook her head. The verdict of an internal debate.

  Please.

  The bartender was a big barrel-chested man with his hair pulled back into a ponytail. He exhaled smoke through his nostrils and set his cigarette to rest in a groove in an ashtray beneath the bar. The blonde fished through her purse for a cigarette, careful not to expose the Glock 9mm she’d bought for herself her second year on the job. She liked its weight. The feel was good. She fished out a Marlboro Light, lit it and took two drags before she realized she didn’t have an ashtray.

  How come there are no ashtrays?

  They outlawed smoking in bars. Took effect the beginning of the month.

  He set her drink on a cocktail napkin in front of her. He pinched his smoldering cigarette butt out of the ashtray beneath the bar, took a drag and flicked it into a trashcan. Then he set the ashtray on the bar.

  Thanks.

  No problem.

  Can I ask you a question?

  Shoot.

  How come you’re still smoking in here...I mean, is there a bartender loophole or something?

  No, I just figure no one’s going to enforce it. I mean, you’re not going to bust me are you?

  She was truly stunned. Bartenders were notoriously good at sniffing out co
ps but people usually didn’t get that vibe from her.

  No, I’m not...I mean...I’m a Fed...I don’t even know if I could bust someone for smoking. Seriously, I have no fucking idea.

  I’m James.

  Hailey.

  They shook hands.

  Even if you could though, you wouldn’t right? It’d be a waste of time. You have more important things to do, I’m sure.

  No, not me. You know, in my experience, people are going to do what they’re going to do. The law doesn’t stop anyone from doing anything. The law just cleans up the mess.

  The day I can’t smoke behind the bar is the day I’ll quit bartending.

  Really? That seems a little extreme. You can just smoke out back.

  Wouldn’t be the same.

  Hailey stuck a bar straw into the pulp of her lime at the bottom of her glass.

  The door jingled and a man hobbled in, one foot anchored in a damp cast. He bellied up to the bar leaving one barstool between himself and Hailey. She could smell him from where he was, and she guessed the bartender could too by the way he hadn’t moved, kept his arms crossed, looking down, all six foot five of him, like some impassive Buddha. The smell was acrid, like singed hair or renal failure. Meth. She pegged it right away.

  Beer and a shot of Jack.

  The Buddha stood still as stone.

  Come on, man.

  The shadow people had come. The little people that live in the corners of your eyes and appear as shadows so you don’t know whether they are real or not. They usually came around the fourth or fifth day. The man spun ninety degrees to his left and stared at the wall until determining nothing was there. He spun back around to look at them. He was jumpy but Hailey saw that he had soft brown eyes. Kind eyes.

  Did you see that?

  The bartender shrugged.

  Hailey scooched her stool back a few inches.

  Shadow people.