by Glover, Dan
“Billy. Billy Austin.”
“I'm Lisa.”
“Yes, I know.”
He had stammered the ‘I know’ slightly, not wanting to seem too familiar. She didn't seem to notice, or if she did, she didn't let on.
“Where’re you from, Billy Austin? You’re not from here.”
“Oklahoma.”
They were standing together behind the bar. He’d just finished stocking the coolers with bottles of beer for tomorrow and seeing that there were sufficient hard liquor bottles behind the bar. A minute ago Lisa had been wiping water spots off the clean glasses from the dishwasher and storing them under the counter and polishing the top of the bar. Now she stood so close to Billy that he could smell the faint touch of perfume she wore. His answer didn’t seem to satisfy her, somehow, and he wondered if she asked not so much about a place but a time… as if to her he existed on a different plane, somewhere and a time unrecognized but perchance dreamed.
“Your skin looks so dark!”
She touched his arm, running her fingers over his skin ever so lightly, just brushing the hair that grew there curly and abundant.
“I'm quarter Cherokee, or so my daddy told me.” He didn't move his arm. He enjoyed her touch. He liked it a lot.
“Your daddy?”
“He's gone now. So's my momma.”
“Yeah, mine too.”
She murmured the words softly as if being reminded of something she’d rather not recall; when she touched Billy’s skin her hand jumping away from his arm as if a static shock passed between them the way he remembered it happening as a boy in those awful Oklahoma's winter and he walked across the carpet before touching something metal and seeing a spark shoot out of his finger. But here winter didn't do what it did in Oklahoma and no carpet adorned this floor.
Lisa stepped away while looking back at him with a smile in her eyes and drawing herself a glass of ale from the spigot, tilting it gingerly to avoid a foamy head. She asked if he wanted one too and he said yes, please. She drew another glass of beer handing it to him.
“So you're all alone in the world, Billy Austin?”
“Yes. I live upstairs.”
His eyes went automatically to the ceiling.
“Really!”
Her eyes followed his to the ceiling. She lighted a cigarette inhaling deeply. Roger didn’t allow smoking in the bar but Billy didn’t say anything; instead he lighted one too. They sat at the bar looking at each other, smoking, as they sipped their ale. Lisa’s eyes went to the ceiling again as Billy studied her face up close. Lisa seemed older than Allison by a few years… closer to his age.
He thought she was as pretty as or maybe even prettier than Allison Johns. Glancing at her body while she looked away, Billy noticed she was thicker-set across the hips than Allison and how she was larger in the chest with silky brown hair she wore pony-tail long and dark eyes that might have been hazel. He didn’t want to stare too intently to find out. When their glasses were empty she looked at him the same way he looked at her.
“I thought I’d seen you walking down the stairs at the start of your shift, Billy… can I see where you live?”
“Sure, come on.”
He put both glasses in the sink and led her outside carefully remembering to lock the door behind them. Roger, the owner, depended on him to lock up. Not every night, but sometimes, and he didn’t want to let Roger down. “It’s this way.” He felt stupid as soon as he said it… of course it was this way. She followed him up the side set of stairs leading to his apartment. He unlocked the door, kicking it at the bottom where it stuck sometimes, especially when it rained or when about to. And it smelled like rain tonight.
“Come on in, Lisa. I’m afraid I don’t have much furniture… I spend most of my time downstairs.”
“You seem shy. Have you ever been with a woman, Billy Austin?”
Lisa settled herself on the worn-out sofa adorning the living room. She didn’t seem to have the qualms about it that Allison had… not that Billy could blame Allison. It was mossy green and sagged in the middle. While sweeping the floor one day Billy discovered that piles of porn magazines, the really filthy ones, held up each corner of the sofa where the legs were missing. Billy thought how the sofa's once-velvet hide looked all matted down like it had been deep down under the ocean for at least a thousand years before someone saw it there and hauled it up for some unknown reason. Like the porn magazines it came with the apartment so he hadn’t discarded either. But he thought how they all needed throwing out.
“I used to be married, once.”
He stood watching her eyes, gauging her reaction.
“It was a long time ago, or so I’m told.”
As soon as he said it Billy thought it was a stupid thing to say but Lisa didn’t seem to notice or if she did she ignored the remark.
“Yeah, me too.”
A distant look came into her eyes.
“Didn't work out?”
“No, I guess it didn't.”
“Well, don't feel too bad.”
He watched her finishing her cigarette by smoking it down to the butt and stabbing it out in the glass ashtray that rocked back and forth on top of the cardboard box that said Chivas Regal on the sides which he had rescued from the Dumpster out back and now used for a coffee table.
“It didn't work out for me either, Billy Austin. Got anything to drink?”
“Beer. I got beer. That's about it.”
“Get me one?”
He went to the kitchen and extracted two cold bottles of Sam Adams Boston Lager from the refrigerator. He liked the taste of beer in bottles better than cans even though they cost more. Walking back to the living room half expecting her to be gone he popped off the cap on one of the bottles with the opener he carried. Once out of his sight, he couldn’t be sure if Lisa ever existed at all.
People were like that… like his friend Allison Johns… they weren’t always real. Or maybe they were never real. Billy hadn’t decided. Lisa still sat there though, her legs crossed, waiting for him. She had lighted another cigarette… smoke hung in the room like an unsettled mist that moved in swirls and twirls as he walked through it. He handed her the beer. She caressed his hand with her fingers while taking it from him. Again, he noticed how she started a little as if she felt something electric.
“I see you watching me when we're working.”
She took a long pull from the bottle and shook a strand of her long dark hair that had worked its way out from her ponytail from her eyes the way he noticed she did sometimes when she cleared tables. She took a drag off her cigarette as she gazed into his eyes.
“Oh, I'm sorry, Lisa.”
He stood there feeling flummoxed and not knowing what else to say. He felt his face grow red, red like the neon bar sign that glowed off and on all night long outside the living room window, shouting out Twenty Nine Katz, Twenty Nine Katz, Twenty Nine Katz. He always blushed easy; momma used to say Indian blood runs quick and hot. He lighted a cigarette in an effort to hide his embarrassment popping the cap off his bottle of Sam Adams and leaning over to drop it into the ashtray.
“It's okay, Billy.”
She looked up into his face with big brown eyes… unfathomed pools he would drown in given a chance. He couldn’t remember ever seeing a woman as beautiful as Lisa at that moment. She reminded him of the shoreline at dawn or maybe at sunset, calm and serene… solid; someone he could hope to hold onto, someone who might anchor the ocean of his being, the raging uncertainties and the wild imaginings and the deep-down shadows watching him patiently, waiting for their time to surface.
She might even calm the wolf.
He found himself wanting her… needing her. He sensed they were different in their approach to life and yet so alike in what they were seeking.
“I like it when you watch me. Come on over here and sit by me, Billy Austin.”
He eased himself down next to her in the spot she indicated by patting her hand. A cloud of dust parti
cles rose up from the sofa cushion like a swarm of fleas but she didn’t seem to notice or maybe she noticed but like him she didn’t bother with such trivialities. He looked at her as she gazed back at him. When he leaned back she leaned against him so that his arm went around her shoulder. He thought how they fit together perfectly.
“Tell me about yourself, Billy. Did you say your parents are dead?”
“I know my mother is but my father left when I was a boy. I don’t know what happened to him… we never heard from him again. I suppose he’s dead.”
“Do you have anything to remember them by? You know, like some kind of memento… a wrist watch, a ring… anything?”
“All I have is this old bible. It belonged to my father. He kept photographs in it. Sometimes I look at the pictures but I don’t know any of the people."
"Let me see?"
He went to the drawer retrieving the bible to set on the sofa beside Lisa.
"Who is this? Is that you, Billy?"
"Yes, I think so."
"Who is the little girl with you?"
"I feel like I should know but I don't."
She put the photo back inside the bible before setting it down. The silence seemed uncomfortable, so much so that Billy spoke without thinking, hoping Lisa wouldn’t get bored with him and leave.
"How about you, Lisa? Did you say your parents are gone too?”
“My father shot my mother and then he shot himself.”
Lisa looked at the floor as if afraid of seeing the shock in his eyes.
“I married a man I met in college. My father drank. I knew he abused her and I tried to get my mother to move in with us but she refused. I blamed myself for a long time… for not pressing my mother harder to leave him. I had no money to bury them. My mother had a small insurance policy where she worked that paid for a cremation. I still have her ashes in an urn at my house. I didn’t want my father’s ashes so I told the funeral home to keep them. I didn’t trust myself with them… I would have flushed them into the sewer where they belonged. I haven’t thought about my parents in years. These days I figure I did all I could do and what happened, happened. That’s all.”
“I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to dredge up old memories… that must have been terrible.”
“We all have skeletons in our closets.”
Lisa sat quietly for the next few minutes alternately pulling on her beer and taking drags from a cigarette.
“Want to watch the Late Show, Lisa?”
The silence was uncomfortable and he didn’t know what else to say and again he felt stupid for saying things he shouldn’t have said as soon as the words were out of his mouth. The wind was up tonight… he heard the waves of the ocean crashing on the shoreline directly behind the tavern every few seconds mirroring the way the thoughts of what might happen later tonight kept arising in his mind… murmurings of soft voices counseling him to calm down. He found himself wanting to kiss Lisa in the worse way but he was afraid of scaring her away if he acted too blatantly towards her. “Sometimes I watch it when I get in from working.”
“I’d rather make out a little.”
Lisa turned to look at him with a smile forming at the edges of her mouth.
“I never liked Jay Leno much…am I a mind reader or what, Billy Austin?”
Chapter 17—Drunk Again
Two nights later Allison found her way to Billy's apartment again.
He rarely had visitors. After his dalliance with Lisa the night before Billy almost felt as if he was cheating on the girl when Allison showed up with a bottle of vodka under her arm and a sunny smile lighting her face.
The discussion seemed to take up naturally where it had left off during their last visit. Billy mixed drinks while Allison sauntered around the apartment as if she owned it.
Did you grow up around here, Billy?”
“No… I’m from Oklahoma. I grew up moving from one apartment to the other, and each one was worse than the one before. We always lived in bad neighborhoods. My parents were poor… my father was half Cherokee or so he claimed… he rarely worked and when he did he spent his paycheck on booze. My white mother didn’t work… she thought God would provide. She prayed all the time.
"As far as I can see it didn’t do anyone any good. After my father left she started drinking. We lost our apartment so we had to live in a car and then in abandoned buildings. The kids at school teased me because I came to school dirty and with holes in my clothes. They didn’t realize I was lucky to be able to come to school at all… or maybe they didn’t care.”
“Jesus, Billy… that must have been rough.”
“When you grow up that way you really don’t know any different. I thought everyone lived like that.”
“That’s what I thought too, Billy… I thought everyone lived in a mansion and had housekeepers. Everyone I knew did. It wasn’t until I got older and started visiting some of my friends who weren’t so well off that I realized how hard the world could be if you didn’t have money. That’s strange, isn’t it, how we take everything for granted.”
"Maybe we all think like that, Allison. We always lived in the bad part of town so all our neighbors were in the same boat with us. I assumed everyone lived hand to mouth because they all did."
Allison held up her empty glass as if he was a bartender and smiled at him. He didn’t mind doing things for her... in fact he enjoyed having someone around who expected him to wait on her. She was like a child in that fashion yet when he looked into her eyes Allison was all woman.
As he was mixing more drinks he couldn’t help but wonder what would happen later tonight... if she might stay with him. The fact that she came to his apartment again unannounced seemed to portend a night to remember but then again Allison wasn’t like any girl he had met before.
"Did you drink when you were a kid, Billy?"
"No, but my father did."
"So did mine. My mother did too... that's where I got my booze. I started out sneaking liquor from the bottles behind the bar when I was eight years old and replacing it with water."
"Didn’t anyone notice?"
"If they did, no one said anything. By the time I was fifteen I was drinking openly around my mother. My father would get testy if he saw me drinking—especially his good wine—so I hid it from him."
She drank so quickly Billy had a hard time keeping up with her. It seemed as if he just sat down and she was clinking around the ice cubes in her empty glass. Before he knew it, the bottle she brought was empty.
“I guess we both led sheltered lives in our own ways, Allison. The vodka is gone… let’s go downstairs and I’ll buy another bottle… that is if you feel like drinking some more… I know I do.”
"I'm just getting started, Billy... I'd love to drink more with you. That's why I like working nights. That way I can sleep late. I've always had problems sleeping at night. I hate waking up in the dark. I'm always thinking I see someone standing in the shadows watching me. Are you like that too, Billy?"
"In a way... I never seem to be able to go to sleep. When I was a kid I thought there must be a trick to it. Everyone else in our apartment would be sound asleep but I'd lie there wide awake staring up at the ceiling. About the time morning came, I'd fall asleep. But then I'd have to get up and go to school.
"The other kids used to make fun of me because I always looked like I just rolled out of bed. It didn’t matter because if it wasn’t that they'd be laughing about my dirty clothes or the holes in my shoes. It was always something."
"Kids are cruel, Billy. I never had any friends when I was growing up. Most of the girls I went to school with were old money. My parents were wealthy but they actually worked for a living. The other parents didn’t. They inherited their money. I guess that made them feel superior somehow."
"Come on, Allison. Let's go downstairs."
He took her by the hand and she didn’t try to pry it loose the way he expected. For some reason it surprised him that her skin was so soft. The touch w
as velvet and they were so close together that he could feel the heat pouring off of her body almost like she was on fire. He led her down the stairs walking slowly so that she didn’t stumble and holding the door for her after unlocking it.
Billy felt a chill run up his spine as they entered the tavern dark and silent and tiptoed across the floor to the bar as if he was doing something he shouldn’t be doing… as if he was deep inside some place where he shouldn’t have ventured… as if the wolf was caught doing what a wolf does… with someone watching it all. A dark man stood in the shadows who when looked at evaporated into nothingness … or did he?
“Why don’t you get two bottles, Billy?”
Allison pressed against him and whispered in his ear as if she too sensed the same dread as Billy. He wondered if she saw the man in the shadows but thought better of asking. He hated letting go of her hand to gather the supplies.
“I’ll pay.”
Billy grabbed two bottles of vodka, a gallon of orange juice, a bag of ice, and though he felt odd taking money from Allison he did so, putting the correct amount of money in the cash register, giving her the change, and making sure to remember to lock up on the way out.
Back at the apartment Allison took over making drinks that seemed to Billy mostly vodka and very little orange juice but they tasted good. He figured he could always drink the orange juice for breakfast.
“When I was fourteen I remember how I got drunk on quadruple screwdrivers one afternoon. I put on a little pink bikini and went down to our pool where my brother Alex was swimming with his friends. Someone splashed water on me. I hadn’t realized that when the fabric of my bikini got wet you could see right through it… Alex told me to put on my robe. I really didn’t have much to show. I still don’t. But he sounded stern, like my father. It pissed me off. So instead of doing as he said, I took off my top and showed the boys, just to shock all of them.”
“I wouldn’t mind so much being shocked like that, Allison.”
Billy laughed as he felt himself blushing. He couldn’t remember ever being so forward with a woman but Allison was different. He felt as if he could be himself around her and she wouldn’t judge him too harshly.