by J. Warren
At the bar, five guys and one woman sat. None of them was under thirty, or two-hundred and fifty pounds. It reminded me of being in the break room at the garage. Behind the bar was one of Sully’s great grandkids. I hadn’t been here a lot even when I lived here, so I didn’t know his name. He seemed familiar, though, in that way some kid who was a senior and played football when you were a freshman does twenty years later. I walked toward the bar and, at the far end, a group of three men burst into laughter. One of them pounded the bar with the flat of his hand. I noticed one of them wasn’t laughing so much as smiling, like he’d just done something important. It was Bud Gantner.
He waved me over. I realized, as I walked, that people’s eyes followed me. Not in a mean way, but just in a ‘who’s this guy?’ way. They knew who the regulars were, and I wasn’t one of them.
Bud turned around on his stool and extended his hand. I took it and smiled. “Glad you could make it,” he said. The other men he was sitting with turned a bit, but kept their backs mostly to me. Bud gestured to his left at a bulky man in a gray pullover. “Mikey Kendall, this is Bart Tipton. Bart does contracting work here and in Eukiah.” The big man wiped his huge hand off on his pants, then extended it to me. I took it and smiled. Bud gestured to the other man, smaller but larger through the middle and with a beard. “This is Ed Kawalcek. He drives trucks for the bottling plant.” His grip was strong and I don’t know why, but I tried to grip back just as strong.
“Pleasure,” I said. Both men smiled, and Ed tipped his mug up to finish his beer.
“This here is Albert Kendall’s boy,” Bud said. Ed hid it fairly well, but I saw his eyes roll.
“Oh, yeah?” Bart asked. I heard it in his voice, too; my father wasn’t a popular guy.
“Yeah,” I said, “but don’t hold it against me,” I shot in. The men grinned some, and Bart chuckled once. I’d heard someone say something like that once, and I thought maybe it would work here. It seemed to. It looked like the tension in both men’s shoulders eased some.
“Find a stool,” Bud said.
Ed pushed his mug forward and stood, “Here, you can have mine. I gotta’ get home before the wife decides I’d look better stuffed and mounted,” he said.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
He nodded, did a sort-of half serious salute to Bud and Bart. Bart stood at that moment, too. “I gotta get, too, I suppose. Supper’s done cold and in the microwave,” Bart said. He turned to me as I watched Ed walk away and extended his hand, again. “Pleasure to meet you. Say hello to your dad for me,” he said. I shook his hand. He patted Bud on the back and walked away. I sat down where Bart had been.
The bartender came over and before I could answer, Bud said “Sully’s for him, and I’ll have another.” It smelled like he’d had a few already. I didn’t mind, though; he seemed very relaxed.
“So, Mikey, how the hell are ya’?” he asked. Two mugs full of light golden beer appeared in front of us. Bud took his to his mouth immediately.
“I dunno. So-so, I guess. How about you?” I took a sip of my beer and it was exactly what I remembered; sharp and cold.
“Not to good, either. I don’t want to talk about it, though. How’r your folks after that fender bender you had yesterday?” he asked.
My eyes grew huge, “Shit,” I said, “I forgot to get over and talk to the Sheriff about it. I doubt mom or dad remembered. They’re fine, though. Just fine.”
“I hear your sister was in town,” Bud said, and I could hear the question.
“She’s not very—religious,” I said, and sipped. He nodded.
“What’ve you been doing with yourself?” he asked.
I didn’t know. “I work at a garage. I’m seeing this girl. I dunno. I’m okay, I guess.”
“Seeing a girl? She pretty?” he asked in that way old men do.
“Yeah. She’s pretty. She’s not so happy with me, though.”
“Why’s that?” he asked, and sipped. The bartender was watching two huge men play darts on the back wall. I looked just as one missed the board and hit the wall itself.
“I dunno,” I said.
“Is that why only so-so?” he asked.
“No. Not really. I—I dunno—I had to take my sister, Sarah, to the airport this afternoon.”
“Ah. What happened?” Bud asked. I thought about how odd it is that over beer, two people can talk about almost anything.
“She doesn’t get along with mom and dad very well.”
“Don’t come to church, neither,” he said, “knowing Susannah Kendall, that don’t sit very well.” I nodded.
“Sarah,” he said, and sipped. He thought for a moment, then said “I remember that one.”
“Yeah?” I sipped my beer. It was cold going down and stung my mouth.
“Yeah. One of the more difficult births I’ve had to deal with. Both your sisters were hard pregnancies for your mother, if I remember rightly,” he said, sipping his own, “but Sarah, she fought. It was almost like…”
“Almost like what?” I asked.
He turned and looked into my eyes, “Almost like she didn’t want to come out. She kept squirming and fighting. That’s not unusual; the problem was she wasn’t working her way out, she was trying to work her way back in.” He sipped again, and looked back at the television. There was a long pause.
“What about me?” I asked.
“You were like ninety-nine-point-nine percent of this town: easy as pie. Came right on out with no fuss and even smiled at me. Almost every baby in this town comes out like that. Take that O’Mally boy over there, for instance,” Bud said, pointing with the bottom of his bottle. I started, and looked where he was pointing. At one of the corner table, was Kevin O’Mally. His hands were on the table, and he was hunched over a beer bottle. The shadows had kept him hidden from me. “That boy still holds the record for the shortest time I ever spent in a delivery room. Seven hours. I didn’t even have time to get my gloves on good,” he said, and laughed. As if he could sense us looking, Kevin looked up. Bud raised his chin and smiled. Kevin did the same in return, then hunched again. My heart was pounding, and I couldn’t figure out why.
“How’d Sarah turn out?” Bud asked.
“She’s a lesbian,” I said, and took a long pull from my beer. His eyes got large, then relaxed.
“Helluva world,” he sighed, shaking his head. He sipped, and mumbled something.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothin’,” Bud said. “It’s just—I never thought—,” he sighed again. “You know you see a kid, and you think that they can be anything, do anything. Then something—,” he said, and mumbled.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said.
“No, you said something.”
He shook his head, took a sip of his whiskey, and rattled the ice. Then he looked at me and said “Had a talk with Jimmy Clarke today. Wanted my opinion on something.”
“What was it?” I asked.
“Them bones they found; he had the measurements and wanted a second opinion before he went to talk to Aiken about it.”
“Was there something wrong?”
“No. Those bones were from a perfectly healthy individual,” he said, then raised his glass to take another sip saying “a perfectly healthy seven or eight year old boy.”
A chill went screaming through me.
“Seen a movie once where something happened and the dead—,” he said, and paused, set his beer down, and stared off at the front door, “the dead got up and started eating folks. Helluva picture. I was a young buck at the time—I dunno, maybe thirty. Scared hell outta’ me. Slept with the lights on damn near two weeks. Still get pretty worked up about it, every now and again. Thing is,” he said, and seemed to snap out of whatever he’d been thinking, looked directly at me and said “Same chill that ran through me every time I remembered a scene from that movie and had to turn the lights on hit me tonight. Ran through me like lightnin’ today. It was like—.” I w
aited a few moments, and he took a swig of his beer, looked down at the table.
“Like what?” I asked, sipping my own.
“Like those bones was coming to life any minute. Like they was gonna’ get up off that table and—I dunno—like the little guy was gonna’ set up and start talkin’.”
SEVENTEEN
Things got really thick. There’s no other way to describe it. It seemed like that moment dragged for hours. Bud just stared at the bar in front of him, and I looked at the men playing darts. The beer was cold in my hand, and the sweat from it made my palm wet.
“I gotta’ take a piss,” I said, and stood up. This seemed to drag him out of his mood, too. He smiled and pointed at the back wall. Neon tubes spelled out ‘restrooms’, but only flickered blue every minute or so; other than that, it was dark.
I’ve always felt odd about hearing other people’s conversations as I walked past their table, though. I try to pretend I’m not listening, but you can’t help it; you hear these things, and they puzzle you the rest of the night. One couple I passed had a little girl at the table. They were doing that yelling at each other through clenched teeth so no one knows how angry we are because we’re in a public place thing. The little girl was doing her best not to cry while she ate a huge French fry slowly. Another table had three burly men, their beers in mugs rather than bottles. They laughed extremely loud at the girl who was taking their orders, but her expression said that whatever their joke was, she didn’t think it was very funny.
The door going into the restroom squeaked. It’s rare to find one that doesn’t. The echo of that tiny squeal seemed to be as loud as a jet taking off. A man said “Excuse me,” as he came out; I’d almost knocked him down with the door. He shouldered past me and when the door closed behind him, I was alone. There’s something very creepy about being in a public bathroom alone. The muffled music outside, the dripping sounds from the urinals; the whole thing makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up for a second.
I took the smaller of the stalls. I’ve never known why, but I don’t like peeing at the urinals, especially if other men are in the room. Something uncomfortable about not knowing where to put your eyes: some men stare at the wall, some look at the ceiling—some have animated conversations with other men right next to them. I’ve never gotten the hang of when it’s okay, and when you shouldn’t talk in the restroom, so I just always choose the stall. The door doesn’t shut all the way, behind me, though. I spent almost five minutes trying to fix the thing, my body screaming at me the whole time, but nothing worked. Finally, I gave up, turned around, and relaxed.
The door squeaked open right at that moment. Somehow, I’d known it would. Someone coughed and walked to the urinals. From under the little dividing wall, I could see someone’s sneaker. It was one of those black canvas high-tops that all of us kids from Placerville used to wear. That brought back memories; my mother had always wanted me to wear something else, but those were all I’d wanted. One time, she’d even gone so far as to buy my school shoes without me. She’d brought home these white leather sneakers with all kinds of colors and designs on them. She’d said “They’re so bright and colorful. That’s ‘cool’, Mikey!”, and I knew the moment she said the word cool what she’d done; she’d talked to some of her friends. My mother never used the word cool to describe anything other than temperature except that once. That year, instead of throwing my old high-tops out, I hid them just up the road at the bus stop. I’d wear her shoes to the bus stop, slip into the old shoes, then change back at the bus stop before going home. I’d thought I’d be the only one, but I found out within weeks that quite a number of the parents had done the same thing, and most of us kids had responded in the same way. There had been black canvas high-tops hidden all over the town that year.
When I came back out of my thoughts, I was finished. I zipped back up and walked out of the stall. Whoever had been at the urinal was done, too; the shoe had gone. I stutter-stepped, though, when I started for the sink; the shoe had belonged to Kevin O’Malley. He was at the sink, washing his hands.
His head was down, so for a second it was only me, my shocked reflection in the mirror, and the back of his head. His short, spiky black hair seemed so out of place with all the graying, balding, heads out in the bar. He seemed lost.
Instead of standing up, then noticing me, though, he did something odd. Kevin, still bent over at the sink, spat once, then cut his eyes toward me. It was only then that I began to wonder what he was doing. His eyebrows came together slightly, and his lips, though together, moved against each other. Something in the set of his shoulders changed. He reached over and shut off the tap without standing up. The only sounds were the echo of the last drip from the sink, and the muffled music outside.
Both of us were wondering the same thing. Me because I’d never talked to him, and because I wondered if he’d ever known how afraid of him I was. Why he didn’t say anything I’ve never figured out. Looking back, it also seemed odd to go that long without anyone coming in; most bar restrooms are a continuous flow of people. That moment hung there forever, though.
“Mikey Kendall, right?” he asked, barely moving his hips or legs as he stood up. He was wearing clothes that didn’t fit with the bar, either; dark jeans and a shiny black pull-over. Something about him made me think that he was lost.
“Yeah,” I said, “You’re Kevin O’Malley.” It wasn’t a question, because I knew who he was the second I saw him. I’d lived in fear of him for so long that something even deeper than his features was burned on me permanently. I guess some writer guy would say that better, but it’s the only way I know to describe it. I felt like I could be blindfolded and still know exactly where Kevin was in a room. It seemed so funny, at that moment, though; I noticed that my shoulders were higher than his. Age had gotten the better of us; I was taller than Kevin O’Malley.
“Ain’t seen you in a long time,” Kevin said, and sniffled. His right hand moved like he wanted to bring it up to his face, but he didn’t.
“Yeah,” I said, and I was about to say something else when a burly man waddled in past us. He unzipped and hawked up something deep from his throat, then spat it into the urinal as the splashing sound started. At the time, I didn’t know what to make of it, but I saw Kevin’s eyes follow the guy for a second; something hungry lived in that stare. Then he looked back at me, and with a flick of his head toward the door he turned and left.
I took a second to wash my hands, and wondered what I should do. He’d meant for me to follow him, obviously. I wondered if I should.
I must’ve spent more than a few minutes thinking about it, though, because the big man who’d come in shouldered up to me, trying to get some space at the counter. “Pardon me there, fella,” he said. I started, then moved aside.
“That there little queer boy ain’t givin’ you no shit, is he?” the man asked while he washed. I noticed his hands were so big, he couldn’t fit them both into the sink at the same time.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“The little queer that ‘us in here a second ago. He wuh’n’t botherin’ you, was he?” the man asked, shutting off the water and pulling paper towels from the dispenser.
“Keh—,” I started, then decided not to say his name, “No. No, he wasn’t bothering me,” I said.
The man nodded to himself, then left. I looked into the mirror, and my eyebrows were pulled together so tight, the rest of my face looked pinched. I walked out the door, and almost right into Kevin. He nodded at me, and then walked down a short hallway that lead away from the bar. He opened a door with a sign above it that would have read Exit if it hadn’t been broken.
Outside, the smell of wet garbage mixed with the smell of woods. Sully’s had only been slapped into an undeveloped plot of forest land; that land crept closer and closer every year. Some day, it would have to be cut back. Kevin walked five feet from the back door of the bar and was standing next to a tree. I walked slowly toward him, hearing the door cl
ick shut behind us. Two feet away from the door, though, the smell of the garbage went away; only the wild smell of trees remained.
Kevin put his hands in his pockets, and I noticed just how thin he was. The light from around front and the full moon made most people look pretty whited-out, but Kevin was nearly silver. I noticed how sunken in his eyes were.
“Jesus, it’s been a long time,” he said, “how’ve you been? What’ve you been up to? Where do you live, now?” I couldn’t figure it out; Kevin was curious about me? His lips were pulled back from his teeth a little and it occurred to me he was smiling. He was happy to see me. He seemed small and something else; some poet would probably say he was withered, that he looked like a decayed version of the golden menace in my head.
“I’ve been good,” I said, still not believing. His eyes were bright and intent on me. “Working as a mechanic and—,” I started.
“You always were good with your hands,” he said, smiling. Something in his voice said that he’d always known how things would turn out.
“—seeing this girl—,” I stumbled.
“Of course. Happy good kind of life, right? You always were the good one,” he said, and looked away. I felt like asking him what he meant, but he seemed to be almost crazy, in a way. His eyes, his voice; something wasn’t right. I don’t mean that he didn’t fit with the image I’d always carried around in my head, I mean that something in the way he was acting was more like a dog that’d been whipped too much. He wanted something from me, and I didn’t know what it was. “I bet she’s a real looker, huh?” he said. I smiled at his tone because I didn’t know what else to do.
“Kevin, it’s really great to see you, but I need to—,” I started and his face fell. Not in the classic movie sense, where the actor falls apart, but it shifted just enough that I knew I’d said the worst thing in the world before I’d even finished saying it.