by John O'Brien
Such is the scene that the bullet-induced sunbeams illuminate. Their light does not reach the five plastic juice containers that are resting at the base of the bar’s interior, beneath the scrubber sink. It is here that the entire treasury of liquor now resides. Utilizing the plastic bottles is the result of a unanimous (unanimous among Rudd and Fenton, the others being either unavailable or unimportant) decision to transfer all remaining liquor to the less delicate vessels after the evening’s attacks had subsided. It is here they rest and here they contain:
1. One complete fifth of Malinowa Raspberry Cordial Austrian Liqueur.
2. One complete fifth of J&B.
3. The remnants of what was left in the recently shot bottle of J&B combined with the small amount left in Langston’s DT bottle. babygottabottlebabygottabottle.
4. One complete bottle of the dry-storage salvage blend.
5. Half a bottle of the same (the original amount had been lightened by Rudd who at some point during the night swigged enough to stave off the impending withdrawals. Rudd.).
They had made it (if that’s what it could be called and surely it was the only thing it could be called—made not in the manufacturing sense, but in the sense that they made their lives last for those hours, no small accomplishment for these men) through the night. It is at this juncture that Langston’s screams begin to pepper the what would otherwise be dewy morning. Jill, already awake in the restroom, hurries to enter the bar but not before ensuring each of the three hooks and eyes of her bra are securely fastened. Oops, missed one, there we go. Okay now.
There is sufficient light for her to get an eyeful of her patient who is wailing and writhing, sightless eyes rolled over white to the back of his head. In between nonsensical screams, Langston sucks on a chard of glass that had been discarded after its contents had been so carefully (albeit shakily) decanted into one of the plastic juice containers. Blind Delirious Man Sniffs Out Liquor on Glass Chard, the headlines would read. The glass has lacerated his lips and tongue. To what extent is difficult to judge as blood covers most of the bottom half of his face and a small river of that same blood and saliva is making its way down his chin.
Jill thought she could handle anything and she will handle this. Just gimme a second. A second, a moment. Maybe a lifetime. She steadies herself as the freakish scene causes her own blood to drain from her face, a faintish feeling upon her. For the first time she is shook, really shook by the magnitude of the Evil these men define their souls upon. And they are all she has.
“Jesus Christ Jill, get a bottle. JeSUS CHRIST NOW,” Rudd staring at her wondering why she hasn’t moved and feeling not too far behind Langston at that. Jill snaps from her own private and terrible shock and assumes her role (surely this must be playacting) once again. She scurries behind the bar and clutches the first container her hand encounters. Unfortunately, it is the Raspberry Cordial and that-being only seventy-six proof—is not the best choice given the problem. Not best but okay in the it’ll-do sense.
“Here now,” Jill kneels by Langston (not too close) and Rudd approaches him from behind. “I’ll grab his arms. You hold his head with one hand and pour what you can with the other.”
Jill takes a firm hold of Langston’s head and is surprised how vulnerable he feels in her arms. She cuts herself as she grabs the glass and removes it from Langston’s lips, slicing him there even further. Now, her blood mingles with Langston’s. Jill. The bottle. She manages to get about three-quarters of what she pours into him. Langston finds that little comfort and subsides into minor spasms. Quiet.
Rudd and Jill step away with a lets-see-how-that-works expression on their faces. Kids in a chemistry lab regarding their recently concocted experiment as it bubbles in the beaker before them. There is blood everywhere now, its thick scent heady and ominous. Rudd, his own shakes becoming apparent, grabs the nearly empty (but hard to tell since its contents are cloaked with a coating of blood on the bottle’s exterior) container from Jill and drains it. Funny, he thinks, this Raspberry Cordial shit ain’t so bad. Jill watches this and it kindles the unlikely memory of a thirsty athlete in a television ad, swigging down his sports drink. “Quenches deep down!” he would say. Commercial smile and all.
The others are awake and on the scene, eyes downcast in embarrassment. Miles, Fenton, and Rudd take their seats at the bar.
“I think it’s best we dole the rest out according to need,” Rudd.
“Which means what? You get the most? Langston? You know I’ve got some serious pain here.” Patting his shoulder, Miles.
What an asshole. Rudd looks poker-face level at Miles. Guy’s trying to play ordinary rules.
“I think it’s getting a little too close to the surface for this kind of shit Miles. Now Fenton here isn’t likely to go down. We all know that, but he’s been here and he’s stood by us, so he deserves a share. Fenton, how about you get the half bottle of mash. We’ll use the full bottle of mash on Langston over here. Miles and I can split the remaining J&B.”
Fenton opens his mouth in protest then thinks better of it. After all, this is where we’re at and there’s nothing else left to do. Miles is quiet too, what with Rudd agreeing to divvy up the J&B. Fair’s fair. It had to come to an end, that much they knew. They regard this … this end as men facing their own death, marooned derelicts splitting the last bits of food, any hope of rescue long gone, starvation imminent. They sit together, still for a moment. Still except for the random gunfire, which they have all but ceased to care about.
Rudd, not forgetting his obligations now, “Come on, we better sit on the floor, or at least the booths, there’s no telling what could penetrate now. Fenton, bring the bottles around. Jill, let’s see what we can do for Langston.”
Fenton goes behind the bar and retrieves the four bottles, handing the full mash to Jill, he sets the half mash by his booth and unscrews the tops on the J&Bs to even them out. He begins to pour from the fuller bottle to the less full bottle when the shake in his hands forces him to abort the attempt. He is reluctant to draw attention to this at the same time aware that he has little choice.
“Jill,” Fenton, voice quaking, “I can’t do it.”
Jill turns to see him helpless, holding out his hands that are quivering with that involuntary palsy she has become so familiar with.
“I’ll be right there, let me see about him first.” She responds, nodding toward Langston who is still somewhat calm from the earlier ministrations. Having fetched some wet paper towels (and now the water from the tap is starting to smell, really smell) Jill cradles Langston’s head in her lap and dabs blood from his face. He drinks nearly a quarter of the bottle in a greedy, sloppy fashion. Jill recaps the bottle and sets it next to the seat on the floor of his booth. She walks to the bar and rations out the J&B between the two bottles. Her work done for now, she returns to the restroom to clean up.
The men sit, guns and liquor placed finite before them. This eventuality now coming to fruition. Each with his own exclusive set of truths. Never more alone. There is random firing on the door, and Rudd or Fenton answers it, still obeying the rules. Rudd is amused by this instinctive call to order. In this predictable faction, Rudd is the Lord of the Flies and they all know it. And not just know but respect it. Respect me, Dad, my men. But that’s over now and Rudd accepts that. His last shred of morality is what brought them to this. Morality that has no home in this nihilistic New World. It was this that accelerated the end of the booze. Hardly what was called for, yes, but his last defining, albeit cataclysmic, gesture was enough for Rudd. His eyes drift to his thigh, the singular puncture there. So even a bullet could be incompetent. Why did it have to be the one meant for him? Selfish still.
But he knows that bottle he compulsively squeezes, now with both hands. It’s his and his alone. It is the last bottle, just as they all have been. It is everything I have always been. Now the end he always knew loomed in his future was here. The end of the liquor, all the booze in the world always had an end. Drunks’
paradise; holed up in a bar with all the booze you could want and even that had an end. Like drinking the last drop of water on the earth, or breathing the last breath of air, Rudd regards this last dose of scotch that way. He gazes at the bottle and watches as his hands now meld into the plastic, making it part of him. The hallucination speaks to him. Divided we fall.
“I’m sorry,” he says aloud to no one, to everyone.
And really, no one does hear it, including Jill as she sits on the floor of the restroom assessing the situation. Run fingers through the thick pile carpet, helps thinking. Uh-oh, change hands, that hand leaves blood stains and that’s a no-no. Think now. Stupid, Stupid, Stupid. Stupid men. Always leaving. Mindlessly spreading their seed and leaving. Tears begin to sting her eyes and she blinks them back. She is hot, confused, and angry. She licks the barrel of the Beretta, a supplication. This act offers no solace.
She enters the kitchen and sees the busboy there. He looks at her, aroused by her image. Breasts. Shirt wet with blood. Gun. Lips. Lips. Girl sets gun on table.
“Jose,” she whispers the alias. This prompts a smirk from the busboy and he even considers telling her his real name. What could matter now? But he quickly abandons the idea.
“Come with me, follow me,” she speaks to him in a low voice. Close to him, she reaches for his penis, another penis. The busboy responds to her and when they reach the ladies’ room, his smirk has widened to a toothy grin and he even relaxes a bit as she performs a matter-of-fact striptease. She stands naked in front of the sink, visible only by the scant light filtered through the door and bullet-decayed window shutters.
“Go out now, see what you can find-more liquor maybe, help, guns, anything-and this is yours, whenever and however you want it.” Jill eases herself onto the vanity and opens herself to him.
Busboy, busyboy now frees his erection and approaches Jill, thinking how he’d thought it would be easy, but not this easy. He gropes her breasts and bites at them. His erection is insistent though and he doesn’t notice her dryness (or wet tears) as he pushes into her and begins an unpracticed, masturbatory thrusting.
Jill bears it, this will be over soon. God let it be over. She clenches her teeth, her eyes squeeze tears. The door opens and Rudd absorbs the scene. The busboy, grunting, climaxing. Rudd and Jill see each other.
“No, no,” Jill, whimpering. Rudd lets the door swing shut. Yeah. That was Jill.
The busboy finishes and extracts himself from her. He wipes himself with a paper towel and Jill gazes at him vacantly, her eyes still puffy but dry now. His semen oozes onto her thigh.
“You’re in luck lady, just so happens I was on my way out anyway,” he says to her as he zips his fly.
“And you, you are sweeeeet,” he hisses at her while simultaneously pinching and pulling her nipples. He turns to leave her alone in the now desecrated ladies’ room.
The busboy, renewed, prances through the kitchen and toward the door, noticing that although it’s closed, it is unbolted. Wha-thefuck? he thinks as he crosses that threshold for the last time and enters the impossibly sunny day.
Fenton is vaguely aware of some activity in the back, the kitchen but acknowledges it as he does the shooting, without resolution. Instead, he is trying hard to resist taking a drink. Seated at the bar with the Glock and bottle arranged on the slate surface. He contemplates the two. It is hard to focus and all of his resources, both cerebral and physical are right here. He is frightened at how rapidly he was assimilated into this hell. Ever since he entered Tony’s he played this character, for Rudd as much as himself and now that identity is disintegrating. Without it, he isn’t sure what is left, nothing is the answer in the cards. Facing it is quite another thing, that kind of courage isn’t easy to come by. Not much of a man, nope. What now. Next.
Jill’s voice rescues him from that loath immersion.
“The busboy went out. I sent the busboy out for … for whatever.” She was unable to say the obvious for fear that doing so would make Fenton’s visibly deteriorated condition too public. Like mentioning the word (liquor, booze, juice, hooch, scotch, a rose by any other name) would pull the curtain back and reveal him. Ruin him. She would not.
“The busboy?” Fenton. Unstable now. Unsure whether he should feel hope at this new, dim prospect of more liquor. Neither Jill nor Fenton knows the busboy is dead, used as target practice for some marksman, shot in the back of the head, his race never revealed to his assailants and vice versa.
“Yeah, he just left. He’ll be okay. He was the last time. Right? C’mon now, try to pull yourself together. Have a drink. I’ll get it for you.” Jill stands and pours him a shot glass of the mash. Comforting. Soothing.
“Here, drink it.” Jill.
Fenton downs the shot and surveys the bar, fortified. Miles is hovering over Osmond’s body, engrossed. Langston is on the floor of his booth, catatonic. Rudd’s booth is vacant although Fenton cannot remember when or how this came to pass. He feels a bolt of fear at his friend’s absence, his own inadequacies surfacing again. The vacancy at Rudd’s booth summons Fenton’s attention.
“Rudd?”
Jill and even Miles, looking too now. Jill races around. Panic. Panic. Dry-storage, kitchen. Panic, sweat. Breath fast, shallow. Men’s room! Should have checked there first. Panic. No Rudd. Back to the bar. Miles and Fenton stand by Rudd’s booth. The bottle, still containing a swallow of scotch, the Walther, and Glock lay surrendered upon the table there. It is clear this will have to suffice as Rudd’s final statement. He is gone.
* * *
“it’s okay, fenton, it’s okay ‘cause think about it. just think about it. busboy back any minute. any minute. and what about ossie over here, one fat sonabitch. lotta liquor to kill that fat son of a bitch. probably some ‘ya know-left, left in his big fatass stomach. probably a lot. big fatass. and a one hundred fifty-one a lot of it, enough to kill him and then some.”
Afterword October 15,1995
I had a drink at Tony’s the other day. Eighteen days ago to be exact. Eighteen days, that’s one day longer than my friends at the other Tony’s can even hope to plan for. Then again, living the eighteenth day is something I’ve taken for granted until now. The original Tony’s, the one I stopped at, is still there under the same management as well as the same roof. This would be the one my brother, John O’Brien, worked at when he was about sixteen. I doubt it’s changed much since 1976 and it’s not a very tony place, as John described it on Day16. As far as Gail’s concerned, well I suppose we’ll never know. The authenticity of that part of the story is for the memories of John and the imaginary-or-not Gail.
I sat at the bar, drank some wine. Johnny was there too. Just a kid, hardworking, joking with the waitresses, bartender. Mid-afternoon, slow time at this place. Extra time to fool around and why not, everyone likes this kid. He really is a funny kid. Cracks everybody up. But, of course, Johnny wasn’t there. Hasn’t been there for almost twenty years. Hasn’t been anywhere in going on two years. That’s because he’s dead now. Shot himself in April of 1994. Bye John.
But in another way, he’s been here with me for every day of those barely eighteen months. Since his death, I’ve been reading his work and studying authors he favored. Yes, lately, it’s been quite a John-a-thon for me. He’d have thought that was funny, John-a-thon, and maybe it was a lifetime ago. I read The Assault on Tony’s just before that pilgrimage to the real Tony’s. John last edited the documents associated with the novel twelve days before his suicide. The last passage in the book by John’s hand was this one:
For the first time in his life Rudd found himself wishing for death, hoping (praying?) that the walls came down before the liquor ran out, that they were stormed, bombed or shot in some truculent surprise attack, some irresistible force, divine intervention.
And then my brother died, or brought his own demise to fruition, which is a truer statement, however cloaked by silky words.
But his computer sits in the room next to where I sleep, or don�
��t sleep. Who could with a dead man’s unwritten words haunting them every night. So, armed with time, good intention, and John’s blood in my veins, I set out to finish Assault. I should also mention that I had his outline. Instructions from the grave as it were. Yeah, John, I get it.
He had adhered to the outline pretty faithfully throughout the completed portion of the novel. Between his notes and my instinct, I knew, too painfully well, how it ended. He and I had always had a somewhat telepathic communication between us and it hasn’t been lost these last days I’ve spent with Assault. Although there is a good amount of John’s prose in the novel that was not in the outline, the main gist was there for me. From John’s last words on is my embellishment of the end he had sketched out. Of course, this subject matter isn’t easy and I apologize to the reader for my enormous ineptitude. John was an extremely talented writer, one of the gifted ones. His shadow is potent to say the least, and any ability I hope to have is dwarfed next to his, quite literally in this case. The only thing I can profess is that I’m certain this is how John would have ended the novel. Of course, his signature is missing from the prose. But I make no apologies regarding subject matter. John’s world was a gritty one. To put a hopeful twist on the fate of our unfortunate crew at Tony’s would be preposterous, unthinkable.
I have robbed the reader of the “Bourbon and Bile” joke John alludes to in his notes, only because I don’t know it. Simultaneously, I saved the same John’s gruesome proposal to end the novel with Miles and Fenton going to work on Osmond with a knife. And this only because John allowed me to by thankfully adding to that note, “… or darkly end the book by just considering it.” I do appreciate that, big brother.