Nick walked past the empty tables in the Grove and pulled out one of the stools standing sentinel by the nearly unoccupied bar. Rob, the thirtyish bartender who wore shirts a size too small to allude to his gym-crafted physique beneath, made a thumb motion to the bottles behind the bar and Nick nodded. Rob knew that Nick drank Scotch whisky and rarely had to ask. The thumb motion and nod were enough to secure a glass.
Nick looked around the barroom while Rob pulled a bottle from the shelf and poured. Aside from Nick, there was fiftyish looking disheveled man wearing a worn dark blazer a few stools down. Nick looked at him for a second. The man's thick, unruly white beard was stained with the smoke of countless cigars like the one smoldering idly in the corner of his mouth. A pint of dark beer, half drunk, sat on a napkin before him. The man nodded and tapped ash from his cigar into the glass ashtray on the bar before turning to a stack of newspapers. On the far end of the bar looked to be a couple of college students waiting for the happy hour crowd to arrive, each with a pale beer before him and a baseball cap on his head. Nick smiled at the conformity of the modern collegian, the boys all sporting baseball caps and the girls with tattoos at the base of their spines, peaking out above their low slung pants.
Rob set the glass of Scotch on the bar.
"What's in the news, today, Nick?" Rob asked.
"Would you believe I didn't read the paper?" he smiled.
"You running a tab?"
Nick nodded.
"Where's Sarah?" Rob asked.
Nick shrugged. "Work. She might show up later."
Rob nodded and walked away, picked up a television remote control and began flipping through the channels on several different televisions, setting each one to a different baseball game, golf match or sports talk show.
"Hey, bud, what's up?" Cap said as he pulled a stool away from the bar and sat down.
"Not much, yet. You?"
Cap shrugged. "I hope some women show up, tonight. I need to go home with someone. Or at least someone's number."
Nick nodded and took a pull from his drink. It burned the back of his tongue. The first sip always did.
"Is she coming, or are you able to flay wingman?”
Nick grinned. "I told her I wanted to talk with you, so if she wanted to come to give me an hour or so."
Cap shook his head. "Oh, well. What's on your mind?"
Rob came over and set a beer down in front of Cap. Nick lit a cigarette and took another sip from his drink.
"Something strange is going on."
"What, with you and Sarah?"
Nick shrugged. "I don't think so, no, although she has been subliminally pressuring me on the whole marriage thing."
"Well, you're almost thirty, you know, and you've been dating her forever."
"Yeah, well, that's not it. I mean, that might be part of it, but it's something a whole lot weirder."
Cap leaned on the edge of the bar. "Like what?"
"Well, I've been having nightmares lately. A lot of them. They're like these dreams I used to have when I was kid. I even had some in college, but they stopped after I finally got a job and started to settle down. But now they're back," Nick said.
"What kind of nightmares?"
"They're about the Monster."
"The monster?"
Nick nodded. "Yeah, when I was a kid I used to sometimes dream about the Monster, this seven-foot tall Bigfoot kind of creature that was always stalking me. It would turn up everywhere and anywhere, but it would never hurt me. Just scare me," Nick said, tilting the rest of the Scotch into his mouth and signaling Rob for another. "When I was little, it used to kill all my friends. It would just come out of nowhere and maul somebody to death or carry him off into the woods. I used to think that it was because my Dad was always moving us around because of the Air Force. My Mom always told me it was just the way my brain was dealing with us moving all the time and leaving my friends again."
"Your mom told you that? How old were you?" Cap asked.
Rob set a new glass of Scotch on the bar and Nick nodded thanks.
"I don't know, I think about eleven or so, but that's not point. They stayed with me all the way through college until I got my first job. Then they stopped. It's been, like, seven or eight years since the last one, and I figured my Mom was probably right and that they had to do with all that upheaval and movement."
"And?"
"And now they're back."
"The Monster?"
"Yeah, for a couple of weeks now."
"Maybe you're stressed out. You just said Sarah's been pressuring you."
"Yeah, but that's not all of it." Nick picked up his glass and took a sip. "I sleep walked the other night."
"You what?"
"Sleep walked. I don't even remember doing it. Sarah woke me up in the morning on the couch."
"So?"
"So? So, have you ever sleep walked?"
"No."
"Me neither."
"So you're stressed out."
"Yeah, but over what?" Nick asked.
"The marriage thing?"
"That can't be it."
"Why not."
"I don't know. I mean, this is The Monster. The thing I dreaded as kid. It was always following me, killing my friends. I even used to have dreams where I'd go hunting for it but never get it. It would be there in the woods, mocking my efforts, taunting me, jumping out from behind trees and growling and then running away. Now, it's different."
Cap took a long drink from his beer. "Different, how?"
"Now it's coming after me."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, now the Monster is coming after me. It's trying to find me. Capture me or kill me or something, but now it's trying to get me. It used to just ignore me, as if I was the butt of its joke and what it could do to my life. The other night, it walked right up to me and would have gotten me if Sarah hadn't woken me up."
Nick looked at the smoldering cigarette in the ashtray and lit a new one from his pack, inhaled deeply and blew a cumulus cloud into the bar air. Nick looked around the bar, the crowd was now hovering around a dozen people broken into three unequal groups. The man with the smoke-stained beard was working on both a new cigar and a new beer as he stared down at the loose leaf paper now strewn across the bar in front of him.
"Still sounds like stress to me," Cap said, finishing off his beer and motioning to Rob for another.
"Yeah, maybe. But it just seems weird, all these dreams, the sleep walking, the pain in my side and the lump on my hip."
"What lump on your hip?" Cap asked.
Nick shook his head and took another drag on his cigarette. "The other day, last week or two weeks ago, I don't remember. Anyway, Sarah looks at me as sees this lump on my hip and says it might be cancer and I should get it checked out."
"Did you?"
"Yeah."
"What did the doctor say?" Cap asked.
"He said it was just a lump of fat and nothing to worry about. Apparently, it's pretty common. I forget the medical term, lapriscopolescomy or something long like that, but lots of people have them. It's just anomalously stored fat tissue. Most people have their fat deposits equally spread out, but not everyone."
"So, it's not cancerous?"
"No. He said in very, very rare instances it can turn cancerous, but he said I'd notice because it would suddenly become very large very quickly."
"What’d he say about the pain in your hip?" Cap asked.
"I didn't think to ask about it," Nick said, pausing for a moment. "I guess I thought they were unrelated."
Cap took a long pull from his beer and looked up at the television before looking back at Nick. "I think it's all stress, man. Just get married." Cap smiled.
Nick made a fake frown. "I don't know. Maybe. It just all seems too fucked up. I mean, the Monster."
Cap looked at Nick blankly and shrugged, as if he didn't know what else to say, having said everything he could that he thought was relevant. "What do you think all this mean
s?"
Nick took a long drag on his cigarette and stared at the slow-forming crowd in the bar. "I don't know. I just think it's weird that it's all starting to happen now. Maybe it is stress."
“Yeah, maybe it is.” Cap said. “And remember, it’s just a dream.”
ELEVEN
Monster Page 10