And She Was (21 page)

“Oh, my love. My sweet, sweet love,” she crooned as his body trembled, then convulsed. She bent and kissed his lips. “I love you. I love you. I love you,” she song-chanted as he took a last struggling breath.

She looked up at Olga and Katherine, at the still glistening streaks of dead-man’s fat on their cheeks. They were watching her, and she could feel their disgust, and she could feel their faithfulness. She felt their arms around her even as they trembled at what they had done. Tears left her face, fell to the sand, forever part of the moving grayness of the island. She looked past her friends at the stars, shedding light like falling feathers. “The world,” she said, “is growing thick.”

AUGUST 10, 1986

I
t was even worse than I expected. As Thad’s boat left, many others had arrived. The bar was packed with guys I didn’t know. Guys from all over the country, there to make fast money and leave. Guys without families, untethered, unrestrained.

I pushed my way through the mob and behind the bar to get my bank and tray.

“You’re late,” Marge yelled while pouring a line of four whiskey shots without lifting the bottle.

The Elbow Room had flown in something of a real band from Anchorage for a week-long stint. Two guitarists and a drummer stood on a plywood platform, butted against the wall. In front of them, a mass of people writhed, most not even partnered up. I figured there were exactly ten women in the whole place, counting me and Marge and Les. Through the bodies, I caught a glimpse of Bellie dancing. As usual, she jacked her body about in some version of the twist.

Someone rang the bell.

I tried to get to the tables along the side of the dance floor, but after losing a tray of drinks to a floppy-armed-Grateful-Dead dancer, I gave up. I kept to the six tables in the rear. They were drinking fast enough, and it was taking long enough to get through that crowd of men controlling the floor like the center of a chessboard. I skipped the table
laid with thin white lines of coke to give them time to finish up. The block of wood I’d set under the tippy table had been knocked out, and I lost an entire load of drinks to a slow slide.

“Three screwdrivers, six Corona, nine tequila,” I yelled at Les, who had leaned toward me while pulling a tap to signal I could order. He nodded and slid beers to two guys who had pushed up to the bar.

Neither he nor Marge were smiling. They were in mad-dash mode. When Les had my drinks ready and leaned over my station to fill my tray, I shouted, “What’s going on tonight?”

He shook his head and rolled his eyes. “It gets like this sometimes,” he yelled.

The bell rang again.

I hefted my tray over my head and took a deep breath before plunging in. The gropers were in fine form. I was averaging three ass grabs a trip, which I ignored because there’s not much you can do with a tray full of drinks and a press of bodies around you. As I dodged through like a boxer seeking openings in his opponent’s guard, I remembered how Juvenal had described the mob-choked first cities of Rome. “The crowd is so dense the people behind jam against my back and sides. Someone rams me with his elbow…this fellow cracks my head with a two-by-four, that one with a ten-gallon jug, my shins are thick with muck, now I’m being rammed by somebody’s big feet—and there goes a soldier’s hobnail in my toe!”

It helped, connecting to another mind across the centuries. Except instead of rams with elbows, I was dealing with the unintentional and intentional gropes that were impossible to sort out.

I was maybe two-thirds of the way through, bobbing and weaving, when a bearded blond guy reached his hand around my ass and held on to a cheek. He didn’t even try to be sly about it. This was intentional, and I felt like this soldier was using his hobnail with tremendous joy.

“Get your fucking hand off me,” I yelled and tried to step through another group of men. The guy moved with me and this time reached up for a handful of tit. He was laughing and having a good time with it. So there I was with twenty pounds of drinks balanced on my fingertips over the heads of scores of drunk fishermen with some guy’s hand squeezing my tit.

And he was laughing.

I snapped. In one almost fluid motion, I grabbed a beer bottle off the tray, chucked the tray behind me into the crowd, and smashed the bottle into the side of his head.

He would have gone down if not for the crowd. He knocked into someone and keeled over at the waist, clutching his ear.

“Fuck! Fuckin’ bitch.” He straightened.

I felt the beer bottle still in my hand. I had imagined its end broken into a viciously jagged edge. But as I raised it again, I saw it was still very intact, very blunt. But an image of gouging his face with broken glass had bloomed in my head. I went with it. I lunged. I still can’t believe I went for his eye like that. But that’s just where I aimed. Someone grabbed me around the waist, and the bottle only bumped a hapless bystander in the neck.

I was pissed. I gripped the bottle, watching for another opening. Beard Guy cussed and lunged for me. Several men grabbed onto him too. By then the ruckus had reached the bar. The lights went up. Marge shoved her way through the mess.

“What the fuck?” Marge said when she reached the scene. She saw the bottle still in my hand and the blood running down the side of the guy’s head. “Shit.”

Most of the men were laughing. A chant started. “Let her at him. Let her at him.”

Marge grabbed my arm. “Get him outta here,” she ordered the two men holding Beard Guy. The crowd backed off as she pulled me behind the bar.

“What happened?” Les asked as Marge sat me down on a stool in the corner by the fridge.

“Some jerk was feeling me up.”

“Why do you get all the fun?” Les said.

“Shut the fuck up, Les.” Marge handed me a shot of schnapps. “You can help us back here. It’s crazy tonight.”

Les dimmed the lights. The band started in with “She’s Got Legs.”

I saw a hand reach out to ring the bell again.

I sat on a stool, tucked into a corner, and tipped back my shot with a shaking hand. My lipstick smeared the glass rim, a broken smile. I stared at the cracked pink curve and touched my bare lips, felt them
tremble. He’d laughed at me. He had grabbed my tit and laughed at me. And I’d fallen apart.

You walk into a room, dressed to perfection, confident shoes, feeling your body all poised and cool. Then you hear it—a snicker across the sudden quiet. And everything crumbles. You see the jeans and flannel shirts, the sensible shoes. And you know yourself in the contrasts. Your dress is too red, too tight. Your feet too big for those little shoes. Your poise vulgar. All that power you had just moments before, the power of a red dress and willing body, tossed on the ground and squashed by a snicker, remote and deadly. That’s how I felt—undone.

A Latin phrase kept pacing through my head.
Etiam capillus unus habet umbrau
. Even one hair has a shadow. I had approximately one hundred thousand hairs casting one determined shadow. It was the one revelation I had, sitting on that stool, watching the mob move. I’d been living in the shade of my hair, completely satisfied to hold all my power in tits, ass, and fluff, never acknowledging the consequences. And then he’d laughed at me. Forced me to grope myself, fumbling for alternative assets. All I’d come up with was a beer bottle. Violence is the last refuge of the powerless. If nothing else works, kick their ass.

“Hey.” Marge shot me a dirty look from down the bar. “Get off your ass. The sink’s filling up.”

I downed another quick shot. Two or three more, I figured, and I’d be in the clear. I wouldn’t have to think about my humiliation. About myself.

Mostly I was in the way. Les and Marge had a system—skimming past each other, mixing drinks six or eight at a time, slamming the cash drawer with turning elbows. I kept my eye on the sink and washed out the glasses when it got full. Mostly I drank. I’d dart between the two fast-moving bodies, grab a couple of booze bottles, and mix whatever I’d come up with. Sitting on my out-of-the-way stool, I watched Les and Marge in motion.

What surprised me most was how much action Les was getting. He had learned to flirt on the fly. I’d say with about a third of the guys he served, Les found some way to advertise his availability. Now it was fairly obvious even to a room full of drunks that Les was gay. He had the earring, not a stud, but a nice dangly gold thing. He used his hips more than most women and had a nice floppy-hand dangle. Occasion
ally, I’d see him lean in to talk to a customer. He’d use it all. His shoulders would move back and forth and up and down with his words. His eyes would get all direct and meaningful. He’d twist his earring with his thumb and index finger. Most often the customer would laugh, wait for Les to serve someone else, then slip away into the crowd. But once in a while, one would linger.

When two-thirty finally came, Marge flashed the lights and yelled for last call. After another round and the “Rodeo Song,” this time led by the band, we started hustling everyone out. Little Liz hadn’t showed, so close-up went fast. Marge was a bit worried about her, since she hadn’t been in for a couple of days. I was just glad for the reprieve, not just from having to sidestep urine and steel myself for the smell, but from not having to think about who she had been, what had brought her down.

I found two fifty-dollar bills underneath a table while sweeping up broken glass, some of which was probably from my tray pitch. I also found a spectacular coke vial, slim, silver and studded with turquoise. It was empty. I shoved it in my pocket. Marge and Les had really raked it in, and each gave me a hundred-dollar bill. So even though I’d done very little drink slinging, I came out okay.

We could hear a bunch of guys still partying in the parking lot, so Marge, Les, and I had a couple drinks to give them time to clear out. When three-thirty came and we could still hear the laughter and shouts, we gave up.

They were waiting for Les. Five guys came up behind him when his back was turned to lock up the bar. Marge was already heaving herself into her truck, and I was about to give the starter a kick.

“You mother-fucking fag,” one of them said, calm as a poet.

Les turned, the key still in his hand. “Actually, a fag, by definition, doesn’t fuck mothers.”

He said it with his feet firmly planted, his hands open by his sides. I could see his pretty face, the way he looked right at them, accepting what he knew was coming. I heard waves hitting the beach and an eagle scream over the water, felt scraps of fog drift over me. And I ached for him in that moment, before the fists and boots and blood. Because what I saw was noble. And because it wouldn’t matter.

Les’s sensible argument was lost on these guys. One of them socked
him in the gut, and Les buckled at the door, his face disappearing into the fold of his body.

“Hey, you fuckers,” Marge shouted, barreling toward them. Her piled-up hair had slipped backward through the long night, and she looked like a deranged Quaker lady, except for the makeup. But these guys were too far gone to cave to the natural male instinct to obey a grandmotherly, Quakerish-looking woman. She tried to grab the shoulder of the guy who was now whaling at Les’s face. One of the others shoved her off the step. She went down hard in the wet sand.

All this happened pretty fast. I had gotten off my bike and halfway to the door, without any clue what I was going to do. Marge saw me coming.

“Go get the boys,” she yelled. “Stormy’s.”

Stormy’s was a pizza joint that often opened when the bar closed to rake in what the guys hadn’t guzzled away. Marge was pushing herself off the ground. I couldn’t see Les’s face behind the guys beating on him. One of them was holding him up, which wasn’t good.

I ran. Stormy’s was only across the street, but I stumbled through a couple of potholes on the way. I fell once. The skin on my palms ground off on the jagged rocks. I burst through the door. At least twenty guys sat around munching on floppy triangles of pizza.

“Les is getting the crap beat out of him,” I yelled between gasps for air.

The response was amazing. Pizza slices dropped like wet rags. Carl overturned a table when he rose. He shoved it out of his way as he sprinted, with the rest of them—Aleut and white—toward the door. I dodged to the side to get out of their way. I was amazed at how a bunch of guys, who are half-drunk, laughing, and eating, can in an instant be on their feet, fairly coordinated, and deadly serious. By the time I got back out the door, the dark mass had reached the Elbow’s parking lot. I ran after them.

Three of the guys had tried to run. They’d been caught on the beach road. The other two were still in the parking lot, on the ground. Punches had given way to kicks. Marge had Les around the waist. He looked bad even in the dark. But he could still walk with help. I ran to his other side, and we slid him into Marge’s truck. He moaned and folded forward, clutching his stomach.

I looked back. Six guys on the beach road kicked at the bodies on the ground. A larger huddle took turns kicking at two forms in the parking lot. It’s one thing to beat someone up. But keeping at it after he can’t even stand is sickening. I felt the night air wrapping around me in this clutching, digging way, like it wanted to pull out strands of my guts and let them fly loose on the wind.

“That’s enough,” I yelled at the backs facing me. No one stopped. I walked closer, shaking. I saw Carl straddling a man, the fringe of his poncho caked with mud. I saw his fist rise and fall, heard the sickening thud over and over. “Enough! Enough!”

Carl ignored me. They all ignored me. I’d become invisible, inconsequential to these men, who a few minutes ago would have hung on my every word. Whatever power I’d wielded had been revoked. I was screaming at deaf men.

Someone grabbed my shoulder and whirled around. Marge’s large face loomed. “Come on. We gotta get Les to the clinic.”

“They’re gonna kill those guys. We need to call the police.”

“Get in the fuckin’ truck.”

The clinic was, of course, dark and empty. Marge used the phone on the porch to call in the nurse who ran the place in between visiting-doctor stints. He got there in ten minutes. I stayed with Les for the two hours it took to check him over, bandage him up, and give him a good shot of something that put him to sleep.

His face, soft swollen and split, came out okay. Nothing broken. Two cracked ribs, a broken finger. He’d have to come in for blood tests every couple of days to make sure his liver was pulling through. “Not as bad as it could have been,” the nurse said. “Must have kept his vitals covered pretty well.” I nodded, listened to the instructions, and smiled at Les. But the entire time, I saw the parking lot and the circle of boots, sinking into bodies soft with pain on the wet sand.

And I saw myself, doing nothing to stop it. Nothing but yelling and running.