Last Call Lounge (14 page)

FOURTEEN

Room 212 was blue – blue paint, blue furniture, blue lighting. The bartenders wore blue silk shirts, buttoned and tucked into black pants. Even at happy hour, the music was bass-laden and loud. A steel cage was suspended over the bar. Inside was a DJ with huge brown headphones, lit from beneath by his equipment. The air was cool and clean from the air conditioner and I could smell cigarettes on my clothes.

It was pretty busy for early evening, even with the hurricane coming. Busier than any happy hour we'd had at my bar in a long time. The crowd was tall guys in jackets with their shirts untucked and women with impossibly large breasts in impossibly short dresses. They drank from stemmed glasses and laughed with all their teeth showing. I slouched and shuffled through them toward the bar.

Curator Jack sat in a black leather bar stool, intently watching one of his bartenders pour a shot of vodka. Jack was wearing a black and yellow bowling shirt and black pleated pants. I tossed my cigarettes onto the bar in front of him.

“Hey, Little John,” Jack said, turning in his stool and pulling out a cigarette. “What brings you to this neck of the woods?” 

I swiveled into the stool next to Jack and lit a cigarette for myself. The bartender looked towards us and Jack gave him a gesture that apparently meant two beers.

“Well,” I said, leaning toward Jack so he could hear me over the music. “Bar got broken into.” 

Jack leaned forward and shook his head.

“I heard,” he said over the music. “Fuckers.  Bunch of fucking animals in this town.”  The bartender returned and put a Heineken in front of each of us. We drank for a moment in silence, then I leaned in to Jack again.

“You think I could buy some change from you?” I asked him. “They took all the money from my till.” 

Jack nodded and stood up. He picked up his beer.

“Come on,” and turned toward the stairs to his office. I grabbed my beer and my cigarettes and followed.

The walls of Jack's office were exposed brick. Large, dark tinted windows looked out over the bar. Photographs and prints in black frames with white mattes were leaning against one wall. Jack's desk, a white metal thing with no drawers, was completely bare. On the wall above it was a sepia toned photograph of a bamboo plant.

“Have a seat,” Jack said, pointing to the office chair at the desk.

I sat, resting my beer on my knee. Jack knelt in front of small white cabinet. Inside was his safe. It beeped as he entered the combination on the keypad. I reached into my back pocket for my wallet and handed Jack the three hundred dollars I'd taken from the drop. Jack counted it.

“What do you need?” he asked.

“Ones and fives,” I said. “They left the quarters all over the floor.”

Jack pulled out two neatly wrapped packs of ones and two of fives. I didn't have anything to put them in, so I just laid them on my lap. Jack closed the safe and the cabinet and sat down on the edge of the desk.

“How'd they get in?”

“Pried the back door open,” I said.

“Do you have an alarm?” Jack asked.

I rubbed my forehead.

“No,” I said. “We did. Years ago. But the bartenders kept forgetting to set it, so my Dad finally turned it off.”  Jack nodded. “Is it all right if I smoke in here?”

“If I can bum one,” Jack said.

I handed him one and we lit them. Jack finished his beer and we ashed into the empty bottle. I could feel the thud of the bass from the music downstairs, pounding through the floor and into the soles of my feet. Jack leaned back on the desk, crossed his arms and didn't say anything.

“Let me ask you something,” I said, looking down at my shoes. “If I sold you my bar, what would you change about it?” 

Jack nodded, like this was a question he knew I was going to ask.

“Well,” he said. “I'd get an alarm.” 

I laughed and smoke caught in my throat. I started coughing and my eyes watered. Curator Jack laughed, a low bellow, and smacked me on the back a couple of times. I downed some of my beer and got my breath back.

“Mother fucker,” I said when I could talk. Jack grinned.

“Seriously, though, Little John,” he said. “I wouldn't change anything. Not the way you mean.”

“What's the way I mean?” I asked.  Jack tugged at his earlobe, took a long drag.

“You're worried that I'd turn it into a place like this,” he said, waving toward the window with his cigarette.

I chewed on my lip and scratched my nose.

“No,” I said. “That's not what I meant.”

“Look,” Jack said with a laugh. “I understand. This isn't really my kind of place, either. But the money's good. Hell, I can charge twelve dollars for a martini made with one shot of vodka that costs me six bucks a bottle.”  He turned to look out the window onto the bar. “The thing is, places like mine are all about trend. I'm packed right now, but that doesn't mean I will be in two years. Your place is a dive bar. It's not going anywhere.”

“Yeah, well,” I said. “That's probably truer than you know.”

Jack leaned back a little and looked me in the eyes. He'd been a football player and he had that jock way of being comfortable looking at another guy in the face. I sniffed and tugged at my collar.

“You thinking of selling me your place?” he asked, his voice thick and somber.

“Don't I tell you every week that I'm thinking about it?” I said.

FIFTEEN

Frank's bag was a duffel bag, a big black thing with a zippered flap on top, the kind of bag you'd carry your softball glove in. He put the bag in the bed of the truck and climbed into the cab. I lit a cigarette before we pulled out of the parking lot and offered him one, but he shook his head.

The drive from the bar to my house was short. You could walk it in fifteen minutes, but I never did. We went under the highway, with traffic thunking overhead, and turned into my neighborhood. Rows of white houses with yellow trim and front porches and chain link. Houses built in the forties and fifties. Developers were moving in, tearing down some of the more rundown buildings and putting up square town homes, two to a lot. Almost every block now had them and they stuck out like monoliths, towering over the wooden bungalows.

The streets were quiet, but at the gas station at the corner, a line of cars snaked into the street. I checked my gas gauge and it was three-quarters full.

Frank was staring out the window.

“What were you gonna do about the hurricane?” I asked, just to make conversation.

Frank breathed in, raised his shoulders. “I don't know,” he said. “You can always find someplace to hang out. I have friends I could call, I guess.”  He drummed his fingers on his knees.

We turned on to my block, a tree-shaded stretch of older homes with ungroomed chows and work trucks in the yards. My house, hidden behind two large azalea bushes, was clean and kempt. Light blue with dark blue trim. Dad left it in great shape and I did my best to keep it that way.

I opened the door and cool air greeted us. Frank stepped in behind me, holding his duffel bag at his side. His eyes took in the room – the purple couch, the big square recliner. I reached around him to close the door.

“Have a seat,” I said. “Make yourself at home.” 

He sat, gingerly, on the edge of the big ottoman, his bag at his feet. I went in the kitchen and came back with two beers. I gave him one, then opened mine and took it with me as I went to check the guest room. It had been my room, when Dad was alive, and it had been Jacob's room, for the brief time that he and Sarah lived with me, after Dad died. She had taken almost everything Jacob-related with her when she left. All that remained was a simple brown crib, no mattress, and in the corner a single bed and a small wooden dresser. The bed had a blue fitted sheet. I grabbed a pillow and a blanket out of the closet.

Back in the living room, Frank was still balanced on the edge of the ottoman, sipping his beer. I sat down on the couch.

“I like your house,” Frank said, nodding at the room.

“Thanks,” I said. “My dad bought it when I was a kid.”  Dad bought the house right after mom killed herself. Before that we lived in an apartment near the highway. When mom died, he tried to give me structure, some sort of normalcy. He moved us to the neighborhood, signed me up for little league, that kind of thing.

“Your Dad owned the bar, too?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Mitchell told me.”  His eyes took in the furniture, the art on the walls, bright prints of roosters and horses that Dad had bought at thrift stores. “Is it ever weird?” he asked.

“Is what ever weird?” I asked.

“Living in your Dad's place?” he said.

I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, holding my beer with both hands. Outside, a dog barked.  The truth was it was weird, sometimes, living in my father's house and running his business. Sometimes I'd wake up in the middle of the night with the feeling that I was in high school that Dad was asleep in his room. Then focus would come to my eyes and I would remember and the weight of it all, the reality of it all, would pin me to the bed.

“I guess,” I said. “Sometimes.”

Frank nodded, sucking in his lip. I held the cold beer bottle against my wrist.

“What about your mom?” Frank asked.

There are times when you want to answer that question, many more times when you don't. When I didn't feel like having the conversation, I would just say that she had died. Somehow, sitting there on my father's couch, drinking a beer with Frank, whose whole world was in a dusty gym bag at his feet, somehow this was the right time.

“She killed herself,” I said. “When I was ten.” 

Frank nodded. His lips pursed into a tight grimace. Not sympathy, exactly. But understanding.

“I hated her, for a long time,” I said. “Hated every thing about her.” 

Frank nodded, blinked a few times, his face and eyes pinched. He pulled at the skin on his neck when he spoke.

“My Mom tried to kill herself, when I was like fourteen.”  His sentence ended pitch up, like a question and I was reminded of how young he was. “She started hearing things. You know, voices and things?  And then one day she cut her wrists.”  He seemed less sad about this than embarrassed, as though the intimacy of the story were inappropriate. He sucked in his lip, then continued. “They put her in a hospital, so I took off, first to Austin, then here. She's a lot better now. She's in this kind of half-way house and she has a job at a cafeteria. She still can't live by herself because she forgets to take her prescriptions.”

I took a sip of my beer and looked at the square of late afternoon light on the floor.

“Where is she?” I asked.

“Little Rock,” Frank said. “I think when I get some money saved, I'm gonna move back. I could get an apartment so she could live with me. Her doctor said she would be okay. I'd just have to make sure she took her prescriptions.” 

We sat for a long time, sipping our beers, both of us watching the square of sunlight make its way across the rug. A wind blew through the azaleas, rattling leaves against the windows. I finished my beer and stood up.

“You can take a shower if you want,” I said.

“That would be great.”

“The bathroom is at the end of the hallway,” I said, pointing.

When I heard the water turn on, I pushed out the back door and on to the porch.

On the back porch, I sat in the canvas lawn chair and lit a cigarette.  The day was blue and crisp and the neighborhood quiet.  I could hear my neighbor Archer pounding on something in his garage.  I pulled out my cell phone and called Ruby.  She answered on the second ring.

“Hi,” she said, letting out a breath.

“Hi,” I said. “Can you leave in the morning?”  I lit a cigarette.

“Little John,” she said. My heart dropped.

“What?”

“I have something I feel like I have to talk to you about, before we go,” she said. Always, there was this part of Ruby, this side of her that she didn't want to share. The few times she did offer to open up, I was overcome, with fear and with a kind of lust. I wanted her, wanted to consume her, all of her. That this inner core existed, that I was allowed to know it existed but never allowed to see it, this is what drove me mad about Ruby.

“Do you still want to go?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Very much.” 

“Then, whatever it is, I don't care,” I said.

“Still,” she said. “I have to tell you.” 

I wanted to hear it, but anything that endangered the trip, the escape with Ruby, I wanted to delay, avoid.

“Meet me at the bar tonight,” I said. “Tell me there. I have to go up and help close. Come have a drink with me and tell me there.”  I heard her pull in a long breath. I could picture her, sitting on the edge of her chair, brushing her ragged bangs with her long with hand, nodding.

“Okay,” she said finally.

I felt myself smile, felt my shoulders release.

“Okay,” I said. “I'll be there at midnight.” 

“Okay,” Ruby said again. “I'll see you tonight.”

Another crisp, blue day on this porch, a long time ago, around Thanksgiving, shortly after my father had died, when Jacob was still a baby.

It had not been a good time for me and Sarah, not that we had many good times in our marriage.  But my father’s death and the holidays layered on top of the everyday stresses of a baby in the house had been pretty damaging.  I stayed at the bar as late as I could as often as I could.  Usually, by the time I woke up around noon, Sarah would have tired of waiting for me and she and Jacob would be dressed and out of the house.

She was, in retrospect, patient with my habits.  But I worked pretty hard at finding the limits to that patience.  Given the choice, almost every time I chose the bar and the whiskey and Worm over her and Jacob.

But that day, that crisp blue day, I had woken up early – early for me, anyway – and made coffee.  It was the first cool morning of the fall and the brisk air came in through the window screens like a sigh.  It was the kind of morning you feel in your lungs.  The kind of morning when you decide to buy a bike or join a gym.

I poured two cups of coffee, then joined Sarah on the front porch.  We sat and watched Jacob.  He was splay-legged on the lawn, pulling at tufts of green grass. Each time a blade came free, he would hold it up and look to Sarah for confirmation, his face wrinkled with studiousness.

Then, later, Sarah put him down for his nap and we had another cup of coffee, this time on the back porch, in the low-slung blue canvas lawn chairs.  I lit a cigarette.  Sarah held her cup with both hands.

Archer was in his back yard, erecting some kind of sports net for his kids.  He was wearing a golf shirt with some gold equipment company’s logo on the chest.  His shirt was tucked into belted shorts and he wore big brown sandals.  When he saw us on the porch, he tossed down the wrench, stood, and wiped his knees.  Then he strode to the chain-link fence that separated our yards.

Sarah liked Archer and his wife, Jennifer.  Jennifer and Sarah often walked the kids together.  Sarah and Archer teased each other about politics, though I think Sarah’s political convictions were stronger than Archer’s and Archer played up his conservative side just for the game of it.

“How y’all doing,” Archer said.  His black hair was slick with sweat and his reflective sunglasses wrapped around his temples.

“Good, Archer, how are you?” Sarah asked with a smile.

Archer nodded as an answer, then pulled his sunglasses off.

“He treating you all right?” he asked, gesturing at me with the glasses.  This was part of his normal banter, but something – the way he avoided looking at me, maybe – made me wonder what Sarah had told Jennifer about me.

“Today,” Sarah said.

“Well, you ever decide you’ve had enough, you come live with me and Jenn,” he said.  “I’ll have me a harem.  Like a Muslim.”

Sarah laughed.  “Archer,” she said, her voice a mock-scold.  “The vast majority of Muslims don’t have harems.”

“I know that,” he said, drawing out his words.  “But I wanna be one of the ones that does.”

He put his sunglasses back on and went back to his sports net.  Sarah reached over and took my hand.  Her palm was warm from the mug.  She watched Archer and her mouth relaxed into a small smile.

“Sometimes,” she said, “I really love this house.”

And that was the moment I knew my marriage was over.  I didn’t say anything right then, but I knew what she meant.  She meant sometimes.  And I knew what that meant about the rest of the time.

I held her hand and sipped my coffee.  It hadn’t been much of a marriage ever, really, but right then I felt the loss of it as a heaviness on my back and my face.  I didn’t say anything and when Jacob called for her from his bedroom, the little room at the back of the house that had been my room growing up, Sarah got up and kissed me on the head.

That night, I got drunk and started a fight, about nothing I can remember now.  But it was that afternoon, that moment, that I gave up on that marriage.

Today, this crisp blue day, Archer was again in his back yard, stacking plywood on his driveway after cutting it on the table saw in his garage. He had sweated through his golf shirt – a dark triangle of sweat spread from his shoulders to a point at his lower back.  He saw me and ambled to the fence. 

“Must be nice,” he said, wiping his forehead on his short sleeve.  “Not giving a shit.  Makes for a lot less work.”

I was tired and scratchy.  I wanted to smoke in peace and contemplate the fact that, among other things, Worm was dead and Ruby was consenting to run away with me.  I didn’t want to have my neglected responsibilities listed out for me.  I didn’t get up.  I took a long drag on my cigarette and let it burn deep in my throat.

“I give a shit.  I just don’t believe a half-inch sheet of plywood is gonna stop a hurricane.”

Archer gave me a hooded look, like he was trying to decide if I was worth the fight.  Then he shook his head and put his hands on his hips.

“So, your plan is what, exactly?” he asked.

“I don’t have a plan,” I said.

“Exactly,” he said.

I tried to stare him down.  I could feel the vein in my temple throbbing with my pulse.

“I came out here for a cigarette,” I said, standing.  “Not a fucking lecture.”