shades, does nothing but spotlight dust and crowd everybody’s table with shadows.
At the table across from me, a young man in a plaid shirt sits sweating and scowling at me through his dark hair. One hand holds his bottle of beer in a white-knuckle grip; the other is under the table. Probably on a gun. That’s Kyle Turner, and he’s wanted me dead since the night I murdered his parents. That was last summer. Every Saturday night since, the kid’s been in here, trying to talk himself into using that Magnum .357 of his to ventilate my skull, but so far he hasn’t been able to draw it out from under the table. So he just sits there glaring, and has Gracie drop the beer down to him at his table so he doesn’t have to get up and reveal the piece he thinks I don’t know about.
Someday he might get the guts to do it, and they’ll probably kick him out of here, but only for disturbing the peace, not because he’ll have disturbed my brain with a few warm rounds of the kind not meant to be served in bars. I admit I get a bit of a kick out of seeing him though, and if he weren’t there I’d surely miss him. His hatred of me makes me feel a little like Wild Bill Hickock.
I know nodding a greeting at him will only aggravate him further, so instead I look the other way, away from the bar, back toward the door and the table shoved right up against the wall to the right of it. Cadaver is sitting there, lost in the shadows, though I smelled him as soon as I came in. I didn’t offer him a greeting because you’re not supposed to unless he offers you one first. It’s a tradition that precedes my patronage here, so I honor it without knowing why.
“Evenin’, Tom,” he says, in that voice of his that sounds like someone dragging a guitar pick over a bass string. He’s got a box where his larynx would be, which I guess is the cost of sixty years of smoking, and his face has sunken so deep you can almost see the contours of his chipped fillings beneath the skin. He’s got a cataract in one eye, the lid is pulled halfway down over the other, and an impressively wide scar bisects his face from forehead to cleft of chin. He’s a sight, and knows it, which is why he favors the dark, where he counts the pennies from his pocket and places them in rows, over and over and over again, until the sound of those coins meeting each other starts to feel like a measurement of time.
An ugly man, for sure, but damn he smells so good he makes me ashamed of my cheap cologne. Makes me wish I’d remembered to buy a nice bottle of Calvin Klein or some such fragrance. Something expensive. You can tell a lot by the way someone smells. Cadaver uses his to hide the smell of death.
“Evening,” I tell him back, and feel more than see his twisted smile.
“Wonder who’s drivin’ tonight,” he says, each word separated by a crackling swallow. It’s wrong of me to say it, but I wish he wouldn’t talk. Man without a human voice is better staying quiet, and I know that grinding electro-speak gives everyone else the creeps too.
“Wish I knew,” I say, and turn to the bar. “Gracie?”
“Comin’ up.” She tosses on the bar the soiled rag she’s been using to wipe the counter. “Hot or cold?” This is her way of asking if I want beer or whiskey. A strand of her auburn hair falls across her eyes as she waits for my reply, and she whips it back with such irritation, I’m suddenly glad she doesn’t have a kid to use as a pinata for her misery.
“Both,” I answer, because it’s that kind of night.
As if I’ve asked her to wash my damn car, she sighs and sets about getting my drinks.
I drop my gaze to the mirror behind the bar and see Wintry raise a hand. His reflection waggles its fingers, keeps waggling them like a spider descending a strand of silk, until the hand is out of sight, then he nods twice and goes back to his drink.
“I heard,” I say to his broad expanse of back. “We could do with it.” I glance over at the kid, see his puzzled expression surface through the anger before he catches me looking and quickly goes back to scowling. His arm tenses, and I wonder briefly if I’m going to feel a bullet rip through my crotch, or my knee. The way that gun is angled makes me wish he’d just take the damn thing out and go for a headshot. But I guess he wants to make me suffer as much as possible.
“Wintry says rain’s coming,” I explain, careful to make it seem like a general announcement so the kid doesn’t decide I’m trying to make a fool out of him by implying he didn’t get it.
“Started already,” Cadaver drones from the shadows.
“Weatherman says it’s goin’ to be a storm,” Cobb intones, his buttocks wriggling as a shudder passes through him. “Hope I can bed down in here if it does.” This last is directed at Gracie as she rounds the bar, a bottle of Bud in one hand, a bottle of whiskey in the other.
“This ain’t a boardin’ house, Cobb,” she says over her shoulder, puffing air up to get the errant lock of hair out of her eyes. I’m struck by the sudden urge to brush it out of her face for her, but she’d likely jerk away and tell me to mind myself, and she’d be right of course. Long ago I learned that men and women’s ideas of polite isn’t always the same, and never will be as long as we guys feel compelled to consult our dicks every time a woman walks into the room. “But there are plenty of empty places on Winter Street. I’m sure Horace and Maggie’d show you someplace to lay your bones. Hell, if you dog Kirk Vess’s heels, I bet he’ll lead you to shelter.”
Vess is our town lunatic, a card Gracie has played in the past just to get on Cobb’s nerves.
“I’m sure.” Cobb’s repulsion at the idea is clear, but everyone here knows he’s fighting a losing battle if he thinks he’ll get Gracie to cave. “I can pay you though.”
Gracie puts down my drinks, brushes dust off my table and looks into my eyes for the tiniest of seconds, enough to let me know that the superhuman precognitive sense unique to women has alerted her to what I’d just a moment ago been considering. And the message is:
She heads back to the bar, a lithe woman dressed in drab clothes designed to make her look less attractive. I’ll never understand that, but then again, the day men understand women is the day we may as well go sit on our plots and wait to be planted.
Or maybe I’m just not that bright at the back of it all.
“You can pay me by puttin’ some clothes on,” she tells Cobb. “Maybe if you were covered up, you wouldn’t need to fret about the rain.”
“I’ll put you up,” Cadaver offers in his robot voice, and Cobb turns slowly around, his bare ass making squeaking sounds against the top of the stool. I wonder how much Pine-Sol Gracie uses in any given month on that chair alone. It’s the only one she allows him use. Just that chair, or his squeaky ass goes on the floor.
There’s a look of consternation on Cobb’s heavily bearded face when he turns fully around, his small blue eyes squinting into the shadows, as if seeing Cadaver will lessen his distaste at the idea of spending the night with the man. His chest is a mass of silvery curls, thickest along his sternum where it leads down over a swollen belly to a frenzied explosion of pubic hair, from which a small stubby penis pokes out. We’ve been seeing Cobb and his tackle for three years now. We should be used to it, and I guess for the most part we are, but every time his dick eyeballs me, I want to ask him if chestnut leaves are considered clothing by whatever governing body inflicted his nakedness on us in the first place. But I keep my mouth shut and avert my eyes, to the kid, who’s doing a good job of looking like he may rupture something at any minute, and finally focus on my drink.
There’s a thumbprint on the shot glass too large to be mine.
“That’s mighty decent of you,” Cobb says eventually.
“Don’t mention it.”
Over Cadaver’s pennies, I can almost hear the hamster wheel spinning in the nudist’s head. Then he says, “But you know what…? I’ll just call my wife. She won’t mind comin’ to get me. Not at this hour. Not at night.” He claps his hands as if he’s just stumbled upon the cure for world hunger. “Hell, she’ll have heard there’s goin’ to be a storm, so she’ll have to come get me, right? No woman would make her man walk in this kinda weather.” He’s looking for support now, and not for the first time I envy Wintry’s muteness, because everyone here knows that getting Mrs. Cobb to come get her husband isn’t going to be as easy as he seems to think. The day he abandoned clothes was the last time anyone saw Eleanor Cobb in town. Naturally, we worried, but a few weeks after her husband’s ‘unveiling’ I checked on her. She’s fine, just laid up with a terminal case of mortification that I don’t see ending until Cobb starts wearing shorts, or that chestnut leaf. Why she stays with him at all is another one of those mysteries.
“You could always start walkin’ now before the worst of it hits,” Flo chimes in. Her voice is husky, perfectly befitting a crime noir femme fatale. It makes my hair stand on end in a good way. “No one ever drowned in the rain.”
Cobb ignores her. He’s got a drink before him and intends to finish it. He squeaks back around to face the bar. “Can I use the phone?” he asks Gracie, and this at least she’s willing to allow, even though it’s a payphone
