barged through the double doors, reached under the counter, and grabbed an ashtray for the kid from the stack on a low shelf. I slammed it in front of him.
I poured him a cup of coffee and slammed that in front of him too.
He said, “Thanks.”
I said, “Thank me by telling me the story.”
“What makes you think there’s a story?” he replied.
“Are you saying there isn’t?”
“No.”
“Then let’s hear it,” I said. “Why? Why the curiosity?”
“You’re the curious one, pal. Asking about one thing, then the other. Besides, everyone’s got a story.”
“I don’t know. It’s not that interesting.”
“Try me. You’d be surprised what passes for interesting in a small town like this.”
“Okay, well …”
“You a nancy?”
“What? No, I, I, I …” he stuttered. “I’m a photographer.”
“What kind? Flowers and shit?”
“Models. As in people. Women, mostly. And I’m kind of driving cross-country, all around and about and so on, and, you know, going from coast to coast. I started in New York, and, uh, I got the idea on a flight a couple years ago. Do you fly often?”
“No.”
I had not been on a plane in many years. Last time I was it was with a fake name.
“Well,” he continued, “when you fly over this country, you see these huge gaps of land between cities, and hidden in all the nature down there are all these little towns in the middle of nowhere, so I got the idea to go through all this
“I have no idea what you just said.”
He sighed. “I’m driving to the Pacific Ocean. I’m photographing my road trip. I’m taking pictures. Writing essays. I hope to make a book of it. A coffee table book. Big color prints.”
“Is that right.”
“Yes it is.”
“Well, isn’t that nice.”
“Yes it is,” he said, glowing. “Anthony Mannuzza.” He held out his hand for me to shake.
I gave it a look like it had his love juice on it. “Whatever. This ain’t a fucking AA meeting over here.” He put his hand back on the counter. “Okay, Mr. Happy, what’s
“My name’s none of your business,” I said. “You from around here?” I said, “No.”
“Here long?”
“Long enough,” I said.
He took his cup of coffee and took a seat at one of the tables by the window.
I saw the unmarked police car pull up outside the restaurant through the window. It was a beige Ford that was already a handful of years old, but the way they built those cop engines, they could practically travel through space if you put the right gas in them.
The engine purred itself to sleep, and out the driver’s-side door came my old buddy Pearce. Danny Pearce was a cop, a detective, actually, and if you want to know what irony is, he was the closest thing I’d had to a friend since I went off to war. He was a good man, a barrel-chested man with a good heart and a desire to do good deeds.
When I blew into Evelyn one night a few years earlier, I was still hitting the sauce pretty hard. I initially drank because it made it easier to deal with being what I had become, but there came a point when I kind of accepted that part of myself, or at least became very stoic in a Marcus Aurelius kind of way. Still, I drank heavily when the mood struck me, and that mood usually urged me to go into a watering hole and pick a fight with somebody. I had a very wild hair growing in a very itchy place, and, to me, bars were made for two very distinct purposes: for fisticuffs and to pick up broads.
My first night in Evelyn, I had wandered into some dive called the Cowboy’s Cabin. I’d seen a million places just like it sprinkled across the world. The jukebox played either Hank Williams or Willie Nelson, and the women were either too young or too old. There was sawdust on the floor, and a pull handle on the crapper in the back. There were the serious drunks minding their own business in the corners, and making all the noise around the bar and the pool tables were the college boys and weekend partiers who wanted to hit somebody almost as much as they wanted to get laid.
I sauntered up to this one particular group of clowns who had claimed one of the pool tables and started staring at them really hard with this big, shit-eating grin on my face. They began to get uncomfortable and whisper among themselves. Finally, one of them summoned up the courage to ask me what in the blue hell I was looking at.
I said, “I’ve never seen anyone as ugly as you before.”
It was on.
In hindsight I guess it wasn’t so much a fight as it was a small-scale riot. The ordeal began with me and those three men at the pool table, a trio whom I will refer to as Larry, Curly, and Moe, because that’s what they looked like. As they came at me and I knocked them back, the other patrons became embroiled one by one. The fight kept getting bigger and bigger, like a plant (albeit a very violent plant), until the whole place was swinging, even the staff.
Shit was flying all around the place—tables, bottles, and chairs. It might have been the alcohol I’d consumed, but I think I even saw a guy hit another guy with a fake leg. That was a hell of a thing, let me tell you.
By the time the responding officers showed up, the mirror behind the bar had been replaced with an unconscious male, and a small fire was burning in the corner of the room.
One cop came in and was immediately confronted by one of the drunks. The drunk suffered a kick to the sac and crumpled up in a fetal position on the bloody floor. The cop doing the kicking was Danny Pearce. He didn’t bat an eye about what he’d done. He just moved on to the next fellow who needed some calming down.
The other cop, Danny’s partner, started blinding people with pepper spray the second he walked in. Bodies fell, caught in the pain and the seizure-like grip of freaking out because you think you’re never going to be able to see again. Everyone started screaming.
The screaming distracted me, and in that one instant, the guy I was duking it out with picked up a bottle and smashed it over the handsome side of my face. Some would say that’s the side of my face that doesn’t actually exist, but they would be wrong. I could feel the cold beer sink into my clothes, and the hot rush of salty blood running along the line of my jaw. I went down, merely because I could feel a piece of glass in my eye, and it made me a little weak in the knees. I couldn’t see. Pearce ran over to defend me as this fucking guy started dropping kicks into my ribs, with cowboy boots, no less.
Pearce clocked him good, brought him down with one punch.
“You okay?” Pearce shouted over the commotion.
“Good enough,” I said.
He helped me to my feet.
With my one good eye, I saw this other guy running up behind Pearce with a pool stick. I hollered something foul, grabbed Pearce by the shoulder, and pushed him out of the way. The stick hit me square on top of the head and broke, but there was no stopping me. I tackled the guy and went crazy on his face with a flurry of short punches.
Pearce pulled me off, but the poor bastard was already sleeping the sleep of the lost and swollen.
Afterward, I didn’t want medical treatment. I only wanted them to get the piece of glass out of my eye, but they wouldn’t listen.
They put me in the back of the ambulance, and just before it took off, Pearce got in and thanked me for saving his ass back there.
“Don’t mention it,” I said. “You’d have done the same for me.”
