The Jailbaiter Boyz, pale and strangers to exercise, were in midset, pounding out their deafening rendition of “Sweet Home Alabama.” A confederate flag hung over the empty dance floor, surrounded by unaligned four-tops filled with flanneled and T-shirted young men drinking long-necked Buds and Lights. Few heads were moving to the music. We caught the perfunctory hard stares from the most insecure members of each group as we passed and made our way through the maze of tables to the dart room.
In the dart room several groups were in play. Some of the male players had their sleeves rolled up past their biceps and all had Marlboro hardpacks in their breast pockets. I recognized one woman as a high school acquaintance, her features heavy now and swollen from drink. She had been part of a group of wild ones who rode around in a lavender Gremlin on weekends, a car that Blair’s males had collectively dubbed the Meatwagon. I had made out with her one night in someone’s dark basement while Billy had had his way with one of her friends in the side room. I nodded to her, but she didn’t know me, and I walked on.
In the back room Billy and I stepped up and leaned on the bar. A wiry ex-wrestler from Blair named Jimmy Flynn was tending, where he had been since graduation. Flynn had always managed to make weight and go to the mat in the one-twenty-nine class; there wasn’t much more of him now. He nodded and said, “I see you two jokers are still hanging out together.”
Billy said, “And you’re still pushing beer.”
“Yeah.”
“Give us two Buds, then.”
“I’ll have a bourbon with mine, Jimmy,” I said.
“What’ll it be?”
“Grand-Dad, if you’ve got it.”
Flynn pointed to the unlit call rack. “Jack and Beam is what it is.”
“The Jim Beam will do it,” I said.
Billy put money on the bar and walked back toward the dart room, where I saw him move toward a woman in a half-length black leather coat. Her hair was as black as the coat, and she wore blue jeans and a loose purple sweater that didn’t work at hiding her lush shape, if that was what she was after. She smiled at something Billy said, and he leaned into her slightly and returned one of his patented pretty-boy grins. I looked around the b k arthiar.
I knew one guy standing up, an alcoholic named Denneman who was memorable for having thrown up whiskey one morning in junior high first period industrial arts, thrown it up with stunning ferocity on the varnished oak of the center drafting table. His young porcine features had mutated into an obese mask of pink splotches and scars. Someone bumped my back-on purpose, I supposed-and I didn’t bother to find out why. Instead I searched for a friendly face.
There was one-a guy I knew who had worked for years at the local Shell, sitting at a deuce away from the crowd with his girl, a plump young woman in a waitress uniform of white oxford shirt and black skirt. I grabbed my beer and whiskey off the bar and moved across the room to join them.
Thankfully, the guy’s name was stitched across his shirt. “Hey, John,” I said, shaking his hand.
“Nick, right?” He smiled crookedly but with warmth as I nodded. “Have a seat, man. This is my girlfriend, Toni.”
Toni looked a little looped but still conscious and I shook her clammy hand as I sat. I was relieved to find that John was as genuinely nice as I remembered him, and the conversation stayed dead set on what type of Chrysler product I was driving now. But John had to go and screw things up by excusing himself to play a game of darts, leaving me to sit with Toni, who was becoming alarmingly more drunk with each rum and pineapple she was firing down.
Toni excused herself and stepped up to the bar. I waved my arm to get Billy’s attention, but he was deep in conversation with the woman in black leather. And John, a lit cigarette drooping out the corner of his mouth, was playing his darts.
Toni returned with a bar tray, on which were set two rum drinks and another round for me. She served the drinks, left the tray on the sticky wood table, and slid the bourbon and beer in front of my forearms.
“Drink up,” she said. “I can tell you like it.”
I shrugged and had a pull off the fresh beer. The Jailbaiter Boyz were playing a Guns N’ Roses cover amid some competing activity in the main room, most likely a spiritless fight.
“So, Toni. Where do you work?”
Toni made me pay for that innocent question by launching into a tirade against the management of the Brave Bull, a steak house around the corner on the mistakenly named Grandview Avenue. Then she got right up in my face (hers was now ghoulishly contorted) with graphically venomous descriptions of her unfortunate coworkers, and it became apparent that she hated all of them, save the Greek chef she called Uncle Baba, who was the “undisputed master” at carving “fuckin’ sides o’ beef” and “fuckin’ cuts o’ veal,” a point that she argued with the vehemence of a litigator at the Nuremberg Trials.
“If you hate the place so much,” I said tiredly behind a slug of Beam, “why don’t you leave?”
“’Cause I can’t get a good job,” she said indignantly, looking around carefully (as if there would be an African-American face within miles of Captain Wright’s), “’cause the co kcang lored women get all the good jobs.”
“Where’d you get that idea?” I said, realizing as I did that I had made a huge mistake.
“Where? Where? I’ll tell you where. I know it’s true ’cause my ex-old man used to work for Montgomery County Social Services. That’s how I fuckin’ know.”
For some reason I said, “Your ex-old man? Bullshit.” And then I watched her fat little face turn red.
Seeing the hopelessness of the hole I had admittedly dug and then leaped into, I began to look around the bar for help. Toni wouldn’t let it die, though, and she reached her flabby right arm across the table (her tricep was shimmying flatulently like one of Uncle Baba’s cuts o’ meat) and began to sock me on the shoulder with progressively harder punches, yelling, between each slug, “Huh? Huh?”
I realized then that she actually wanted to fight, and for a brief moment I indeed considered what a kick it would be to see her rubbery face cave in as I smacked her across the barroom, but John was a truly good guy, and then there was the tiny obstacle of the six-and-a-half-foot bouncer of indeterminate lineage in the black Harley T- shirt who was now eyeing me out the corner of his narrowed eyes. I finished my shot, then my beer, and set the bottle on the table.
“Have a nice night,” I said, and went to recover Billy.
I pulled him away from his friend and gave him a nudge for the front door. Somebody at one of the tables near the dance floor yelled something at Billy, but when we glanced in that direction no one was looking our way. The Jailbaiter Boyz were destroying Free’s “Fire and Water” as we headed out the door and into the cool, fresh air.
Billy was laughing as we climbed into the Maxima. Maybelle’s tail thumped the backseat. “You saved me, man.”
“I saved myself,” I said. “Who was the lady?”
“No lady.” Billy shook his head as he started the engine and pushed a button for the heat. “I met her in here one night, about a year before I met April. Took her over to my car in front of Wheaton Guns, that night, and fucked her right in the parking lot. She made me pull out before I came-she didn’t want to get pregnant ‘again,’ she said. Man, I shot off all over her leather jacket, the same motherfucker she was wearing tonight. She got some hankies out of the glove box, real calm, and wiped all that jism off, like it was nothing. And we just walked back into Cap’n Fights and had a couple more beers.”
“You’re a hopeless romantic, you know it?”
Billy chuckled. “She called me a couple of times after that. Described on the phone how she wanted to do all this funky shit to me-leather and shit-shit I’m just not into, man. So I didn’t hook up. I never saw her again, until tonight. But I gotta love that jacket.”
“A sensitive guy, Billy. To the end.”
“That’s me, Greek.” He smiled. “How about another beer?”
“ k si HeOkay.”
“We’re on a roll tonight, aren’t we?” Billy handed me a beer and opened one for himself.
“Yeah, Billy. I believe we are.”
