other’s people ’cause he’s working in a bar in the middle of the day and you’re coming into one at the same time. You tell the guy,
No cigarettes.
– Bartender comes back, drops seventeen bucks in front of you, which, three bucks ain’t too bad for a bottle of Bud in New York these days, so you feel pretty good about that. You guys do the nod thing again and he goes back to his paper. You wrap your hand around that bottle and take your first sip. It’s coooooold. Bartender reads his paper, bar hounds over there, one is doing a crossword, one is just chain-smoking and making his Old Crow last. You drink your beer, listen to the music and you’re having a pretty good day, figure you’ll stick around that place and drink the rest of that twenty.
You know what he’s talking about. You’ve had days like that.
– And that’s when the door bangs open, some dingleberry comes in, orders a fucking margarita so now the bartender has to work and he sits down right next to you and starts with the fucking chatter. There goes your mellow, right out the window.
You think about the pack of smokes sitting on the little table on your porch at home. Down the phone lines, the bong rips again, and you know this story isn’t getting any shorter.
– This dingleberry, he lives in the place, but you can tell by the way the bartender doesn’t give him the nod and the way the boozehounds turn their stools away from him a little that they all wish he would fucking move out. Right now he can’t believe his luck, a new fucking face in this place he can chew the ear off of. He starts right in with,
You stop worrying about the cigarettes.
– Yeah, the dingleberry calls the place the Murder Bar. It’s that place, you know the one. They had it closed for a couple years? Well, now it’s open again. So he tells this story about the place, how it’s not really named the Murder Bar or even the M Bar, that’s just what people from the neighborhood, people in the know, call it ’cause they were living here when it happened. He tells you,
You hear the guy on the phone take a quick drink of something and you know exactly what it is. You can almost smell it, the warm bite of Tullamore Dew.
– Now the dingleberry starts telling you about it, how a guy that used to work in this place, when it was the bar before this one, got in some kind of money trouble or something and came in the place one night to rob his own boss and he went haywire and ended up blowing away everybody in the place, like twenty people in cold blood. How it didn’t end there and how you
You think about things. A gun going off in a Chinese kid’s mouth. A big Samoan in the middle of a cafe, blood gushing out of his left temple. A cop on his back in the rain, waiting for you to finish him. The brothers who beat your woman to death, ripped open by your bullets.
– And the maddog is the one who came out on top, took all that money, like twenty million easy, and slipped off to someplace warm,
You think about being hunted. What that feels like. You think about going through it again, and curse yourself for forgetting the damn cigarettes.
– Anyway, that bit about the money and Mexico and the treasure hunters is a coda to this particular story that you have never heard before, which is why you are hearing this story right now from me.
And that is how things start to get fucked up again. That and the backpacker with the Russian accent.
THE BUCKET is right on the beach. It’s a small place, a thatched palm roof over a bar, no walls. Stools don’t work on the beach, so eight rope swings hang from the beams, and sets of white plastic tables and chairs are on the sand. There’s no electricity. Pedro hauls bags of ice down here every morning on his tricycle and dumps them into corrugated tubs full of bottles of Sol and Negro Modelo. If you order a cocktail, you get the same ice the beer sits in. If you want to eat, Pedro has a barbeque he made by sawing a fifty-five-gallon drum in half. You can get ribs, chicken, a burger, or whatever the fishermen happen to bring around that day. Every now and then Pedro’s wife will come down with her
I’m at The Bucket around nine, after my morning swim. Pedro gets the coffeepot off the barbeque grill, pours me a cup and drops yesterday’s
Pedro has chorizo on the grill and a frying pan heating up. He cracks a couple eggs into the pan, gets a plastic container of salsa from the cooler bag on his tricycle, and stirs some in, scrambling the eggs. He takes a key from his belt, unlocks the enameled steel cabinet beneath the bar, grabs the bottles of booze, and starts to set them out. I walk around to the grill, give the eggs a few more stirs, and dump them onto a plastic plate. The chorizos are blackened, fat spitting from the cracks in their skin. I spear them, stick them on the plate next to the eggs, and sit back down on my swing at the bar. Pedro brings me a folded towel and sets it next to the plate. I open it up and peel off one of the still warm tortillas his wife made at home this morning. I stuff a chorizo into the tortilla, pack some of the eggs around it, fold the thing up, take a bite, and sear the inside of my mouth just like I do every morning. It’s worth it.
Pedro is about my age, thirty-five. He looks a little older because he’s spent his whole life on the Yucatan. His face is a dark, sun-wrinkled plate. He’s short and round, has a little pencil moustache, and wears heavy black plastic glasses like the ones American soldiers get for free.
He tops off my coffee.
– Go fish today?
I look out at the flat, crystal blue water. Up in town the tourists will be loading into the boats, heading for the reef to go diving or to the deep water to fish. The local fishermen here have already gone out and Pedro’s boat is the only one still in, anchored to the shore by long yellow ropes tied to lengths of rebar driven into the sand. I could fish, take the boat out by myself or wait for Pedro’s brother to show up and go out with him for an evening fish. If he doesn’t have a job tonight.
– Not today.
– Nice day for fishing.
– Too nice. I might catch a fish. And then what? Have to bring it in, clean it, cook it.
No, no fishing today.
– Game on later?