Bar Talk

“You get enough people to see things your way, could kill a man on a city street and no one could touch you.”

The man’s talk is making me nervous, but he’s just bought me another bourbon and the bar is almost closed up anyway, so I figure what the hell and set down on top of one of the beer coolers and look at him, urging him on with my eyes.

“When I was young, summer my fourteenth year, it was during the riots, group of people smash the windows of a car, drag this man out of it kicking and screaming. I seen them doing it, walk over, and the man, he’s bleeding and crying through broken teeth. I laid no hand to help him. I let my foot down on his face and crunched his nose up but good and didn’t stop ‘til the cops come round to scare us all off. They wouldn’t push no prosecution. They was as children among us. Our group had the power.”

As a bartender you hear a lot of things. In a rough bar those things can get pretty frightening. I sip my drink and let my eyes rest on his own and wonder why he has his hands off the countertop.

“Sometimes I remember that day, crushing a man’s skull underfoot, listening to him try to breath through broken equipment, and I revel in it. Memories come as thick as syrup. Gotta beat ‘em back with hands and arms.”

I sip the drink he’d laid his dime on for me and then kicked it all back. “I gotta close up, pal.”
“You remember your first fuck?”

I look the wrinkled old face over and find it hard to believe that he’s ever even known a woman’s touch out of kindness or freewill. “Sure do.”

“Never get that back, the full force of the pleasure of the new. The experience alien and beautiful to you. Sooner or later, becomes routine. Like brushing your teeth. Like the wind through the trees. Ice on a mountain.”

Now I am picking up my glass and washing it, nervousness like cold water on my back. “You’re already settled, just down your drink and scat, ok?”

“But we all have to keep trying, right? Chase it down and try to recapture that first, pure, unknown moment.”

He’s pulling something up from his waist and I have my hand on Pete’s old Browning that we keep under the bar. I level the pistol at him just as he raises his own and I fire. A sound like thunder as the gun bucks, the full weight of that man’s body dragging him off of his stool and down onto the ground.

“Got that right, brother,” I say to the empty stool.

I rest a moment, have another drink before calling the cops.