Dead Reckoning and Other Stories

by Dino Parenti

  “Just to be sure,” he says a moment later. “You’re not a cop, right?”

  I glower back, my eyes swollen with blood and tedium. This is not a new sensation. When someone you love fails repeatedly to even acknowledge there’s a problem, you become a pro at internalizing exasperation.

  I gotta say, something about the barkeep’s bewildered mug keeps screaming background extra from Easy Rider, though no specific puss coalesces from the flipbook of chrome and muttonchops. This is a mild and agreeable frustration though. No faces means no associations. A nice omen, since I never plan to indulge again after tonight, and this time I really, truly mean it.

  “No, brother, I’m not a cop. You a cop?”

  The barkeep frowns back pure constipation. “Me? Fuck no. No fucking way.” And he counts off on his fingers before peeling bills again, lips moving, eyes darting.

  Okay, so maybe booze isn’t what I’m hooked to exactly, but addictive pathologies aren’t all that different when you get down to it.

  Ozone and dust keep oozing through the few non-caked pores of the window screen. The damp sparkle reminds me of sex in the days before it turned fickle on me.

  “The public storage next door doing good business?” I ask, just to move things along. I swear I can feel my veins start their itching from the inside.

  The barkeep pauses his counting, mutters his way back to the nearest whole number, and takes it again from there.

  “I’d say not. The manager came in last week. Said the eight units occupied are bursting at the seams, but the other twenty-two are ghost-turd city. Most of ‘em got auctioned off over the past couple of months. Said they found a Rembrandt in one of them. Or was it a Dali? I forget my artists. Turned out to be a knock-off in any case, so . . . ”

  His whispered counts get louder as he nears the end, cresting to a falsetto as Spanish campero music Dopplers across the highway like canyon echo from the big-rig lumbering by.

  Once the Playboy mud-flaps have winked out of view, I say, “So, been making mojitos long?”

  A shudder seizes the barkeep, as if from an aborted sneeze. A dozen bats of his eyes later, and he’s seemingly recovered.

  “Not too long. It’s a . . . it’s a stable request out here. But it keeps the truckers awake, so . . . ”

  “Oscar had a knack,” I say. Maybe I said it to ease the barkeep’s fidgety hands. Maybe to ease my own. “Ensured me up-and-down that you do as well. Mojitos only if I came by at night though. Daytime, I was to ask for a stinger, whatever the hell that is. My beverage recall has gotten rusty since college.”

  The barkeep arches his bushy, horned eyebrows as he finishes counting, content at last to have one task under his belt. “Any hard liquor like brandy or vodka pansied down with a quarter of crème de menthe. Lady’s drink if you ask me. My mom put ‘em away like gumdrops. But they’re fast to make, and daylight demands . . . haste.”

  A quick breath as the world brightens before it roars, and the length of termite-riddled broom handle propping open the sash vibrates that much closer to the edge of the sill. “Yes, well drinks do make for a handy distraction.”

  “One man’s distraction, right, guy? Sure as hell puts food on my table, I can tell you that.” He folds my change lengthwise along a finger and extends it over behind a twitchy, picket-gapped smile. “So where you headed on this late Sunday night?”

  I wonder how much if anything to spill. My resolution to let candor rule the rest of my days withers fast under the scrutiny of merchants and pushers of vice.

  “Someplace far and uncorrupted,” I tell him in the end, pocketing my money. “But since I’m hurting for a spaceship, California will have to do before I head north from there. Maybe.”

  The barkeep snorts. “That a fact?”

  “Yeah, got a buddy in Sherman Oaks who crunches numbers for the movies. Might have some work for me if the fluffery is right.”

  I keep to myself that California’s also home to many a top-shelf treatment center. Resolutions be damned.

  “Cali’s a trek, mister. Don’t see a U-Haul out there.”

  Chatter. The novice’s preferred crutch. Oscar hardly said two words before he got cooking.

  “Just me and my Audi and everything I could pack into a couple of suitcases.” I even take a moment to glance at it through the window to verify its presence. Desert truck stop at night necessitates parking where one can keep an eye on what’s his. “It’s not a lot, but what’s there is very precious to me. I worry . . . I may have to sell some before long to get to where I need to go, and I don’t much want to. Kind of sentimental about my things. They tell me where I’ve been.”

  “So does the clap,” the barkeep says, chuckling before he even finishes the gag. It’s all nerves, and as if to confirm it, he rubs incessantly at the bridge of his nose where no glasses rest. “Anyway, Audi’s supposed to be a reliable set of wheels. Number one vehicle choice of soccer moms and nurses, so I’ve read . . . someplace.”

  I take a pull of electrified air. Buttery sweat is starting to leech through my palms, which I wipe surreptitiously on my pants. “Is that right? Mine’s falling apart.”

  “Yeah? Well, you know that theory about planned obsolescence . . . ?”

  The filibustering soon takes on the buzzing quality of something winged and antennaed, trapped between glass and screen, and the next burst of lighting is enough to finally shake a sigh of committal out of the barkeep.

  “I’ll just wish you luck in your travels then. In the meantime . . . one mojito, coming up.”

  He shuffles to the door, Doc Martens cheeping on the glazed concrete. Once there he pokes his head out to verify privacy, then draws the deadbolt before returning and getting down to business.

  I catch the urn full of matchbooks I noted upon entering, and I hear my mom’s mad teeth-grinding while she read, as if trying to retype all the narratives in her head.

  The barkeep leads me through a non-descript door in the back and into a bathroom that doubles as a storeroom brimming with fifty-gallon drums of anyone’s guess. I watch him with mild interest as he starts his work, and though he’s barely begun and I haven’t actually accepted anything yet, I still manage to feel as though I’m failing at something. Damn these rallying emotions!

  That said, he’s clinical but efficient for a tenderfoot. No obnoxious, self-conscious flourishes like the hot-dogging posers back in town. Very old school in technique. And while I appreciate this, the silence soon grows teeth that start chomping at my ears.

  “Do you believe . . . ?” I start to ask, and the chewing abates at once. “Do you believe that part of being a good man is living without the recognition of honorable deeds?”

  Though I don’t expect an answer, the barkeep stops. He even takes to gnawing on the air a bit before responding.

  “Must be a ton of good men out there then.”

  And he gets back to it.

  A breath caterpillars out of me. “You think your job is hard. I mean, what man doesn’t think that, right? Maybe you’re a mechanic or a dentist. Maybe you’re a property developer. Or were a developer, before the bubble popped. But you know what’s harder than watching your livelihood die? Mutuality. Giving in equal measure to what you get. The bedrock of all relationships. Am I bothering you by talking?”

  The barkeep freezes mid-duty to say, “Nope,” before resuming.

  A bombardment of strikes and ensuing concussions. The Southwest’s answer to Dresden, and the tubes overhead stutter and hum.

  “Ever have to part with anything precious before? An heirloom or some other one-of-a-kind type thing?”

  The barkeep shrugs, but stays on task.

  “It’s funny how it works. Once you sell that first item, it’s easy to justify the rest. Kind of like your first murder would be, I suppose.”

  Not the most tactful inference to make considering our setting and situation, but either the barkeep didn’t catch it or he’s made his peace with chaos and chance long ago.

&nb
sp; A girl has pulled into the gas station kitty-corner to the bar and I watch her a while through the window. Squat but shapely in an athletic sort of way. Pretty from what I can make of her, or maybe I just need her to be. Based on her hasty untidiness and how packed her hand-me-down SUV looks, she’s booking it for greener pastures as well. No one’s in the car with her. The baby-bump is small yet, but it won’t be for long. Her head is a swivel as she coaxes the exorbitant petrol to pump faster through body language, and I think of the many ways my mom implied her desires to run away in her day while dad did his time. All those half-started journals. All those longing stare sessions out the bright kitchen window until I was sure her eye sockets were going to spit fire.

  “A real eye-opener,” I say, “having your ideal of the world upended and ground into the mud by forces beyond your control. And if that breaks someone you love before it breaks you? Talk about both barrels.”

  A nod from the barkeep. I admit that he’s good at this aspect of his trade at least, letting the gabbers do the gabbing, letting them rid it from their systems. It’s what they pay their hard-earned money for.

  The girl eventually speeds off after wheedling a stubborn bowel movement from her Jack Russell atop the phony grass beneath the station’s monument sign. Sadness blindsides me hard at seeing her go, and after a brilliant trident that sears the outlying hills—etching perfectly for a split-second the bags and boxes piled in the back of my own car—the melancholy swaps with anxiety.

  “A person doesn’t have much in this life but his wiles and his dignity,” I declare while chewing at the inside of my lip. “And the former is of such power that . . . that it can either feed the latter, or gobble it whole. Catch your wife one night working a glass pipe behind the garage ‘cause life as she knows it is drying up fast, and see if that axiom doesn’t grow legs before your very eyes.”

  The barkeep croons interest at such unexpected transgressions.

  “The shit work she takes just to keep traction since the firm imploded starts weighing her down. The crow’s feet aren’t far behind after that. And the house you’ve built and stockpiled with a life keeps slipping further from your grip. And it’s not like you’re without sin or clean as a whistle yourself. Some time back, you’re not sure when anymore, you began a torrid little fling with pills. Sleeping pills at first. Job stresses, you know? But it wasn’t long before some of your own grunt jobs led to backaches and bum knees, and the downers became pain pills. Oxy and Percocet.”

  I follow a moth as it hopscotches against the screen, testing for chinks in the barrier before fluttering away. It was a lame distraction.

  “I’m an addict, brother,” I say at long last. “Wish I could cop to better, but I also can’t keep sugar-coating my penchants.”

  It’s enough to prompt the barkeep to stop again.

  “Yeah, huh? Isn’t admission the gateway to healing? Isn’t that what they tell you before handing you a chip?”

  And he ponders the subject for another beat before getting back to task.

  “I suppose they do. But you know what’s funny? Just when you think it can’t get any worse, you’re introduced to the concept of instinctual drift. This is what the shrinks don’t tell you about: the gradual reversion from learned behavior to instinctual behavior. Certain crucial stimulants like love, supportiveness, encouragement, when they get buried under the burdens of say, expectation, a person can revert to a baser state. Their more natural state. In our hypothetical case, she stops demanding stimulus from you, and seeks it outside the home. But since you’re still bonded together she insists on you being involved. Except you don’t want to be involved. Not like this.”

  “Uh-huh,” the barkeep hums, sweaty hands and jittery fingers working away.

  “I mean, the rock is bad enough, but when she starts bringing home other men, you swear you couldn’t scrape the bottom any harder. That you’re plum out of skin. And then the day comes when she insists that you watch. They pay double for audience participation, she tells you. Explains it as if it’s the most alien of concepts to you. She even says in response to your presumed dithering over it: ‘Don’t blame me. You men are the ones who get off on humiliating your fellow primates. Ask yourselves when shame replaced good old-fashioned territorial violence?’”

  And dammit, here it goes . . .

  How to make a Red Headed Slut: pour an ounce of peach schnapps and an ounce of Jager into a glass of cranberry juice. Chill and serve . . .

  SNAP! invisible rubber band . . .

  “Hmm . . . ” groans the barkeep. And though he can’t hear my prattling brain, a hand nevertheless shoots to his temple to rub the weariness away.

  I say, “What’s a thousand bucks compared to a front-row-seat of a three-hundred-pound insurance adjuster riding your missus like a tackling dummy? You trying to maintain eye contact while dodging gales of sweat this dude’s flopping head keeps flinging across the sheets?”

  How to make a Bend Over Shirley: mix 1 ½ ounces of raspberry vodka, 4 ounces of Sprite, and ¾ ounces of grenadine syrup into a highball with ice. Top with cherries . . .

  SNAP!

  The barkeep pauses to pop the stress from his knuckles, and for some reason I chuckle at the party-favor sound of it.

  “What’s a couple of grand compared to watching three frat initiates dressed like Droogs from A Clockwork Orange giving your strung-out better half a train? With you sitting five feet away, handcuffed to a chair? A feedbag filled with horseradish belted to your head?”

  How to make Pussy Juice: dump 1 ½ ounces of rum, a ½ ounce of grenadine syrup, a teaspoon of lime juice, and equal measures of orange and pineapple juice into a glass. Shake hard . . .

  SNAP!

  The barkeep’s nostrils flare under a strobing of lightning bolts. Not even halfway done and I can sense his nerves starting to fray. In the meantime, my chuckles have officially migrated to laughter.

  “What’s a few more bucks . . . compared to having her sell off all your prized possessions and forcing a second mortgage because your space-cadet wife gets knocked up? And you know it isn’t yours because . . . because you’d long since lost the will and the flow, but she wants you to assume the mantle because it’s . . . right. Because if she’s willing to carry the spawn of another, then you should be willing to rear and raise it without complaint . . . because the tax write-offs.”

  How to make a Dirty Mother: mix 1 ½ ounces of brandy and a ½ ounce of Kahlua into an old school glass with ice. Stir well . . .

  SNAP!

  “What’s getting paid by a bunch of strangers to play the cuckold compared to coughing up your own life savings to partake in the very same services . . . because you started reconnecting with the fact that you like it? Realizing that what you thought you’d long since thwarted with therapy and marriage has reemerged with a vengeance? That your deep aches and needs are now every bit as hot as Tammy’s for the rock? Only yours is a different kind of rush. I tell you, brother, it’s all madness. Mutuality is a bad bitch with a grudge. Oh, and did I tell you that we toasted with mojitos after I proposed to her in Miami? It was like—”

  And it’s like the impropriety of it all slaps me in the face suddenly, for I lockjaw a moment to stifle my own giggling, and all the jauntiness swirls down to my toes.

  “Mojito one-o-one,” I start to think . . .

  . . . or am I now saying it aloud?

  “Take a tumbler, squeeze in half a lime, plop in a tablespoon of sugar, followed by a couple of sprigs of mint. Add three-to-four ounces of sparkling water. Crush and mix the mint, lime, sugar, and sparkling water. Mixologists refer to this as muddling, but a barkeep always crushes and mixes. And last, but not least, the rum. Three solid ounces of it. Four if you really mean it. Finish with ice, then cap the whole job with a final fresh sprig of—”

  SNAP—

  Except it’s not a rubber band, but the barkeep’s freckled, ham-hock hand slamming against the stall before hacking up my semi-hard pecker from his mouth in seg
ments.

  Slobber-vines snap and sling back into his rusty beard in gossamer bungees, which he forearms away like dribbled chowder.

  Okay, so maybe opiates and uppers aren’t what I’m hooked to exactly, but like I said earlier about addictive pathologies . . .

  “Sorry,” the barkeep says, heaving gravelly breaths that catch on the roof of his throat.

  I peer down at the glistening, livid eyes glaring back up at me.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” coughs the barkeep. He keeps rubbing the back of his palm against his lips. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just gimme a sec . . . ”

  “Sure, yeah, alright.” The delay between the ensuing flash-and-detonation remains steady at four seconds. “Look, if you’ve got another appointment coming or, or just want to . . . switch to hands, we can prorate the bill and call it a night . . . ?

  The barkeep, cheeks fried from exertion, shakes his head.

  “It’s just . . . mom’s in the hospital in Hartford. Not looking so good. She ain’t been herself since my sister died of this fast-working sepsis . . . Anyway, just gotta . . . pace things out here . . . ”

  I sigh to impart patience, but really I’m just anxious to blow my wad and move on.

  “Sure, or course. I was blabbering.Sorry about your sister and mom. I’ll have good thoughts.Just . . . pick it up whenever you’re ready.”

  The barkeep tries to muffle his huffs as he adjusts his position on the shitter to be more in line with the gouged hole in the wall, then he pops my ruddy half-boner back into his mouth and gets back to it.

  Slurps and grunts once more bounce off the tiles and concrete, joined straightaway by the ever-mounting rattle of stalls as I hump vigorously against the scrawled metal panel barely held to the wall by a pair of half-pulled rusted screws. My wedding band ghost-notes against the top edge on the down-strokes, and between truck horns yowling in the distance like lost coyotes, and our clandestine dealings seeping out the window, it’s a toss-up as to which racket keeps startling awake the baby in my car.