Brazing

by Lila Felix

  Chapter Seven

  Bridger

  Something is seriously wrong with that girl. Something is seriously wrong with my brother.

  Everyone around me is bat shit crazy.

  Every damned one of them.

  I didn’t go straight home. Instead, I opted for The Pit, a pool hall close by. The place was full of pompous frat boys who thought they could play pool. They’d learned by lessons from their butler or some shit and then came to college thinking that they were the Black Widow. I was happy to take Daddy’s money off their hands and watch their bleach blonde hair deflate along with their smile and their pride.

  And their collars.

  Heavens above, who told them it was okay to wear their collars popped up?

  As I entered the place, it smelled like cake and peaches which was the opposite of how a pool hall should smell. A pool hall should smell like cigar smoke and double fermented beer and mud. That was the country boy in me.

  There was a reason the place smelled like a cake bakery.

  A group of girls to my right was smoking those vapor electronic cigarette contraptions. I remembered in the first grade when Mrs. Barr made us play the recorder for music class. I broke mine on the second day of class. That may or may not have been an accident. But if you asked anyone in my family, it wasn’t an accident and we all knew it. That’s what they looked like. Like a group of grown girls, dressed like they were going clubbing but playing smoking recorders.

  And as I scanned the room it just got worse. Scouring my face with my hands, I tried to wake up from this douche bag filled dream. In the corner, all holding their cue sticks as if they could all take turns at the same table, were four Ken dolls. Three of them didn’t look so bad, but the other one looked like a particular Ken doll whose father didn’t let him play with Daddy’s very special train collection when he was little. He was smoking on one of those recorder things with such veracity, he could’ve given Amtrak a run for their money.

  He could use the pick-up line, “Wanna take a ride on a real steam engine?”

  The only reason I stayed was because I didn’t want to go back to the dorms just yet. I perched myself on one of the leather stools and ordered a Scotch rocks just for show.

  The steamhead approached the bar and ordered some drink that looked like a frog vomited in a glass. The bartender didn’t charge him, probably because he didn’t want to admit to anyone that he’d actually known how to make that drink.

  Alien piss, that’s what it was.

  “Hey man, you play?” Steamhead was now talking to me and I could feel the money already in my pocket.

  I drummed up my hillbilly accent. If these boys thought you were from anywhere that wasn’t city, they automatically took me for a sucker. “Yeah, I sure did play a little when we was in them hills back home.”

  Okay, maybe I took it a little too far.

  “Oh, well, we have a little wager going on over there. Care to join us?” He talked really slowly which only accented his very city demeanor. Then he blew some of his cotton candy steam in my face.

  Ass clown.

  “I could try.”

  Here was the thing about taking someone’s money. The first game had to be botched. You wanted to really prove to them how bad you were. Then the real fun started.

  “Well, come on then.” He motioned me towards the pool table in the corner and I proceeded to completely fail at pool. I made pool balls fly all over the place and hit the eight ball in three times before they decided I’d lost. I gave up my twenty dollar bill with a fake smile.

  “You know, maybe this time I can do a little better.” My hillbilly got stronger and stronger. It was like my inner Podunk roots were rebelling against being in the presence of so much douchiness.

  “Well, let’s try another game.”

  “Okay,” I dug in my pocket, “All I got is this hundred.”

  “Well,” Ken shrugged and took another puff of his magic dragon, “Why don’t we all put in hundreds. That way it’s fair.”

  Now we’re talking.

  Five crisp hundreds sat on the corner of the table. Beau, the kid’s name was Beau, broke first and then tried to high five me. I sneered in his direction. And ten minutes later, I was fiving myself, five hundreds in my back pocket.

  “Hey!” Ken was really upset now. When he yelled at me, puffs of steam came out of his nostrils too.

  “You’ve got a little” I touched my mouth, “Stupid on your face. Next time don’t assume that just because I’m wearing cowboy boots and talk a little slower that I’m your next target. Y’all have a goodnight now, you hear?”

  One of the girls stood from the miniscule circular table and approached me as I tried to leave.

  “Hey, sugar, you’re going home alone?”

  I looked her up and down. A pink strapless dress so tight and short that if I got her home, I wouldn’t be surprised at anything she had to show me. She left nothing to the imagination with a dress like that. And I was a guy who liked surprises. Her blonde hair was long and fell down to land right at the curve of her ass which she flicked in my direction in reaction to my once over.

  But it was her shoes that slammed the ‘no’ door in my face. Not that I was interested in the first place, but when I looked down at her silvery, more sparkly than a show pony, shoes—all I could think of were purple cowboy boots.

  There was nothing sexier in the world than a girl in a skirt and a pair of cowboy boots.

  I bowed out of her invitation as politely as possible and went straight home and attempted but failed at falling asleep without the picture of Tate on my lap pulsing through my mind.