by Larry Brown
The door opened back there and she looked at it expectantly, but it wasn’t Aaron, only some girl she hadn’t seen before, a tall girl with brown hair and white undergarments who stepped to the end of the bar and called to the bartender for a shot of whiskey. The girl looked up at a clock on the wall and the bartender brought the shot. She leaned her head back and downed it and wiped her mouth, then looked over at Fay. Fay smiled and nodded at her but the girl had no expression on her face at all. After a moment the girl looked away.
People kept coming in and the noise level of the talk was starting to rise over the music. The man at the door was taking money from everybody who came in now. The bartender turned the music up a little louder. The girl with the brown hair had a beer in her hand now and she was drinking it fast. The bartender went over and said something to her. She said something back and started to lift the beer again, but with a quick move he took the beer away from her and pointed to the tables. Fay heard a few sharp words, then the girl tossed her hair back from her face and turned and walked toward some drunks at a table in the center of the room. The next time Fay looked over there, the girl had taken off her top and was dancing between the spread legs of a young man with a drink in his hand who was gazing up at her like somebody might have just warped him in the head with a two by four. Other customers at the table were leaning over and stuffing bills into the low waistband of her little panties. Now she wore a different look on her face, one that said Come fuck me because I like it.
Gradually, one by one, other girls began to emerge from the rear door. A few of them were the same ones Fay had seen that first night. She saw the girl who had been down on her knees. Each of them stopped by the bar and had a quick drink before they went out among the tables. The front door kept opening and closing and the roll of bills in the door-man’s hand was getting thicker. She ordered another beer. She kept looking for Reena but she didn’t see her.
He’d been gone too long. Way too long. It looked like he would come on out and at least see about her, see if she was doing okay. She thought about those rooms back there and what went on in them.
She smoked another cigarette and kept sitting there. The waitress she had talked to that night finally came back by with an empty tray and stopped.
“How you doing?” she said. “Fay, right?”
“Yeah, Fay. I’m fine. You all right?”
“Oh yeah. You fixing to start working here?”
“I don’t reckon so. Why?”
The waitress pulled a pencil from her pocket and scratched behind one of her ears with it, then slid the tray down and held it on her hip like some women hold their babies. She was chewing gum and she smiled now.
“Oh, I don’t know. You seem to be pretty good friends with Reena. And now you come in with the big man. How long you been in town?”
Fay picked up her beer and took a drink from it. She turned on her stool and set the beer on her closed legs. The air conditioning was cranked down so far she could feel goose pimples forming on her arms.
“A week or so. You seen Reena?”
“Not tonight. She may be in later. I don’t know what her schedule is this week. You need anything?”
Fay lifted her beer slightly.
“I’m fine.”
“Okay,” the girl said, and stuck her pencil back in her pocket. “My name’s Wanda. Maybe we can have a drink sometime and shoot the shit. Maybe me and you and Reena could get together sometime.”
“Okay,” Fay said, and the girl moved off.
It was loud and smoky now. When she glanced back over her shoulder she saw that the bar had nearly filled up. People had pulled tables together and there was much laughing and talking. Alongside Fay people had crowded in but nobody seemed to be paying any attention to her. Then the lights dimmed on the stage and the first dancer stepped up. It was the girl with brown hair that she had seen come from the back and get the shot of whiskey. Some slow guitar music that Fay didn’t know started up, and the girl was already moving to it. The level of talk in the room dropped as the eyes of the men turned toward her. She had bent her knees slightly and she was swaying with the music as if the guitar man was there and playing only for her. She turned on her long legs and moved her hips from side to side and even Fay had to admit that she was pretty fine. The guitar player started singing a sad lament to a lost lover and the red dress she had been wearing one night, and Fay listened to the words and heard the fingers move on the strings and watched the girl interpret the song through the movement of her body. She danced smoothly on her high heels and the money started hitting the stage all around her, though she seemed to give no notice of it or even of anybody else in that packed and smoky room. Bills that had been wadded and thrown rained on her, glanced off her arms, her legs, rolled between her shoes. The colored lights whirled on her and spun around the dark walls and showered her hair with all their different hues, and she kept on dancing. The guitar wailed and screamed and the player offered up his voice and matched it until it all rose up together into a place that was somewhere beyond heartbreak, a place that was all loss and sadness and desperation, and then it stopped and the room went black. There was a great amount of clapping and whistling, calls for more, but when the lights came back on the money was gone and so was she.
Finally Fay had to get up and go to the bathroom. She asked a drunk next to her to save her seat and he said he would, and she took her purse with her. She noticed the bartender watching her when she went around the end of the bar and through the door to the bathrooms. Some sullen girl was in there putting on some eye shadow. Fay spoke to her but she didn’t say anything, just kept frowning into the mirror and putting the stuff on. Fay stepped into the stall and did her business and when she came back out the girl had left. She went back to her bar stool and sat down and debated over getting another beer. She was pretty hungry now and wished she’d eaten more of the sandwich. She ordered another beer and got the bartender to give her a small bag of potato chips, but they were so hot she could hardly eat them and she left most of them on the bar still in the bag. She smoked another cigarette and saw that it had been an hour and a half now. She kept watching the rear door. Once in a while a girl would go back there. Sometimes a man would. The men would stay gone about ten minutes and then come back. Wanda came by a few times but Fay could see how busy she was. She walked fast and had a sheaf of bills stuffed in her apron pocket.
Aaron had been gone just way too long now and she was about ready to ask the bartender if he’d mind going to see about him, but he was working so hard back there mixing drinks and hauling out bottles and cans of beer for the waitresses that she was afraid to. She thought about going outside, just to get out of the smoke and noise for a while.
The rear door opened again and there stood the man who had taken Reena’s money away from her. Aaron’s brother. She saw his eyes move onto her and she froze, then quickly looked away. She didn’t want him coming over at all and she wanted Aaron to come back right now. But then between heartbeats he was moving toward her. A man standing next to her stepped away from the bar and Aaron’s brother slid in. He didn’t look at her at first, only rapped his knuckles on the wood to get the bartender’s attention. She didn’t look around, but in the pause between the end of one song and the start of another she could hear the liquor going down his throat, could hear him swallowing. And then she had to look at him. He was smiling with uneven broken teeth and lips that looked too red for a man’s. He was close enough that she could smell his breath and it was awful. He wore jeans, a green T-shirt under a sport coat. His hair was slicked straight back, just the way Aaron wore his, and there was a slight resemblance between them. She knew somehow that this man and Aaron had different fathers, same mother. Arlene was in the structure of the facial bones, the straight hair, the look in the eyes. But he was nowhere as big as Aaron.
“How you doing, Fay?” he said. “Why don’t you let me buy you a drink?”
“I’ve got one,” she said weakly, but h
e reached out and took it from her hand and hefted its weight.
“Feels about empty to me,” he said. “Why don’t you let me order you something?”
She just nodded. The bartender stood there waiting.
“Fix her something fruity, Harry,” he said. “Something sweet she’ll like. Can you do that for us?”
The bartender bent his head curtly and took the empty can from him and threw it into the trash. He turned to his bottles back there and selected a few and started mixing. Aaron’s brother turned back to her and rested his elbow on the bar with his drink in his hand.
“You know who I am, don’t you?”
“I know who you are. I don’t know your name.”
He extended his hand. She looked down at it. The nails were not those of a working man. They were neater than her own. His fingers bore heavy rings of gold and jewels winked there in the small light from the bar.
“I’m Cully,” he said. “I think you’ve met my mother. Arlene?”
She felt she had to take the hand. When it closed around hers it felt cool and clammy. She turned loose of it as soon as she could.
“I remember you,” she said.
“And I remember you.” He turned his face away for a moment. “How’s that drink coming back there, Harry?”
For answer the bartender set it in front of her. It was in a tall straight glass and it was colored like lemonade with the faintest pink cloud floating at the top of the glass. A long straw stuck out.
“Try it,” Cully said. “See what you think.”
“Do you know where Aaron is?” she said.
He didn’t answer at first. He just kept looking at her. She couldn’t take his eyes, so she looked away, back toward the rear door.
“He’ll be out after while,” he said. He urged her gently, a light push with his finger against her arm. “Try your drink. I had Harry make it special just for you.”
She picked it up. It was very cold in her hand. She bent forward and put her mouth around the straw and sipped at it. It was sweet and delicious, slightly sour, a kind of flavor that made you automatically want more. She took another big sip and set it back down.
“It’s good,” she said, looking at him again. “Thank you.”
“That’s the spirit. Drink up, kid.”
For want of something to say, something to do, she reached back into her purse and pulled out her cigarettes again. Before she even got one out of the pack he had struck his lighter and held it out. She dipped her head, nodded her thanks, lit it. Sat back and blew a long plume of white smoke toward the ceiling.
He was already close but he moved in a little closer. He held his glass just below his lips, looking over the rim of it at her. Something about her seemed to amuse him.
“I think I made a bad first impression on you,” he said. “Hate to get started off on the wrong foot like that.”
“What’d you want to hit Reena for?”
He laughed to himself. He looked down at his glass and swirled the ice in it, then took another sip. The song ended and another one started up. Fay turned her head for just a moment and saw another dancer move onto the stage and begin to move. She reached for the drink again.
Cully extended one finger and stroked the back of her hand. She pulled it back. He didn’t look up.
“Let me tell you some things about people in the world like Reena,” he said.
“You didn’t have to hit her in the eye.”
“Oh I didn’t?”
“It’s a chickenshit thing for a man to do.”
His finger crept over to her hand again. This time she held it still on her glass. The finger moved. It rubbed in circles while he talked.
“You can’t run a place like this and let people steal from you.”
“What’d she steal?”
“That bitch? Goddamn money, what do you think?”
“She said you took hers.”
He laughed again and twisted a ring. He looked around in the bar, a tiny smile fixed on his lips. He lifted a hand and waved at somebody, then turned back to her. The finger etched faint trails on her hand. She picked up the drink and took another sip.
“I didn’t take any money from her,” he said. “I just got what was mine. She didn’t want to give it up, so …” His words trailed off and then he said, “Put it like this, we had a little conversation about it. I probably should have kicked her ass a lot worse than I did.”
“What about Chuck? What if he’d been there?”
He chortled in his throat and turned the drink up and finished it and slammed the glass down on the bar loud enough to get the attention of the bartender, who didn’t do anything but reach and get it and pitch the ice toward the sink and start mixing another one.
“Where’s Aaron at?” she said.
“I can get you a good job,” he said. “Maybe some movie work later on. Get you in front of the camera, see how you do.”
She didn’t believe any of that shit. He’d gotten her name from Aaron, or from Reena, and he was just a mean man who hit women. And did worse than that to them maybe too. A man like her daddy.
The bartender set the fresh drink up on the bar and Cully put his hand around it. Fay stubbed her cigarette out. She was ready to get the hell out of here. Right now.
“Can you go tell Aaron I’m ready to go?” she said.
“Why don’t you go tell him yourself?” he said, and turned his back and walked away from her. She sat watching him. He stopped and looked back. The drink was in her hand and it was still cold and she took another sip from it. She could feel it hitting her already and maybe he saw something that caused him to come back to her. The music was still playing and she didn’t see how it could get any louder. It had begun to beat inside her head with a sound that made her ears throb, small percussions that were going off inside her brain, a beat that she could feel even in the pulse of her blood. Getting drunk. And not caring. The place you slip from where you know what is right and the place you slide into where you just don’t give a shit. Maybe that’s what he saw.
She looked at the drink. It was almost empty. She finished it off. Somehow he was beside her again and handing the glass back to the bartender. Later she would remember him filling it again and setting it before her, and she would remember the noise and the lights, but would have only the vaguest memory of Aaron coming out from behind the bar to where she sat, and fragments of a drunken conversation:
“Goddamn, what’s done happened to you?”
“Drunk,” she said. “Drunk and don’t give a rat’s ass. We got to go fuck, baby, we got to go eat, baby.”
And vaguely him getting his arm around her and hauling her off the stool, half carrying her toward the front door, his back under her hand wet with sweat. A drunken altercation, more heads busted and shoved into the front door, folks leaping out of the way and Aaron and his brother back in the middle of it while she sat at a table with her head lolling and trying to light a cigarette and firing up the wrong end and dropping it on the floor and watching the two of them knocking people over chairs and finally a shot fired into a wall or a ceiling and then somebody being kicked into what looked like death in the parking lot while she hung on to the El Camino and tried to hold herself up. And some place miles down a road where he held her head and helped her puke and getting it on her like that night in the trailer with that fishboy. Con-way and the Twitty Birds wailed on the tape deck. She lifted her eyes to the stars and saw them and the carpet of black in which they lay. Laying her head on his thigh and reading the green numbers on the dash and feeling him lift the beer to his mouth again and again, the pop of the lighter, the little red eye coming out as he turned it and the wind rushing in through the windows to cool her sweaty brow. Another time when she lay alone with the Chevy not moving and wondering where she was, a black place again, then waking up to hear clearly Merle Haggard singing her back into the sweet blackness. And she went to it gladly, whispering only one word just before: “Sam.”
SHE WOKE ON her bed at Arlene’s house with the curtains and blinds drawn and her head pounding. She felt between her legs. Something sticky, something wet. She was naked but for her blouse and bra. She pushed back the covers and sat up and held her head with her hands. She swung her legs over and felt it coming and barely made it to the bathroom on time, a cold sweat breaking out on her face while her stomach contracted and gave up what little it had in it, over and over, until the bitter taste of her bile rose up in her throat. On her knees she grabbed a water glass and filled it from the sink and then threw that up, too.
“God,” she said. “Fuck.”
She didn’t leave the bathroom until it had passed. Holding on to the door frame she spied her panties lying on the floor and went to them, picked them up, sniffed at the crotch as if that would tell her what had transpired. She got clean ones out of a drawer where she had stashed them and slipped them on and sat back down on the bed. She saw her skirt on a chair. She made no move to fetch it. Her purse was on the floor beside the door and she got it and sat back down with it, fingered the clasp and then opened it. Her cigarettes were in there, one left in the pack. She found her lighter but was loath to light the last one. Not until she had a cup of coffee at least. She put the cigarette back in the pack and set it down on the bedside table with the lighter.
She went back into the bathroom and brushed her teeth. After she got through with that she washed her face with cold water and combed her hair. She wanted a shower or a bath but she wanted coffee worse, so she found a pair of her shorts and put them on and slipped her feet into her sandals and got the cigarette and the lighter and opened the door to the hall. Dead silence. Somebody had taken her watch off her wrist and she went back to the room and found it on a cedar chest where a small lace doily sat beside small tin cups and antique truck toys. She picked it up and slipped it on. It was two-fifteen in the afternoon.
