by Dan Chaon
“I don’t know,” Troy said. “Just curious.”
“A trip down memory lane,” Lisa Fix said, and pinched her mouth a bit. “I knew your wife, Carla, too, as a matter of fact. She and Chrissy were seniors when I was a sophomore. I can’t say that I remember ever speaking to them. Why? Is something on your mind?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He looked briefly at her eyes, which were sharply attentive, and then he looked back down. He thought to say Chrissy was the first girl I ever kissed, but what would be the point of that? “Just thinking about stuff,” he said.
“Well . . .” Lisa said. “Look, Chrissy Hart slit her wrists in her mom’s bathtub, and Carla has a serious drug problem and hasn’t been heard from in months. I don’t see much that’s positive that can be gleaned from a discussion of those people.” She cleared her throat, and her gaze hooked into him. “Why don’t we think about the future instead of the past? Did you fill out that sheet I gave you?”
He grimaced. He still had the mimeographed piece of paper she had given him, onto which he was supposed to write down ten “short-term goals” and ten “long-term goals,” but he didn’t know where he had put the thing. He hadn’t filled it out.
“What about Loomis?” he said. “You said last week that you’d look into seeing if I could talk to him on the phone. That’s one short-term goal we can talk about.”
Lisa looked at him heavily, as if he were a student who had given the wrong answer, even after she had coached and coached. “Well,” she said, “I did look into that. And. Loomis’s guardian has refused your request. She thinks that it’s best if Loomis settles in awhile after . . . his trauma. I can’t say that I don’t agree.”
“Fuck,” Troy said, softly. He reddened—he could feel his temper growing, and as he swallowed it his eyes fishbowled with tears of frustration. He sat there, his face impassive, and drew his eyelids down slowly. He lowered his face and pressed his thumbs against his eye ducts for a moment.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Well then. Let’s move on.”
——
At three-thirty he telephoned the headquarters, to let them know that he was traveling to his place of employment. The alarm on his ankle would be turned off for a brief time—ten minutes or so—to allow him to drive the few miles to the bar, to the Stumble Inn. Sitting in his car, he imagined himself as a red blinking dot, stuttering across the screen of someone’s computer, watched, monitored. Early on, Lisa Fix had suggested that he think about another job—for example, working for the county’s organization for the mentally retarded, for which he would be paid for thirty-five hours, minimum wage, with five hours going to his community service—but he’d stood his ground on this. He had worked as a bartender for years, he said. He was good at his job. It was his livelihood, the one thing he felt confident he did well, and this was the one thing that Eric Schriffer had done for him. They couldn’t force him to change jobs. They couldn’t completely unmake his life.
“Well then,” she said. “I can put you on a cleanup crew for your community service. I was trying to give you a better option.”
“I don’t want to quit my job,” he said. “And I don’t like retarded people. What good is minimum wage shit work going to do me?”
“Okay then,” Lisa Fix said. She gave him another one of her older sister stares, one that said: I can’t believe you’re so stupid.
Once he was at work, he called the number again, to assure them that he had arrived. He recited his offender number several times, and finally, the man at the other end of the phone said, “Okay. Check. I’ve entered you into the database.”
“Thank you,” Troy said, and glanced up to see a middle-aged drunk staring at him. The man had a craggy, oblong face, vaguely like Abraham Lincoln, and his drooping, dim-witted eyes examined Troy for what seemed like a long time. Then Abe smiled, his mouth turned up in a gentle, satisfied bow.
“They got you, huh?” the man said, and widened his grin to show a row of surprisingly large white teeth: dentures. “They really got you now!”
“Yes,” Troy said politely, but didn’t smile. “They got me.”
——
Crystal was behind the bar, and glanced at him sympathetically as he slid open the cooler and began to count the bottled beer. “Hey, babe,” she said. “How’re you doing?”
“Mm,” he grunted, and wrote on the back of a napkin the numbers of beers that he needed to bring up from the basement. “Slow day?” he said.
She nodded, her hands working in a bus tub of soapy water. “Terrible slow,” she said. “For a Friday, especially.” She brought up a beer glass and rinsed it under the tap.
“What’s the situation with Honest Abe over there?” Troy said. He gestured with his chin toward the man with the dentures, who was sitting by the telephone, staring at it placidly.
“Oh, boy,” Crystal said. “I don’t know where he came from. He’s been here since this morning. He’s about eight or nine beers in.”
“Well,” Troy said. “Ring up his tab before you close out. I’m cutting him off.”
She widened her eyes at him, as she always did when she thought he was being harsh or abrupt. She had large blue eyes, and straight, thick hair the color of cedarwood, a round pretty face. She was a nice girl. “The Mormon Chick,” Ray used to call her, because her parents were supposedly Mormons from Wyoming. She wasn’t religious herself as far as Troy knew—she worked as a bartender, after all—but she exuded a certain kind of goodness. There was a kindhearted innocence to her: She worried about other people’s sadness and suffering and wanted to do what was right. She once confided to Troy that she thought people, all people, were basically good at heart, and Troy had looked at her wryly.
“I read that book, too,” he said. “You know what? That Anne Frank—the Nazis killed her anyway.”
She had argued with him a little back then, but now she said nothing. She cut off President Lincoln without protest, shrugging. “Vivian’s here” was all she said, and Troy let out a slow sigh. Vivian was the owner, and she frequently got angry when Troy decided to refuse to serve a customer. “You’re not the beer police, Troy,” Vivian had said on a number of occasions. “If they’re not causing trouble, they can drink until they’re passed out on the floor as far as I’m concerned.”
Troy slid open the ice cooler to check the status, to see if he needed to bring some more from the ice machine in the basement. “What’s she doing here?” he said, frowning. “I thought she was taking the day off.”
“She’s training a new guy,” Crystal said. “She hired a new cook. They’re down in the office now, I guess, filling out some forms or something.”
“Hm,” Troy said. “Is something up with Junie?”
“He’s sick again,” Crystal said, and pursed her mouth. “I feel so sorry for him!” she said. “He’s old. Do you know he’s almost seventy? He shouldn’t have to be working all the time.”
“Oh come on,” Troy said. “He likes to work.” But the truth was that Junie the cook had been looking worse and worse lately, though he’d never looked exactly healthy. He was a small, wiry Sioux man, with deeply melancholy eyes and a permanent, exaggerated frown, and lately, every time Troy looked at him, Junie seemed to send out waves of pessimism. What if he ended up like Junie, Troy would find himself thinking. Junie, who had been in and out of jail, who smelled of old man b.o., tobacco, and stale beer, was now sick and probably dying. It occurred to him that Junie had once been his age. It occurred to him that a man could live out his last days in a bar like Vivian’s Stumble Inn, that you could live for years and years and years with nothing at all, and still exist.
“Geez,” Troy said at last, trailing these thoughts. “How sick is he?”
“I don’t know. But he’s in the hospital,” Crystal said. “I might go visit him this weekend. Bring him some flowers or something. Do you want to come?” And then she stopped herself awkwardly. “Sorry,” she said.
He was silent. These small, h
umiliating moments were not the worst thing about his “house arrest,” but they were steady and goading, the most constant. He smiled at Crystal, but it felt more like a wince. “I have other plans this weekend,” he said, ironically, even as she gazed at him with her large, sympathetic eyes.
“Are you okay, Troy?” she said. “I mean, I know you don’t want to talk about it, but . . .” She sighed, made a flustered motion with her hand. “It must hurt you,” she said. “You limp.”
He felt himself twitch, involuntarily. “No, not really,” he said. “It’s not tight or anything.”
“That’s good,” she said. She looked down at his pant leg, to where the anklet monitor was discreetly covered. “I just meant, well. Spiritually. It must be painful. It’s a very cruel thing for them to do. To put that thing on you.”
“Not really,” Troy said, and he looked away from her, smiling tightly. The anklet felt warm and heavy. “It’s not a big deal,” he said. He shut the sliding door of the ice cooler, decisively. “I hardly notice it.”
——
By the time Vivian came upstairs with the new guy, Abraham Lincoln had left peaceably and the bar was empty. Troy was reading the local newspaper, moodily thinking of his own recent appearance on page two. When someone went to jail in St. Bonaventure, everyone was aware of it. “Arrests” were written up on the same page as the obituaries and birth announcements and weddings. The write-up on Troy had been right under a big, grinning picture of a girl he’d gone to high school with. Beneath the descriptions of the girl’s bridal gown and her proud parents, Troy had found himself summed up in a few sentences. “Area man. Possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute. Court date set.” Today, he saw, there was another birth, another death, a drunk-driving arrest.
Vivian came up behind him. She stood there, her chin lifted, watching over his shoulder as he read. He finished the obituary before he looked up.
“Is there something you want me to do?” Troy said.
She made a wave of her hand, as if surprised. “Oh, I wouldn’t want to take you away from your newspaper!” she said. She was a raspy-voiced woman in her late fifties, with a blond, steel-wool perm and a stout, shapely figure, which she accented with tight jeans and western blouses. Troy was used to her attitude of resigned suspicion and impatience, as if her main job was to keep him out of trouble, to ensure that he didn’t slack off too much or sneak drinks when she wasn’t looking. Mostly, he thought, this was just an act. He was a good employee, and she knew it. But it was a role she enjoyed playing, and to please her Troy began to take the liquor bottles off the shelf and dust them.
“I just hired a young guy to work in the kitchen,” she said. “He’s going to be starting tonight, so you’ll have to keep an eye on him. You can manage that, can’t you?”
“I hope it doesn’t get too busy,” Troy said.
Vivian cocked her head. “Well, if it does, it will be a good test for him. He has a lot of experience. He worked in Chicago for years.”
“Is that right?” Troy said. Vivian’s glasses hung from a beaded chain around her neck, and she lifted them to her face, hovering over the newspaper Troy had been reading, scanning it. “What’s he coming here for, from Chicago?”
“Fed up with city life, he says,” Vivian murmured. “There were some tragic circumstances, I gathered, but I didn’t want to pry.”
“Mm,” Troy said. He continued to run his wipe over the glass bodies of the liquor bottles, frowning. “So what about Junie?” he said.
“Junie had another heart attack,” Vivian said irritably, as if Troy were trying to make her feel ashamed. “What do you think I should do? I don’t know when, or if, he’ll be back. I can’t close down the bar to wait and see if he gets well. And I’m damned tired of listening to you bitch every time I ask you to cook for me.”
“Okay!” Troy said. “I was just asking.” He watched as Vivian lit a cigarette and breathed a stream of smoke down onto the obituary notice.
“Just asking,” she muttered. “I don’t need you and Crystal guilting me about poor old Junie, that’s for sure. I’ve got enough troubles as it is.” She gave him a hard stare, but then they both composed themselves into politeness as the young guy she’d hired came up the stairs.
“Hello, Jonah!” Vivian cried, and Troy watched grimly as she switched into warm-and-friendly mode: the disarming, gold-tipped teeth in her smile, the crinkly eyes, the endearments—“honey,” “sweetheart,” etcetera. She did this with everyone she hired. For the first week or so, she treated them like she was a kindergarten teacher and they were her prized students. And then they lost their charm. She became a disappointed mother, ironic and long-suffering, tolerating their lack of competence and clucking critically even when she was satisfied with them.
“Hi,” the guy said shyly. “I’m Jonah Doyle.” He glanced at Vivian, and stood there awkwardly, his long arms limp at his sides before she introduced them. The guy kept his head down, not even looking Troy in the eye, but then when Troy offered his hand, Jonah clasped it in both his palms, squeezing it surprisingly hard. “I’m really pleased to meet you,” Jonah said, with a nervous, earnest enthusiasm, as if Troy were someone he had heard of, someone famous.
“Yeah,” Troy said. He shifted a bit, uncertainly. A narrow strip of raised scar tissue ran from the edge of the kid’s eye, across his cheek. This might have seemed threatening on someone else. But with this guy it just seemed disconcerting. He had a freckled, boyish face, with round cheeks and carefully combed and parted blond-brown hair, and the scar was like an out-of-place appendage—a toe instead of a finger, a misaligned ear, an empty eye socket. It was hard to keep from staring.
“I’m really looking forward to working with you,” Jonah said, and Troy nodded slowly, trying to avoid the guy’s face. Jonah was dressed up like a churchgoer in a button-up shirt and khaki slacks, but then for some reason he had on heavy black work boots.
“Yeah,” Troy said. “I’m looking forward to working with you, too.” He glanced over to Vivian, who smiled benignly. If she noticed something strange in the air, her expression didn’t betray it.
——
At least, as it turned out, the guy was competent. When things picked up around 6:30, Troy was fairly amazed at how much more efficient Jonah was than Junie. Troy would thrust an order through the little window that separated the bar from the kitchen and the next time he passed by a plate would have appeared—cheese sticks or Buffalo wings or nachos, arranged neatly and even garnished. He glanced back in the kitchen and watched briefly as Jonah’s long, nimble fingers arranged deep-fried jalapeño poppers in a circle over a bed of greens—something Junie would have never bothered with. Junie would have tossed the poppers onto a bare plate once they had cooled off a bit. He certainly wouldn’t have fanned them out like petals, or added a little side cup of nacho cheese in the center, as Jonah did. “You’re getting fancy, eh?” Doug Lepucki said, grinning as Troy set the plate down on the bar, and Troy shrugged. “New cook,” he said, and a popeyed young guy leaning on the bar with a clutched twenty-dollar bill ogled Doug’s plate and said, “I’ll take one of those things, plus a pitcher.”
In his previous life, Troy would have been pleased. People tipped extra on food tabs, and he was under no obligation to share tips with the cook. It was surprisingly busy—the Stumble Inn had never been a particularly popular Friday-night gathering place, but by nine there may have been more than forty patrons packed into the small bar, and he was moving fast, pouring beers and pitchers and fixing drinks, a permanent sheen of sweat on his forehead. He had to empty the tip jar because it got too full.
But the truth was, he felt a little unnerved. It was a rowdy crowd, and the chimes of group laughter, the screams of delighted women, the bellows of asserting men, the general cacophony of drunken voices—the steady rising and falling of human chattering hooked into his spine.
The bar was too full of people for comfort, he thought. Too full of people who knew him
, or who knew of him, or who had heard from an acquaintance about his situation. He didn’t go out from behind the bar to clear tables of plates or glasses, feeling self-conscious of the monitor beneath his pant leg. A boisterous group of young men in their early twenties, apparently friends of Ray’s, were the most troublesome. “Hey, bartender!” they called. “A round of bong hits for the boys over here, bartender!” and a flock of har-har-hars rose up from their table like crows.
——
What could he say? This was part of his punishment, this humiliation, and all he could do was frown stoically. He thought of Lisa Fix: “I wouldn’t say that this is the ideal job for someone in your situation,” she had said.
He was aware of Jonah, too. Jonah’s eyes on him. He’d turn to look over his shoulder and the prickly feeling on the back of his neck would intensify for a moment. Here was Jonah, his nose and mouth shadowed, peering out from the kitchen as Troy tilted the edge of a glass against the flow of beer. Troy filled the glass, letting the foam fall away and slide down the outside edge of the mug. He looked over his shoulder again, just in time to catch Jonah gazing intently at his back. Jonah smiled, shifted his eyes. “What?” Troy said, but Jonah didn’t hear him over the general noise of the bar and Troy was too busy to bother repeating himself.
But it continued to grate on him as the night wore on. Every time he turned to look, there was Jonah, intent in his surveillance, then pretending to glance away as if he hadn’t been staring. It made him aware of himself as an object of observation, in general. There were the patrons who knew, watching as he limped along with his hidden parole anklet, turning to their friends to remark, grinning with gossip, as he passed. There was the monitor signal he was emitting, even now. There was the black book, the “itinerary,” which Lisa Fix would comment on, prodding the mundane and intimate details of his life, as if it were all typical, as if she could predict the rest of his life with a shrug of her shoulders. All of this settled over him heavily, and when he looked over to see Jonah with his neck craned and his lips parted, scrutinizing Troy’s preparation of a round of Jagermeister shots as if it were a magic show, he turned with exasperation to face the guy. What in the fuck are you staring at, he started to say.
