Last Call Lounge

by Stuart Spears

  The smell of wet concrete, of sawdust and motor oil. We stood side by side in the garage door and watched as the rain poured off the roof in growing sheets. Frank finished his beer and put the bottle in the trash.

  “I’m gonna go back to bed,” he said. “Thanks for the beer.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Archer said. “Thanks for the help.”

  Frank grinned, the lopsided grin under his broken nose and bruised eyes, then trotted across the yard to my house. I took the last sip of my beer.

  “I’m gonna get going, too,” I said. When I shook Archer’s hand, it was cool and wet from the beer. “Thanks.”

  “Ain’t nothing,” he said. “You getting out of town?”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “Well, you be careful, Little John,” he said. “And watch out for dog-walking yuppies. They seem to give you trouble.”

  He gave my shoulder a punch and I stepped out of his garage and into the rain. I ran around the side of my house and jumped into my truck, cracked the window, and lit a cigarette. From where I sat, I could just see the light from Archer’s garage spill a yellow rectangle across his glossed driveway, although I couldn’t see into the garage. Then the rectangle slowly disappeared. Archer had closed the door. I put the truck in reverse and backed out.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The house next to the Fletchers house had been torn down, the trees cut and the lawn plowed up. I sat in my truck, finishing a cigarette, looking at the lot, now just a square of mud. Capped PVC pipes stuck up here and there like weeds. In this part of the neighborhood, the old bungalows were being torn down, replaced with two-to-a-lot townhomes or fat mansions that swelled from sidewalk to sidewalk.

  The empty lot made Worm’s mother’s house look stranded and exposed. The trees and fence that had long hidden the sides of the house were gone and the window unit air conditioners and crooked breaker boxes were laid bare. I stepped out of my truck and trotted to the gate.

  The Fletchers house was a brick bungalow, the brick painted over yellow years ago. The windows were boarded up with particle board. I climbed the cracked concrete steps of the front porch. The door was open. I leaned my head in a knocked on the frame.

  “Mrs. Fletcher?”

  “John,” she said from somewhere inside.

  I stepped in. What little light there was in the room filtered in through cracks and seams in the boards over the windows and had a thick, red glow.

  “Sorry I didn’t call,” I said. My eyes were adjusting. I sensed she was sitting on the couch, so I made my way to the chair on the opposite wall. I found it with my foot and sat on the arm.

  “It’s nice of you to come by,” she said. “Gabriel was just packing up the last of my things.” She was sitting, I could see now, with her purse in her lap. A suitcase was at her feet. Someone, Gabriel probably, was banging and shuffling around in a back room. He was Worm’s older brother, older by ten years, and I had always heard more of him than seen him.

  “It’s been a long time,” I said and I knew, with a sudden certainty, exactly when I had last been here, in her house, in her living room. He had called me, a Saturday afternoon the summer that Sarah had left with Jacob. I was alone in the cool blue living room of my father’s house.

  “I have Astros tickets,” he said. I had spent the morning, dumb and gray, on the couch, only getting up to smoke a cigarette on the porch. “They’re good seats. Great seats, I mean, really.”

  And I thought, what the fuck? Why not? Why not spend the afternoon getting fucked up on seven dollar beers and whatever Worm had in his pockets? No one was waiting for me to take my kid somewhere, no one was expecting me at the bar. What the fuck, I thought. Fuck it all.

  “Cool,” I said. “Pick me up.”

  It was cool for June and the dome of the stadium was open. Worm’s seats were great, lower level but high enough up to be under the shade of the mezzanine. We got tall Bud Lights in plastic cups every time the beer man came past.

  “This is fucking awesome,” Worm exclaimed several times, slapping me on the shoulder like we were in a commercial for those Bud Lights.

  “You got anything with you?” I asked him, leaning in close even though no one would have heard me over the crowd noise. He nodded and slipped a baggie from his pocket into my hand. I put my beer in the cup holder in front of me and climbed the steps to find the bathroom.

  After the sunlight of the ball game, the white glare of the bathroom made my eyes ache. I waited for a stall, my hand clenched around the bag in my pocket. In the stall, I lifted the seat of the toilet, for some reason feeling the need to promote the illusion that I was in there to piss. I faced the toilet, opened the bag, and rubbed probably a line’s worth of Worm’s coke on my gums.

  Then I walked back to our seats, everything brighter now and more solid. The sunlight sat on the outfield like gold.

  “This is fucking awesome,” I said as I slapped Worm on the back. I was mocking him, but he didn’t know it. He smiled at me, took the baggie, and headed up the stairs.

  I seemed to have lost an inning or so. I sipped my beer through my teeth, stared at the scoreboard but couldn’t seem to get the score.Then Worm was at my side again.

  “I’m glad you came out today, Little John,” he said. His hand was on my shoulder and he was making his serious face. “I was getting worried about you since Sarah. You know.” A shot of annoyance ran across my back, but the coke and the beer and the sun sitting on the outfield brushed it away.

  “Well, thanks,” I said. Not sure where to look, I looked at my beer. Thin foam swirled in a circle and I realized that I didn’t even know how Worm knew Sarah had left.

  Another inning passed. Worm and I took turns sneaking the baggie to the bathroom until the coke was gone. The game was just a white glare and the occasional loud crack that shot us all to our feet. Then we looked up and it was the seventh and the Astros were down by five. At the bottom of the seventh, they stop serving beer.

  “Well, shit,” Worm said. “I’ve got beer at home. We can hang out there.”

  We climbed the concrete stadium steps into the cool of the walkway. Sweat stuck my shirt to my back. Worm put his arm around my shoulder.

  “Awesome,” he said.

  As we walked down the ramp and to the street, Worm talked, about the game, about the day. His habit, after baseball games, was to recount what he considered the best or worst Astros plays, in tiny detail, even if I had been standing next to him. Even if I had seen the exact same play myself. The beer and the coke had made me deliciously numb and I let his prattling slip past me.

  Then, at the corner where his truck was parked, he was holding my shoulder and giving me serious face again. I looked at my feet.

  “Seriously,” he was saying. “You need anything, let me know. Seriously. Anything.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Thanks.”

  In his stupid, huge truck, raised 100 feet above the ground, Bon Jovi thumping from behind the seat, the coke started to wear off, the beer started to tighten my scalp. My shoulders clenched and I realized I hadn’t had a cigarette since the start of the game. I lit one and rolled down the window and Worm rolled his down and turned up the music.

  His house, back then, was pinched between two other houses. It was dark, then, too, blissfully dark and blissfully empty. Worm went to the kitchen and came back with two cold cans of beer. He sat on the couch, put his arm across the back. I opened my beer and stood in front of him.

  “You got any more of the other stuff?” I asked.

  He sipped his beer and shifted his weight.

  “No,” he said. “No.” He took another sip of beer. “Look,” he said. “I’m staying here for a while, with my mom. Just for a while, to help her with the rent, you know? And she doesn’t want me doing any of that.” He sipped again. “Not that she said anything, you know. But I thought, while I’m here, I’d cool it on dealing. For a while, you know.”

  “I�
�m not talking about dealing, Worm,” I said. My body was vibrating, like I’d just gotten off a long train ride. “I’m just talking about some for us. Just to keep going.”

  “Yeah, well,” he said. “That was the last of what I had. And I’d have to call somebody and I already told him I was gonna take a break for a while, too. And, I mean, my mom.”

  I laughed.

  “Jesus, Worm, how old are you?” I sat down on the arm of the chair, this same chair I was sitting on this day, the day I should have been evacuating from a major hurricane. That day, after the baseball game, I sat on the same arm of the same chair and made a face. “’My mom,’” I said in a grating voice.

  That was about all the convincing it took. And then we were at the Galaxy shooting pool. And then we were at my bar, after hours, drinking draft beer and doing lines right off the bar top. And then I woke up, thumb-tounged and cracked and alone in the cool blue of my father’s house.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Fletcher,” I said. “I really am.”

  In the dark, I could see her sigh, see her body sag. Her face was still mostly shadow, but it wasn’t hard to see that she was crying.

  “I remember when your mother died,” she said. He voice was deep, a smoker’s voice, with a South Texas accent. “Sorry to bring it up, but Ray’s death has made me think of things like that.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about her lately, too.”

  “Could you have stopped her, do you think?” she asked. “If you had known she was going to do it?”

  I sat back in the chair and struggled for a moment to clear my thoughts and put together the right thing to say. The room seemed darker.

  Then she said, “He loved you, John.”

  “I know.” I did.

  “Sometimes you were probably his only friend,” she said.

  I closed my eyes. I couldn’t, for a moment, feel anything, not my body, not the chair. Then, for the first time since my father had died, I cried.

  “I wasn’t a very good friend, I guess,” I said. I sat in the dark and cried and she was silent. “I could have been and I wasn’t.” I wiped at my eyes with my fingers.

  Mrs. Fletcher set her purse on the couch next to her. I thought she was going to stand, but she just wiped her face with her hands.

  “Why did you come today, John?” she asked.

  I stopped crying and tried to study her face. Gabriel was still banging around somewhere behind me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. My throat was dry. “I guess,” I said, “I guess I just wanted to tell you that I’m sorry.”

  Now she stood. She picked up her purse and held it in both hands in front of her.

  “I need to finish preparing,” she said.

  I stood and she held out her arm, leading me to the door. I crossed the dark room toward the gray light of the still-open door. Outside, the weather had started to turn. We were between arms of the storm and now the rain was a thick mist and the sky glowed green. Mrs. Fletcher followed me onto the porch.

  In the sunlight, I finally saw her clearly. She was tired, obviously, and her eyes were red. She had a mannish head and deep green eyes and her face was more lined than I remembered. I tried one more time.

  “I am sorry,” I said.

  She held her purse in both hands and stood in the threshold of the door.

  “I appreciate that you came by, John,” she said, looking past me. “I really do. But I can’t forgive you yet.”

  I stepped off the porch and walked on the flagstones through the yard and out the gate. When I got to my truck, I turned, but the door to the Fletchers’ house was closed.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I drove back to the house to get Ruby, then drove the back roads out to Sarah’s house in the Heritage. I took the back roads this time because the main highways were clogged with those trying to get out of town ahead of the hurricane. The sky was flat gray and low.

  Ruby sat silently as I told her everything. She looked at me a few times as I explained everything I knew, everything I understood, but mostly she stared out the window. Her face grew more pale. She pressed herself harder and harder into the passenger door, farther away from me. As I talked, she sunk. She collapsed. She stared out the window and tears soaked her cheeks.

  At Sarah’s, I sat for a moment in my truck, the air conditioner whirring. The wind was starting to strafe through the tree tops and leaves and paper swirled down the street. I pulled my cigarettes out, then tossed them in the glove compartment. I left the car running. Ruby was still silent.

  Sarah opened the door. She had not put on makeup and her morning straw hair was pulled in a loose ponytail off her neck.

  The lights in the house were on against the dim gray of the day.

  “Little John,” she sighed.

  “Hi,” I said. My eyelids were heavy and thick. I rubbed them and was surprised to find tears.

  Suddenly, I wanted to tell her everything, about Worm and Tracy and how I had caused their deaths. About the cocaine and the money and the gun and everything. But I couldn’t. For the first time in a long time, I truly wanted to share my pain with her. But I knew that, if I did, she would try to talk me out of what I had to do. She would want to apply the rules of a logical world to the moment I found myself in.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, rubbing my face with my hands. “I came to say goodbye to Jake.”

  “We are leaving in five minutes,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  Sarah gave me an old stare, then stepped out of the doorway to let me in. The house was evenly chilled. Sarah led me down the hall to Jacob’s room. He was sitting on his bed with a scattering of toys around him. A rolling Star Wars suitcase was stuffed and propped up by the door.

  I sat down on the bed next to Jacob. Sarah stood just inside the door, watching me. Then, in a last, generous gesture, she left me alone with my son.

  “What are you doing, kiddo?” I asked. Jacob was touching each toy around him, as though he were counting them. He did not turn to me.

  “Jacob,” I said, scratching at my neck. “I came to say goodbye.”

  “Okay,” he said. He had a Playmobile horse in his hands and he was turning it over and over, inspecting it from all angles.

  “You and mom are going to Austin,” I tried again. “I have to stay here and take care of some things.”

  “Okay,” he said again. He picked up another toy, a wind-up duck, and studied it, too. For just a second, I felt relief flash across my back – I had said goodbye and he’d heard it. I got up to leave.

  In that moment, though, I thought of my mother. It was a memory I hadn’t bothered with in a long time. She was sitting at the kitchen table in our little yellow apartment. It was a morning when I was nine. She was drinking coffee and I was trying to sneak past her out the door.

  Life with my mother had, by then, become weighty and gray and I had structured my life around avoiding her. I dressed in the bathroom with the door shut tight. I stayed late after school so I missed dinner. In the mornings, the school bus stopped directly outside the front door of our apartment building, so, if I timed everything just right, I could slip out and onto the bus and not have to say a word to her.

  Much later, of course, I would realize that she had been depressed, but at the time, all I knew was that her need was crushing me and I had to get out. When she did happen to catch me, she’d grip my hand and raise her wet brown eyes to me.

  “Mijo,” she’d say and I’d squirm and look at the floor. She’d grip my hand, sometimes pull me in for a kiss, sometimes just stare.

  So, this one morning, she was sitting at the kitchen table in our little yellow apartment. My father must have been asleep in the room in the back. She had a cup of coffee on the table in front of her. I peeked through the kitchen door and shouldered my backpack, ready to bolt.

  I put my eyes down and made it almost to the front door when I heard a clanging so loud it made me drop my
backpack. I stopped to pick it up and looked back at my mother. She was still in her seat, rapping the side of her coffee mug with her spoon. When I met her eyes, a weak smile came to her lips.

  “Mijo,” she said and held out her hand.

  I picked up my backpack and crossed to her. She took my hand and pulled me into the seat next to her. I could smell the coffee. Her eyes were red. She took a deep breath.

  “Do you want to know why I’m crying, Juanito?” she asked with a small choke.

  I hated her for that question. At that moment, and for most of the rest of my life, I hated her for it. At that moment, I felt fear and disgust crawl down my spine. I looked at the floor.

  “Okay,” I said.

  She held my hand until I looked into her face. She was a beautiful woman, with large black eyes and thick hair that flowed like black liquid across her shoulders and down her back. She stared at me, her lips pursed.

  Then she gave me a small smile. She let go of my hand. I felt a wash of cool where the air-conditioned air hit the sweat on my palm. She put her hands in her lap and smiled up at me.

  “It’s okay, Juanito,” she said. “I’m okay. Go to school.”

  I turned and ran. Out the front door, down the dim stairwell, past the mailboxes, and out into the yellow-blue morning. The bus wasn’t there yet, so I just kept running.

  I hated her for that moment, for taking my hand and then for letting me go, for my entire life. Hated the manipulation, the burden.

  But, this day, standing in Jacob’s bedroom in his grandparents’ house, I realized what my mother had done. Or tried to do. She was weak and had been her weakest when she asked me that awful question. But when she let go of my hand, when she let me leave, she was trying to be the adult. She was trying to shield me from the stupid, petty, meanness of my father. Of life. Of her own soul. One last time, she was trying to be my mother.

  Jacob was on his bed. Stuffed animals lined one side of the bedcover, plastic cars and horses lined the other. The ceiling fan turned below the blue ceiling.