The Last of the Smoking Bartenders

by C. J. Howell

  Pammy rushed to Junior’s side and laid her weight against Chevis, holding his arms to the wall.

  Don’t fucking move. You’ll make it worse.

  Fuck that, pull me off. Chevis spat.

  Jimmy nudged Junior aside and put a hand on Chevis’s shaved head.

  She’s right. Be still. We’re going to pull you off but we have to leave the arrow in.

  Give me a hit.

  Junior went to get the glass pipe and held it to Chevis’s lips. He lit the bowl underneath and rotated it back and forth as Chevis inhaled. Pammy braced herself against the wall and gained leverage with her elbow and yanked out the bolt with Jimmy holding onto Chevis. Chevis staggered forward with the bolt in place below the clavicle.

  Give me another hit.

  Junior handed him the pipe.

  Lorne stroked his beard and grinned madly looking down at Frank lying on the floor and then at Chevis standing up and then back again. Ashley wordlessly disappeared into the back bedroom. She went directly to the mirrored floor length closet doors facing a bare mattress and box spring. Behind a tangle of plastic coat hangers she scooped up a pile of rubber banded rolls of bills and a black 9mm and tucked them into a tiny velvet backpack with shoe string shoulder straps. She slipped back into the box car living room as they were pulling Chevis from the wall. She looked at Junior but spoke to the others.

  Take me with you.

  Chapter 13

  Nineteen-year-old girls smell like hope. He had been good looking once, was good looking although he never knew what to do with it, didn’t know how good looking people were supposed to act, but he used to see it in the eyes of some women, a penetrating look that just couldn’t have been given to everyone, to the world at large. How to respond to such a look? He had never been taught, or had never learned. Now, at some level, he knew rot had set in. Not just in the obvious places, the gums, the feet, in between the toes, but deeper, internal perhaps. And yet he was suddenly certain that he would know what to do if he was ever given that look again.

  He woke next to the recycle bin in the alley, his head momentarily stuck to it, not melted to it from the heat but affixed by superheated beverage remnants that had impossibly vaporized and condensed on the outside of the plastic bin with their sticky qualities intact. A liquid outflow trickled to the center of the alley where it pooled and steamed, refusing to evaporate entirely, a beer and wine reduction simmering on one hundred and thirty degree asphalt. The smell congealed in the humid air, which was thick as pea soup. The larval life, he did not care to think about.

  He got to his feet with less pain than expected, the sauna of the alley loosening his joints to rubber. He emerged from the mouth of the alley to a bright street awash in sunlight. The bars were shuttered, but the sidewalks were crowded. Students, backpacks slung, migrated in the same general direction. The human flow had its own gravitational pull. The momentum carried him to the ASU campus, broad sidewalks, neat squares of green lawn and manicured rock gardens and desert ’scapes, sandstone academic buildings and institutional dorms. But the sickness from the night before was still with him. He could see nothing but the women. The girls. It was like entering a world he didn’t know existed. A world told about by drunks in bars, and foretold in the most firebrand Southern Baptist churches and beer commercials. These were simply not the girls he had gone to college with. Their bodies were different, toned and tight, shiny and hard, tanned or alabaster, with good posture walking with purpose, straight ahead, shoulders back and bare in spaghetti straps, blanketed and caressed by silky hair that left a trail of perfume in its wake to do its work on the world. Calf muscles. Bellies everywhere, taut and muscular or young and doughy, they all looked good exposed to the sun between shirt and skirt. The thigh had an entirely different shape then it used to. The secret milky flesh of the dreams of Tom’s adolescence replaced by the firm smooth legs of athletes. He drank them in, their health, their life, their innate goodness, and he desired to touch it, hold it, to know it was real. How could the world go on with these creatures? How did it not grind to a halt in admiration, in desire, in madness? He wanted to touch, to feel. It would break every moral he held and lived by, would break the law. But he could do it. Just reach his hand out. In this very instant nothing was stopping him from grabbing that ocean of skin. Is this how men became rapists? The lack of money had made him an outcast, a leper, untouchable, but had it made him something worse? There were no more lines. Somewhere on the hot and desolate road they had melted away. Where nothing was possible, everything was possible. A girl strode by, white halter top and a frayed jean skirt, a rope of straight blonde hair slung over her long thin neck. He held out his arm, birdlike, a parrot doubtful about the strength of a skinny branch. Could he stop himself? How did he know what he was? Was one not a murderer until one murders? Or was one always a murderer, the act latent, the committal of the act coloring everything that had gone before? She walked past him, elegant shoulder blades visible though the thin sheer fabric. He watched her until she disappeared in the crowd, his arm still half-cocked, as if asking a question to the air.

  He felt faint, dehydrated, delusional perhaps. He walked back to the Circle K and bought a bottle of water for $1.89. No food. He reemerged uncomfortable. His reflection in the tinted window revealed a red-faced stranger, skin peeling and blistered. He wanted to hide. It is a problem of the homeless. Nowhere to go to hide, to rest, to regroup. With nowhere to go he began walking. Soon he came to train tracks and began to follow them instead. At least he was off the street, out of view. The tracks cut through the city but in most places cinderblock walls backed the yards of houses and buildings to dampen the noise from locomotives. It formed a tunnel through urbana, a hobo highway he thought, as he walked on the tracks, rust brown colored above crushed gravel and weeds. When the tracks crossed city streets, the drawbridge gates open, he shuffled across dodging traffic. The tracks traversed through neighborhoods and industrial warehouse districts with no discernible pattern or concern. The tracks were here long before the city he guessed. When he had just about stopped paying attention to what he was doing and had settled into the draining numbness of the march, thankful that mind had separated from body, feeling a certain elation, like a runner’s high, conscious of nothing except the sweat and a high altitude buzzing in his brain and a fuzziness of vision, his detachment was so complete that at first he didn’t take the vibrations of the tracks for what they were, an oncoming train. A thunderous blast of the whistle jolted him from the tracks and sent him rolling into a ditch.

  Chapter 14

  US 62, outside of Battleboro, Arkansas.

  Soft evening air smoothed the edges out of the day. A layer of pink hung above the treeline. A light mist permeated lush green marsh grass and hovered indecisively in tall reeds with white tipped cattails. Somewhere nearby a rooster crowed. Traffic was sparse on the two lane road. His boots on the faded yellow line, kicking pebbles off of the narrow shoulder. The confused lowing of cows carried on the breeze from an unseen pasture. The smell of manure and fresh cut hay bales after an afternoon rain.

  A figure walked along the road in the direction he had come from. Heavy plodding steps like a pack mule, a hitchhiker, a pilgrim, or a prisoner. He kept a steady unhurried gait. A pickup truck approached preceded by the rumble of a V8 with at least one piston misfiring. The man turned to face it with an outstretched arm. The truck didn’t slow down for the man, so Tom didn’t bother sticking his own thumb out, just watched the truck pass by. The truck flicked on its headlights as if suddenly reminded that daylight was fading.

  The man put his arm down and kept walking. No other cars came. When he reached where Tom was standing, he stopped and put his pack down and stretched.

  Evening.

  Evening.

  Tom smiled, his pack shifting awkwardly on his back with over a hundred dollars in change in a thick sack at the bottom.

  Not many cars.

  Not many.

  It took a moment to adj
ust in the dimming light but Tom could see the man was a young man, maybe a kid with a three week beard. What came off as long hair was really just three weeks late on a haircut. He was thin, but not hungry. Dark blue t-shirt, good quality, thick, not made to shrink. His khakis were made out of some modern polymer, thin but light, drawstrings at the ankles to form a seal over the boots to keep the bugs out. He took out a joint from a crumpled pack of American Spirits and lit it, took three drags scoffing on the side of the road and offered it to Tom. Tom held up his hand, declining with a grin. It was long before he had lost his discipline. The kid gave him a suit-yourself-smile.

  Where you headed?

  West.

  How about you?

  The end of the Earth.

  Tom watched him with a patient look.

  Tierra del Fuego.

  An eighteen-wheeler rattled by with the air brake on. Neither man noticed.

  Tierra del Fuego. You mean in South America?

  As far as you can go.

  Sounds like a long way.

  It must be.

  Tom nodded.

  Well, that’s a new one.

  The boy seemed satisfied. He pulled heavily on the joint. He looked somewhere in the unfocused distance.

  You mind if I ask why?

  You can ask, but I won’t have a good answer.

  Tom smiled and scratched his beard.

  Why are you heading west?

  Tom snorted and shook his head.

  You can ask…

  But there ain’t a good…

  Yeah.

  Yup.

  They stood in silence for a while listening to the chatter of the birds reaching a crescendo as the air cooled and objects grew fuzzier in the changing light.

  The kid snuffed out the joint and put the roach back in the cellophane cigarette pack while simultaneously pulling out a fresh American Spirit.

  Not much chance of us both getting a ride out here. Hard enough for one, what with night coming. But the two of us. No chance.

  Providence.

  Tom lit a GPC and held out the match. The kid cupped his hand to protect the flame and lit his Spirit.

  Providence?

  You don’t believe in Providence?

  No, I don’t. I believe in reality.

  Providence happens.

  Maybe, but not to me.

  You’re too young to talk like that.

  The man exhaled squinty eyed.

  I’m a Jew.

  What’s that got to do with anything?

  Here’s what the Jews know.

  As he began to speak he gestured with his hands expansively as if waiting for the void to fill with words.

  One...people are evil. The overarching myth of the Holocaust is that there was an oppressive government that committed atrocities and that the citizens of this government were led into committing those atrocities. In fact, it was exactly the opposite. It was a million tiny individual acts of barbarism that accomplished the Holocaust. The result of a permissive, laissez faire government.

  I don’t think you’re using that term right. The Nazi government wasn’t exactly permissive...

  For some they were....Whatever. The important thing is that people operating in a moral void will revert to their evil nature. It is how Abu Ghraib happened and would happen again if this kind of freedom over other people were given to people to act out as they please. The people running that war either didn’t understand the evil nature of people, or they were aware of people enjoying their government sanctioned permissiveness and didn’t care.

  Tom frowned, noncommittal.

  Two...people are good. When outside the rule of law as created and enforced by people, who are evil, people will act altruistically and even sacrifice themselves for their fellow man. That leads to...three...there is no natural rule of law. There are only people who are evil, and people who see evil and respond to it.

  So what does all this mean?

  There is no God. There are only people who, if allowed, will be evil, and people who witness this evil and are sufficiently moved to rebel against it because of our latent altruistic nature.

  So it’s more or less every man for himself?

  Someone once asked me if Jews believe in God. I said no. All Jews are atheists, except for the Orthodox who are fanatical like the Mormons or the Evangelicals or anyone who will believe something with no hint of proof at all. This person was a Christian and she indignantly said that she had no proof of the existence of God but she believed in him. That is called the leap of faith and it is a tenet of the religion. I said that is the difference. While I cannot prove that God exists, all Jews have proof that God does not exist. She said, the Holocaust? I said yes. No God would allow half of you to be murdered. And if there is such a God, well, he isn’t really worth worshiping, is he? I mean, wouldn’t he just damn the other half to hell? The first half certainly didn’t deserve to get murdered. She said there is a glorious afterlife that would certainly be better than the murderous one they have left. I said Jews don’t believe in the afterlife. She had nothing to say to that.

  The Lord works in mysterious ways.

  Look, I’m not saying someone isn’t going to pick us both up, but if they do, it isn’t Providence.

  What would you call it then?

  Luck.

  All right, luck then.

  I mean it would be pretty insulting if God let all the shit slide that goes on in the world but intervenes to give us two jokers a ride.

  Okay then. I get your point. So what now that we are foreclosed from getting a ride except by an extreme stroke of luck?

  I’ll tell you what. You stick your thumb out now, and I’ll hide in the tall grass, and when someone stops I’ll sneak up and bludgeon them to death.

  Tom stared blankly, but suddenly his pulse quickened, his mental sensors twitched uncontrollably.

  I’m just fucking with you. I’ll go catch a train.

  A train? Tom struggled to shake the feeling off.

  Yeah, there’s track that crosses the road a mile back. You never ride the rails, jump a freight train?

  Isn’t that dangerous?

  Of course it’s dangerous. Just remember one thing. Run along side it and grab on to something first, then jump. Never jump if you don’t know where you’re going to land.

  They crushed out their cigarettes. The illusion of pink in the clouds had faded to deep purple and then disappeared. It was night. They stood listening to the croaking frogs that had announced their presence and a carpet of cricket chirps that laid down a baseline of background noise.

  All right then.

  Good luck.

  The kid smiled, teeth showing in the night.

  Good luck to you to sir.

  They shook hands and then the kid walked back the way he came and was soon invisible in the blackness. When he was gone Tom felt strangely alone and noticed how dark it had gotten.

  Chapter 15

  There is a moment on every commercial airline flight, during the descent, about five to ten minutes before landing, where if you are sufficiently disconnected from Ipads and laptops, headphones and LCD screens of any kind, you are struck with the reality that you are incased in a metal cylinder that is literally barreling toward the earth at five hundred miles an hour in a loosely controlled, jet-thrusted free fall. The cabin rattles and shakes, rolling like a ship at sea, the overhead compartments strain against their latches, the seats jostle against their bolts, the giant riveted wings bend in unsettling ways, almost flapping on powerful air currents. The noise, if you allow yourself to hear it, is a deafening roar. A scream. You cannot escape this reality, that you are plummeting toward the ground. You know that technology usually saves you from certain death. The correct angle of the nose raised just right, the hydraulic landing gear, the billions of calculations and the firing circuits and switches and properly charged ions that make them, should bring you once more safely to ground.

  But not always.

  The
night appeared to Lorne in a series of still life images, movie frames in no particular sequence. Pine trees lit by headlights surging out of a pitch-black sky. Tall grass marking the boundary of the highway. The quiet town, Alpine, unlit, dwarfed by mountains too dark to see. Felt but not seen. The florescent devil eyes of some nocturnal ground animal scampering across the road to watch from the underbrush. Angry, mad, feral. A police car that only he and maybe Jimmy noticed, parked behind a stand of poplars with its snout faced toward the road, the occupant either asleep or engaged in some private interlude. He didn’t pull over the Malibu or even tail it even though Lorne knew they looked sketchy as hell. The night was disjointed, out of order. Flipping pages too fast to read.

  Lorne drove, bad foot and all. There was surprisingly little talk. Not that Lorne supposed the others were lost in thought, or thinking at all, except for how many hits was too many. Chevis sat erect in the front seat, no indication that a crossbow bolt bisected his chest. Pammy anchored the back seat with Jimmy, then Junior and Ashley half on Junior’s lap and half on the door’s peeling vinyl armrest.

  Ashley shifted an ounce and a half away from the door and onto the boy, and when she looked into his eyes and saw herself there she felt good, and then for a split second she faltered, she doubted herself and was surprised. She brushed a bead of sweat from the left side of her chin and looked away. She knew she was an illusion. Did he see? She was what men wanted to see. Did he want to see? She self-consciously twisted a strand of hair and tucked it behind her ear, felt her cheek, started to speak and then didn’t, not knowing what she’d say and aware that she didn’t know, and then she looked back into those black pools of his eyes and saw nothingness, a deep rich bath of empty, a warm chocolate custard of numb that she could go to sleep in forever. If only she ever slept.