“Yes.” Ruth said the word with a worn surrender. “I feel so tired sometimes, like my heart has rusted over.”
She carried the two full cups to the breakfast nook and sat across from Barnes. Barnes could hear the rain outside slapping against the redwood deck off Ruth’s house. May, he thought, is supposed to be the month of flowers.
Ruth said, “Sometimes I think that Robert was just a habit I was too blind to see. Not always, not necessarily, a bad habit, but I don’t want that monkey back on my back. Somewhere along the line, we became nothing more than comfortable. Is that what it’s supposed to be, marriage?”
“You’re asking me?”
“No. I guess I’m asking myself. I don’t know about guys, but girls, at least the girls I knew in middle school, set a plan in their minds about how their life will be. This will happen and this and this—marriage, or not, and kids, or not. You begin to look at your life like a sweet trip down a golden-hued road. Ken and Barbie in living color. Then all at once I looked in Robert’s office at him working on a conference paper on the semiotics of Victorian travel narratives. I see in him an absolutely unknown man there. He was Robert, certainly.” She paused for a moment and leaned over with her hands clasped together in front of her on the table. She continued with a conspiratorial tone to her voice, “I could tell by that little bald spot on the back of his head.” She paused again. “But, you know, he was just like an image, vague and bewildered in my mind, that I had plucked out of a poor memory. Right then it was like stepping out of a movie theater into the bright noon sun. Talk about a revelation. Jesus Christ. I sat down and I knew right then that he would leave me because, really, we had left each other quite a long time ago.”
Ruth wiped a hand across her face. She drank from her coffee cup and asked if Barnes wanted something more. He answered that he did. She poured him another cup but that was not exactly what he had meant.
“You have Grace,” he said slowly.
“I have Grace,” she echoed. “She lifts me. She lifts me and she anchors me. She’s like a newel post for me.”
That evening, Barnes walked the six blocks to a downtown bar. Halfway there, he met a group of college kids walking toward him talking and laughing loudly. They all wore white T-shirts, dark shorts, and baseball caps. The night was too dark for Barnes to see what was written on the shirts and caps, but the kids looked to have on uniforms from how closely matched they appeared. They walked with a swagger as though they owned the sidewalk and Barnes rounded slightly into a yard as they passed. The last of the men, a half-pace behind the others, turned his head toward Barnes, who suddenly felt jacklighted in the temperate shine of a porch light. The kid nodded in silence and Barnes nodded back.
Barnes felt strange, suddenly, to feel them pass into the night behind him, though he had seen people walk those sidewalks on warm evenings for years. He walked very straight, his hands hard inside the pockets of his jeans, and listened and watched the darkness. The kids had walked past like ghosts and Barnes replayed them in his mind as though they were his ghosts.
The ghosts Barnes kept followed the college kids into the night. He smiled unexpectedly, thinking that if Chandler were leading that group of ghosts they would turn and head for the Rio and a round of tequila screamers.
Barnes looked in the large windows of the Rio as he passed, did not see any of his crew. He needed someplace dark where the apparitions were flesh and blood. He rounded a corner and walked down a blind alley to Bake’s Back Alley Bar. The small city’s real people came to Bake’s. There were no ferns, they did not offer grappa as a drink, there were no separate bathrooms. At Bake’s, some people played pool, some people played chess, and some people passed out on the bar.
Bake’s was darker than the night. Even the lights over the two pool tables looked dark in the haze of cigarette smoke, a haze that had recirculated through the bar for generations.
“Barnes,” someone called from a table.
Barnes walked toward the table and found Hunter sitting alone with a beer in front of him.
“Sit down,” Hunter said.
Barnes pulled out a chair and sat. Hunter, his assistant on the crew, sat back in the swirl of silence and smoke. The two men seemed to be idling. Barnes felt it and he could tell by the way Hunter waited for him to begin speaking that Hunter also felt their conversation stall until Barnes could place it back in gear.
“Glad I ran into you,” Barnes said. And he was, although the thought had not entered his mind until he sat at the table. “Everything going okay at the office?”
“Fine and dandy,” Hunter said. While Barnes took a couple of days off before the new fire season began, Hunter took care of last-minute concerns, preparing the crew’s cache, testing all of the pumps and chainsaws and video machines they would need over the next two weeks of crew training.
The waitress dropped a coaster on the table and asked, “What can I get you?”
Barnes answered, “Fat Tire.”
She wrote on another coaster on her tray. “And you still okay?” she asked Hunter.
“I’ll take another.”
She turned and left without another word.
“White called,” Hunter said. “He wanted to make sure, again, that it was okay that he came back to the crew and to let us know that he’s been sober since last year.”
Barnes shook his head. “Hell,” he said. “It’s not his fault that Lopez died. Or maybe it is, but he didn’t intend it that way. If he stays sober, then he can stay on the crew. If he sniffs a cork, I’ll can his ass real quick.”
“I told him as much . . . again. He thinks you probably hate him.”
“He’s probably right but nobody made me the moral arbiter.”
The waitress brought their beers as a man stepped over from the nearest pool table. “These your quarters?” he asked.
“Not mine,” said Barnes.
“They’re mine,” Hunter said to the man. “You play doubles?”
“Only with women and pool.” He laughed at his own joke.
Hunter deposited his quarters for the balls and racked them. Barnes remained sitting, watching his friend arrange the table for a game of eight ball. The other guy, large and sweaty, looking like he slept in Bake’s, lined the cue ball for his opening strike. The man’s head was shaped like a cuesta hill, a gentle slope up the greasy backside of his hair and a quick, flat face. A head that had been shaped by a fast-moving glacier or by too many brawls.
“Nickel a ball?” the man asked.
“Five bucks it is,” Hunter said. “It’s your paycheck.”
The man snapped his cue stick and the balls collided, sending the table into a kaleidoscope of motion. The immediate and violent anarchy of the break slowed into a disharmony of sixteen scattered balls on the table and none in the pockets.
“Shit,” the man said. “Your shot,” he added as he walked to a table, his belly leading the way.
Hunter chalked a cue as he paced around the table, stopping to study an angle before pacing back to where he first stood.
“You going to shoot?” yelled the man with the cuesta head. His friend, almost as large, sat slouched in his chair, watching Hunter.
“You can’t rush greatness,” Hunter said without looking at the two men sitting in the fulsome darkness away from the table.
“You just got to,” Hunter began as he leaned over the table and shot the ball into the side pocket, “watch and admire.” Hunter downed two more balls before missing a bank shot on the four ball.
Cuesta said to his friend, “Get some, bro.”
Bro nodded. He did not look drunk until he staggered to the table, and then he lost his drunkenness as soon as he reached the table. Like a man crossing ice, he reached the other side and found his legs. He did not find, however, a shot, for Hunter had left him boxed in against the rail.
“That’s a piss-poor lay,” Bro said.
“That’s what she said,” added Cuesta. He laughed alone.
Bro lined a shot he hoped would leave Barnes as stuck as him. Barnes stood and took Hunter’s cue stick. He leaned against the wall next to the rack of cues.
Cuesta joined him. The man smelled rancid from beer and sweat and cigarettes. Before Barnes could move away, Cuesta said, “That buddy of yours sure is cocky.”
Barnes did not answer. He looked at Cuesta’s face, four days removed from a razor and red like an alcoholic’s.
Cuesta added, “He any good at this?”
“Not bad,” Barnes said as Bro banked the cue ball in an effort to hide it in the top corner behind the ten ball. He hit it too hard and the cue ball bounced into the open.
“Your shot, man,” Cuesta said.
Barnes looked over his choices. He had only one shot with the seven ball a sitting duck in the far side pocket, but he took his time just the same.
“Damn, man. You guys always take this much time?” Cuesta asked.
“Only with women and pool,” Hunter answered.
Cuesta spat on the bar’s floor and glared at Hunter. Bro handed him another bottle of Budweiser and Cuesta wrapped his lips around the end like a sucker fish.
Barnes considered downing the eight ball and ending the game right then.
Hunter walked to Barnes and whispered, “You feeling tough tonight?”
Barnes answered, “I hope we won’t find out.”
“I think it’s so.” Hunter slapped Barnes on the shoulder and walked back to their table. He did not sit, though, and kept his eyes on Cuesta and Bro.
Hunter was not large, just over six foot and of medium build, about the size of most firefighters. Too small and the long hours and longer hikes wore a firefighter down, too large and the hours spent bending over a pulaski took too heavy a toll on the back. Hunter ran and worked out every day on weights, both for vanity and his job. His black hair was cut short as it was every year, once a year at the beginning of the fire season. Hunter liked to play the harmonica and did not mind an occasional fight, especially after he had a few beers to prime his pump.
Barnes pocketed the seven and left himself a shot at the two ball. He downed that but went no further.
Cuesta walked to the table and stood there, his hand on his chin, pretending to study the table. “This how they do it, bro?”
“Looks like it,” Bro answered.
“Hell, man. Quick and dirty is what I say. Just scream shit and shoot.”
Bro laughed, sounding more from habit than actual enjoyment. “With women and pool,” he said and laughed again.
“Let me see. We got the spots?” Cuesta asked.
“Like hell,” Hunter replied. “You got stripes. Should be enough of them on the table to make it easy on you.”
“Fuck that, man,” Cuesta said. He knocked the twelve ball in, then the eleven, then the thirteen, but missed a long straight shot across a yard of green at the fifteen.
Cuesta bumped shoulders with Hunter as they passed each other. Neither turned to look at the other, but Barnes could see Hunter’s smile. The table laid out with the solid balls all hovering near pockets. With a little luck, Hunter would look like a shark.
Barnes stood with his back to the wall and watched Hunter begin his run. Halfway through the run, Cuesta walked over and asked Barnes, “Did he sucker me?”
“You offered the bet. He just agreed.”
“A little too quick I think.”
“No matter. It’s just a friendly game.”
“My ass. We’ll play double or nothing on the next one.”
“He’s just getting warmed up. You might consider quitting while you’re ahead,” Barnes said.
“Fuck that shit, man.”
By then, Hunter had deposited all the solids and banked the eight ball into the corner pocket. He leaned on his pool cue while Cuesta pulled a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and tossed it on the table.
Cuesta bent to rack the balls for the next game. His white T-shirt pulled up on his back and his jeans lowered as he leaned over, exposing the crack of his butt.
Hunter murmured to Barnes, “That plumber’s smile gets any bigger and he’ll have to take out a union card.”
With the balls racked, Hunter broke and dropped two solids into pockets. “A place for everything, and everything in its place,” he said as he paced the table searching out his next shot.
“Shit,” Cuesta said and walked to his table, leaving Barnes and Bro standing next to each other against the wall. The Texas Tornadoes were on the jukebox singing “Que Paso.”
“My buddy’s not having a good time,” Bro said after a drink of beer.
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“He don’t like to lose, man.”
“It’s only a pool game. It’s not life or death.”
“He’s not a good loser. Don’t matter if it’s having to stop at a stop sign, he don’t like it.”
“I’m afraid he’ll probably lose big time.”
Bro continued talking as though Barnes had said nothing. “His wife’s a pig”—Barnes did not answer that the man was not exactly buffed beefcake himself—“he hates his job and now he gets his ass kicked at pool. Shit-for-damn.” Bro shook his head, then pulled hard on his Bud. “You work in Fort Collins?”
“The Forest Service.”
“No shit? Like a forest ranger or something?”
“We fight forest fires.”
“No shit. You and him fight forest fires? Like that one killed all those dudes last year?”
“Like that.”
“You know any of them?”
“Who?”
“Those guys got killed.”
“Yes, I knew them.”
“Sounded pretty bad, man.”
“Yes.”
“Chicks and all. Man.”
“Yes.”
“You knew them, huh?”
“Yes.”
“You weren’t there, were you?”
“I was there.”
“No shit, man. How’d you live?”
“I don’t know.”
“Lucky, I guess.”
“Yes. Lucky, I guess.”
“How’d you know them?”
“I was their crew boss.”
“You were their boss?”
Hunter’s run ended with only one solid ball left on the table’s green. He winked at Barnes as he walked to their table for another beer brought by the waitress.
Bro sidetracked on his way to the table and talked with Cuesta. He motioned toward Barnes as he talked with the big man, who grabbed his beer and joined Barnes standing near the wall. Cuesta had a menacing smile spread across his face as he approached Barnes. Before speaking, he waited for Bro to sink his first ball and leave himself in line for a decent run.
Cuesta said, “So you guys killed all those dudes over there near Craig.” It was not even close to a question.
Barnes shook his head and began to walk away.
“Damned chicken-shit coward,” Cuesta said loudly. The bar skipped a beat. The jukebox stopped just then and so did everyone and everything else in the bar. The bronchitic breathing of the patrons formed all the sound other than the swish of a pool cue cutting the cigarette haze.
Cuesta did not even have time to raise his hands as Barnes turned and swung his pool cue. The cue left a wake of silence in the haze before it connected solid against the side of Cuesta’s meaty neck. Barnes followed the cue with a punch to the man’s solar plexus, or at least to the area that should have been his solar plexus.
Everything happened quickly then. Bro punched Barnes between the shoulder blades but Hunter took out Bro with a punch that sounded as though it broke the man’s nose. The exhilarating sound of fist hitting bone suffused the room and seemed to fill Cuesta with a rage. His face broad and red, Cuesta came toward Barnes with a roll of his shoulders, looking like a boxer off the opening bell. Barnes weaved to the side. A smash to the cheek, hooks and haymakers, jolts to the face. Cuesta hit and Barnes hit back, connecting against the man’s
face and shoulders. The fight ended as quickly as it began with bouncers and bartenders separating the men, sending Cuesta and Bro out the main door and Barnes and Hunter out the kitchen.
Along College Avenue, groups of college students and high school kids loitered in the warm summer evening. An inversion had all but dried away the day’s rain. The high school kids stood in huddles on the street benches waiting for a cruiser they knew to drive by. Horns honked, waves flashed as did signs, yells died in the hum of truck tires. The college students talked, watched the cruisers drive by, drifted in and out of crowded bars. None of them, not the students nor the kids, carried any sense of tomorrow much less of mortality.
Barnes and Hunter crossed their paths and passed their groups almost without being noticed. They walked to a café and sat across from each other at a booth. Barnes could feel a bruise rising on his cheek and his hands had already swelled.
“You guys been having fun tonight?” the waitress asked.
“Does it look like it?” Hunter laughed. He had not been hit in the quick fight, having dropped Bro with his one punch before the bouncers intervened.
“You don’t look so bad,” she said. “But your friend, here, looks like he tried kissing a truck.”
“Sometimes you’re the bug and sometimes you’re the windshield,” Hunter said.
The waitress laughed her customer laugh. “What can I get you?”
“Coffee for now,” Hunter answered.
The waitress walked away.
“Nice ass,” Hunter said.
“I’m forty-five. I’m too old for that shit,” Barnes said.
“What?”
“The fight.”
A northbound Greyhound droned by on the road outside, the shadows of the riders just shades on the darkened windows. A police siren erupted in inscrutable wails as it headed east.
Barnes could feel his head beginning to throb. “We could have ended our fire season a week before it began.”
“We could have, but we didn’t. And we didn’t get our asses kicked.”
“It was still stupid.”
“Maybe, but didn’t it feel good?”
After the Fire Page 6
