Drink for the Thirst to Come

by Lawrence Santoro

  A moment. “So, ‘Who?’ you finally ask.” He sounded more relaxed. “By name there was Halbherz. That’s German. Written down it looked like it should be ‘half heart’ so everyone called him Halfheart, which sounded like ‘Hey fart!’ the way the guys said, which he hated. Halfheart’s old man had been a Kraut. Mean as a snake but dead by this time and thus a good Kraut, but who cared? Though that is a story by itself! Halfheart said he was glad his old man was out of the way and nobody even wondered if that was true or not. Short Draw told him once, ‘Half Heart? That could be an Indian name. If you want.’

  “Halfheart said he didn’t.

  “‘Just an offer,’ Shorty said. ‘Wouldn’t be a very good Indian, anyway. Name of Half Heart.’ He wasn’t pissed, he was just making a point.

  “That was Short Draw, our name for him, or Shorty. Shorty was known as Little Beaver by others. Why? He was little and he was an Indian. Outside of us and some others his name was Roscoe Beverage, which nobody called him except teachers but which is why all our guys called him Short Draw in honor of a nickel beer or for when the bartender didn’t give your Yuengling an honest pull.” He laughed that same in the chest creak. “Keegan said that. Halfheart thought that was about the funniest damn thing ever said. Laughed and laughed till someone, Keegan probably, told him ‘Fuckin’ don’t die, will you!’ Shorty was only half an Indian on his mom’s half but he also looked like Red Ryder’s kid buddy, Little Beaver, so that all came together.

  “There was Daryl who was Daryl or sometimes Darly, and if you knew Daryl you’d know why. The guys sort of had to be his friends. Lanky, doofus, hair every which way, big apple in his Adams, big feet, glasses of course, ears. Said things over and over.

  “There was PD. Pete Durance. It was Peter, but who wants his guys calling him Peter? So PD it was. Sounded like Petey the way it was said.

  “And there was Keegan, Jackie Keegan. There had been his brother, Rory. But Rory. Rory was dead that summer. Which is the point.

  “That’s it, the guys, and at this time they’re all about to make the big fucking move!”

  “Big move?”

  “The big fucking move. The move to Stenawatt High is the big fucking move.”

  “Which one are you?” I ask.

  He sucked air. Let it out. “‘Which one?’ Which one? Huh. You figure it, which one. Now for your scoot. A scoot is this.”

  “It’s going someplace where you’re not supposed to go. Right?”

  “Going a place you’re not supposed to. Right. You’re learning. East Enders west of the tracks, they’d be going to Pendora for baseball. That’s okay. Maybe to the CYO dances at St. Maggie’s. Okay too. They might go to Mostly’s for pop, funny books or whatever. Truth told,” he said, “Mostly’s had nothing on a half-dozen fountain stores up the End, but summer days, the guys stopped at Mostly’s for a Pepper or to snake a look at the funnies before heading up Thorne to Chucky B.”

  “What is that? Chucky?”

  “Chucky B, Chucky B. Hold on about Chucky B, I’m about to get there.” Another rusty laugh. “‘Plenty ’a room for us all,’ Keegan’d say, ‘no waitin’ at the Chuck!’ Then, Keegan, he’d smack someone, Halfheart or Shorty, up the back of the head, punch PD in the arm or Daryl, whoever was around. They loved it. But I’m talking scoots.” He stopped. “So, you tell me. What’s Chucky B’s?” he asked.

  “A playground?”

  “Yeah. A playground.”

  The story went on.

  There was a great view of the mountain, the yards, the whole East End from the stoop at Skidoo’s Tap.

  “’Boes hung there day and night, enjoying the view, waiting.”

  “For what? Waiting?”

  “For what waiting?” he said. “For what might you think?”

  “Work, booze, handouts? I don’t know.”

  “‘I don’t know I don’t know.’ But yeah. That’s, yeah, what we thought. But no.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, an invitation is for what,” he said.

  Another 18-wheeler Dopplered west; its diesel horn came and went into the night.

  “You still want to know about that last ‘scoot’?

  I did.

  “Skidoo’s, see, was mystery, adult stuff. Get it?”

  I did.

  “Whenever that eye-door opened, out comes smells as mentioned, most of them bad, but still… But still no matter what stink oozed out, those ’boes and roadies—what Keegan called them, ‘Knights of the Road’ before you ask—those ’boes and roadies went on point, sniffing, waiting…”

  That rusty hinge cracked in his chest again.

  “Daryl had it right, first time. First time we biked to the west top of Spring Road.

  “‘Jesus,’ Halfheart said, looking at the ’boes that first time.

  “Shorty gives one of his Injun grunts.

  “PD shakes his head.

  “‘What the fuck they so happy for?’ That’s Keegan.

  “Then Daryl. ‘What the fuck they so happy about?’ he says. ‘I don’t know what the fuck,’ he said. ‘I don’t know happy, but hey, looks like, I don’t know, but what the fuck, looks like they’re hopeful.” A second’s dark and quiet. “He talked like that, Daryl,” the old guy said, “but hopeful was what they were. All those busted mugs are all sudden, happy pups. Dirty ’boes, stumblebums, and hay bags they might be, but that door opens and every one’s styling. ‘What the fuck?’ Yeah. That door goes whoosh and they’re buttoned up and spit-combing. Then,” he leaned, his voice went low, “then, see, one maybe gets the call. And in he goes. Then, whoosh, see? The ’boes left out? They’d had a whiff, a couple bars of tune. Then the look fades and it’s back to the view till next time.

  “‘Yeah, hope was what the fuck,’” says Daryl.

  “‘More like flies to shit,’” Keegan says.

  “See? Everyone figured Skidoo’s was just another road to Schnockertown.”

  “Schnocker…”

  “…town. Yeah. A Daryl word. First time he said it, Keegan just looked at him. Didn’t noogie him, so it stuck. Anyway, that door opened, it was always cool, fragrant, and the tunes never stopped.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “‘How’d you know?’ You ask ‘What?’ then ‘Why?’ now we’re off to ‘How?’” He took a breath. “The scoot is how. After the busting the ’Cracker we’d drop bike—sometimes—right at the ’boes’ feet. No thinking, no talking, just drop and dash like/that! Up those three steps, break the beam, scoot and scream. Grab a couple, three-seconds of Kool-Air, suck a snootfull of the other half, hang peepers on the clientele, swing ’round the eye-pole inside, then scoot the out door, howling all the way.

  “Pissed him off, Skidoo. Regulars’d turn to look. Daylight’d catch their ugly mugs. Women, too. ‘Hay bags,’ the ’boes called them, so we called them too. That was fun, knowing the bags saw you. Didn’t matter how ugly, there was always that something about women, no matter. You know?”

  I did.

  “Now, Keegan’s the mother duck, see? First in, last out, he watches us pass. Then he sticks his chin out, and like it’s some big choice, he calls to Skid, ‘Make mine a fist of John Daniels.’ See, he’s Bogey or Raft, so familiar he calls it by its given name of John.”

  I laughed.

  “Us too. Halfheart doubled over every time, funniest thing he’s ever heard.

  “Then, like Keegan’s had a second’s thought, he says, ‘And what the hell, Skid, set up the house.’

  “By then, Skid’s yelling fuck off. Keegan though, he waits for fuck-off number two, like he doesn’t get it. Then, real disappointed, he says, ‘Damn, Skid! I don’t even know why I come here.’”

  I laughed again.

  “Then he strolls. Not a scoot, a walk with a little swagger, like he belonged. You know?

  “Keegan,” the old guy said. “Down on the sidewalk he’d take a bow, hoist his jeans, you know, like Cagney. Something. Very even, Keegan was, very smooth. Always wa
s, before Rory. Hell, even after!”

  Another bus passed heading west.

  “This day now, we scoot. We’re in. We’re out. Door’s open as usual. No Keegan of course. We wait. We listen. The ’boes stare down on us. We hold our bikes like they’re our precious dicks. Halfheart’s working up a laugh. Then nothing. Nothing. Then the door shuts—whoosh—Keegan’s still inside. We wait, we wait, we look, we wait. We don’t know. We don’t know. We drift. We look back. Nothing.

  “There’s chatter, ‘What could happen?’ That’s Halfheart. He’s got Keegan’s bike. We drift half a block to Mostly’s stoop. ‘He gets served, he’s in for it.’ That’s Shorty, the non-Indian half talking. PD leans close, whispering, ‘Keegan’s got no money, guys!’ Like it’s a big secret. Halfheart gives him the face. ‘Skid ain’t serving him, you maroon,’ he says like Bugs. ‘He’ll bum-rush him, call the cops maybe, who cares? Keegan don’t.’

  “‘He got no money!’” The old guy coughed up a laugh. “Master of the obvious, PD was. Truth, though. Someone always tipped Keegan his Pepper, comics, whatever, and no one ever mentioned it again. Jesus, the guy was an orphan. Anyway, Skidoo never called cop. Cripes, no. So, this, what I’m telling about, the bad part, this starts at Mostly’s after that scoot. We’re outside because old man Mostly doesn’t like us Enders touching his comics he might ‘actually sell for some Goddamn money, for Christ sake!’ That was Mostly. Anyway, it’s summer. Hot as summer, anyway. Anyway, we’re not in school. And Rory, Keegan’s kid brother, he’d just drowned at Squaw Lake—what we called it, the pond up at Chucky B’s. Viewing, funeral, all that, that was long over, long enough over so you could talk about it without Keegan getting, you know?”

  “Too bad,” I say.

  “Too bad, too bad. Not much to say about Rory drowning except he did it. Disappeared late afternoon, then showed up late that night at the bottom of Squaw Lake, Chucky B’s, for the cops in fish waders. Full of water and nibbled on by carp. ‘What a loss.’ ‘Such a waste.’ ‘Kid drowns in a cemetery,’ everyone says. ‘How ironic,’ everyone says. Okay, they didn’t know the word but they recognize irony. Just shook their heads, you know?”

  “Cemetery?” I said. “You said Chucky B’s was a playground.”

  “I said? You said. I exaggerated. Chucky B’s is the Charles Bynum Cemetery. Big old place. Miles to hang out in. Hills, trees, little ponds, dark paths. Goes back to the Revolution. So Halfheart, Short Draw, PD, and Daryl are by Mostly’s. Sweating and swearing. Waiting for Keegan.”

  The old guy slowed to a cough. I figured another digression. There was.

  “I have to mention. About this time, up from down by St. Maggie’s comes this woman. She’s young, thin, and she’s pushing a baby carriage, a big one. She goes by. Everyone goes quiet, like something holy’s going on. The cart is full of babies, three of them, a year apart maybe. She’s maybe new, maybe visiting someone, I don’t know, nobody’d ever seen her. I give a peek-around. None of the others are moving.

  “She’s not old. Old enough, 20 maybe 22. And she throws a shadow, going by. I feel the cool of her shadow. I feel the cool of it to this day; swear I do. I smell her: sweat and baby stink, yeah, but another, a smell of sweet, sweet girl like flowers or something nice and something else. But her shadow’s like the light and we’re the one’s casting the dark.

  “Then she’s by and everyone pretends nothing’s happened. Halfheart’s picking gum out of his sneaker treads. Short Draw’s staring the way she came, no expression—even half-Indians are like that. PD’s squinting at the sky like he’s remembering something.”

  He leaned toward me. “See? Everyone’s somewhere else, not there on Mostly’s stinking hot step and thinking, not about Keegan, but…

  “Then Halfheart says, ‘Hey, girly, you want another one?’ He’s quiet; no one hears but us. He says it like he’s asking if she wanted a second dip of chocolate or something, but we know what he means. No one but us. Shorty goes very non-Indian. Even PD makes to pound the crap out of him.

  “Then Daryl. Daryl says, ‘What?’ Meaning, ‘What do you mean?’ Meaning, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Meaning, ‘Want another what?’ Like he didn’t know where kids came from. Which maybe he didn’t.

  “Halfheart gives Daryl the eye like he doesn’t know if he should tell him or kill him. So the moment’s gone. Someone laughs. Then there’s Keegan.”

  A small town passed at a distance in the dark. I see two lights. A gas station, a small man in the window, everything blue in blue bus glass and a soda machine on a corner. That was the other light. They drifted by. Then the place was gone forever.

  “And?” That was me.

  “And Keegan came up the street from Skid’s. At least he looks like Keegan, at least looks like something wearing a Keegan suit. He passes the girl, he walks through her or she through him, cart, babies and all. Well, maybe not.

  “‘J’see that babe?’ Halfheart says. ‘Want to know what I said? I said…’

  “Keegan doesn’t want to hear. He doesn’t hitch his jeans, he doesn’t spit—no one spit like Keegan—he takes his bike, looks nowhere. ‘I’m gone,’ he says to no one. And he’s down the street toward the bar. By then the girl’s around the corner or down the hill, anyway she’s nowhere, and when Keegan gets to Skid’s, he leans the bike toward one of the ’boes. Words follow. We don’t hear the words. After the words, like he said, he’s gone.”

  “Where? Inside?”

  “Where inside? Inside. No scoot, he walks, climbing steps to a noose.

  “‘Gone? I’m gone?’ That’s Daryl yelling like he does at us but never at Keegan. ‘I’m GONE! You’re not gone, Keegan. You’re here, you’re us! You’re not gone!’

  “Then Daryl drops bike and he’s after him, still shouting. And whoosh.

  The old guy coughed again. “The rest wander up to the corner and now I gotta hang hog.” Like that, he was off to the back.

  I watched the dark out the window. Not much to see in the Alleghenies in the deepest part of night. Whatever’s out there, it’s imaginary.

  A stir of air freshener and he was back. “Finally Halfheart and Shorty, they go in after them.” The old guy wrestled with the seat. He settled. “Leave PD with the bikes and the ’boes and they’re off. Whoosh.

  “And?”

  “And? And inside, it’s like always. Juke tunes and stink, gloom and bar art. Halfheart stays in the beam at the door. Daylight has his back. Shorty runs to the center, way past the eye pole, farther than any of the guys had ever been before. There’s no screaming. What’s to scream?”

  The old guy’s looking out the window.

  “Nothing out there,” I said.

  “Yeah. Nothing. Then, like I said, out they came. Tumbling. Daryl’s white eyes. Eyes fill up. Then everybody asks everything, wants to know what’s going on, what’s happening, where’s Keegan, what the fuck? Then Daryl’s off. He looks around and he’s up, heading to Chucky B’s. Heading to the Place the others figure.”

  I begin to ask.

  “Don’t ask,” the old guy said. “The Place is our place up in Charles Bynum’s. Out the back, near the fence and woods, a big old yew tree, trunk like a thousand brown bones rising, branches thick as a fat man, twisted like an arthritis, reaching, far out, drooping, then red creeper tying it all to ground. A tent, a living tent, our tent. The oldest thing in the Chuck, that tree. Our ‘Angel Yew,’ Daryl says. We hung there. A guy could sit and be, read a comic, suck a Pepper, cool and quiet. Peek the world. What world there was.

  “Anyway, Daryl’s no athlete. Nuts get cracked pedaling the ’Cracker; they’re his nuts. Now he’s walking up Thorne, the rest pedaling after. He wins. You remember what it was, running? Back then? Your body knew where it all was: ground, bumps, the next step, the next jump? Everything worked, feet barely touch. Push earth with your toes and you float and fly, nothing to it? Remember?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Maybe that’s what Daryl looked.
Only he’s walking. And the rest, they’re shoving cranks like starting a cold climb up the ’Cracker. Halfheart and Shorty, they’re coming fast. So’s PD. But Daryl’s through the gates, up the road, into the trees. He’s past Squaw Lake and gone. Vanished.

  “The guys get to the Angel Yew. No Daryl. They hang like doofuses. How long? A while. Then Daryl. He claws through the vines and there he’s standing, draped, low branches frame him. It’s like they want to…” The old guy clenched both fists under his chin. He held an imaginary something close.

  “Daryl’s not twitching. Not blinking. This is, what? Tops, it’s fifteen, twenty minutes after Keegan’s ‘I’m gone.’ The others are panting like mutts. It’s near sundown, see? The air’s turning cool. The guys are sweating like pigs. Then, ‘Christ!’ Halfheart says.

  “‘Shh,’ Shorty says. ‘Cripes!’

  “PD sat and stared.

  “‘They got me,’ he said, Daryl said.

  “‘Got?’ That’s Halfheart. Shorty kicked him.

  “‘I think.’ He looked at himself. He brushed his shirt and pants. He touched a spot on his shirt, kept rubbing.

  “‘Christ.’ Halfheart again.

  “‘Probably not, though, huh?’

  “‘What?’ Halfheart again.

  “‘Mom. She probably won’t kill me for messing myself. And they probably didn’t get me. They had me then let me go. I’m sure.’

  “‘They let you?’ Halfheart said. ‘Hell no! We came and got—’

  “‘Shh!’ Shorty says.

  “‘I almost vanished,’ Daryl said. ‘I could see through,’ he held his hand to his face, ‘or thought I could.’

  “Halfheart now shouts up his nose, ‘O! Kay! What’s! Happening!?’ Like he’s talking to a Jap can’t speak English.

  “Shorty shushes. ‘Where were you?’ he says.

  “‘Rory’s,’ Daryl says.

  “‘And?’ That’s Halfheart again. Yelling.