by John O'Brien
The floor was mostly damp, the bulk of the fluid long gone down the drain that lay in a depressed area in the center of the room. That was perhaps the biggest tragedy, that no one had thought to block that drain, and for an insane moment Rudd wondered if there wouldn’t be a way to still chase the liquor lost down it, a siphon, the first few inches. Crazy. Some small accumulation remained in the form of stray ounces left in the irregular shapes inevitable among so much broken glass. But really, the room was a total loss, almost as if it had been deliberately wrecked bottle by bottle. Yet no one from the outside could have been in here, and no one from the inside could have done this. That was a literal fact: no one inside could have done this. Rudd was certain of that, and Rudd was a realist; they all were, men like them everywhere.
No, dry-storage was ruined by the shock absorbed during the previous night’s bombings. They all suspected it would be bad, but the shock of the bombings-almost military in their intensity yet obviously nothing more than a highly crafted street offensive-shook the building and likely many buildings for close to a half hour. Plaster crumbled and there were a few minor injuries, but the most terrible part for all of them was the distant sound of breaking glass.
“One of us should have come down–” tried Fenton.
But if he intended to say more Rudd cut him short. “That was my call and now it’s made!” he said; then more softly, to himself really: “I thought … I mean to say, I kept thinking that it wouldn’t be so bad. This late in the game … it seems so late, close to the end, I thought maybe better a few less bottles than one less guy.” Despondently, he slipped down along the wall until he was sitting in the dampness, which slowly steamed into the backside of his pants. “God, let it be blood,” he said, chuckling to himself sadly.
“What was that, Rudd?” asked Fenton gently.
“Oh it’s an old joke. A wino falls down in the alley with his last pint in his back pocket. ‘God, let it be blood’ is what he says when he feels his pocket get wet.”
“You did the right thing. I promise. Let’s take it from here, okay?” Fenton was scared, but Fenton was also a friend.
Rudd rose back to his full height. “I may have done the right thing,” he said, “but that’s hardly what was called for.”
As one the men shone their flashlights into dry-storage, played the beams across the fallen shelves and cracked and splattered walls so that it briefly became a game of beam chase beam and stopped just short of a giggle or a glance, and the beams were brightest at their centers. This was difficult, this inspection, but it had to be done because it had to be over so the new reality of their situation could begin writing its definition.
“You start on the left,” said Fenton, surprising Rudd, not unpleasantly in this time of weakness, by his initiative, “combing your light up and down along the walls. I’ll start on the right and we’ll pass in the middle for double coverage. Save the floor for last. Forget the ceiling,” he added awkwardly. Then after a pause: “If that sounds good to you.”
Rudd nodded. “Stop if you see anything, anything at all.”
So they began systematically, proceeding just as Fenton had suggested. The shelves in dry-storage were wooden, supported separately at three-foot intervals, short due to the liquid weight they were expected to bear. The shelves were stacked seven high floor to ceiling and held the various bottles three deep–had held–the bottles unpacked and kept in stock out of their cases due to Tony’s insistence long ago that breakage be done on a bottle-by-bottle basis (now that was funny) during the course of an evening. Hal was a minimalist and liked to keep the bar sparse, only two bottles of well liquor in place and a dedicated bar-back to make sure it stayed that way. Too bad: had the bottles been left in their corrugated cardboard cartons, the way they were in most places, some of them might have survived the drop. But none did. And they all dropped because no shelf, it quickly became apparent, had held; except for the bottom ones, and it was here that Rudd paused his flashlight and said, “Wait a minute!”
Fenton immediately whipped his own beam to the same spot. “What?” he demanded.
“In the back, here.” Rudd stepped forward to the shelf, but the crunch of glass under his foot stopped him cold. He turned back to Fenton. “I just thought of something. We may be able to salvage some of these little puddles held in the broken pieces.” Fenton nodded and Rudd proceeded more carefully.
He squatted down and reached gingerly behind the second-lowest shelf, which had fallen only in the front so that it hung at something close to a forty-five-degree angle to the wall, crushing the bottles on the front of the lowest shelf, but actually being borne up by some of the bottles at the rear of the lowest shelf. It was these bottles, a precious few of them, that remained unbroken. Rudd extracted a fifth of J&B scotch and held it forth to Fenton as gleefully as any schoolboy showing his mother a gold-starred piece of homework.
“Well done!” cried Fenton.
“You bet your ass!” added Rudd, and they were both momentarily reassured by the sight of a virgin fifth with an unbroken seal.
“Any more? How many?”
And as Rudd handed the bottle to his friend their eyes met over their prize. These were two boys discovering back issues of Playboy in a father’s closet, though these men had never been boys together.
Rudd probed further with his flashlight then his hand. He pulled out another J&B, held it out for Fenton to take. “Twooo,” he said thoughtfully, hopefully, now the accountant. “I think … yeah, three.”
Now Fenton stood sentry over three full fifths of J&B scotch, which really, for these men at least, was a good thing to have three bottles of. Miles of course would drink anything—for that matter they all would soon enough-but the traditional drink of choice at Tony’s was scotch.
“One more, something different,” reported Rudd.
It turned out to be a bottle of Malinowa Raspberry Cordial Austrian Liqueur (seventy-six proof). The men stared at the bottle as if it were a copy of Good Housekeeping mixed in with the pornography.
“What is it?”
“Seventy-six proof, looks like,” answered Rudd as he puzzled over the label. “I don’t know what the hell it’s doing down here on the scotch shelf.”
It seemed they couldn’t make up their minds whether to be angry over not finding another bottle of J&B or pleased over finding another bottle of anything, especially something sporting a reasonable proof such as this. There had been something of a liqueur orgy on the seventh day, the stranger stuff being kept to single orders, mostly for the visual appeal of the unusual bottles, and hence not back-stocked down here. They’d burned through it all that night and it wasn’t pretty, but it did save them one night’s worth of real booze, which now of course was lost.
“I think we should give Osmond his share out of this stuff,” said Rudd. “By the way, what the hell is he passed out on?”
“I don’t know, but he’s out cold in his booth, been that way all morning.”
“Son of a bitch. Think he had a bottle hidden?”
“Don’t know. Maybe, could’ve, I suppose.”
“Son of a bitch. Well he definitely gets his share from this shit. Passed out. Son of a bitch.”
They nodded as one, in evident agreement over the son-of-a-bitchedness of Osmond.
Rudd stood up. “That’s it for that shelf,” he said.
They silently resumed their scanning, but no other backs of bottom shelves had survived the damage. In less than three minutes they knew and ten minutes after that they admitted: no other unbroken bottles were present in dry-storage. Out of forty-some bottles four had survived. Fenton almost proclaimed this but thought better of it and stopped himself in time, waited.
“That’s it,” Rudd told him. “Run upstairs and get … oh, I don’t know, two I suppose, juice containers. We’ll pour what we can from these broken bottles into them.”
“There are plenty of juice containers. We could have one for scotch and another for vodka, one for wh
iskey, like that.”
“Umm, no. It won’t be worth it. We’ll end up with five or six almost empty containers: too depressing. Best we just mix it. Believe me, by the time we need it we won’t care at all.”
Fenton went upstairs, where later he, Rudd, and the others inspected what was salvaged from dry-storage. Balanced on the bar, three fifths of J&B, one of Malinowa Raspberry Cordial Austrian Liqueur (seventy-six proof), one and two-thirds juice containers of Amalgamash, stood the attention of Rudd, Fenton, Miles, Langston, somewhat fortified by the very odor of alcohol, Jill, as sort of a disinterested de facto supervisor or lady principal, and the busboy, who stood passive, cognizant, and secretly resentful of mostly himself. Absent was only Osmond, who remained passed out in his booth and that was frankly just as well because anybody who managed to pass himself out for that long must have had something stashed and though if somebody was gonna do that it would’ve been Osmond it didn’t change the fact that it was wrong at the very least and way outside the conduct agreed upon by this group at the very worst, which it was, the very worst.
One of the juice containers, the one with the lesser volume, was darker than the other. Different colors, even through the translucent plastic, they were, like amber and chestnut.
“How’d that happen?” asked Miles, pointing very closely at but not quite touching the chestnut-colored bottle. This in keeping with the demeanor that prevailed among the men present, one of chemistry students surrounding a rack of fuming test tubes.
And in the role of white-coated professor, Rudd started to answer but was momentarily interrupted by gunfire on the street out front. Everyone paused, as was their custom, bowing their heads as if in prayer. But no one felt threatened, and the attitude of their lips, the way they were mostly, slightly cocked, made the group look like they were merely waiting for someone to finish a coughing fit.
When the shooting stopped, Rudd said, “How’s the shoulder, Miles?”
Miles dropped his eyes. “Fine,” he muttered, not looking at anybody. “I asked about the bottle.”
“Just different puddles as we went along. I don’t really see any need to mix it further.”
At this Langston fell away from the table in a violent spasm of trembling. “It’s okay,” he offered, making for his booth. “An early one, it’ll pass. But I don’t think I should be near the breakables right now.”
“Jill, better pour him off a solid double from one of these scotch bottles.” He scanned the others for any sign of dissension, knowing that it was unlikely, especially with Osmond not present. “Triage, guys,” added Rudd anyway. “We knew it would come to this.”
“I’m not the bartender,” said Jill right to Rudd, and he thought, you sleep with them and it isn’t long before they start giving you this kind of lip.
But he also thought about her breasts. They were on the largish side and Rudd liked that in a woman. He also liked her auburn hair and pert little nose, the way that she gave head and was pretty smart. “Bartender’s dead, Jill. He is in the freezer, been there for weeks, but I wouldn’t open the door now that the power’s out. I was fairly certain that you were aware of this development.”
“You can be such an asshole,” she said, picking up the scotch bottle, cracking the seal, and pouring off the dosage for Langston.
“I’m a drunk, Jill, it goes with the territory.”
Well he’s part right, she thought, as she silently crossed the room to Langston’s booth. But the territory had more to do with being male than it did with being a drunk. These men, these hopeless desperate men that she was stuck here with, she’d pour their drinks and suck their dicks because as bad as they could be at times they were still better than the men on the outside of that door, because there was a certain nobility in their consistency and pathos, because they’d done what they had to do despite the fact that every one of them was on a greased slide to hell and knew it, and because to leave would be to expose them to a reality that might just break them: she really didn’t like them touching her.
“You’ll have to hold his head and give it to him,” Rudd told her from the bar.
“I know, I know.” And she did more or less pour the scotch into Langston’s mouth, only missing a drop and that was a good score. The man was trembling but calmed at her touch and again with the liquor. “Not much, I’m afraid,” she whispered. “But there isn’t much left.” That was cold, she thought, and felt bad. This man was really sick. This was serious, like cancer or something. He could die from this.
At the bar Fenton wanted to know, “What did you mean about what was called for?”
“What?” said Rudd.
“Down in dry-storage you said something like, ‘I did the right thing but it wasn’t called for.’ What did you mean by that?”
“I may have done the right thing, but that’s hardly what was called for.”
“Yeah, right, yeah.”
This room was fairly large with a simple slate-topped bar running L on the right side and tables and booths that service the restaurant filling the left side. The bar held a clutch of blond wood stools and it was on two of these that Rudd and Fenton were seated talking, all the remaining liquor in Tony’s beheld before them. These two men were members of the Hollydale Country Club and that was how they met. Rudd had been a member longer and met Fenton on the latter’s first visit after being invited to join. This fact gave Rudd an edge of seniority that had long since touched all aspects of their acquaintance and friendship. Hollydale was no more-they could guess as much-but they would always be members. They had this over the other men.
The men had been bunking on the black leather benches of the booths and had taken to thinking of them as rooms and being every bit as possessive of them as a bunch of teenage boys. Langston lay in his booth and Jill sat across from him, watching him grope for what little peace could be found in a single swallow of scotch. Before the riots Jill had had little experience with alcohol and way too much experience with sex. By now though she had seen enough evidence in this room to know just how grave the danger was that these men faced. She suspected that they had all hoped to be shot dead before having to face the end of the supply, though Langston, the man quivering on his back before her, was the only one to ever actually confess this to her.
Two stools down from the corner of the bar where Rudd and Fenton sat, that is on the short part of the L and near the door, Miles nursed his shoulder and stared into space. At the far end of the bar from Miles stood the busboy, leaning against the wall. He’d been outside once, days ago, and he was starting to realize that these men would inevitably send him out again. He could, it was true, move around out there, being Latino and thus resembling the average rioter far better than any of the white men of Tony’s. No one ever referred to him as anything but busboy; they didn’t even know his name and he liked it that way. Only the woman, Jill, once pushed him so hard for a name that he made one up just to get her out of his face. She still whispered it sometimes to him, only when they were alone, as if understanding it was a secret, or perhaps a bond.
Osmond lay face down in his own booth. The most significant fact about Osmond right now was that he was dead, though nobody at Tony’s had discovered this yet. He died of alcohol poisoning hours ago. Osmond had always suspected he could pull this off when the time came, and he was right. He had appropriated a fifth of one-hundred-and-fifty-one-proof rum for just this purpose when the end started to feel close. Plan was to simply shoot himself if he failed and remained alive, or vomited, after drinking down the bottle. He did neither. The bottle was now under his chest, incredibly not broken by his enormous girth, his obesity, ironically giving him the appearance of being in mid breath. The others were angry. They knew he had cheated and it pissed them off that he should be sleeping so soundly while someone like Langston who played by the rules was going through hell. They ignored him. Well, that was Osmond.
A good shot normally but no help at all when Langston began screaming so loud and suddenly that
Jill started to fly out of the other side of that booth even before a mighty spastic thrust of Langston’s chest sent him bolt upright and the table tore up at the bolts as his right shoulder hit it. Everyone froze at the crack of Langston’s shoulder as it popped out of its socket. There was a split second before the table teetered to a precarious rest against the bench where a moment ago Jill had been seated. Langston fell to his convulsions, groaning on the loose bolts and crud of the floor of his booth, and everyone knew then that Langston had always been right: he was the first of them to go down.
“DTs comin’!” hollered Miles from his seat at the bar. But his voice held more fear than mockery.
“Shut up, Miles,” snapped Rudd anyway. He rose from his seat, grabbing the bottle of J&B from which Langston had just been poured a drink. “Jill! Let’s go. I’ll hold him down and you get some more of this into him. Try half the bottle–”
He was interrupted by some heavy work on the front door. Not the simple random wall gunfire that they were accustomed to, no this was a very real attempt to enter Tony’s. Dents-and some holes-were appearing at an alarming rate on the interior security shutter. No way to tell if there was even anything left of the outside shutter, though Rudd had long since ceased to count on it.
“Fuck!” yelled Miles, whose back was pretty much to and near the shooting. He dove across the bar, western movie style, forgetting about his shoulder until his head-first landing reminded him. “Fuck!” he added through real tears. But this late in the game they had all learned a lot, and it wasn’t long before Miles was returning fire from behind the bar.
Langston screamed, thrashed. It was impossible to determine if he knew what was happening. Rudd was close enough to Jill to push her back into Langston’s booth. He crouched low and handed her the bottle which he had not for one second forgotten was in his hand.
