by Anna Bruno
No one ever suggested we have another baby. The reason I never wished for another child is not heroic. If I had another child, I could not look at him without thinking that he didn’t have Lion’s bow-shaped lips, or his wide, bluish-gray eyes; that he didn’t have Lion’s robust, portly little body and, as a result, would never share my dad’s pet name for him, Cicciotto, one of the few Italian musings he’d ever allowed himself, a reminder of another life and time. Every time my living child laughed, I’d miss Lion’s giggle, which always came quicker and lasted longer than I expected. In our bed, I’d note his presence but regret that he didn’t worm his way between us, pushing his body against Lucas’s bare chest for warmth and clutching my long hair in his fingers, in exactly the way Lion once did. As horrible as this sounds, all the ways this other child was not Lion would accumulate, and the result would feel less like love and more like indifference.
* * *
WHEN LUCAS AND I wrapped up with Doug, divorce attorney to the stars, I had to drive back to my apartment alone. The meeting ran longer than expected, owing to Lucas’s breakdown, so I was forced to endure the twenty-seven red lights that line Route 1 in traffic, not city traffic—small-town traffic, which is actually more annoying than city traffic because if you live in a city, you signed up for traffic but if you live in a small town, traffic only exists during a one-hour window when all the clock punchers drop whatever they’re doing and head to the bar, or home, depending on their values.
At one of the red lights, I noticed that the pea-green Subaru Outback in front of me had a 13.1 sticker on its back hatch. I thought, Why would anyone want to call attention to the fact that she finished half of something? Misery emanated from me then—I can see that now—and not just misery, but failure. It was easier, or necessary, to see everything as failure—to see 13.1 miles as failure—than to face my particular failure.
My check-engine light came on, which wouldn’t have fazed me—I would’ve just driven to the shop, which is three blocks from my apartment, next to the hardware store—but then the engine started smoking. I pulled over and found myself in the parking lot of the LongHorn Steakhouse for the second time in my life.
This time, I found the faux stone exterior distasteful—a cheap, vulgar Disneylandesque nod to the Southwest, with red neon lights lining the roof. The large, fake cattle horns above the door reminded me of the fake Texas longhorn head that hangs above the bar inside. I wanted nothing to do with any of it, but it was damn cold outside, leaving me no choice but to go in while I waited for AAA.
Later, I would pay a guy six grand to take apart my engine, clean out the sludge, and put the whole thing back together. I could have just bought a new car, but the idea of dealing with a car salesman was utterly repulsive for a number of reasons, first and foremost because the minute I walked into the dealership, the salesman would say something like, “Why don’t you bring your husband in to take a look?”
In Upstate New York, AAA tow truck drivers take their sweet time, so I was forced to kill more than an hour in the LongHorn. I’d forgotten how big the place was, and it was crowded at the dinner hour. There was only one seat open at the bar next to a middle-aged man devouring an enormous Panhandle steak.
I forced a fake smile, thinking about heart disease and diabetes and the opioid epidemic, and everything that’s wrong with America. Cheesy pop country, which played low in the background, numbed my brain.
If I’d come ten minutes earlier, it would have been happy hour. My twelve-dollar cocktail was a premade sugary mix with not nearly enough booze in it to accelerate time. I’d come here once before with Lucas to share time—to steal a couple of hours together—and I was here now, by myself, to kill time. Sharing time is a flash, impossible to hold on to. Killing time is slow, methodical torture. It is looking at the clock, and then looking again and again. It is waiting for something you need but you don’t want.
In anticipation of the tow truck driver’s arrival, I mustered my sobriety and self-restraint and told the bartender, “Thank you, the drink was just fine. I’ll take the check, please.” But when the check finally came, I noticed he’d fucked it up, and it wasn’t fucked in my favor, so I couldn’t just tip him a little extra and be done with it.
When he took back the bill, he laughed at his mistake. “You didn’t order the T-bone, now, did you?”
I should have just paid for my neighbor’s T-bone and left because the bartender took forever to bring me the correct bill, and in that time, I couldn’t help but think about how much this place had changed since my last visit.
Actually, this place was exactly the same. I was different.
The first time I crossed the threshold of the LongHorn, so long ago now, Lucas called me out for being from Connecticut. I said, “Oh my God, I love you.” It wasn’t a serious I love you. It was one of those things you say when someone cracks you up. Maybe I should have said, “I love that,” because it was so early in our relationship. But in a subterranean way, it was true: I loved him.
He took my hand and said, “I love you too, Emma.” We didn’t stop saying it until Lion died.
* * *
“WHY ARE YOU STILL here, Jimmy?” I ask.
“You’re fixing me up. Then we’ll both go home, and tomorrow will be another day.”
“No, I mean why are you still in this town? Why don’t you go back out west, practice engineering again? Lucas said you loved it.”
“That was another life,” he says. “My life is here now.” He looks around the room, which makes me think here is this bar specifically.
I want to tell him that there’s nothing here, that he could find the same bar in any town, but I’m afraid he’ll ask me the same question: Why do you stay?
“I’m gonna open a restaurant,” he says. “Not some diner making breakfast all day. A real restaurant. Tuna tartar and miso black cod and squid-ink pasta—that kind of restaurant.”
The part of me that is my father’s daughter wants to tell him to open his restaurant someplace else. But another part of me that is also my father’s daughter wants to loan him the money to actually do this thing. Jimmy’s raw, rustic cuisine would attract newcomers, young professor types, as well as tourists from Brooklyn and the Upper West Side in search of authenticity. I picture Jimmy completely in his element, swanning around long farm tables, as diners eat his food late into the night.
1AM
MARTIN YAGLA IS BACK.
Jimmy jerks away from me. We turn our ears to the stairs. The sound of chaos ricochets off the walls: shrieking, scuffling, shattering, Amelia’s voice. “Get out! I’m calling the cops! You’re fucking crazy!”
I look up toward the screen mounted in the corner. It’s black.
The previous owner, back in the day when the bar was called Hanihand’s, had installed video cameras upstairs. He did so presumably for security but most of the old regulars thought it was more of a voyeuristic thing. James Hanihand would disappear to the basement and wait for a group of college girls to wander in; then he’d do a bunch of blow and jerk off to cleavage and tight little asses. Or so goes the legend. Hanihand snorted his way into bankruptcy, before I had the pleasure to make his acquaintance.
The cameras are permanently off now because, before tonight, no one cared much about the footage—heck, we all live the footage, and when we aren’t several drinks deep, it’s usually mind-numbing. If the video cameras were on, I’d be tempted to keep my eyes on the screen, watch Yag implode from a safe distance, but as they are not, my impulse is to run toward the action.
Jimmy tells me to stay put. He scans the room and his eyes land on a bag of softball gear, a relic of the coed team Lucas and Jimmy organized and The Final Final sponsored. The sound of the zipper alerts me: the voices from above have gone quiet. I hear only the rhythmic thump of the jukebox. Jimmy grabs a metal bat. I scurry up the stairs after him. He’s faster than me, clearing two steps at a time.
Yag walks the length of the bar, dispensing the contents of a r
ed gas can. He looks at Jimmy, then at me, then back at Jimmy. His eyes bug out. He wasn’t expecting us to come up from the basement—he thought we’d left for the night. He locks on me and mutters something under his breath.
“What do you think you’re doing, Yag?” I hear the harshness in my own voice. It doesn’t sound like fear; it rings of condemnation.
He says the bar is toxic. He calls it a “filthy hellhole,” and I immediately think of my mother, her refusal to sit down in this place. I don’t entirely disagree. Then I channel Lucas, hearing the tone his voice would take, how he would defuse the situation, and I realize: We are in a situation.
Cal is gone, down at the police station. So is his gun. This is a good thing, I think; Summer shouldn’t be here. Maybe no one will get killed tonight. If we’d only called the police earlier, immediately, Martin might be in custody right now. But we didn’t. We waited. If only. If only.
Death is in the air. What does that even mean? It sounds so melo-dramatic, like the name of a single episode of a nineties TV drama, a name that was previously unseen until Netflix invented the full-series binge, and the nature of time shifted from days and weeks and months to episodes and seasons and series. But it’s so apropos. Maybe it’s the way the conditioned air feels: artificially dry, ice-cold. I move away from the vent.
“Yag,” I say. “Martin, come on. Martin, you’re right. This place is filthy. We can clean it up. We can go down to the basement and get the bucket and the mop, and the massive container of bleach. We can take care of it.”
“No, man, it’s in the cracks,” he says.
He empties more gas from the can onto the pool table.
The jukebox is still playing. Amelia turned the music back on when Jimmy and I were down in the basement. A newish pop song comes on, distinguishable by its chipper beepity boppity bop, whoo-oo, whoo-oo, baby, baby—the college girls play it over and over again. They are long gone now, and I’m sure they added the song to the queue hours ago. Aside from me, Jimmy, and Yag, there are no other patrons in the bar. Amelia huddles behind the bar on her cell phone with the police.
The late-night Chinese place next door in the adjoining building is a grease pit. If The Final Final goes up in flames, it will too—there’s no way around it. We might lose the whole block.
“Emma, get out,” Amelia says. She’s right—there’s no one blocking me. I would leave, but I’m frozen. I am both panicked and calm, or rather, the panic has tricked my mind into a state of calm. Everything happens before me in slow motion: Amelia’s mouth moves; Yag waves his right hand over his head, clutching a lighter; Jimmy grips the bat and angles his body in a loaded stance, elbow up.
* * *
I AM BACK IN the Adirondacks. My hand is on my belly. I am three months pregnant with Lionel. Lucas lifts the oar. I tell him to stop. He swings at Kilo, misses.
Jimmy swings the baseball bat in Yag’s direction. Jimmy’s eyes are open, curious; Lucas’s eyes were squinted, angry. Jimmy’s jaw is slack, mouth open, poised to speak; Lucas’s jaw was locked, teeth clenched, without words. Jimmy’s motion is different; he’s holding back, swinging to warn. Lucas was protecting his family, swinging to kill.
* * *
I WALK OVER TO the table at the front of the bar where Summer drew ponies and weed plants hours prior. I sit down slowly, as if it’s a regular night, as if in a minute or two, Amelia will walk over and ask me if I want the usual. My elbows are on the table and I rest my chin on my fist.
The air-conditioning is on full blast, but Summer left the front window open. I listen to the rain, and the warm, wet air provides relief from the Freon. There isn’t much of a breeze but the smell finds its way in through the window anyway. The rain has trapped all the scents of the day, a mix of grass and gravel with hints of cigarette butts and dog piss. It’s not a bad smell; it smells real and familiar.
I am no longer Lucas’s wife. I am not carrying his baby. There’s no point in taking a swing anymore. Oar, bat, Lucas, Jimmy. Does any of it matter? Does it matter if Jimmy strikes Yag? How hard he swings? Will he give him a jolt? Knock him out? Crack his skull? Maybe he’ll do none of these. He’ll chicken out. And Yag’s thumb will roll that metal spark wheel down to the red ignition button, and a ninety-eight-cent lighter from the corner store will be the end of us all.
There is a signed receipt and pen on the table in front of me. Amelia hasn’t had a chance to pick them up. I flip over the receipt and write,
The filth is in the cracks ^ We cannot clean the cracks
… Burn the bar to the ground
That’s not a fallacy; it’s just plain crazy.
The bowl of matchbooks at the center of the bar, in front of the taps, catches my eye. Fancy Pete made the bowl during his pottery phase. It’s a little misshapen, glazed deep green with a drip effect. The matchbooks are branded with THE FINAL FINAL in Courier New, as if someone typed each one individually on an old-fashioned typewriter.
Desire strikes from deep inside: I want the bar to burn to the ground. For the first time in our lives, Martin Yagla and I are aligned. The Final Final has betrayed us—this old haunt, our second home. It seduced us with the illusion of family. It staved off loneliness with banter. It drowned self-blame in booze. It is, and has always been, one thing: a trap.
I want to light it up myself, and I think maybe I have it in me, maybe I could do it, except for one thing: my humanity. My mind runs through possible eventualities, however unlikely. Amelia’s lungs will fill with smoke too quickly. Jimmy will get trapped under a fallen beam trying to save Yag. A dog, left home alone upstairs, will be locked inside with no way out A child sleeping above the Chinese place will be unable to escape the inferno. I don’t want anyone to get hurt.
Amelia motions for me to leave. The 911 operator must be telling her to clear out the bar. The phone is pressed tightly to her ear. She repeats, “Okay. I’m still here. Okay. Okay. Yes, I’m still here.”
The rain stops suddenly, the way my tears always stop, which means it could always start again. The sirens are louder now. They are no longer a distant chorus. They are an urgent clamor. Everything else goes on mute. The jukebox is silent. Amelia’s repetitive exchange with the 911 operator is barely audible. Yag and Jimmy appear to have reached a détente—Jimmy with raised bat and Yag with raised lighter.
Maybe we’ll all walk out of here. Everyone will be alive. But Lionel will still be dead.
Then Jimmy unmutes the room with words, stupid words. “Do you hear the sirens, Yag? The police are coming. It’s over. It’s all over.”
“Don’t you see it?” Yag says. “We’re all worthless! Filth. It’s all over all of us.” He sets the gas can down on the pool table and rubs the back of his right hand on his pants.
“What are you gonna do, Yag?” Jimmy asks. “You gonna kill us all? Light this place up and burn us alive? Come on. The police are almost here. Give me the lighter.”
“You don’t think I’ll do it? I’m a murderer already. When we came in from the roof, Lucas fixed the screen. We headed out back, cracked our beers, and then I couldn’t find my stupid, fucking phone. I left it on that damn roof. After I got it, I was trying to be quiet and forgot to put the screen back on. It’s my fucking fault!” He looks across the bar at me, his eyes flickering. “Wooooooo. Splat. I knew what was going to happen and I left the screen off.”
Fuck Yag, I think. Fuck him for annexing my pain, for making it about him. Fuck him for reminding everyone what I already know: I should have been there. I am responsible.
I yell, “Don’t flatter yourself, Yag.”
The room smells strongly of gas. Scratching his nose, Yag picks up the gas can and pours some on himself, down his shirt and jeans. He is the fuse.
“You win, Dr. Yag,” Jimmy says. He extends his hands and squats down to place the bat on the floor. “You’re going to let Amelia and Emma walk out of here first, okay?”
Yag shakes his head. “Why do any of you even want to live? We’re already dea
d!”
Jimmy dips his head, like a defensive back going in for a tackle. Yag falls backward into the pool table. He pushes off and charges Jimmy, who is off balance, and manages to push him to the top of the basement stairs. Jimmy releases his arms from Yag’s body and grabs the door frame with his fingertips. He holds on. Gravity carries Yag forward. The sound of his body crashing down the stairs is unbearably loud, bone on wood, again and again, picking up speed the whole way down. I’m not sure he’ll survive it.
Jimmy looks at me, and it’s only for a second but it’s the longest second in the history of the world. He’s making a decision, and even if I wanted to, I know I can’t stop him. No one can. He lets go of the door frame, turns, and disappears into the basement.
Five police cars are outside now, pulled up on the curb, catawampus. The bar fills with red and blue lights.
When the officers enter, they smell gas immediately. One of them grabs me. I don’t resist. My mind is slow, as if I’m in a meditative state. I can see and hear but I cannot react—I cannot speak, and I cannot move.
I hear Amelia say, “The basement. They are in the basement.”
“How many are in the basement?” the cop asks.
“Two,” Amelia says. “Martin and Jimmy. Martin Yagla has a lighter.”
“Get them out of here now,” one cop yells to the other. Amelia and I are dragged out, one on each arm. She is walking. I’m not aware of my own feet.
I smell the smoke before I see it, and I swear it smells of death, and I know what has happened: Yag lit the fuse.
Jimmy and Yag tumble out the front door. As they hit the sidewalk, Jimmy is gripping Yag, arms around his waist. They are both on fire. A firefighter, already on scene, launches on top of them with a huge fire blanket, which puts out the flames almost instantly but somehow intensifies the smell, which is smoky and acrid and fatty, flesh burning, distinctly human, not animal, and also rank with toxic chemicals.
