Jewelweed (50 page)

“Regular.”

The bartender tilted a glass under the spigot and unhurriedly filled it, as if enjoying a ritual.

“Bud Jenks in tonight?” asked Blake.

“He will be before long,” said the man, looking through bushy silver eyebrows and collecting Blake's two dollars. Down the hallway, a black Labrador slept on the floor just inside the back door, between the restrooms, the tips of her muzzle hairs white with age.

The woman roused, looked at Blake out of one eye, and said something like “Whadda wan' wuth Buddy? Whadda—” Half of her teeth were missing and there were deep lines in her face. Her pale blue eye refused to focus.

“Take it easy, Rosa,” said the bartender. “Nothing to concern yourself with.”

“Ba-bastards,” she mumbled, as if naming something she'd been trying to remember for a long time, and again cradled her head in her arms.

Blake carried his beer over to the empty booth nearest the door while the bartender walked to the back wall and made a telephone call.

The cool liquid went down easy and he savored the taste. The two young men at the table began laughing and talking loudly about something
that had been on television the day before. “Liberals, conservatives, it's all a bunch of bullshit,” said one.

“It's the rich and the rest of us,” said his friend, and then repeated it, “the rich and the rest.” A different song began playing on the radio, steel guitars but no fiddles.

The door behind Blake opened and he turned around. Bud Jenks seemed even more massive than Blake remembered. His blue pants looked as if they might be guard-issue, but not the green nylon jacket or untied boots. He shuffled heavily over to the bar and sat on a stool next to the old woman.

The bartender nodded. “Evening, Bud,” and held up an expectant glass.

The back of Bud's head shook. “No thanks,” he said.

The woman turned toward him. “Ba-bastards,” she said again. Then she put her head back down, her gray hair stringy and matted.

Blake stood out of the booth and pulled the length of pipe out of his back pocket.

Bud stood up from the stool and turned to the old woman. “Come on,” he said. “Come on now.”

Blake moved to the side, blocking the door.

Bud picked up the old woman and turned around.

The old woman swore.

“Time to go home, Mom,” said Bud, ignoring her complaints. He held her carefully, protectively, and began to move forward.

Their eyes met. Bud saw the pipe and recognized Blake. Blake understood that Jenks had come to take his mother home.

Blake called up the past, summoned the divine fear he'd felt in prison, along with its vicious twin, hatred, but the channel wouldn't open. All he could see was Bud Jenks holding his mother, taking her home.

Blake opened the door with his left hand. He held it open and stood back as Bud carried his mother out into the street. As Bud passed through the doorway they exchanged another look and Blake felt something inside him die. What he had come for would never happen. What there had been between him and Bud Jenks was over, blown out like a flame too weak to live.

The door banged closed and Blake continued to stand just inside, feeling a relief he'd never experienced before—something so deeply private and fundamentally right that he could not imagine ever telling anyone
else about it. Something so profoundly good had happened that he almost felt embarrassed.

He shoved the piece of pipe back into his pocket, drank the last of the beer in his glass, and carried it to the bar.

“Another,” he said.

“You bet,” said the man with bushy eyebrows. He refilled the glass and pushed it over the counter.

“And a whiskey, straight up,” added Blake. He went back to the booth.

As the alcohol began its dull, happy work, he celebrated his good fortune by trying to figure out what it meant. He'd been so sure of what was going to happen. On the way over, the sky, air, and everything else had seemed to confirm his passionate mission. The town seemed to be waiting, even eager for him, as had the piece of pipe beside the drain slot. Even the way the bartender said “He will be before long” seemed to imply that he knew what Blake had come for.

That was all wrong, of course. More importantly, everything that had seemed to point to a single imagined outcome had just led to another, completely unanticipated outcome. He'd come over here to confront the Bud Jenks he'd known in prison, and instead he'd met a man he didn't know at all.

“Another, please,” he said, back at the bar. “Both of them.”

“You bet.”

At his booth, he continued drinking and thinking about the two Bud Jenkses. It had been a long time since he'd felt the effects of alcohol in his brain, and he was astonished by how pleasantly it enhanced the thinking process. It was almost as if—

“Hey,” said one of the two young men who had been drinking at the table ten feet away. They had both come over to his booth. “Hey,” one of them said again.

“Hey what?” said Blake.

“You're sitting in Big Jim's booth.”

“Who's Big Jim?”

“He's a guy who doesn't want anyone sitting in his booth,” said the other one, grinning in a twitchy way.

“When he gets here he can have it,” said Blake.

“Big Jim doesn't like people to sit in his booth—even when he isn't
here,” said the man who had spoken first, pushing his upper lip out over his lower lip in a way that might mean he often made the same facial movement for no particular reason. Blake wondered if they were brothers, or if they simply bought their clothes at the same crappy store.

Blake shrugged and climbed out of the booth. “I'll sit somewhere else, then,” he said. He carried his glass up to the bar and had it refilled. He put a five on the counter. The two men followed him over and stood on either side of him.

“No trouble here tonight, guys,” said the bartender. The way he said this made Blake think he'd said it before on earlier occasions.

The two men went back to their table. The bartender found a couple dollars of change in the cash box and placed them on the counter.

Blake left them and carried his beer back to the same booth. He tried to resume his thoughts from earlier. He tried to reconcile these two dramatically different identities of Bud Jenks. On the one hand, the brutal prison guard, on the other, a caring son. Maybe something had changed inside him. Maybe the prison had imposed new rules, given the guards a raise, and held them to a higher standard. Or maybe the Bud Jenks Blake had come looking for no longer existed except inside Blake's mind.

“Hey.” The two men had come back. “You're still sitting in Big Jim's booth.”

The two couples who had been drinking and eating sandwiches got up, carried their coats down the hallway past the bathrooms, around the sleeping Labrador, and out the back door. The two older men sitting at the bar moved farther down.

“No trouble in here, guys,” said the bartender, walking around the bar and coming toward them, but stopping ten feet away. “We'll be closing up before long. It's getting late.”

“Big Jim wouldn't like you sitting in his booth.”

“I've had enough of this,” said Blake, climbing out of the booth, his right hand closing around the piece of pipe in his back pocket.

He could feel the same holy anger he'd carried into the tavern earlier returning. Apparently it wasn't necessary to address grievances from the past, he thought, because the present moment would always provide ample opportunities for violence. The threat of man-on-man violence had always characterized the society he lived in, and it almost felt good to
have all that atmospheric hostility suddenly come together and take shape, confirming once again that at this moment in history, man's deepest social instinct was his antisocial instinct.

At that moment Blake's father came through the front door in his light tan jacket and shorts. He carried a six-pack under one arm and nodded at the bartender.

“Evening, Larry,” he said.

“Evening, Nate.”

“Thanks for the call. I appreciate it. You two,” Nate said in a friendly voice, “what are you drinking?”

They looked at each other and said, “Beer.”

“I know that,” said Nate. “But what kind of beer? That's what I'm asking.”

“The regular kind.”

“I'd like you to try this new beer I found last week. I don't know, maybe you've already tasted it. It's called sour beer, and it's made by leaving the top off the fermenting cask, so the wild yeast in the air can do its work. It's sour, fruity, and strong, almost like wine but not really. Have you ever heard of it?”

They shook their heads.

“Neither had I. That's what I'm trying to tell you. This is something new, brewed and bottled right here in Wisconsin. Try it. You'll see what I mean. It's different.”

The two men looked at each other and then one of them turned to Nate. “Are you some kind of salesman?”

“No, I'm some kind of truck driver. My name's Nate. Here, go ahead, take a drink. See what you think.” He handed a bottle of sour beer to each of them.

They twisted off the caps and took a drink. “It's okay,” one said.

“Not bad,” said the other.

“Come on, it's better than that,” said Nate. “Much better than that. You wouldn't want to drink it every day, but when you're in just the right mood, nothing else will do. Here, you can have these bottles too. Larry, you should get a supply of this. People would really like it.”

“They might at that.”

“I'll bring you a case tomorrow. Come on, Blake, we've got to get you
home.” He took his son's arm, pulled the piece of pipe out of his back pocket, and led him out the door.

Bee met them in the lot. “Hurry,” she whispered. “The police do a sweep around closing time.” Nate's pickup was parked in the street, with a seven-foot aluminum ramp leaning into the bed. Bee rocked Blake's motorcycle off the stand and pushed it toward the ramp.

The three pushed the blue and white Suzuki into the back of the truck, tied it in with rope, and tossed the ramp in with it.

“Get in,” said Bee.

Blake sat between her and Nate.

Nate drove out of town.

“You're a certified idiot,” said Bee to Blake. “Do you know that?”

Blake ignored her. “Where'd you find the beer, Dad?”

“Son, I'd appreciate it very much if you didn't say anything for the rest of the way home.”

T
he Words Friends of Jesus Church did not have an ideal room for its monthly business meetings. Sunday school rooms were simply too small, and after months of prayer and discussion the Spiritual Oversight Committee had decided to reserve the sanctuary—which provided adequate seating for over one hundred adults—for events of a more holy nature. And so the fifteen or twenty members of the faith community who assumed responsibility for the upkeep of the church building and the coordination of its many functions had been conducting their meetings in the basement, seated on metal folding chairs, at tables with collapsing tubular legs and mustard-brown Formica tops.

Though no one complained, they encountered notable difficulties in the basement. The concrete walls and floor—coated with three separate applications of a glossy gray epoxy enamel believed by the trustees to adhere to damp surfaces and resist mold and mildew better than ordinary paint—conspired with the fiberboard ceiling that concealed the wiring, water, and sewer pipes to create an acoustic environment resembling the inside of a small gymnasium. Even when a microphone was plugged into a portable amplifier, some people couldn't hear much of anything, and others couldn't hear well enough. Consequently, speakers often had to repeat themselves, which took extra time and diminished the vitality of the initial communication by removing it from the immediate context and order of business from which it had been delivered.

The metal folding chairs provided further encumbrances. They became increasingly uncomfortable over extended periods of time, frustrating even the most creative efforts to find a satisfactory sitting position. And much time was required for these meetings because of the thorough
manner in which all revenue was duly noted by the treasurer and assistant treasurer, and then all expenditures were duly noted by the treasurer and assistant treasurer and discussed by the meeting at large, before expenditures were anticipated for the coming month, presented one item at a time by the treasurer and assistant treasurer, and discussed at length, item by item, by the meeting at large. Following the pastor's monthly record of her activities, then, reports on actions taken and activities organized during the month were presented by chairpersons of the Building and Grounds Committee, the Spiritual Oversight Committee, the Education Committee, the Missions Committee, the Hospitality Committee, the Social Concerns Committee, the Youth Committee, and the Community Outreach Committee.