Authors: Astrid Lee Donovan
CHAPTER SEVEN
If the 66 Inn was the benign tumor, forgotten and unloved, on the central nervous system of Vinita, then Chester’s was its ganglia. Few things had changed at Chester’s since it first opened doors some thirty years ago; the same cracked neon signs advertising Hamm’s beer still refused to glow and even the regulars huddled over their drinks at the center of the grime-laden mahogany bar top seemed imported from an era in which time forgot; an era of disparate resignation to an uncertain future untouched by sexual revolutions, brave new deals or polyester hot pants, and an era which had no use for the two young strangers who just walked through its fading green door into a haze of smoke and lamentation.
Buck Owens warbled through a seemingly endless array of plaintive ballads as the two made their way past a tangled row of truck drivers, pensioners and oil workers, all of whom shared the common bond of mistrust as being the sole constant in life. Particularly when it came to two outsiders encroaching on carefully cultivated territory. If Samantha’s partner could smell the hostility over the high-octane draughts of machismo and alcoholism that were part and parcel to Chester’s, she herself didn’t notice—or at least pretended not to. Samantha’s prime directive was the same as it had been for the past twenty-one years: to forget herself. And what amphetamine and pills were unable to complete, she could only hope that more traditional methods would suffice.
“Two whiskeys,” she snapped at the bartender, a portly and bearded ball of invective who was more than a little bemused by the sight of a female—and a quite stunning one at that—under the age of 50 at 11 o’clock on a Wednesday night.
“Can’t serve the hard stuff past 9 without a membership,” he replied matter-of-factly.
“Membership?”
“Yup. County law. Only establishment-designated membership cards can purchase hard alcohol past 9 p.m.”
“Fine, then. Three beers—two for me, and one for this jerk,” she muttered, pointing at the guest she had walked into the bar with.
“You got it. No tabs at this hour.”
“That’s fine,” interjected her partner, peeling off two dollars as the bartender returned with their beers.
“To the beginning of—something or another,” Samantha mock-toasted, clinking bottles with her companion.
“You make it sound so… unsavory.”
Samantha almost choked as she took a long pull. “Unsavory? And
you
? Given the events of tonight, I don’t exactly feel like we’re living out a Disney story anymore.”
“Adaptation’s just part of survival.”
“Cute. Profound even, Mr. Darwin.” Samantha yawned and went back to sullenly pulling down her drink. “So you… what’s your story?”
“Just tryin’ to earn a living for the most part.”
“And so far?”
“Can’t say that my success rate up until tonight has been shabby.”
“I see. And I suppose that the past few hours are just standard occupational hazards that come with the territory?”
“If there was a clearly defined territory in my line of business, we wouldn’t be in this mess now would we?”
“I see. And what exactly is your line of business?”
“Survival.”
“Jesus,” Samantha said, bursting out laughing. “You really think you’re clever now, don’t you? Let me ask you something. Your wife. You mentioned you were married back in the car. How does she feel about your… er… line of business?”
“We’ve been separated for about a year now.”
“Big surprise.”
“Would it surprise you if I told you all of this is to help support our daughter?”
“Daughter?!?” Samantha choked. “Daughter…. well that just takes the cake!”
“Have to do what you have to do. You think it’s easy tryin’ to provide for a family on a dishwasher’s salary?”
“I been takin’ care of Randy on about as much as the equivalent.”
“So you see my point.”
“Touché, sir. Touché.” Samantha finished her beer. “Barkeep! Another round please?”
Nearby, a coterie of drunken Mexicans began slurring along as “Your Cheatin’ Heart” came on the jukebox. The smell of gasoline and Old Spice choked the air, and Samantha’s nostrils flared in revulsion. Her face, though still courteous in her beauty, felt as if it had aged ten years in the past three hours. Despite the din, the buzzing of the neon signs dimly illuminating the back wall could be plainly heard, and it relieved her. It made her feel somehow less alone; as if the mute vocabulary of inanimate objects were the only forms of reassurance she felt she could still place her trust in. She turned to face her companion. “So… you and your wife. How long were you married?”
“Before the separation? ‘Bout four years.”
“Mind if I asked what happened?”
“Another man. And another. And another.”
“I see. Not for nothin’, but shouldn’t that tell you something?”
“Like what?”
“Well… what drives a woman to cheat?”
“Could be dissatisfaction. Could be her nature. Could be any number of factors.”
“Bullshit.”
“Oh?”
“A woman cheats…” Samantha paused, and took a long pull of her fresh beer. “A woman cheats because she’s too insecure to devote her entire self to any one person. She can’t make that sacrifice because deep down, she knows that means giving up some bit of power. She’s frightened to part with it, so she’d rather give away the most obvious thing—her body—rather than give her heart away.”
“I think you’re thinking in absolutes. And I think you’re thinking based solely on your own experiences than anything else. Fact is, I couldn’t provide for my family… for my daughter… on what I was makin’ as a dishwasher, so she ran into the arms of someone else who could. Simple as economics. The supply met the demand. That was about a year ago.”
“Did you love her?”
“Not particularly. But I did love my daughter.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“‘Bout six months ago. It was her fourth birthday party. Here… have a look…” He reached into the inside of his jacket and pulled out a creased photograph. The girl in question looked emaciated, despite a broad smile on her face and nattily arranged pigtails crowned by a yellow birthday hat. A neck brace restrained her as much as the wheelchair she was sitting in. Behind her, a redheaded woman in a perm, once attractive but now a mere hollow shell, forced an embarrassed grin for posterity’s sake. The little girl’s face seemed to look beyond the edges of the picture, even beyond the cue of the photographer, into an undefined space beyond, into… an escape. And when she looked at the eyes of the little girl, Samantha felt she was looking into a mirror.
“She was diagnosed with cerebral palsy when she was about eighteen months. Doctor gave her six months. That was three years ago now,” he said chuckling and smiling sadly. He slipped the photograph back into his pocket and drank silently.
Samantha shuddered. Though she rarely drank, she could always rely on a lubricated sense of sympathy oozing out of her when she did. In the same way that others turned maudlin, angry or ignorantly blissful, Samantha felt the pangs of human charity more acutely when she drank. “I’m… so… sorry,” Samantha said, bewildered and more than a little embarrassed of her.
“Why’s that? Not like you were responsible for anything.”
“And your wife? I mean, ex-wife…”
“What’s past is past.”
“You seem awfully calm for… well, a kidnapper,” Samantha whispered the last word with a confidentiality that surprised her. It was an apt description, no doubt about that; but somehow she didn’t feel it was all that accurate. She wasn’t certain if it was the beer or his casual and honest revelation, but there was a burgeoning sense of the very word she would have cursed herself for admitting to; respect.
She eventually decided it was simply the beer. She wondered if something stronger would help her relax more, but didn’t dare approach her companion. God knows she wasn’t exactly about to unconditionally trust a man who just hours earlier had forced her into a car at gunpoint.
Still, Samantha wasn’t going to fault herself for wanting.
“Maybe calm isn’t the right word,” she continued. “What I mean is—”
“I know exactly what you mean,” he snapped, practically hissing at her. He seized her wrist and squeezed tightly. “Don’t make the assumption that tonight was about anything more than a series of mistakes.
Major
mistakes, I might add. You are—and I don’t mean this as anything more than the truth, now—entirely irrelevant to me. Nothing personal, but you’re just an accessory to me. Maybe we knew each other more, wouldn’t be that way. Could be close friends. Could be bitter enemies. Fact is, you don’t know me. I don’t know you. And given everything about tonight, maybe it’s better that way. But I’m stuck with you, now. We’re both in some pretty deep shit, you understand?”
Samantha nodded.
“So like it or not,” he continued. “We gotta find a way out of this; at least for the immediate time being. We figure that out, we can go our separate ways and leave each other well enough alone.”
“And assuming we can’t.”
“Well then, missy… I do believe we may be fucked.”
The cloud of smoke that wafted perpetually in Chester’s was suddenly pierced by a guttural shriek. Samantha turned around to see two of the Mexicans who just minutes ago were sharing the warming common bond of alcohol-lubricated brotherhood tearing into one another with all the fury that wounded hubris allowed. Honor had been slighted somehow; and although she knew not a word of Spanish, it was clear to her that pure animal reaction knew neither cultural nor territorial bounds. It was a shared human trait. To deny it was simply to deny 10,000 years of human conditioning; hell, even human biology itself - the simian mind; fight or flight; belittlement and ego; money and humiliation. It was a sad truth, but an unavoidable one. Was it that much different between this eccentric stranger and Randy?
Why did she find herself caring less and less about whether or not Randy even lived or died?
The bartender and two of his own compadres strolled over just in time to allow the larger brawler to get in one final punch before hustling the offenders into the parking lot. Hank Williams’ wistful yodeling repeated ad infinitum on the skipped record as the two rolled into the parking lot still tearing at one another’s clothes.
“That, my young friend, was some quality entertainment,” retorted Samantha’s companion.
“So what now?” she continued.
“We order another drink.”
“For some reason, I suppose I don’t have any choice in the matter.”
“And you’d be right.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
For close to an hour, the two men sat at the end of the bar, staring silently at their tumblers of whiskey, peering up only to order another round and glare at the attractive if dissolute young woman and her emaciated, feeble, and—in their minds, purely “faggot”—companion who clearly had nothing to do with Vinita; or Oklahoma for that matter. Hell, these two drugged up yo-yos likely had nothing to do with the America they knew and loved that was built by their fathers and grandfathers; the America that was being transformed into a plastic cesspool suitable only for pantywaists and savages. The America now being bought and sold by liars and figureheads with capped teeth and fake tans. The America of low fat diets and The Great Unwashed, where a “self respecting white girl” could walk the streets arm in arm with “niggers and Injuns” in absolute impunity – a neutered America. A critically wounded America - an America they no longer recognized. Their own country that no longer recognized them had evolved to have no boundaries. An America so distorted, so intentionally malign, so optimistically corrupt that they felt their very marrow chewed up and spat out like chewing tobacco at the very sight of the young couple.
They didn’t take drugs. They only prayed for money. They could get by without drastic measures. They were men. They were secure and virile men. They knew nothing of a television dream. They were men to whom the future was appalling. To them, neutrality was impotent. They took no shit. They were men who were drinking themselves into oblivion at the same bar of their fathers and their blood turned to fluid pits of spleen and disgust merely glancing over at the opposite end of the bar.
If there were ghosts that lurked in the heart of Chester’s, these men were their children. To watch these men would be like watching a bone slowly emerge from their flesh.
The more they drank, the more they hated. The more they hated, the more their hatred bore into them like a cancer. They could feel it in their veins and in the remnants of their livers. In their very bones itself.
Neither Samantha nor her companion took notice of the venom-spiked glances from across the bar. They had their own trials to contend with. But even in their rapidly drunken state, they could sense an aura of poison milling about the mildewed room. It was as flagrant as it was silent. It could be chalked up to adrenaline or paranoia, but no excuse in the world could dissolve it. Nor was it going away any time soon.
Samantha took another sip from her beer, hoping it would ease the tension. Yet even as the clock crept past midnight and the crowd dissipated slowly, returning once more to a night that had already forgotten them, the unease remained. It merged with the alcohol now warming her system. It felt as much a tacit part of the bar room as the faded boxing posters and half-lit neon signs. Before she knew it she had already finished the bottle. Her companion ordered another round.
“I’m going to be honest with you,” she said, her words slightly slurring. “You’ve been somewhat… chivalrous, I guess you could say. Maybe that’s not the right word. I don’t… I can’t imagine that typically… for a kidnapper—”
“I really wish you’d stop calling me that.”
“For sure, it’s honest.”
“It was a mistake.”
“So that’s not part of your job description?”
“Not typically.”
“You didn’t seem to have given it much thought.”
“First time for everything.”
“Yeah, but it fits you… I kinda… I always visualized a kidnapper as being… I guess from the movies and all… as being this kinda scary, gross dude… in the Mafia or something…”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. But I’m still not a kidnapper.”
“What are you then?”
“Just somebody passing through.”
“What should I call you?”
“How ‘bout my name, for starters?” He turned to face her with an enigmatic and sly grin on his face. She had never seen that sort of grin before; slightly sinister, as though the face had its own ulterior motives, yet at the same time, innocent. Benign. A grin she actually felt a tinge of security being in the presence of that normally would have alarmed her. “I’m Dez,” he said calmly, shaking her hand.
The very sound of the name was almost so incongruous, so bizarre to Samantha that she choked and sputtered. “Dez?!?” She collected herself. “I’m sorry… you… you just don’t seem like a Dez.”
“What do I seem like?”
“I don’t know… I guess I haven’t given it much thought… ‘til you said it. I’m Samantha, by the way…”
“You seem like a Samantha.”
“Meaning?”
“Someone without a history.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re probably too young to be hanging around with the likes of Randy Cox. How old are you anyways? Seventeen? Eighteen?”
“I’ll have you know I’m twenty-one.”
“Same difference.”
“Actually, it isn’t… You don’t seem all that older and wiser yourself.”
“Not the point.”
“It is. Can’t play the role of my father if you’re still in diapers yourself… How old are you?”
“Twenty-nine, if you must know.”
Samantha chortled. “How ancient. How worldly. So, Mr. Dez... what makes you think… I’m incapable of taking care of myself?”
“Oh, I think you’re quite capable. And I think in a perfect world, you’d be in your last year of college, engaged to your sweetheart and thinking about settling down, maybe raising a family or starting a career, or buying a home or any other… uh… more ‘sensible’ options. And in that perfect world, neither of us would be here right now. But here we are. So, since we’re both here… what exactly is it about Randy? I mean, I get the impression he’s a good looking guy, but what do you really know about him?”
“Enough that after four years he’s someone I’ve - grown accustomed to?”
“You mean tolerate.”
“That’s - that’s rich. Offering me relationship advice…”
“So you know about the drugs and the other women and the drinking? Oh shit… I forgot. You didn’t even know he owed me over a thousand bucks…”
“I’m his girlfriend, not his fucking mother…”
“So you condone the son of a bitch? Or maybe simply don’t care anymore?”
The last retort stung Samantha like a sock in the mouth.
“You know, you really are something else - one minute, you’re almost being nice, polite, almost charming, really. The next, you’re giving me crap and acting self-righteous! I don’t need this - I’m going out for some fresh air…”
“Now look—”
But it was too late. Samantha had stormed out of Chester’s with a look of haughty defiance on her face. Dez sighed, and lit a fresh cigarette. The bartender came over, polishing a glass with a dirty rag. “Can’t win ‘em all, huh pal?”
Dez stared at him blandly, then let out a long drag of air. “Brother, you don’t know the half of it…”