The Barkeep (2 page)

“I suppose it would.”

It was still quiet at the bar, early afternoon, before the happy-hour crowd arrived with their after-work bonhomie, and even as the barkeep kept himself busy wiping bottles and slicing limes, he had no choice but to nod and listen. He liked it busy at the bar, he liked it when the crowd was three deep and the calls for drinks came from all sides like a rising tide of feverish chants, when there wasn’t time to take in the stories and the gripes and he was able to lose himself in the work. That was the quest in everything he did: the work, the meditation, the exercise, the sex. To lose himself. And as the barkeep would be the first to tell you, it was not without reason.

“That’s what I’m doing now,” said the old man. “That’s why I’m here. I’m taking my farewell tour. Before the sickness closes me down for good. To see how things, they worked out, to see the results of my handiwork.” He picked up what was
left of his drink, examined it as if he were appraising an uncut diamond. “And from where I’m sitting now, things look like they didn’t work out half-bad.”

The barkeep stared while the old man guzzled the rest of his drink. Truth is, a bartender is only ever a sounding board. You don’t care about his opinion when you are spilling your guts, and why should you? But the barkeep still would stand there like he cared, nodding now and then, never reacting with more than a casual raise of the eyebrow. And you would see in his affect what you wanted to see in his affect rather than the truth, that he didn’t give a damn. But there was something about this old man and the buttons he pushed that seemed to make what he was saying personal to the barkeep. The barkeep watched as the old man greedily drank the dregs of his drink, like a vampire trying to suck every last ounce from a pale stretch of neck.

“The name’s Grackle,” said the old man after he thumped down his glass. “Birdie Grackle.”

“Birdie?”

“You know Gene Vincent?”

“‘Bird Doggin’.’”

“There you go. Not so dumb as you look. I’d be hunting still if anything worked. But now it all just sets there like an old hound sleeping ’neath a cottonwood in the midday heat.”

“Another Mojito, Birdie?”

“Not at those prices,” he said, trying to laugh but ending up with a sputtering cough that turned his raw face red and brought tears to his eyes. “Why don’t you pour me up a gut puncher, just for the kick of it?”

The barkeep turned and grabbed a bottle of whiskey from the bottom shelf, something more suitable for stripping paint than drinking. As he poured, Birdie Grackle stared at the
rising brown liquor as if it were some golden elixir that could transform body and soul.

“How much is that?” said Grackle.

“Four dollars.”

“That’s a crime.”

“I’ll put it on your tab.”

“You do that,” said Grackle, picking up the shot glass. “And put two more on while you’re at it.” He downed the shot with a snatch of his wrist, let out a small slurp as his mouth and throat absorbed the alcohol, and slammed the glass onto the bar. “Another one for me and one for you to boot.”

“Thank you all the same,” said the barkeep, “but I never drink with customers.”

“Pour them both out, doctor. You’ll do me the honor before we’re through here.”

“And why’s that?” said the barkeep as he laid out a second shot glass next to the first and filled them both.

“Because, Justin boy, on this stop of my farewell tour, you’re the old patient I came to see.”

“You know my name.”

“I know more than that, doctor.” Grackle took hold of one of the glasses. “Here’s to blood in your eye.”

“What are we drinking to?”

“Your mother.”

The barkeep stared at him for a long moment, took in the old man’s alky eyes, his pale, ruined cheeks, the peculiarly self-satisfied twist of his lips. He glanced again at the tattoos of Jesus and the Devil on the old man’s forearms and realized, with a start, that despite the differing hair and expressions, the features on each were the same, they were the old man’s features, those of Birdie Grackle himself, both savior and Satan. The barkeep took the second glass of whiskey and downed
it quickly, let the cheap rotgut burn his throat until something close to pain slipped out.

“Good for you,” said the old man before he drank his own.

“You knew my mother?”

“Not really. I only met her that once.”

“When was that, Birdie?”

Birdie Grackle sucked his dentures for a moment and then said, “The night I done killed her.”

2.

FUZZY NAVEL

J
ustin was filled with the sudden urge to punch this Birdie Grackle in his filthy mouth. It came upon him so unexpectedly that he actually savored the bitter teeth-grinding pleasure of it. He didn’t feel much these days—he worked hard not to feel much—and so it was almost a novelty, this bitter anger that soaked through his flesh and into his gut. But it was a disappointing failure too, and so he bit his lip and stifled the urge. The barkeep had learned to stifle most of his urges, which is what happens to sons who stumble upon their mothers’ murdered bodies, or to bartenders when the customer is always right. Back to apparent calm, he stared evenly at Birdie Grackle, the rheumy eyes, the uneasy lips working hard to keep the dentures from falling onto the bar.

Justin figured the old man for a liar, and with good reason. First, Grackle had made his confession in a bar. Justin had learned long ago that looking for truth in a bar is like looking for sex in a convent, you might eventually find something worth all the trouble, but the search will be long and full of the deepest frustrations. And second, Justin knew enough about life to know that your mother’s murderer didn’t just happen to walk into your bar and introduce himself to you over a Mojito.
But Justin’s emotional response to the old man and what he had said was so unusual that he felt compelled to explore it. It was like, liar or no, the old man was a test that Justin needed to pass.

Justin leaned forward and poured another shot into Birdie Grackle’s glass. With an especially laconic voice he said, “Are you hungry, Birdie?”

“I must admit to being a mite bit peckish,” said the old man.

“With all your infirmities, can you still chew yourself a prime piece of beef?”

Grackle’s smile was revolting enough to force Justin to pull back. “So long as I cut them pieces small enough.”

“Capital Grille on Broad Street, then. Let’s say half past eight?”

“Let’s say,” said Birdie Grackle, “so long as you’re treating.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” said Justin. “And forget about your tab here. I’ll take care of that, too.”

“That’s mighty neighborly, considering,” said Birdie. “And seeing as you’re being so generous to an old man on death’s door, what say we have usselves another Mojito.”

Marson bitched about the change in plans, but Justin had become the beating heart of Zenzibar’s evening trade, and so there wasn’t much the boss could do about it. The on-call sub showed up at seven to take over Justin’s shift, which left Justin enough time to prepare himself for another dose of Birdie Grackle, as pleasant a prospect as another dose of clap.

Justin Chase lived in a nineteenth-century “trinity” he rented on the cheap. The real estate agent, before she showed
Justin the little tiny town house, described it as cozy. What he discovered when he toured the place was that each of the three floors was about the size of a prison cell. But the agent needn’t have worried her perfectly coiffed head of hair about it; Justin thought the place perfect. The first level now held a couch, a small dining table, and a galley kitchen. The second level was taken up by a futon on the floor, a bureau, and the bathroom. The third level was completely empty, the floor covered with light-green tatami mats Justin had picked up off Craigslist.

He showered on the second floor to get the stench of the bar off his skin and then, with his long dark hair loose about his shoulders and clad only in a blue silk robe, he slowly climbed the stairs. Without haste he took his position on one of the tatami mats.

A Zen master was once visited by an acclaimed scholar who intended to make a study of the master’s religious practices. As they sat for the tea ceremony, the master poured tea into the scholar’s cup until it overflowed and then kept on pouring. “Stop,” said the scholar. “No more will go in.” “Like this cup, you are full of your own opinions and emotions,” said the master as he kept pouring. “How can I teach you anything until you first empty your cup?”

In the wake of his mother’s murder six years before, Justin had zipped through the first three stages of grief—shock, denial and bargaining—got hung up a bit on the guilt and the anger, and then crashed headfirst into depression, where he moldered without relief, as if locked within a dark, damp cage. It was in the midst of this breakdown that he stumbled onto an answer for how to get out of his prison. He found it in a book, of all places, pressed upon him by the shaking hands of a fellow patient at the mental hospital where his brother had sent him. The volume was small, black, bound in frayed,
moth-eaten cloth, old and musty, Eastern and mystical. The first time he opened it, he found it filled with the most ridiculous of gibberish. It fit his mood perfectly.

The book was a methodology for allowing his mind, as the text described, to rest undistractedly in the nothing-to-do, nothing-to-hold condition of the primordial void state. Easier said than done, and not so easily said. But Justin, at the time, intuitively saw in it a route out of his pain. Whatever horrors he faced in this world, whatever demons approached, the answer was not to flee in terror. Instead the book taught him to face the horror of the world with a calm courage.
Fear it not
, read the book.
Be not terrified. Be not awed. Know it to be the embodiment of thine own intellect.

There was a rational side to our thinking, and there was an emotional side, and the book gave him a clue how to separate one from the other. He gave the book’s methods a try and, shockingly, they seemed to work. He saw clearly the futility of trying to leave a mark on the shifting planes of reality, like trying to write his name in the foam of an ocean wave. He learned to discard his dreams of worldly success and let his entire existence float on the winds of chance. As he quieted his hopes, his emotions dimmed; as he made fewer and fewer choices, he became more and more content to let his life come to him. And slowly, from the words of the book and through his practice, he found for himself an equilibrium outside his pain. That was how he finally left the cage of his depression, and then left the institution, and then flitted across the surface of the country with the perfect mindlessness of a moth. That was how he ended in this house, in this life, that was how he became a barkeep.

But now that old bastard Birdie Grackle had done the one impermissible thing: he had threatened to breach the
floodgates of Justin’s emotions. Justin had no doubts where that would lead if he let it continue: with Justin lying curled on the floor, unable to stand, unable to breathe, unable to see anything but the darkness. That way led to the asylum. He had been there and back already, he wouldn’t go again. But by hard experience Justin had learned how to deal with rogue emotions that pierced his placid surface. He sat cross-legged on the tatami mat, closed his eyes, evened out his breathing, and began to empty his cup.

Slowly and carefully, he called forth his emotions and let them rise within him. He didn’t now try to stifle them or dim their force. Instead he thought of his mother and her lovely face. And he remembered lugging the great fusty bundle of his laundry, like the great burden of his youthful ambitions, along the dark path from the street to the large stone house with bold white pillars. And he remembered slipping on something and almost losing his balance, figuring it to be a smear of mud left over from the rain. And he remembered reaching the front door, which was slightly ajar. And the wedge of light that leaked out of the narrow opening. And the slick of red he could now see on the sole of his running shoe. And, even as the inkling that something was deadly wrong blossomed monstrous in his heart, the way he called out “Mom?” as he pushed the door open. “Mom?”

And as he remembered, he let the emotions flow, as if he were an urn being filled with a never-ending stream. They poured into him, dark and roiling, and he tasted each of them, the silvery bitterness, the shock and the hurt, the pain of betrayal, the despair, the fury, the sadness, such sadness, the sense of loss, the sense of being lost, loneliness, anger, fury, guilt. Yes, guilt. Despite his even breaths and quiet body, his heart raced as the emotions rose to choke him. They filled him
with their trial and turmoil, and for a moment he had the panicky sensation that he was drowning.

He wanted to escape, to flee, to swim to the surface and cast everything aside, but he maintained his posture. The emotions kept rising, one pushing up the next, each pushing out the other. He became a deep pool of these dark and swirling emotions, the bottom unfathomable, the emotions themselves rising so quickly a stream fell out of one low edge of the pool and plunged down a craggy slope until emptying into some great sea. And each of these emotions, after they filled him with their power and pain, followed one after the other down that fall and away.