The Life of Hope (4 page)

“You gotta have a steak,” she said. “It’s a steakhouse and tavern.”

I started to laugh, but this was obviously a no-nonsense breed of enormous woman. “I don’t want a steak.”

She snatched up my bottle. “No steak, no beer.”

I pointed towards the old man. “He’s not eating a steak. And those girls aren’t eating a steak.”

“They’re not drinking beer, either,” she argued.

The young girls giggled furiously, and I detected the old man’s shoulders bouncing with senile mirth.

I decided to try a moral stance. “Do you know,” I said, “that if everyone in the west didn’t eat red meat, no one in the world would be starving?”

“If everyone ate steak, no one would be starving, either,” the enormous woman countered.

“Is this a joke?”

“It is a policy,” she informed me.

“Right. A policy.”

“You got to have policies,” she said with near-religious fervor.

“If I have two beer, do I have to have two steaks?”

She glared. “Don’t be radickallus.”

“Well, I don’t know. I don’t want a steak. I sure want that
beer, though. Listen, couldn’t you check with my old buddy Moe?”

“It’s Moe’s policy. If it was up to me, I would give you the beer. I am not unreasonable.”

“I suppose a further policy would be that, despite the fact you’re not going to let me have that beer, you still want me to pay for it.”

The enormous woman nodded. “That’s the policy.”

“Even if I were a very strange goomba named Bud who was likely to trash the joint with the rest of his biker cronies? The type of guy who swallows pickled eggs whole, no less?”

“Right,” she nodded.

“Okay,” I said. “Lucky for you I’m not.” I rose out of my seat and presented the woman with a dollar bill. She rammed it down between her breasts and made change from the same place, handing me a cold dime.

“Well, so long. It’s been a pleasure.” I proceeded to leave.

“Hey, young feller!” This was the old fart at the counter. He’d spun around on his stool and was grinning at me. Despite the heat of the day he was dressed in a thick hunting jacket and a woollen toque pulled down over his ears. He was approximately one hundred years old, his face toothless and wrinkled. “You forgot your Hoper!” he cackled.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Goin’ after Ol’ Mossback?” The name of the mythical fish burbled in his throat, jiggling the ancient folds of skin.

“Right.”

He held out the Hoper in a twisted claw that shook with palsy. The lure had buckled at its joints and was pointed limply earthward. With a tiny flick of his wrist (although this was a fairly strenuous act for the geezer) he snapped it so that it was standing rigidly erect.

The old man began to laugh, great wheezy gulps of backward air, as if this was the funniest thing imaginable. “Keep your dick in your pants!” he managed to snort.

I snatched back my Hoper and left Moe’s.

I had one remaining option, The Willing Mind. I’d been afraid it might come to this.

The Willing Mind lay beyond the line of shops and businesses,
isolated from them like a leper. Beyond it rolling fields sprang up with determination, as if this single piece of civilization was the final straw, too much for Mother Nature to handle.

Many years ago, I suppose, the building that held The Willing Mind might have been nice enough, but now it looked deformed and humpbacked. Its angles and joinings were cockeyed, its oak-shingled roof rolling like waves on the ocean. The house had last seen fresh paint, I guessed, around the turn of the century, and that paint had been a garish crimson. Time had stolen all but a few stray peelings, tiny slivers that looked like blood.

The Willing Mind was curiously windowed. The upper storey had a line of what looked like portholes, tiny, round and imperfectly spaced. The lower floor had three oddly shaped windows, glassed in dissimilar fashion. One pane was thick and smoky, and, seen through it, the inhabitants and furnishings appeared to be melting, engulfed in some great blast of heat. The second window, a small elliptical one, was a mirror, and yielded my own reflection, distorted and distant. For the third window, the largest and most prominent, the builders had pilfered a stained-glass window, one that pictured Christ’s crucifixion. It had been inserted upside down.

By far the oddest thing was the sign that swung above the front door. Ornate gold-leaf letters named the place, THE WILLING MIND, and a painting underneath showed a stylized heart beating within a mass of gray tissue. It was crude and off-putting, and left to my own devices I would never have passed beneath it. But, circumstances being what they were, I didn’t see that I had any choice.

The inside of The Willing Mind was full of more strangeness. For one thing, although outside lingered a hot summer’s day, as the heavy door slammed shut behind me, I had the immediate impression of having escaped foul weather.

Much of the tavern’s interior was dominated by a stand-up bar, something stolen from the set of a B Western; it snaked around the walls, following all of the improbable dents and bumps. This left room for three or four tables, lonely and unused. It was obvious that all of the bar’s business was conducted over the antique wooden counter.

The interior decoration, I suspected, had been done by my
friend Edgar the axe-murderer. Stuffed animals lurked everywhere, a bear raging mutely in a corner, a lynx crouched and snarling near a window, any number of squirrels, skunks and birds frozen above the cabinets that held the tavern’s liquor supply. Another Edgartonian touch were the items suspended on The Willing Mind’s walls: the front grill from a Ford pick-up truck, a poster advertising a circus that had toured Oregon in 1927, and a purplish photograph of a chubby woman testing her bathwater with a big toe.

As I took all this in, the inhabitants of The Willing Mind turned and stared at me.

The most singular of these was a tall, gaunt man with skin the color of autumn leaves. His hair was midnight black, speckled with bits of white, like starlight. It was long, combed back from his high forehead, and tumbling on to his shoulders.

Of all the eyes that rested on me, this man’s, the Indian’s, were the most unsettling. For one thing, they were buried deeply into the leather of his face. For another, his eyes didn’t look to be functional. What should have been white was distinctly silver, and what should have been black shone pearly white. But this was all some trick of the light, because the man nodded at me and smiled politely. He held a cigarette between the tips of his fingers, and with this he gestured aristocratically at the emptiness beside him.

I obediently went to stand next to the man, taking note of the other people as I did so.

There were three more standing at The Willing Mind’s bar, two of them isolated and obviously a couple. The man, or boy, was perhaps nineteen or twenty, ginger-haired and smiling. He would have been handsome except that acne had invaded his face savagely, leaving it scabbed and scarred. His mate was a small girl, a year or two younger, whose body had run to fat but stopped just before it got there. She had been burned golden by the sun.

The last occupant was a jerk. Everything about this guy announced JERK so loudly that a Venutian would understand. He wore striped bellbottoms and a green and orange checked sports coat with bulging pockets, the pockets obviously packed with palm-buzzers and chewing gum that turned your mouth
black. Underneath this he wore a satin shirt with none of the buttons fastened, either for reasons of fashion or because he possessed an incredibly large belly. Around his neck he wore about a dozen medallions and mandalas, and each of his fingers was ringed, each ring so enormous that he had to hold his hands spread open like fat little bird’s feet. The jerk’s face was basically pleasant, but he’d covered it with sunglasses, and topped it with a curly hairpiece. The guy had likely paid hundreds for the rug; I judged it to be worth four dollars.

The jerk broke the silence in The Willing Mind by bellowing, “Mona!!”

From somewhere beneath us a voice responded, “What?”

“We got a live one!” the jerk bellowed.

“No fuckin’ around?” came the voice from below.

“Abso-loota nyet!” shouted back the jerk.

“Hold on, I’ll be right up.”

I stood beside the Indian and looked where he was looking, that being an opened trapdoor in the floor on the other side of the bar. After a few moments a head appeared there. “Hello!” said this head. Then the head continued upward, followed by a woman’s body.

I said, “Hello,” right back.

I’d found my bar.

Mona reminded me at once of Elspeth, and no one, not even one of Elspeth’s detractors, has ever claimed that she is less than stunning. Elspeth and this woman shared a particularly Irish look, eyes of a light green and a pale complexion framed
with raven-black hair. Both women had upturned noses, although this woman’s was more pixie-ish than Ellie’s. On the other hand, while both had prominent chins, Elspeth’s was the more jutting—this may be more a matter of mental attitude than physiology. The greatest difference was in the length of their hair. Elspeth’s was fabulously long, falling well past her derriere. (We had a running joke: every Christmas we’d pretend to be the young lovers from that O. Henry story, “The Gift of the Magi.” I’d come in on Christmas Eve with a beautiful ivory comb, doing my best to give the impression of a young man who’d just pawned his gold pocket watch—God knows, I’d usually had to pawn
something
—and Elspeth would receive me, as gloriously maned as ever. “You bitch!” I’d rave. “Where’s my frigging watch fob?”) Mona wore her hair cut very short, like she’d just come out of boot camp. Her hair was disheveled to say the least, little tufts and clumps springing out in random directions; you couldn’t even call these things cowlicks, because if a cow had been licking the lady’s head it would have been much neater. Her one imperfection (peculiar hairdo notwithstanding), so tiny it was many moments before one even noticed it, was that her left eye was slightly askew.

Both women had general issue female bodies if you accept as standard something near perfect. But Elspeth had a tendency to overdress in a severe fashion, usually wearing baggy tweed trousers, a bra, a blouse and a thick sweater, completely hiding the curve of her breasts. Mona wore shorts and a man’s undershirt, the armless singlet style; the undershirt was too big for her, and her every movement afforded me a peek at her tits. When she bent over to shut the trapdoor the view was unobstructed. I saw that her breasts were slightly larger than my wife’s, the nipples many shades darker. Mona’s shorts had a military look to them, khaki in color and multipocketed; they also were too big and rode dangerously low on her hips. On her feet Mona wore sandals. I thought they too were oversized, until I noticed that her feet were crammed into them. Mona’s feet were the biggest I’ve ever seen on a woman, and that’s going some considering how many times I’ve been given the boot.

“How do,” said Mona. She’d obviously been up to something fairly strenuous in the basement. Mona wiped sweat off her
face and then fanned air with her hands. (Her hands were enormous, too, much bigger than mine.) “What can I do you for?”

“Draft. Please. Thank you.”

“Draft.” It looked as if Mona spent a moment trying to recall just exactly what draft was, a moment during which she reached down the neckhole of her undershirt and absentmindedly wiped the perspiration from her breasts. “You want a pint of draft?”

“Yes. I do. Please. Thank you.”

“ ’Kay.” Mona picked up a heavy pewter tankard and wandered away to the other end of the bar. She went to an antique draft pump and began to draw my ale.

The man beside me, the Indian, touched his fingertips to my shoulder. When I turned he said, “Hello. My name is Jonathon.” He profferred his hand, holding it high, near his shoulder, so that I had to reach out and up in order to shake it. “Hello, Jonathon,” I returned. “My name is Paul.”

“Oh yes.” Jonathon smiled and took a puff of his cigarette.

“My name is Big Bernie!” shouted the jerk, although he stood about five foot nine and (apart from his enormous tummy) was almost slight. “And this,” he said, patting his belly affectionately, “this is Little Bernie!”

“Hi, guys,” said I.

“Hi! Say hi, Little Bernie!”

Big Bernie’s stomach said, “Hi, Paul!”—or that’s how it seemed to me. The crease at the belly-button opened and closed like a mouth, and a strange, high voice issued forth.

I guess I looked a little dumbfounded, because the young couple laughed lightly. “Don’t worry,” said the boy. “You get used to it.”

Big Bernie now spoke to his stomach. “What do you say, Li’l Bern? How’s about one more martoony?”

“How’s about some food?” Bernie’s stomach responded testily.

“I’ll get the Moaner to put an olive in it,” said Big Bernie.

“An olive, big fucking deal. I mean, like maybe I should put the whole system down here on red fucking alert, huh?” Little Bernie was a sarcastic son-of-a-gun. Incidentally, during the potbelly’s little tirade I could see Big Bernie’s lips moving.

At least, I was pretty sure I could.

Mona came back with a pint of ale. “How much is it?” I asked, reaching for my pockets.

Mona looked momentarily confused. “Don’ya wanna run a tab?”

“You’re going to let me?”

“Sure. Why not?” Mona shrugged. “Anyways, it’s a buck-fifty if you wanna know.”

“That’s very reasonable,” I said, taking a sip.

Well, the price may have been reasonable, but the beer sure wasn’t. I’d once made a plastic container full of beer from a kit called Homebrew and was almost hospitalized for my efforts. This stuff was a notch or two below Homebrew quality-wise. I involuntarily made a face.

Mona scowled. “I don’t know what it is,” she said.

“You told me it was beer.”

Mona laughed, a pretty sound, though slightly rough, like the lightest grade of sandpaper. “I mean, I don’t know why it tastes like that. That’s what I was doin’ in the cellar, checking the keg and the pipes and all. They seem okay. It’s not very good, is it?”