Authors: Nathan Ballingrud
“Goddamnmit!” Will said. “Somebody get that fucking bottle!”
Nobody wanted to get near them. One of the other guys Eric had come in with, some heavily muscled punk with his hat on backwards and some kind of Celtic tattoo snaking down his right arm, leaned against the pool table and laughed. “God
damn
, son,” he said.
Fights happened all the time, and sometimes you just had to let them play themselves out, but the jagged bottle elevated this to a higher level of calamity.
Eric wouldn’t let go of the guy’s neck. He hit him again a few more times, and when the bottle came around once more he took it on the cheek. Blood sprayed onto the floor, the pool table, across his own face. Eric made a high-pitched noise that seemed to signal a transition into another state of being, that seemed to carve this moment from the rational world and hold it separate. It seemed that another presence had entered the room, something invisible, some blood-streaked thing crawling into the light.
Jeffrey flew in from the sidelines, like some berserker canary in a sky full of hawks. He threw himself against them both, wrapping his weak little hands around the wrist of the guy with the broken bottle. The momentum of his charge carried them all into the table where the college kids were sitting, and everybody went down in a clamor of toppling chairs and spilling glasses and shrieks of fear.
Alicia shouted something, running toward the tumble of bodies. Will rounded the bar – too late, he knew, he should have been the one to engage them – and followed her into the scrum. A bright flash leapt from the tangle of bodies, like lightning in the belly of a thunderhead.
By the time he arrived, it was already over. Eric had maneuvered on top of the other guy and was giving him a brutal series of jabs to the side of the head before somebody finally pulled him off. His antagonist, deprived of his weapon, moved groggily, his eyes already swelling shut, his face a bloodied wreck. His right hand looked broken. The kids who’d been at the table formed a penumbra around the scene, looking on with an almost professional calm.
One of the girls said, “Did you call the police?”
“Of course I fucking did.”
She looked at the others and said, “Let’s go.” They dispersed immediately, pouring through the door and sublimating into the night.
Once freed from the actual entanglement, Eric had grown immediately calm, like a chemical rendered inert. The flesh on his cheek was torn in a gruesome display; it would leave a scar that would pull his whole face out of alignment. He seemed not to feel it. His eyes were dilated and unfocused, but the rage seemed spent, and he went back to the pool table to retrieve what was left of his beer.
“Eric,” Will said. “You need to get to a hospital. Seriously.”
“Cops are coming?” he said. The words were a slush in his mouth.
“Yes.”
“Fucking pussy.” Will didn’t know if that was meant for him or the guy on the floor. “All right, come on,” Eric said, and headed out the door. His remaining friends followed, not sparing a glance for their vanquished comrade.
Will, Alicia, and Jeffrey were left with the beaten man, who was only now pulling himself with glacial slowness into the closest upright chair. Will fetched a bar rag and gave it to him for his face, but he just held it limply, his hand suspended at his side. A thin stream of blood drooled from a cut on his face and pooled in a wrinkle on his shirt.
“You all right, man?”
“Just fuck off, dude.”
“Yeah, you can say that to the cops, too, asshole.” It was easy to be tough when the danger had passed. He felt a little ashamed by it, but not enough to shut himself up. “Grabbing a bottle in a fight is chickenshit.”
The guy stood abruptly, knocking his chair over. Will felt his stomach lurch; he’d badly miscalculated the scene, and now he was going to pay for it with his own broken teeth. But the guy didn’t waste any attention on him. He tottered briefly, achieved his bearings, and headed out the front door, into the warm night air. They watched him walk slowly down the sidewalk, into the lightless neighborhood, until he was obscured by parked cars and trees.
“What the hell was that?” Alicia said. Will turned to offer up some wry commentary about Eric and his friends, but saw right away that the question was for Jeffrey, not him. “What did you think you were doing?”
“I don’t know,” Jeffrey said. “It was instinct, I guess.”
“You’re not some tough guy. You could have been seriously hurt.”
“I know. But he had a broken bottle. He could have killed him.”
Will had no stomach for listening to Jeffrey play the humble hero. He had a sudden urge to break a chair over his head. “You did good,” he said.
Only now did he notice how much blood there was, all over his bar, like strange little sigils. On the green felt of the pool table, on the floor beside it, splashed on the chairs and pooled in a little puddle where the guy had been sitting just moments before. Stipples and coins of it making a trail over the floor where Eric had walked. A smear of it on the glass door, left there when he’d pushed his way out. Rosie’s Bar felt curiously hollow, like a socket from which something had been torn loose, or a voided womb.
Still no sign of the police. On a fucking Tuesday night. What else could they be doing?
The three of them spent the next twenty minutes restoring the tables and chairs to their places, wiping up as much of the blood as they could find. Will found a smartphone against the back wall, probably dropped there by one of the college kids when their table was knocked into. He slid it into his pocket while he finished cleaning.
When they were done, he returned to his place behind the bar and poured himself a shot of Jameson. He knocked it down and poured three more, arrayed them on the bar, one for each.
They raised their glasses and touched the rims. His hand was shaking.
“To New Orleans!” Alicia said.
“This fucking town.”
They drank.
W
ILL LIKED COMING
home in the small hours. Carrie always left the light over the oven on for him before going to bed, creating a little island of domestic warmth: the clean white range, the fat green teapot, the checkered hand towel hanging from the oven door. Everything else was an ocean of quiet darkness. He set his keys softly on the countertop, retrieved a bottle of Abita Amber from the fridge, and settled down at the kitchen table. He’d given himself a buzz at the bar, and the world seemed pleasantly muddled to him now, not unlike the feeling of being half-asleep on a late morning.
He tried to push the fight out of his mind. The police finally did stroll in, well after Alicia and Jeffrey had gone home and Doug, the graveyard bartender, had taken over. Will had waited for them with growing impatience, nursing a beer in the corner. When they arrived, they took his statement, gave the place a cursory look, and ambled out again, looking fairly unimpressed by it all. Which was all to the good. Nobody wanted on-duty cops hanging out in the bar. Just having the squad car parked out front – pale white in the dark, the reflective NOPD lettering on the doors flaring into a bright blue warning in the headlights of every passing car – was murder on business. When Will headed home, the bar had been empty, and Doug was leaned back against the counter, reading yesterday’s newspaper.
This fight was Eric’s worst; he’d taken real damage from that broken bottle. Surely this would slow him down just a little bit. At the very least, it might keep him from drinking while he waited for the stitches to heal. The thought brought Will some peace. He’d make a point of dropping in on him the next day, to make sure he’d wised up and gone to the emergency room.
Feeling restless, he wandered through the living room, navigating the darkness by muscle memory, and opened the door into the bedroom. Carrie was asleep, the sheets kicked down around her ankles in the heat. She ended up knocking half the covers to the floor every night, but couldn’t sleep with the air conditioner on because it made her too cold. It was a battle Will had long ago surrendered, having resigned himself to making do with the weak cooling effort of the ceiling fan. She was wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with Captain America’s shield, hiked up around her waist, revealing a pair of white granny-panties which, once, he had found both odd and charming. Her short blond hair was rucked up against the pillow, and her face had the defenseless, wide-open innocence of deep sleep. It was easiest to love her when she was like this. He touched her cheek, hooked a strand of hair back over her ear.
He stood there for a moment, trying to decide if he was tired enough to join her. But the clangor of the evening still rang in his blood. He went back to the kitchen and grabbed another beer from the fridge.
A faint musical chime sounded somewhere, far away: a descending spill of notes in a minor key, like a refrain from gloomy lullaby. He stopped in mid-stoop, the cold air from the refrigerator washing over him. There was nothing more, so he brought his beer back to the kitchen table and settled into his chair.
The sound came again, and this time he felt a vibration in his pants pocket. It was the cell phone from the bar, the one left behind by someone in that crowd of kids. He slipped it free and examined it: a bright yellow smartphone, fairly new judging by its condition, with a series of sparkling heart stickers affixed to its outer rim. The desktop was a picture of some far eastern mountain, snow-capped, radiant with reflected sunlight. He slid his finger across the screen to access the display, and there was a notification of two text messages received.
A momentary hesitation flickered through his mind before he looked at them. Privacy be damned; she should have been more careful if she didn’t want him to look.
The messages were from somebody named Garrett:
I think something is in here with me.
And then, sent two minutes later:
I’m scared.
Will put the phone down and dropped his hands, staring at it. The fog in his head dissipated somewhat, and he was surprised to feel his heart beating. The screen remained lit for a few seconds, and then blinked back to its inert state. He sat silently, unsure of what to do next. A sporadic ticking sounded somewhere in the darkness, beyond his little island of light. A scuttling roach. The phone chimed again, vibrating raucously against the tabletop. He leaned over and looked at the message.
It knows I’m here. It’s trying to talk. Please come.
“What the fuck,” Will whispered. He picked up the phone and scrolled up through Garrett’s messages. Maybe this was a game. Maybe they went back to the bar, knew he had the phone, and were fucking with him. Before these texts, there were only six messages exchanged between them. Arranging a study session for class, a mention of coffee; simple banalities. Nothing like this.
They were messing with him. He texted a reply:
You can pick up the phone tomorrow night at the bar. I go in at six.
Send.
Enough time passed that he figured it was all over. He took another pull from his beer and decided it was just about time to join Carrie in bed after all. The roach scuttled somewhere over toward the cabinets, but his normal sense of revulsion was dimmed by his weariness, and his irritation at the events of the night. To his own surprise, his brain kept cycling around to Jeffrey. Again and again. Launching himself into the fray and maybe tipping the balance in Eric’s favor. The look in Alicia’s eyes afterwards: she’d said she was pissed, and she probably was a little, but there was a heat in that look that did not come from anger. It made Will feel small.
The phone clamored again, making him jump. “God damn you,” he said to it, and picked it up to see what it had to say.
Tina?
He sighed and texted back, against his own better judgment.
No, not Tina, asswipe. I have her phone.
He pressed send, and immediately felt a swelling of guilt. Why the hostility? Maybe the guy really didn’t know.
Who are you? Get Tina.
She left it at the bar. I’m the bartender. Tell her to pick it up tomorrow night. And stop fucking around.
Send.
He shut the ringer off, and set it on the dishtowel from the stove, to dull its vibrations. It sat there, a cheery yellow rectangle in the dark cave of his kitchen. He finished off the beer, trying to keep his mind unanchored, free-floating; but Jeffrey and Alicia kept bobbing to the surface, thwarting his efforts. He imagined them entangled together in bed, a pale twist of limbs and sweat. Something dark turned over inside him, and he felt the sting of shame prickle his skin.
The scuttling sound intensified, and the roach veered into the light. It froze there, as if realizing its error. Its antennae searched the air, trying to gauge the severity of its predicament. Will considered the effort involved in getting up to kill it; it would be long gone before he even got close. He stomped his foot, trying to scare it. The roach did not flinch, brash as a rooster, unmoved by the sudden trembling of the world beneath it.
The phone vibrated quietly on its dishtowel. Will didn’t even bother to look at it. He got up from the table, placing the empty beer bottles into the recycling bin with a muted clink, and headed to bed. The roach disappeared under the refrigerator. Everything was clean, orderly, and quiet.
W
HEN HE AWOKE
, Carrie was already up, and the smell of coffee and frying bacon floated into the bedroom like a summons from God. He lay in the sweet fog of half sleep, relishing the bliss of it. He listened to Carrie’s footsteps as she moved around in the kitchen, listened to her hum something quietly to herself, and felt a surprising well of gratitude for this fine life. He imagined Eric waking up in whatever grim hovel he’d retreated to last night, his face crusty with blood, bright with pain. Closing his eyes, he stretched in the cool sheets and derived a wicked pleasure from the contrast.
He heard the clink of plates on the countertop, and knew that it was time to haul himself back into the world.