Eddie reached into a back pocket for his wallet and took out two fives and a ten
and lay the bills on the counter. “Twenty on number thirteen pump.”
Sam reached for the money with one hand and rang up the purchase with the
other. “Yes, sir. Twenty on lucky thirteen.”
Eddie turned to go, but halfway to the door he stopped and looked out the plate
glass window. The boys watched him.
“Will there be anything else?” Sam asked.
Eddie didn’t answer. He was studying his truck, which had taken on an odd hue
under the florescent lights, as though by some magic of desert air its paint had
turned translucent and beneath it his truck glowed, softly, like a lanterned candle.
“I hope he ain’t going to get weird on us,” Earl whispered. He reached up and
took down the restroom key that was hanging behind them and slid it under the
counter. He looked out at Eddie’s truck. “Fornicate hisself all over our head like
that one dude done last week.”
Eddie turned to the boys. “There some place abouts I can grab a bite to eat?”
A smile slowly spread across Earl’s face. He jostled Sam with his elbow. “Notice
them plates?”
Sam nodded.
“Go ahead,” Earl hissed. “Tell him.”
“There’s Debbie’s.”
“Good place to eat?”
“None better,” Sam said. “Ask them about their desserts they serve with whipped
cream delight.”
Earl raised a hand to the other boy’s shoulder and turned his back. He seemed to
have caught something in his throat.
“Which way is it?” Eddie asked.
Sam pointed out the window. “Go left when you pull back on the highway. ‘Bout
two mile down the road. Big red sign out front right before their turnoff. Can’t
miss it.”
Earl hacked all the harder.
“Thanks,” Eddie said and went out.
As he filled his gas tank, Eddie cleaned the dirt and the smashed, sun-baked
bugs from the windshield. He went to the dispenser and grabbed a handful of
paper towels. When he turned around, he took one step back toward his truck
and stopped. A set of yellow eyes were pointing at him from behind the front grill.
Eddie let go the towels, and the evening wind that had begun to rise at sunset
scattered them across concourse and out into the desert.
He walked to the front of his truck and stooped and reached up under his
bumper with the handle of the window squeegee and pried out the carcass of the
jackrabbit he’d thumped a mile this side of the Nevada line. Eddie grabbed the fur
on the back of its neck and walked it to the trash container and dropped the
rabbit in, pushing on its hindquarters with the squeegee handle to get it down
the hole. “Let the dead bury the dead.”
He climbed back into his truck and pulled up to the road and stopped. At first the
boys weren’t certain if he would go left, but he did.
“Think he’ll come back pissed?” Sam said.
“How long have you been pumping gas here?”
“Be a year in December.”
“So far, any of ‘em ever come back? Even that minister with his wife and kids in
tow?”
Sam shook his head. He drummed his fingers on top of the register and looked
down the road, the glow of Eddie’s taillights already swallowed by the coming of
night, the red desert dust filling the air.
“Miss Debbie ought to be aputting us on commission for all the business we’re
sending her way,” Earl said. “At least let us take it out in trade now and again
with one of them big-titted girls of hers.”
Sam grinned. “You are one horned-up toad tonight.”
“No different than any other.”
When he saw the twenty-foot-tall billboard, Eddie took his foot from the gas
pedal and touched his brakes. The lower row of bulbs had either not yet come on
or burned out and not been replaced. The top row was lit, though, and beneath
the lights Debbie’s Ranch was written in script.
A hundred feet beyond the sign he came to a gravel drive and stopped. He leaned
over and cranked open his passenger window. He saw no buildings, no window
lights, just a blue neon “D” that hovered in the dark. Eddie shifted into first and
followed the drive to a parking lot where the only other vehicle was a dust-
covered Ram Charger. He switched off his headlights. Outside his windshield, heat
lightning flashed above the desert floor, illuminating within tall, Telarian skeins
hundreds of cacti, T-shaped like graveyard crosses. Along the horizon, he could
make out the silhouette of the western most Rocky Mountains he had come out
of late that morning as the snow had started to spit on his windshield.
When he climbed down from his pickup, the sand carried in the wind stung his
eyes almost shut. He lowered his head and limped as quickly as he could across
the lot to the front door. Inside, Eddie took out his bandana and wiped the grit
from his face, and he stood there a moment, his eyes graying a dark lit by brass
lanterns hung from overhead beams.
The room had about it a queer odor, something similar to an alchemy of cow
manure and Channel Number 5. The sides of the adobe building swayed and had
two-inch cracks running from floor to ceiling, and its walls were buttressed with
piers not all a part of the original Spanish architecture. Hung on the walls were oil
paintings framed in black patina as finely cracked as old enamel glazing. Portraits
of formally dressed men and women who stood out in front of the premises, a
woman in one holding a Winchester .30-.30 carbine in the crook of her arms.
Beneath the prints a collection of pioneer antiques. A foot-pedaled Singer sewing
machine. An ancient stereopticon.
At a table near the bar sat a pot-bellied, wide-butted rancher, maybe ten years
older than Eddie, outfitted in too-tight jeans and ostrich-leather cowboy boots.
He wore a snap-button shirt made of red-checkered gingham, and an inch-thick
dewlap of fat rolled over his neck collar he had drawn tight with a black string tie.
A woman with orange-dyed hair and dressed in a rainbow-colored robe and
matching turban sat dealing him cards, five times larger in size than cards from
an ordinary deck and oddly printed. No spades or clubs. No hearts. The only card
Eddie could make out had on it a hooded skeleton holding a scythe.
On the other side of the room sat two women, smiling at him with a casual
carnality. One, looking at him from over her shoulder, wore a pink, long-sleeved
evening gown, similar to one he had seen on television when he managed to stay
awake for the Academy Awards, except this woman’s dress was cut so low in the
back the crack of her bottom showed. The other wore something like a one-piece
bathing suit. Banana yellow, frilly and lacy, the woman’s enormous breasts all but
spilling like cantaloupes out onto the table. The two kept on talking even as they
appraised him from head to toe but mostly in the middle, eating him with their
predacious eyes, and for the first time in months Eddie felt a welling inside his
trousers.
A white-haired man with a Colonel Sanders’ goatee stood behind a polished
counter cut from birds-eye-maple. Eddie walked over to him and sat on a stool
upholstered in rawhide and ran a hand through his hair.
“What’ll it be?”
Eddie didn’t look at him. He was trying to keep his focus on a square foot of
wood-planked floor halfway between him and the two women. Out of the corner
of his eye he saw the turbaned woman studying the cards before her, shaking
her head as though what she saw met with her disapproval. He told the barman
to bring him a Rolling Rock.
The fat man sitting at the table with the turbaned woman twisted around and
smirked. The barman arched his white eyebrows. He studied Eddie’s washed out,
button-down shirt and craned his neck over the counter and nodded at his
boots. “Shoot. I could tell you was an Eastern dude soon as you come through
my door.”
“A what?”
“Ain’t no Rock served west of Omaha, son.”
“No?”
“Hardly any served west of St. Louis.”
Eddie nodded thoughtfully, as though the barman had graced him with one of life’
s smaller epiphanies. “I guess I hadn’t been paying all that much attention. Last
few days I’ve been tryin’ some of the brews I can’t ordinarily get.”
Eddie scanned the back bar, studying the signs advertising Budweiser and Blue
Ribbon and Mail Pouch Chewing Tobacco. “Just give me whatever you got on
draught.”
“We only carry about ten.”
Eddie leaned forward and squinted at the tap handles.
“How ‘bout a nice cold Mich?” the barman said. “You got the look of about you of
one of them Reno-high-rollers.”
Eddie grinned. “In that case . . .”
“Tall Michelob comin’ at you.”
The barman walked down the counter and crouched. Out of a freezer beneath the
bar he took a frosted, fishbowl mug so large it took him both hands to hold. He
stood and put mug beneath a tap, whistling as he drew the beer.
Along the backbar hung plastic-bagged snacks of peanuts and cashews. A
raunchy Penthouse calendar. At one end, stood a tall jar with a rattlesnake coiled
inside, the alcohol evaporated down so the tip of its tail had rotted white and a
bit of its spine showed. Above the row of beer taps midway to the ceiling hung a
chrome-plated reading light and beneath it a sign:
Our Pleasure Menu
Appetizers
Sensual Breast Massage
Lingerie Show
Power Shower for Two
Very Naughty Dancing
Entrees
Straight Lay
½ and ½
Reverse ½ and ½
Bondage for You or Me
The barman set the foaming mug before him. “That’ll be two-fifty.”
Eddie swallowed, his eyes locked on the Pleasure Menu.
“Two dollars and fifty cents,” the barman repeated, slowly and raising his voice,
holding onto the mug by its stem.
The fat man at the table looked up to the ceiling and shook his head.
“Sorry,” Eddie said and reached for his wallet and put down a five-dollar bill.
The barman let go the mug and picked up the bill. “That’s okay, son. His first time
here, our menu has a way of sucking a man’s wind out right down to his gonads.”
Eddie looked back to the menu. “Boy, you got that right.”
The barman went to the register. When he came back, he lay down Eddie’s
change and went to the sink at the other end and began to wash out the glasses
he’d left soaping. Eddie lifted the fishbowl with both hands and emptied half of it.
Across the room, Eddie could hear the whispers of the two women, but not the
words. Their eyes never strayed from him. When he tried to get a better look,
the women in pink gave him a pout, and with her hand parted the slit in the gown
running along her thigh.
Eddie took another long drink of beer and stood and walked over to the old-time
Wurlitzer setting against the wall opposite from the two women and reached into
his jeans’ pocket.
“It’s unplugged,” the barman called over to him.
Eddie turned around.
The barman was holding a glass up to a lantern, twisting it in the waxen light. He
huffed on the glass and wiped at it some more with his cloth. “Got us a live
orcheestra coming on in a bit.”
“You got a band?”
“No, an orcheestra. One with violins and a cello and the whole shebang.”
“Shebanged before you get banged,” said the fat man at the table.
Eddie pushed the quarter back into his pocket. Above the jukebox hung a row of
pencil sketches. One of empty train tracks, a thin spire of smoke rising into the
air far in the distance, the mountains in the background resembling those he’d
seen from out in the parking lot. One of what looked like a portrait of the goateed
barman. Pretty good likeness too. Another of a car plunging over a cliff into
nothingness, a girl behind the wheel, an older woman behind her in the back seat
holding up a bottle, the mouth of the girl open, her hair coming out in her hands
like bunches of charred straw. A voice behind Eddie spoke.
“See anything you like?”
Eddie turned around. She looked to be maybe twenty, tall for a girl even
accounting for her three-inch stiletto pumps. She wore a loose-fitting, black linen
dress that fell half way down her cheerleader-muscled thighs. The dress was
short-sleeved to her elbows, and not low cut across the bust that showed off all
the more her brickhouse figure. When she turned her head, the girl’s dangling
earrings winked in the lantern lights. Her eyes were a forget-me-not blue, shiny,
like those of a small-town girl the first time she thinks a boy likes her. She had
the prettiest smile Eddie had ever seen, yet impish, as though she was about to
have some fun, not with any malice, but only to see if he caught her sense of
humor. She had highlighted her sparrow-brown hair with hints of henna and
permed it into ringlet curls that fell to her neck and gleamed as though she had
wandered in from the rain.
Eddie’s eyes darted across the room to the two women. He looked back to the
girl. “Miss?”
She nodded at the wall behind the jukebox. “See anything you like?”
He turned and looked again at the drawings. “They’re all good.”
“Thank you.”
Eddie tapped a thumb knuckle against his chin. “Very good.”
“I drew them.”
He turned back to her. “No fooling?”
She smiled and cocked her head toward the bar. “Buy a lady a drink?”
The barman had a napkin on the counter next to Eddie’s beer and stood waiting.
“Your usual, sweet pea?”
“Yes, easy on the ice for the first one.”
“As always.” The barman turned to Eddie. “Another fishbowl for you, pardner?”
“I would, thank you,” Eddie said, and reached for his wallet and brought out a
twenty and lay it before him. “In case you’ll be wanting a re-fill,” he said.
A television set was turned on in a room behind the backbar. God talks to us in
Genesis about Adam and Eve. He doesn’t say anything about Adam and Steve.
Not in Genesis and not anywhere else.
The girl giggled. “Debbie loves Jerry Falwell.”
“Really?”
“Sunday mornings he’s on too early. So she videotapes his sermons and watches
the show in the evening.”
The barman set down their drinks.
“Debbie says preachers make the best lays.”
“I’d never heard that.”
The girl twisted around on the stool and with her painted eyes looked about the
bar. She sipped on her straw. “You’d be surprised what you can learn here about
people.”
She set her drink on the bar and rotated the stool so the outside of her knees
touched the inside of his. “So what’s your name, sweetie?”
He told her. “Yours?”
The girl looked up at the lantern above them. She twisted a ringlet of hair about
her forefinger. “Have you ever read Moby Dick?”
Eddie glanced down at his steel-toed boots, dusty and grease stained. He shook
his head. “Never been much of a reader.”
The girl smiled. She took her hand from her hair and put two fingers over the
inside of her wrist as if she’d some blemish to conceal. “Call me Isabella.”
Eddie whispered her name half aloud. “I ain’t never met no Isabella before.”
“Or Izzy if you like.”
He considered her suggestion, slightly rocking his head from side to side. “All
right. Izzy suits me fine.”
“Where you headed to?”
“Portland.”
“As in Oregon? Or the other direction, as in Maine?”
“No, Oregon,” Eddie said. “My buddy, George, works on a paper up there. When I
get to his place he’s fixing to take a few days off to take me fishin’.”
Izzy leaned and sipped at her drink, a tall concoction of various colored liquids
layered one atop the other. She looked at the turbaned woman, and when she
straightened from her drink she sighed. “You have to admire someone who will
cheat at tarot, don’t you think?”
“Excuse me?”
“Of course, it will do her no good. Your fate is your fate. Ahab will tell you as
much.”
Eddie looked down the bar to the cash register. “He the bartender?”
The girl shook her head. A woman came in through the back door, hips swaying
to her own drummer, and Izzy called out. “Now, there’s a real honey.”
The woman put a hand to her peroxide scalded hair. “There’s a real honey,
herself.”
The girl stirred her drink. “Where you from?”
When he told her, Izzy’s eyes lit up. “Me too.”
“Really?”
“Athens. You know where that is?”
“Not exactly.” Eddie emptied his fishbowl and to the bartender pointed two
fingers at their glasses.
“Wasn’t born there,” Izzy said.
“Where was it you was born?”
“Germany. Frankfurt.”
“How’d you come to be born there?”
“My dad was in the Army.”
The barman brought their drinks. She raised her glass to Eddie. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure.”
“It can be,” Izzy said. She put her plum shaded lips to the straw and winked.
Eddie’s face reddened, and Izzy laughed and laid her hand on his forearm. “Just
kidding. Debbie doesn’t pressure us to get down to business. If a guy wants to
come in and talk, what she loses in tricks she makes up on the drinks they buy
us.”
She took back her hand. “I don’t normally start out with a guy by giving up my
life story. Not even a little of it.”
“How come you did with me?”
The girl put her fingertips to the rim of her glass and twisted it back and forth as
she might the channel dial on a car radio. “Because you’re from home.”
“Your mom and dad still there?”
“Her and my step-dad.”
“Step-dad?”
“Mom left my real dad a couple of months after I came along.”
Through the door adjacent the back bar came three young men, striding almost
in a parade march, clean cut, their faces as solemn as door-to-door Jehovah’s
Witnesses, instrument valises in hand and dressed in black tuxedos and white
bow ties and scarlet cummerbunds. They crossed the room to a redwood dais in
the far corner and uncased their instruments. Eddie watched as they tightened
and tuned the strings. After a while he asked Izzy what kind of band they were.
“Chamber orchestra.”
“I can’t recollect ever hearing one of them.
“The blond kid is Debbie’s nephew. He’ll be a senior at UNLV come fall. She pays
his tuition. Makes him come up here on his breaks. Says it gives the place some
class. Entice some of those high rollers from Reno to come our way before they
head back to Tahoe and San Francisco.”
She finished her drink. The bartender set before her another. They watched the
musicians. “What kind of tunes is it they play?” Eddie said.
“Lots of Bach. Some Teleman. Debbie prefers baroque to classical, the German
composers to the Italian, seeing how she was brought up Lutheran, but she’ll
allow them to play some Mozart now and again.”
“Charlie Daniels most likely is out of the question?”
“Oh, they could, but they wouldn’t get past the first chord before Debbie would
be out here, cussing them red, Reverend Jerry on Sunday be damned.”
The musicians raised their instruments. “They’re really very good.”
The cello player slowly drew his bow across the strings. Izzy closed her eyes and
smiled like a woman just kissed. “I love the cello.”
As they listened, the girl’s long, unringed fingers moved gently to the music like
they were brushing away smoke.
“Too bad about your folks divorcing when you was so young and all.”
“Better than when I got older. One less person I don’t have to forget.”
“Was your mom expecting when she got married?”
Izzy stirred her drink.
“Sorry. I’ve picked up a bad habit of nosing where I shouldn’t be.”
“She was an orphan.”
“I see,” Eddie said, and nodded, as though her mother being an orphan explained
how it was her daughter had ended up selling herself.
“Mom’s father died of a heart attack before she was born. Her mother when she
was five. Breast cancer. She and Aunt Mary and Uncle Ralph were raised by Aunt
Iris. My great-aunt.”
The musicians had come to the end of the first piece and were leafing through
their sheets of music, quietly debating among themselves what next to play. Izzy
slipped off her stool and crossed to the dais and said something to Debbie’s
nephew. He spoke to the others who again raised their instruments. The girl
returned to the bar.
“It’s an allegro,” Izzy said. “By Vivaldi.”
Eddie lowered his head. It sounded similar to church music only with more joy. He
told her it was very pretty.
“On the day I’m married, this will be my recessional.”
Izzy leaned back and rested both her elbows on the bar behind her so that she
faced the musicians. “On New Year’s Eve, when Iris was at her Saint Patrick’s
bingo extravaganza, Mom snuck out with her cronies and drove to a bar down in
Parkersburg. That’s where she met my dad.”
“Short courtship?”
“Goodness no. Mom’s not cheap. They dated for more than a month. Got married
on Valentine’s Day.”
“Love at first sight?”
Izzy shook her head. “Mom wanted to get away from Iris is all, and she met a
man horned up enough to take her on, warts and all. When I came along, she
was a year younger than I am now. After she dumped him and came home, she
dumped me on Iris. Moved up to Columbus, and from what Iris told me it was
party central.”
“How old was you when she remarried?”
“Almost six.”
“You go to live with them?”
“Yeah. Didn’t want to.”
“I can see why not,” Eddie said.
“She scared me. Before Mom remarried, on the days she could recover from her
hangover and bother herself to drive down, she had a temper that was all match
and no fuse. Sometimes I hid out under the porch until she left.”
Since Eddie had come in, the wind had steadily picked up, and now it whistled
through the cracks that fissured the adobe, swinging the lanterns. The candle
flame in the lamp above them flickered as it healed in a circle around the glass.
Continue reading here
and lay the bills on the counter. “Twenty on number thirteen pump.”
Sam reached for the money with one hand and rang up the purchase with the
other. “Yes, sir. Twenty on lucky thirteen.”
Eddie turned to go, but halfway to the door he stopped and looked out the plate
glass window. The boys watched him.
“Will there be anything else?” Sam asked.
Eddie didn’t answer. He was studying his truck, which had taken on an odd hue
under the florescent lights, as though by some magic of desert air its paint had
turned translucent and beneath it his truck glowed, softly, like a lanterned candle.
“I hope he ain’t going to get weird on us,” Earl whispered. He reached up and
took down the restroom key that was hanging behind them and slid it under the
counter. He looked out at Eddie’s truck. “Fornicate hisself all over our head like
that one dude done last week.”
Eddie turned to the boys. “There some place abouts I can grab a bite to eat?”
A smile slowly spread across Earl’s face. He jostled Sam with his elbow. “Notice
them plates?”
Sam nodded.
“Go ahead,” Earl hissed. “Tell him.”
“There’s Debbie’s.”
“Good place to eat?”
“None better,” Sam said. “Ask them about their desserts they serve with whipped
cream delight.”
Earl raised a hand to the other boy’s shoulder and turned his back. He seemed to
have caught something in his throat.
“Which way is it?” Eddie asked.
Sam pointed out the window. “Go left when you pull back on the highway. ‘Bout
two mile down the road. Big red sign out front right before their turnoff. Can’t
miss it.”
Earl hacked all the harder.
“Thanks,” Eddie said and went out.
As he filled his gas tank, Eddie cleaned the dirt and the smashed, sun-baked
bugs from the windshield. He went to the dispenser and grabbed a handful of
paper towels. When he turned around, he took one step back toward his truck
and stopped. A set of yellow eyes were pointing at him from behind the front grill.
Eddie let go the towels, and the evening wind that had begun to rise at sunset
scattered them across concourse and out into the desert.
He walked to the front of his truck and stooped and reached up under his
bumper with the handle of the window squeegee and pried out the carcass of the
jackrabbit he’d thumped a mile this side of the Nevada line. Eddie grabbed the fur
on the back of its neck and walked it to the trash container and dropped the
rabbit in, pushing on its hindquarters with the squeegee handle to get it down
the hole. “Let the dead bury the dead.”
He climbed back into his truck and pulled up to the road and stopped. At first the
boys weren’t certain if he would go left, but he did.
“Think he’ll come back pissed?” Sam said.
“How long have you been pumping gas here?”
“Be a year in December.”
“So far, any of ‘em ever come back? Even that minister with his wife and kids in
tow?”
Sam shook his head. He drummed his fingers on top of the register and looked
down the road, the glow of Eddie’s taillights already swallowed by the coming of
night, the red desert dust filling the air.
“Miss Debbie ought to be aputting us on commission for all the business we’re
sending her way,” Earl said. “At least let us take it out in trade now and again
with one of them big-titted girls of hers.”
Sam grinned. “You are one horned-up toad tonight.”
“No different than any other.”
When he saw the twenty-foot-tall billboard, Eddie took his foot from the gas
pedal and touched his brakes. The lower row of bulbs had either not yet come on
or burned out and not been replaced. The top row was lit, though, and beneath
the lights Debbie’s Ranch was written in script.
A hundred feet beyond the sign he came to a gravel drive and stopped. He leaned
over and cranked open his passenger window. He saw no buildings, no window
lights, just a blue neon “D” that hovered in the dark. Eddie shifted into first and
followed the drive to a parking lot where the only other vehicle was a dust-
covered Ram Charger. He switched off his headlights. Outside his windshield, heat
lightning flashed above the desert floor, illuminating within tall, Telarian skeins
hundreds of cacti, T-shaped like graveyard crosses. Along the horizon, he could
make out the silhouette of the western most Rocky Mountains he had come out
of late that morning as the snow had started to spit on his windshield.
When he climbed down from his pickup, the sand carried in the wind stung his
eyes almost shut. He lowered his head and limped as quickly as he could across
the lot to the front door. Inside, Eddie took out his bandana and wiped the grit
from his face, and he stood there a moment, his eyes graying a dark lit by brass
lanterns hung from overhead beams.
The room had about it a queer odor, something similar to an alchemy of cow
manure and Channel Number 5. The sides of the adobe building swayed and had
two-inch cracks running from floor to ceiling, and its walls were buttressed with
piers not all a part of the original Spanish architecture. Hung on the walls were oil
paintings framed in black patina as finely cracked as old enamel glazing. Portraits
of formally dressed men and women who stood out in front of the premises, a
woman in one holding a Winchester .30-.30 carbine in the crook of her arms.
Beneath the prints a collection of pioneer antiques. A foot-pedaled Singer sewing
machine. An ancient stereopticon.
At a table near the bar sat a pot-bellied, wide-butted rancher, maybe ten years
older than Eddie, outfitted in too-tight jeans and ostrich-leather cowboy boots.
He wore a snap-button shirt made of red-checkered gingham, and an inch-thick
dewlap of fat rolled over his neck collar he had drawn tight with a black string tie.
A woman with orange-dyed hair and dressed in a rainbow-colored robe and
matching turban sat dealing him cards, five times larger in size than cards from
an ordinary deck and oddly printed. No spades or clubs. No hearts. The only card
Eddie could make out had on it a hooded skeleton holding a scythe.
On the other side of the room sat two women, smiling at him with a casual
carnality. One, looking at him from over her shoulder, wore a pink, long-sleeved
evening gown, similar to one he had seen on television when he managed to stay
awake for the Academy Awards, except this woman’s dress was cut so low in the
back the crack of her bottom showed. The other wore something like a one-piece
bathing suit. Banana yellow, frilly and lacy, the woman’s enormous breasts all but
spilling like cantaloupes out onto the table. The two kept on talking even as they
appraised him from head to toe but mostly in the middle, eating him with their
predacious eyes, and for the first time in months Eddie felt a welling inside his
trousers.
A white-haired man with a Colonel Sanders’ goatee stood behind a polished
counter cut from birds-eye-maple. Eddie walked over to him and sat on a stool
upholstered in rawhide and ran a hand through his hair.
“What’ll it be?”
Eddie didn’t look at him. He was trying to keep his focus on a square foot of
wood-planked floor halfway between him and the two women. Out of the corner
of his eye he saw the turbaned woman studying the cards before her, shaking
her head as though what she saw met with her disapproval. He told the barman
to bring him a Rolling Rock.
The fat man sitting at the table with the turbaned woman twisted around and
smirked. The barman arched his white eyebrows. He studied Eddie’s washed out,
button-down shirt and craned his neck over the counter and nodded at his
boots. “Shoot. I could tell you was an Eastern dude soon as you come through
my door.”
“A what?”
“Ain’t no Rock served west of Omaha, son.”
“No?”
“Hardly any served west of St. Louis.”
Eddie nodded thoughtfully, as though the barman had graced him with one of life’
s smaller epiphanies. “I guess I hadn’t been paying all that much attention. Last
few days I’ve been tryin’ some of the brews I can’t ordinarily get.”
Eddie scanned the back bar, studying the signs advertising Budweiser and Blue
Ribbon and Mail Pouch Chewing Tobacco. “Just give me whatever you got on
draught.”
“We only carry about ten.”
Eddie leaned forward and squinted at the tap handles.
“How ‘bout a nice cold Mich?” the barman said. “You got the look of about you of
one of them Reno-high-rollers.”
Eddie grinned. “In that case . . .”
“Tall Michelob comin’ at you.”
The barman walked down the counter and crouched. Out of a freezer beneath the
bar he took a frosted, fishbowl mug so large it took him both hands to hold. He
stood and put mug beneath a tap, whistling as he drew the beer.
Along the backbar hung plastic-bagged snacks of peanuts and cashews. A
raunchy Penthouse calendar. At one end, stood a tall jar with a rattlesnake coiled
inside, the alcohol evaporated down so the tip of its tail had rotted white and a
bit of its spine showed. Above the row of beer taps midway to the ceiling hung a
chrome-plated reading light and beneath it a sign:
Our Pleasure Menu
Appetizers
Sensual Breast Massage
Lingerie Show
Power Shower for Two
Very Naughty Dancing
Entrees
Straight Lay
½ and ½
Reverse ½ and ½
Bondage for You or Me
The barman set the foaming mug before him. “That’ll be two-fifty.”
Eddie swallowed, his eyes locked on the Pleasure Menu.
“Two dollars and fifty cents,” the barman repeated, slowly and raising his voice,
holding onto the mug by its stem.
The fat man at the table looked up to the ceiling and shook his head.
“Sorry,” Eddie said and reached for his wallet and put down a five-dollar bill.
The barman let go the mug and picked up the bill. “That’s okay, son. His first time
here, our menu has a way of sucking a man’s wind out right down to his gonads.”
Eddie looked back to the menu. “Boy, you got that right.”
The barman went to the register. When he came back, he lay down Eddie’s
change and went to the sink at the other end and began to wash out the glasses
he’d left soaping. Eddie lifted the fishbowl with both hands and emptied half of it.
Across the room, Eddie could hear the whispers of the two women, but not the
words. Their eyes never strayed from him. When he tried to get a better look,
the women in pink gave him a pout, and with her hand parted the slit in the gown
running along her thigh.
Eddie took another long drink of beer and stood and walked over to the old-time
Wurlitzer setting against the wall opposite from the two women and reached into
his jeans’ pocket.
“It’s unplugged,” the barman called over to him.
Eddie turned around.
The barman was holding a glass up to a lantern, twisting it in the waxen light. He
huffed on the glass and wiped at it some more with his cloth. “Got us a live
orcheestra coming on in a bit.”
“You got a band?”
“No, an orcheestra. One with violins and a cello and the whole shebang.”
“Shebanged before you get banged,” said the fat man at the table.
Eddie pushed the quarter back into his pocket. Above the jukebox hung a row of
pencil sketches. One of empty train tracks, a thin spire of smoke rising into the
air far in the distance, the mountains in the background resembling those he’d
seen from out in the parking lot. One of what looked like a portrait of the goateed
barman. Pretty good likeness too. Another of a car plunging over a cliff into
nothingness, a girl behind the wheel, an older woman behind her in the back seat
holding up a bottle, the mouth of the girl open, her hair coming out in her hands
like bunches of charred straw. A voice behind Eddie spoke.
“See anything you like?”
Eddie turned around. She looked to be maybe twenty, tall for a girl even
accounting for her three-inch stiletto pumps. She wore a loose-fitting, black linen
dress that fell half way down her cheerleader-muscled thighs. The dress was
short-sleeved to her elbows, and not low cut across the bust that showed off all
the more her brickhouse figure. When she turned her head, the girl’s dangling
earrings winked in the lantern lights. Her eyes were a forget-me-not blue, shiny,
like those of a small-town girl the first time she thinks a boy likes her. She had
the prettiest smile Eddie had ever seen, yet impish, as though she was about to
have some fun, not with any malice, but only to see if he caught her sense of
humor. She had highlighted her sparrow-brown hair with hints of henna and
permed it into ringlet curls that fell to her neck and gleamed as though she had
wandered in from the rain.
Eddie’s eyes darted across the room to the two women. He looked back to the
girl. “Miss?”
She nodded at the wall behind the jukebox. “See anything you like?”
He turned and looked again at the drawings. “They’re all good.”
“Thank you.”
Eddie tapped a thumb knuckle against his chin. “Very good.”
“I drew them.”
He turned back to her. “No fooling?”
She smiled and cocked her head toward the bar. “Buy a lady a drink?”
The barman had a napkin on the counter next to Eddie’s beer and stood waiting.
“Your usual, sweet pea?”
“Yes, easy on the ice for the first one.”
“As always.” The barman turned to Eddie. “Another fishbowl for you, pardner?”
“I would, thank you,” Eddie said, and reached for his wallet and brought out a
twenty and lay it before him. “In case you’ll be wanting a re-fill,” he said.
A television set was turned on in a room behind the backbar. God talks to us in
Genesis about Adam and Eve. He doesn’t say anything about Adam and Steve.
Not in Genesis and not anywhere else.
The girl giggled. “Debbie loves Jerry Falwell.”
“Really?”
“Sunday mornings he’s on too early. So she videotapes his sermons and watches
the show in the evening.”
The barman set down their drinks.
“Debbie says preachers make the best lays.”
“I’d never heard that.”
The girl twisted around on the stool and with her painted eyes looked about the
bar. She sipped on her straw. “You’d be surprised what you can learn here about
people.”
She set her drink on the bar and rotated the stool so the outside of her knees
touched the inside of his. “So what’s your name, sweetie?”
He told her. “Yours?”
The girl looked up at the lantern above them. She twisted a ringlet of hair about
her forefinger. “Have you ever read Moby Dick?”
Eddie glanced down at his steel-toed boots, dusty and grease stained. He shook
his head. “Never been much of a reader.”
The girl smiled. She took her hand from her hair and put two fingers over the
inside of her wrist as if she’d some blemish to conceal. “Call me Isabella.”
Eddie whispered her name half aloud. “I ain’t never met no Isabella before.”
“Or Izzy if you like.”
He considered her suggestion, slightly rocking his head from side to side. “All
right. Izzy suits me fine.”
“Where you headed to?”
“Portland.”
“As in Oregon? Or the other direction, as in Maine?”
“No, Oregon,” Eddie said. “My buddy, George, works on a paper up there. When I
get to his place he’s fixing to take a few days off to take me fishin’.”
Izzy leaned and sipped at her drink, a tall concoction of various colored liquids
layered one atop the other. She looked at the turbaned woman, and when she
straightened from her drink she sighed. “You have to admire someone who will
cheat at tarot, don’t you think?”
“Excuse me?”
“Of course, it will do her no good. Your fate is your fate. Ahab will tell you as
much.”
Eddie looked down the bar to the cash register. “He the bartender?”
The girl shook her head. A woman came in through the back door, hips swaying
to her own drummer, and Izzy called out. “Now, there’s a real honey.”
The woman put a hand to her peroxide scalded hair. “There’s a real honey,
herself.”
The girl stirred her drink. “Where you from?”
When he told her, Izzy’s eyes lit up. “Me too.”
“Really?”
“Athens. You know where that is?”
“Not exactly.” Eddie emptied his fishbowl and to the bartender pointed two
fingers at their glasses.
“Wasn’t born there,” Izzy said.
“Where was it you was born?”
“Germany. Frankfurt.”
“How’d you come to be born there?”
“My dad was in the Army.”
The barman brought their drinks. She raised her glass to Eddie. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure.”
“It can be,” Izzy said. She put her plum shaded lips to the straw and winked.
Eddie’s face reddened, and Izzy laughed and laid her hand on his forearm. “Just
kidding. Debbie doesn’t pressure us to get down to business. If a guy wants to
come in and talk, what she loses in tricks she makes up on the drinks they buy
us.”
She took back her hand. “I don’t normally start out with a guy by giving up my
life story. Not even a little of it.”
“How come you did with me?”
The girl put her fingertips to the rim of her glass and twisted it back and forth as
she might the channel dial on a car radio. “Because you’re from home.”
“Your mom and dad still there?”
“Her and my step-dad.”
“Step-dad?”
“Mom left my real dad a couple of months after I came along.”
Through the door adjacent the back bar came three young men, striding almost
in a parade march, clean cut, their faces as solemn as door-to-door Jehovah’s
Witnesses, instrument valises in hand and dressed in black tuxedos and white
bow ties and scarlet cummerbunds. They crossed the room to a redwood dais in
the far corner and uncased their instruments. Eddie watched as they tightened
and tuned the strings. After a while he asked Izzy what kind of band they were.
“Chamber orchestra.”
“I can’t recollect ever hearing one of them.
“The blond kid is Debbie’s nephew. He’ll be a senior at UNLV come fall. She pays
his tuition. Makes him come up here on his breaks. Says it gives the place some
class. Entice some of those high rollers from Reno to come our way before they
head back to Tahoe and San Francisco.”
She finished her drink. The bartender set before her another. They watched the
musicians. “What kind of tunes is it they play?” Eddie said.
“Lots of Bach. Some Teleman. Debbie prefers baroque to classical, the German
composers to the Italian, seeing how she was brought up Lutheran, but she’ll
allow them to play some Mozart now and again.”
“Charlie Daniels most likely is out of the question?”
“Oh, they could, but they wouldn’t get past the first chord before Debbie would
be out here, cussing them red, Reverend Jerry on Sunday be damned.”
The musicians raised their instruments. “They’re really very good.”
The cello player slowly drew his bow across the strings. Izzy closed her eyes and
smiled like a woman just kissed. “I love the cello.”
As they listened, the girl’s long, unringed fingers moved gently to the music like
they were brushing away smoke.
“Too bad about your folks divorcing when you was so young and all.”
“Better than when I got older. One less person I don’t have to forget.”
“Was your mom expecting when she got married?”
Izzy stirred her drink.
“Sorry. I’ve picked up a bad habit of nosing where I shouldn’t be.”
“She was an orphan.”
“I see,” Eddie said, and nodded, as though her mother being an orphan explained
how it was her daughter had ended up selling herself.
“Mom’s father died of a heart attack before she was born. Her mother when she
was five. Breast cancer. She and Aunt Mary and Uncle Ralph were raised by Aunt
Iris. My great-aunt.”
The musicians had come to the end of the first piece and were leafing through
their sheets of music, quietly debating among themselves what next to play. Izzy
slipped off her stool and crossed to the dais and said something to Debbie’s
nephew. He spoke to the others who again raised their instruments. The girl
returned to the bar.
“It’s an allegro,” Izzy said. “By Vivaldi.”
Eddie lowered his head. It sounded similar to church music only with more joy. He
told her it was very pretty.
“On the day I’m married, this will be my recessional.”
Izzy leaned back and rested both her elbows on the bar behind her so that she
faced the musicians. “On New Year’s Eve, when Iris was at her Saint Patrick’s
bingo extravaganza, Mom snuck out with her cronies and drove to a bar down in
Parkersburg. That’s where she met my dad.”
“Short courtship?”
“Goodness no. Mom’s not cheap. They dated for more than a month. Got married
on Valentine’s Day.”
“Love at first sight?”
Izzy shook her head. “Mom wanted to get away from Iris is all, and she met a
man horned up enough to take her on, warts and all. When I came along, she
was a year younger than I am now. After she dumped him and came home, she
dumped me on Iris. Moved up to Columbus, and from what Iris told me it was
party central.”
“How old was you when she remarried?”
“Almost six.”
“You go to live with them?”
“Yeah. Didn’t want to.”
“I can see why not,” Eddie said.
“She scared me. Before Mom remarried, on the days she could recover from her
hangover and bother herself to drive down, she had a temper that was all match
and no fuse. Sometimes I hid out under the porch until she left.”
Since Eddie had come in, the wind had steadily picked up, and now it whistled
through the cracks that fissured the adobe, swinging the lanterns. The candle
flame in the lamp above them flickered as it healed in a circle around the glass.
Continue reading here
| r.kv.r.y. quarterly fall 2008 winter 2009 fiction debbie's ranch part ii by scott kauffman (read part i here) |