Last Call Lounge (4 page)

Worm opened the front door, closed it carefully, moved inside and gently laid the backpack on the coffee table. He sat down on the couch and put his fists on his thighs. He looked at the backpack for a long minute, then reached for my cigarettes and lit one.

“Look,” he said at last. “I think the police might be watching me, too. I mean, I don’t think they are, but they could be. Probably they’re not, but maybe they might be, with everything that’s going on. I try to keep everything really low key, you know?” He wasn’t looking at me, just at the bag. “But guys like Frank aren’t all that smart. And I just started buying from this Mexican guy that I don’t know that well.”  He took a breath, shook his hands in front of his face. “Anyway, look. It’s not that big a deal.”

He reached over and unzipped the backpack. Inside were two tightly wrapped plastic grocery bags. He pulled them out, set one on the table and handed the other to me. I untwisted the top. Inside were neatly bound bundles of cash, twenties and hundreds from what I could see, each held together by rubber bands. I closed the top of the bag. My teeth hurt and I rubbed my jaw.

“How much is in here?” I asked. I could feel the sweat pooling in my lower back.

“About $42,000,” Worm said.  He couldn’t help himself – he was grinning with dopey pride.

“Fuck,” I said.

“It’s not that big a deal,” he said. He was up, on his feet, bopping around the living room. “Really. Who’s gonna question that a bar owner has some cash in his safe?”

A nerve in my neck twitched.

“It’s just some money I’ve saved up,” he said. “No big deal. But if the police find it on me, it's Probable Cause. They find it in your safe, which no one would ever be looking in your safe anyway, but if they did, they would just think you’d had a good month. No big deal at all,” he told himself.

I leaned forward, put my eyes on my fists. I puffed out my cheeks, let out a long breath.

“What’s in the other bag?” I asked.

Worm stood still, then raised his hands.

“Okay,” he said. “This is really no big deal. Really.” He untwisted the bag and laid a gun on the table.

It was a black, government issue Colt. Square and serious against the warm, brown grain of my coffee table.  All the light in the room was sucked into it.  Everything else was in shadows.

“This is not what I had in mind when I invited you over,” I said.

“It’s no big deal,” Worm said again. “It’s the same thing, you know?  If I get stopped and they find that on me, I’m fucked.”

“You don’t have a license for it?”

“Well, it's not even mine, is the thing,” Worm said. He was bopping around the room again. I was staring at the gun. “I traded a guy for it. I mean that he offered it to me because he was out of money and he owed me some money so I did him a favor and held on to it. Just until he gets some money, you know?” 

There was nothing in that for me, so I just stayed quiet.

“So, big deal, right?” he asked. “Stick it in a desk drawer. Who’s gonna think anything about a bar owner having a gun in his office?  Just like the money. No one is ever gonna see it, and if they did, what would they think?  You own a bar, you have some cash, you have a gun just in case.”

“Who’s gun is it?” I asked. 

The hurt look came across his face and he stopped bopping around for a second.

“Like I said, I took it from a guy as a favor,” he said. His voice was high and he was shaking his head. “You don’t know him. He just owed me some money so I took the gun until he can pay me back.”

I rubbed my temples with my thumbs.

“Fuck,” I said. I leaned over, reached under the couch, and pulled out the carved wooden box. Worm sat down as I rolled a joint. He watched me light it, pull in a long drag, and hold it in my lungs. I handed it to him without looking at him. He took a drag. I closed my eyes.

“Fuck,” I said.

“So, that’s the deal,” Worm said. He sat up straight, looked at me levelly, passed the joint back to me. “You hold on to the money and the gun, just for a couple of weeks, or whatever, until everything kind of calms down, and I’ll make sure Frank doesn’t do any business in your bar.”

“Or anybody else,” I said.

He was going to put the hurt expression on again, but decided against it.

“Or anybody else,” he said. I stayed silent. Worm stayed as silent as he could for as long as he could. About ten seconds. “Please, Little John,” he said then, his voice cracking.

My shoulders and arms felt heavy, my tongue felt thick. I stubbed the joint out in the ashtray without offering it back to Worm.

“Fine,” I said. “But just for a while.  A very short while.”

“Sure,” Worm said. “Sure, sure. No problem.”

He wrapped the gun back in the grocery bag and stuck it and the money in the backpack. He stood up, held the backpack out to me with a straight arm.

“Just remember,” he said, eyebrows down. “I counted it.”  Then he laughed a goofy boy laugh and I smiled back for his sake.

“Oh, shit,” he said. “I almost forgot. Guess who I saw the other day?”

I wasn’t in any mood to guess and told him so.

“Ruby,” he said.

Ruby wasn’t anybody. Not to me. Not any more. Ruby was just the memory of old pain. Old, badly focused photographs. Ruby was something that happened to somebody else, a long time ago.

“Huh,” I said. “Ruby.”

“Yeah,” Worm said. “I saw her out in front of her aunt’s old house. I didn’t stop, but it was her.”

“Wow,” I said. “Ruby. Wow.”  I didn’t want to think about Ruby. I wanted to think about something else. Tracy’s perfect gymnast body flashed through my mind.

“Hey, Ray?” I said. “Do you think I could get an 8-ball from you?”  Inside, I was kicking myself, but at this point I didn’t give a fuck. I wanted to get fucked up and forget Worm, the money, the gun, Ruby.

Worm turned to me. He smile was big, now. Lots of teeth.

“Sure,” he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a baggie. He held it up between his thumb and forefinger for me to see, then tossed it onto the coffee table.

“That one’s on the house,” he said.

The drive back to the bar was quieter – the drunks were off the streets, so the cops had gone home, too.  The gas stations were still busy.  It was almost four-thirty in the morning, so probably these were early risers instead.  These were the survivalists, the guys with freezers in their garages and back-up generators installed in their houses.  Big trucks with gun racks and Texas A and M Century Club stickers in the windows.  Their diligence made me feel like a fugitive.  I slumped low in my seat.

The bar was dark except for the light from the big Lone Star Beer clock that hung like a moon over the register. It was an old building, full of noises when left alone. Creaks and moans of old wood that I’d heard my whole life and found comforting. I grabbed a rocks glass and carried the backpack into the office.

The office was everything a bar office should be – small and cramped and full of heavy, old wooden furniture.  A big oak desk, an armed, wooden swivel chair. Stuff that came with the place when my Dad bought it. I sat in the swivel chair, put the backpack on the desk, and opened the big bottom desk drawer.

When I took over the bar, there was a half-empty bottle of Blanton's in the drawer. I had long since finished that one off, replaced it many times. I pulled the current bottle of Blanton's out, poured myself a drink.

The safe was a massive metal monster, sunk into the concrete in the floor. A huge combination safe that I never knew the combination to. It had been unlocked my whole life, as far as I knew. Dad said he didn’t know the combination, and that the guy he bought the place from didn’t either. I kept the safe hidden, under a heavy, gray filing cabinet full of heavy, gray papers from the city, county, and state. No one used the safe but me. The bartenders would put the drop for the night in a locking drawer under the bar. I made bank deposits every day or at least every other day, so cash didn’t really pile up. But, for years, Dad had been stashing a little bit each month in the safe. I did, too, after he died. Not much, but enough to get by for a few months if something happened. I figured if the place was robbed, or burned down, or if the next big hurricane hit Houston, my money would still be there.

Worm knew about the safe. I'd gone into it, once or twice, after hours when he was hanging out. To grab some cash to buy off him. I'd make him come to my house for the actual transaction, but sometimes we were together and I needed to get to my money.

I opened the backpack, took the two plastic bags out. I pulled the file cabinet off the safe, the screech of metal on concrete ripped through the office. The top of the safe was covered with an old piece of plywood. I slid that aside and pulled up the heavy safe door. Inside was my own cash – about $12,000 – in two blue bank bags. I folded the empty backpack, placed it on top of the bank bags, closed the lid and covered the safe.

I unwrapped the gun, threw the plastic bag in the trash can under the desk. The gun was cool and heavy in my hand. I pushed the catch and the magazine slid out onto my palm. One round was gone. I pulled the slide back slightly. The chamber was empty. I resisted the urge to field strip the gun and clean it. I did sniff it, but it just smelled like gun oil.  I pushed the magazine back in until it clicked, laid the gun carefully on the desk. Then I unwrapped the cash, threw that bag away. I stared at the money and the gun for a long time, sipping my whiskey and smoking a cigarette. Then I pulled the little trashcan out from under the desk. It was half-full of papers and plastic bags. I used it rarely and I was the only one who ever emptied it. I dumped the trash out on the floor, put the gun in, and covered it back up with the trash. Then I carefully put the trashcan back in its place.

In the corner, on the floor, were two cases of non-alcoholic beer. In six months we wouldn’t go through two cases of non-alcoholic beer. I peeled open the top of the top case, took out one six-pack and set it on the desk. I dropped the money into the space where the six-pack had been, closed the case. Put it on the floor, put the other case on top of it, the six pack on top of that. Slid the whole stack back into the corner and threw a newspaper on top for good measure.

I sat back, scanned the room. Nothing seemed amiss, nothing anyone would notice. I sat in the office for a long time, smoking and listening to the creaking of the building. A truck drove past out front and the window pane in the office door rattled. I rocked a little in the chair, finished my whiskey, and stubbed out my cigarette.

It was when I walked out the office door that I noticed Pancho was gone.

FOUR

“Tell me you love me, Little John,” Ruby said.

A Tuesday, our fourth Tuesday together. I was naked above her. Our bellies were full of free Indian buffet. She took me in her hand, gripped me hard, stopped me.

“Tell me you love me,” she said, her voice foggy and thick.

“Of course I do,” I said.

She grinned and squeezed harder. The fear of pain shot all the way up to my neck.

“Say it,” she said.

I looked into her eyes.

“I love you, Ruby,” I said.

She released her grip, pulled me into her warmth with a giggling sigh. Her mouth found my ear, her breath was dusky.

“Oh, John,” she said in a hot whisper. “I love you, too.”

Ruby and I had fallen in together, fast and with physical desperation.  We were young enough to feel like long-separated soul mates, that our pains drew us together.  My mother killed herself – Ruby was abandoned by her mom as an infant, left with a maiden aunt.  She had never known her mother or father, had never heard from either again.

Once we were together, we were together constantly.  We played a game, of Ruby’s invention, where we went to the cheapest restaurants we could find and pretended that we had just gotten engaged. We would smile into each others eyes, we would hold hands. Ruby would stretch her neck to kiss me. We’d sit on the same side of the booth. Eventually, the waiter would ask, “What are you two celebrating?”

Ruby would take both of my hands, lean her forehead against mine.

“John just asked me to marry him,” she’d say.

Our drinks would be free, our desserts. Sometimes our whole ticket would be comped. Other waiters would come by our table to congratulate us. Sometimes the dessert would have a candle stuck in it, sometimes the other diners would applaud.

“I feel guilty,” I said once, leaning in to whisper in Ruby’s ear, but really to breathe her in, to breathe in the mist and soap and cigarette smell that was Ruby. In front of us was a complimentary plate of spring rolls.

“Don’t be silly,” she said, leaning her head on my shoulder. Her black hair fell across her forehead and she raised a long, blurred-white hand to brush it back behind her ear. “Look how happy they are.”  The waitress and the manager did look happier. They were standing behind a long glass counter, talking loudly and laughing.

“Still,” I said. “I feel bad.”

“What they give us,” she said, “is worth it to them, in exchange for how much better their night is. How much more fun. That’s why we’ll never do this anywhere expensive.” She furrowed her brow and nodded at her logic. “That would be fraudulent.”

“How is everything, lovebirds?” the waitress asked. She was smiling at me like I was already a husband, a good, loyal husband. Ruby stretched her neck to kiss me on the cheek.

“Everything is great,” I said.

The game changed over the seven months that we were together, but it always involved us being happy and sharing our happiness in exchange for something. We were planning our wedding and we got free cake samples. We were expecting and the motel gave us a free breakfast. We rolled and played and got fat and Ruby whispered in my ear.

“I love you, too.”

Then, seven months and six days after it started, Ruby was throwing her things into a plastic grocery bag. She had just told me she was moving, alone, to San Francisco, in two weeks. I had argued, threatened, but mostly just watched from across the room.

We had had a fight, the kind of stupid fight you can only have when you are in love and young and a little drunk.

“I really don’t understand,” I said, watching as she picked through the CDs. She turned to me, looked at me with unfocused eyes, then turned back to the CDs.

“You wouldn’t even call me your girlfriend,” she said, her coal-smoke hair falling around her face as she bent over the shelf. “All the talk about marriage, about kids,” she said. “And you can’t even say ‘girlfriend.’” 

Pain racked my ribcage. “That was just a game, Ruby. The marriage and kids were just a game,” I said.

“I guess I didn’t think it was,” she said.

And I knew I didn’t think it was, either.  But I didn’t say it.  I let her pack and I told myself she was trying to trap me.

Over the next two weeks, I fell apart. I stopped shaving, rarely showered. I called her every day, called all of her friends. I would drive by her house several times a day to see if her car was there. If it wasn’t, I was overcome with longing and jealousy. If it was, I would park across the street and wait, hoping for a glimpse of her in a window.

When I wasn’t driving past her house or calling her, I was sitting at the bar, drinking rum and coke, crying to anyone unlucky enough to sit next to me. I watched my father’s expression grow from sympathy to frustration, but I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t stop it. All the feelings, of being left alone, of being betrayed, that I had felt after mom killed herself came rushing back over me. I was being abandoned again.

Word came to me that Ruby had moved, had left without saying good bye. I got worse. I found it nearly impossible to get out of bed. My father started scheduling me to work the door at the bar so I had to get up, at least a couple times a week. I would sit at my post, downing rum and unburdening my woes to anyone and everyone.

Finally, one night, about a month after she had moved, my father closed the bar early. It was one-thirty, the place was nearly empty. Dad turned off the stereo, called last call. The regulars seemed to know what was going on. They paid up and left without a word of complaint.

Dad closed the till, locked the door behind the last customer, and turned off the house lights.

“Grab two rocks glasses,” he said, walking toward the office, “and follow me.”

I finished my cigarette, grabbed the glasses and crawled down the hall. I had pushed it too far, I knew, and Dad was going to let me have it.

In the office, Dad was sitting on a small step stool. He motioned for me to sit in the swivel chair. I sat down and Dad reached around me, pulled open the big, lower desk drawer and pulled out the bottle of bourbon. Before that night, I hadn’t known that bottle was there. An old bottle of Blanton's, much better than anything we had on the shelves. Dad took the glasses from me, opened the bottle, and poured out two heavy shots. He handed one to me.

“Tonight,” he said, “we are going to stay here, we are going to drink this bottle, and we are going to cry about Ruby.”  He studied the golden liquid, twirling in his glass. “Then tomorrow, you are going to get up. You are going to shower. You are going to shave. And you are going to shut the hell up about that girl.”  He held his glass up for me, to toast. I laughed, in spite of myself, and clinked my glass against his.

We drank the whole bottle and we did cry. I cried about Ruby, but really about being 23, about that rudderless-ness you have. Dad cried about mom, about the way she died, about me not having her. That was the night he told me about Kate, the bartender with the red hair.  About the affair he had with her, years before mom died.  Kate had left, days after they slept together, and Dad said he never saw her or talked to her again.  But mom eventually found out about it and that that was when their marriage first started to fall apart.  He told me some stuff I had known, some stuff I hadn’t.  He cried and told me everything.

We finished the bottle fairly quickly, but kept talking and, by the time we walked out the front door into the yellow morning, we were both back to sober.

“I love you, son,” he said, smiling at me through red, puffy eyes. We were standing on the sidewalk, blinking blindly at the morning traffic. Dad’s hand was on my shoulder. “Now shut the hell up.”  I smiled back, hugged Dad, went home, showered, shaved, and drove to the recruiting office.

The day after Worm gave me the gun and the money, I woke up late, feeling hollow and brittle like aluminum. Tracy was gone, but the whole house smelled of her – buttery lotion and cigarettes. I started a pot of coffee, showered. I remembered to check my phone. Two missed calls from the bar. No response – no call, no text – from Sugarland Richie. I sat on my front porch, drinking coffee, listening to the pounding of a hammer as my neighbor boarded up his windows with plywood. The citrusy smell of cut birch filled the air.

I was hung over, stretched out and shaky and my spine knotted at the base of my skull.  The shower, the half pot of coffee hadn’t helped any, so I got out the Blanton’s and poured a heavy shot over an ice cube.  Then I filled a flask with a few more shots and shoved it in my pocket.

Outside, the shree of cicadas rose and fell.  The air inside my truck was baked, stale cigarette smoke.

I rolled down the windows and headed north.  Fridays were my day to pick up Jacob from daycare and take him to his grandparents’ house.  I took back roads, to avoid highways and the police, because my registration was expired.  But also because I liked the back roads better anyway, liked the extra time to smoke and take a pull at the flask.

I crossed under a highway and the neighborhood changed.  More pulled apart.  More half-paved lots, more abandoned strip centers.  Houston and not Houston.

Sarah and Jacob lived with her parents in The Heritage, a planned community in the pine woods north of the city.  Picking up Jacob was my sole remaining non-financial paternal duty.  I complained to Sarah about Fridays, about how they screwed up my sleep pattern, but the truth was I liked them.  Jacob’s teachers, when they saw me with him, they smiled at me with a warmth I didn’t get in any other part of my life.

Under another highway and over the feeder road, the woods grew dense.  After another mile, the pavement became smooth and the street signs were printed in the patented font of The Heritage.

Jacob’s daycare was in a Catholic church, a glass-and-brick compound that looked more like a retirement home.  The school building was the farthest to the back.  I parked at the back of the black smooth lot, under the shade of a leaning pine.  I opened the door to let out some of the heat, drank a shot of whiskey, then crushed two mints in my teeth.  I felt the bourbon when I stood.  My knees felt good and loose and my back popped.

The lobby of the school building was cool and dry and smelled like new carpeting.  One wall was covered in construction paper depictions of the month’s Virtue Lesson.  Responsibility.  The Virtue Tree was brown and green and the leaves showed stick figures feeding dogs and doing homework.

Besides Jacob, there was only one other kid in the classroom.  Miss Elena sat at a white plastic table, writing notes in a yellow binder.  She rose when she saw me, put her hand on my arm to turn me away from Jacob.  He was putting a book away on a plywood shelf.

“Jacob seems anxious today, Mr. Ayers,” she frowned at me.  She was probably twenty-two but held herself like a matron.

“Okay,” I said.  Jacob was sitting on the floor, pulling on his shoes.  He looked a lot like my mother. The same soft, round eyes, the same way of dipping his head to the side when you spoke to him. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.  In the brisk, air-conditioned air, I could smell cigarettes on my clothes.

“He wouldn’t eat his lunch or his snack.”

“Okay,” I said.  My mouth was watering.

Miss Elena turned and looked up into my face.  She had a long chin and nose.  Her hair was a shade of red too unattractive to be anything but natural.  She watched my eyes.  I blinked hard.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said and swallowed hard.  Jacob was at my side with his backpack on.  “Just a lot going on right now.”

“Of course,” she said as I wiped my mouth again.  “Be safe.”

Jacob held my hand in the parking lot, small and cool in my sweaty palm.  His black mop hair bounced and his black eyes looked like my mother’s.  Heat radiated from the asphalt.

I opened the truck door.  Jacob threw his backpack on the floor and climbed up.  There was no child seat in the truck, so he sat stiff-legged on the bench and waited for me to buckle him.  He kicked a sneakered shoe at the glove compartment.

“Quit that,” I said and snapped the buckle in place.

The drive to his grandparents’ house was short.  Streets in The Heritage had been part of the design plan.  They curved through thick pines, past rocky creeks.  We followed the bending avenue.  Jacob looked at his hands.

“You okay?” I asked.  He nodded.

Sarah’s parents’ house was at the end of a cul-de-sac, tucked behind a brick mailbox and a landscaped front path.  I parked on the street, at the end of the path.  Jacob hopped out of the truck, grabbed his bag, and pushed the truck door shut.

Sarah and her parents were still at work.  I opened the door with my key.  The house was empty.  It was cool and dark with high vaulted ceilings.  It was an open layout – from the front step, you could see out the sliding glass door to the back yard.  Jacob sat on the tiled floor of the foyer, tossed his backpack in the corner and pulled off his shoes.

Sarah’s parents had told me many times to make myself at home but I couldn’t really do it.  There was a casualness to the house, a clutter I couldn’t get used to.  Dishes piled on the counter, mail scatter over the dining room table.  Not dirty but always cluttered.  I never knew where to sit, where to put my drink.