Prelude to a Scream (18 page)

Chapter Thirteen

I
T TOOK A MONTH.

Camp Kill-Care
looked like any of the bars Ted Nichols preferred.

As usual Stanley let Ted get his nozzle in, gave him a half hour to get started.

So long as Stanley could see the entry doors there was no particular reason to crowd the man.

Let him enjoy his last few weeks of renal tranquility.

The door into a bar is there for one of three reasons: It is convenient to people who want to drink; it is convenient to people who need to drink; it is convenient to people who have to drink.

Sometimes the crowds get a little mixed up, and you'll find a stone drunk with wet pants sitting in the catbird seat in a nice fern bar. To the catbird's advantage, some of the nicer clientele will be hobnobbing with him to prove they're congenial enough to countenance anybody. Then, when it gets to be ten o'clock, having had their two or three drinks, these latter types will leave a matrix of complimentary screwdrivers ranged in front of the guy with wet pants and go home. After all, these latter types have to go to work in the morning.

The guy in wet pants is already at work.

This is a lonely scene for the guy in wet pants, who is lonely anyway. But after he's mopped up the screwdrivers if he can still walk he'll go drink where drinkers more of his ilk drink. It's just natural to drink with people who drink like you do. Natural and less painful. It's part of the downward spiral.

Ted hadn't hit the wet pants stage yet. But, like Stanley, he had hit the phase where he liked to drink alone. Unlike Stanley, who wandered from bar to bar with no particular allegiance, Ted had it down to three or four bars in which he was a regular. If Ted went into a bar and saw somebody who might try to talk to him, he'd go right back out the door and straight to the next bar on his route. He hit these bars in the same order, and they were all peas in a pod, taxonomically speaking.

Camp Kill-Care
was half full. Something passing for country-western music brayed from the jukebox, anthemic and hickly. Play it anthemic, Clint-I-forget-your-other-two-names, which means loud. Then modulate real stupid, like an S-curve in a gun barrel, and call it country. A huge, maybe priceless stained glass window was suspended by wires behind the bar. It always amazed Stanley that such a thing could hang in any kind of bar unmolested. It also bespoke the gentility of the premises, if tacitly and suspensefully. It seemed to him that, surely, sooner if not later, somebody would become annoyed with the placidity of this window—if only because it was there, let alone that it depicted a dove flying between Adam and Eve with an olive branch in its beak—and throw a chair through it. But nobody yet had.

Maybe tonight's the night, Stanley was thinking. There's always hope.

Then he saw her.

For just a moment Stanley had wanted a drink. Every night he followed Ted, it happened once or twice.

But the sight of her both stimulated and then almost cured his thirst.

She was sitting at the corner of the bar nearest the door with her back to it. Stanley was halfway down the bar, turning to take a seat, when he saw her.

Brunette hair, low-cut canvas sneakers, faded jeans clean and snug, a yoked cowgirl blouse with a couple of buttons open at the neck and nothing underneath. Light makeup and hoop earrings, the hair caught behind her ears by a tortoise-shell headband.

The eyes were just like he remembered them.

Favoring the healing incision in his back had taught him to limp, but now it was more a habit than anything else. As he changed course along the row of stools against the bar he realized that he liked his limp. It gave him a lot of time to study things while he was getting around.

He slid onto a stool at the far end of the bar, where he could watch her. The stool had a padded back, and he pressed his incision against it. Maybe if he held it there his guts wouldn't spill out. The incision no longer pained him much, but it still itched when he was trying to sleep. The firm lumbar pressure of the stool-back reassured him. Maybe if he held it there the scar would finish healing. Maybe if he held it there the scar would go away.

So, he thought. Her certainty of Ted's habitude allowed her, too, to lay for him at his first stop.

Around him various people chirped. He heard a whirring sound and, though he'd seen it before, looked up. A model train was making its way along the top of the back bar. He watched it. A red caboose disappeared behind the frame of the stained glass window just as a steam locomotive appeared from behind the opposite edge, emitting pusillanimous whistles. The engine began an oval curve in the track that would encircle the entire barroom, passing above the entrance door and below a large color television chained to the ceiling, over the tinted window to the street, over the video game in the corner, over the entrances to the rest rooms, over Stanley's head, over the bottles behind the bar, behind the stained glass again, over the jukebox and back to the TV, right after it passed…

He leveled his gaze.

…Over her. In between the jukebox and the TV.

He lowered his gaze to an ashtray on the bar in front of him.

What now, big shot?

He looked around. Nobody was paying any attention to the train. Nobody was paying any attention to him.

That included the bartender. This was a blonde woman wearing cutoff denim shorts and a cowgirl blouse tied in a knot over her ribcage. Her navel pouted outwards, a semaphore of great sexual prowess, to some. At least one of the men sitting near Stanley was drinking at this bar solely because this navel was to be studied here.

Just as Stanley was considering such a bartender as likely to be more concerned with the effect she was having on the customers than with setting a drink in front of them, she asked him was he thirsty.

“I was beginning to wonder whether anybody worked here,” he said.

“Depends on what you call work,” she said.

“You look terrific.”

She drew the tips of both sets of fingers across her exposed abdomen. “Two hours a day at the gym. Every day. Year in, year out. Then I'll get a few wrinkles anyway and they'll fire me. Hopefully before that happens some fat real estate genius will come in here and slip a rock on my finger, tell the chauffeur to limo us up to his penthouse on Nob Hill.” She rapped her knuckles on the bartop, twice. “For luck. And I do mean soon.”

The man to Stanley's right stood uncertainly off his bar stool. “Thanks, Cindy,” he said, throwing a ten onto the bar.

She looked Stanley straight in the eye. “You bet, Caesar.” She turned to sweep the ten and the man's empty glass with its coaster off the bar. “See you tomorrow.”

Stanley watched the man weave toward the front of the bar and shoulder his way through the door into the street.

“He sounds regular,” said Stanley.

“Every night.” She dropped the empty glass into a sink full of soap suds.

“Likes to drink, I guess.”

“No,” she said. “Not particularly. He's the father of my son.”

Stanley stared at her.

“It hurts him deep to hear me talk about marrying somebody else.”

Stanley blinked as he watched the street door close itself.

“I don't know why I told you that,” the woman said. “I'm not that mean.”

“I'm sure you're not.”

“Look. You want a drink? You were doing all the complaining a minute ago.”

Stanley paused. Then he said, “Bushmills. Over.”

She got a glass and dragged it through a tub of ice beneath the bar.

“Throw out about half that,” he said.

She did.

“They tell you to do that?”

She nodded. “Yes. But they don't water the booze.” She placed the glass on a coaster in front of him and filled it with whiskey.

“Thanks.” Stanley took a sip.

“Taste like whiskey?”

“Tastes like whiskey.”

Since it was his first drink in a month, it tasted unfamiliar—a taste he would not have expected, a taste that did not coincide with the nostalgic succulence in his memory, wherein it resided in a file labeled
uisce beatha
, Gaelic for
breath of life
.

Cindy smiled a little smile and shelved the bottle.

Instead of going away she pulled a cigarette out of a pack that lived under the bar and showed it to him. “Mind?”

He plucked a folder of matches out of the ashtray and lit the cigarette for her. She inhaled deeply and leaned back into the corner of the bar, where it turned into the wall. Her first exhale sounded like a long sigh. They watched the room. The little train passed overhead.

“He always tip you?”

“Who?”

“Your husband.”

“He's not my husband anymore.”

“Ah.”

“He just comes here to watch.”

“I'm sorry I asked.” He was, too.

“I'm sorry I married him.”

“Nice kid?”

She smiled. “The greatest.”

“Why can't he drink somewhere else?”

“Good question.”

“It's not just a little weird?”

She shook her head. “The guy's completely harmless.”

“Anybody ever suggest to him he's a little maudlin, too?”

“That too, what you said.”

“Maudlin?”

“That's it. Harmless and maudlin. Worst kind of husband.”

“Interesting combination.”

“You think so? Maybe he should have met you first.”

Stanley ducked his head and scratched his ear. She touched his wrist.

“I'm sorry,” she said, leaning closer to him and lowering her voice. “Would you rather talk about the Giants?”

“No. I'd rather talk about the brunette sitting at the other end of the bar.”

Her smile froze. For a moment Stanley thought she was going to slap him.

Stanley sipped his drink. “It's not like you think.”

She stood up straight, not looking toward the brunette in question. “Oh no?” She took a drag on the cigarette.

“No.”

“You a cop?” she said, with renewed interest. “I just love cops. Those guns and that sense of propriety and all that dirt they get on them anyway.”

“I'm not a cop. Why do people keep asking me that?”

“Maybe your shoes squeak.”

“What's the brunette's name?”

“The guy talking to her calls her Donna.”

“Donna what?”

“Beats me. I just heard that guy calling her Donna. When he calls her that, she answers.”

“So what's the matter?”

“I don't know. She look like a Donna to you?”

He looked past her toward Donna. Now Donna had lit a cigarette, too, and was making a point to her companion by tapping on the bar in front of him with a green butane lighter.

Stanley couldn't see the gold stamp of the Reno casino. It was too far away.

But he was willing to bet it was there.

“How the hell would I know?”

“Well that's just the goddamn point, isn't it?”

Stanley brooded a moment. “What's she drinking?”

“Tom Collins.”

She wouldn't have to provide her own lime in this place.

“She's a regular?”

“No. Last time I saw her was the first time I saw her.”

“When was that?”

“What am I, a pocket organizer?”

He smiled and gestured toward her shirt. “A tie might help.”

She glanced down at her cleavage, smiled, and leaned over the bar. The cleavage had freckles. “About two weeks ago. It was a Friday.”

Stanley moved his drink just a little, so that his knuckles did not come in contact with her breast. “You weren't here last Friday.”

“And you were?”

Stanley nodded.

“Last Friday Caesar the Second had the chicken pox.”

“Chicken pox? Kids still get chicken pox?”

“Kids still get chicken pox.”

“The germ pool at school, I guess.”

“He's lucky that's all he caught. His best little buddy David came down with the crabs last year.”

“Last
year
?”

She nodded.

“I'm almost afraid to ask this, but… How old is little Caesar the Second's best buddy David?”

She shrugged. “Same as Caesar.”

“Twelve?”

“Eleven, when he caught the crabs.”

“Frankly,” Stanley said, taking a sip of his whiskey, “I'm shocked.”