Les and I sat at one of the tables against the wall not far from the band, which was playing an up-tempo country song. He went up to the bar to get us something, and I lit a cigarette, a little preoccupied with what he’d bring me back to drink, and I watched a couple dancing out on the floor, a heavy man and woman, both in cowboy boots, jeans, and dark T-shirts, moving fast to the music.
Les came back to the table with a full pitcher of beer and two glasses. He poured me some until the foam started to flow over the top and I had to sit back and drink a third of it down. It was ice-cold and washed the cigarette taste from my mouth and throat. Les finished pouring for himself and he smiled at me, clinking his glass to mine, but the band was too loud for us to talk over so he turned sideways in his chair and we both watched the older couple dance. The band’s lead singer was pretty, only twenty-five or-six years old. She had curly red hair—or at least it looked that color under the stage lights—and she wore tight jeans and her singing voice was really strong. The bass player was bald, closer to forty than thirty; I tried to picture Nick playing in a band like this, in a place like this, but I couldn’t. One of the nights when I told him he should try and get a job with a local group, maybe play in the clubs, he just shook his head at me and asked if I’d already forgotten what the B in BEAST stood for. I told him no, I hadn’t, but I felt ashamed of myself. Clubs were nothing buta Boozing opportunity. But now, as I finished my first mug of beer and Les filled my second, my head loose on my neck, I was sure fear of drinking had nothing to do with why Nick never took his bass guitar out to an audition; like most addicts, he had the worst fear of all, that his dreams would actually come true.
And I hadn’t been in a barroom—warm and dark, loud and full of smoke—since I was a user working at the Tip Top with Jimmy Doran. But I felt okay because there wasn’t a white snake in sight and that time seemed so long ago anyway, almost like somebody else had lived it, and now I had a mature man in my life, and not some addict trying to hang his own recovery on me. I looked at Lester’s dark profile against the tangerine light in front of us, his deep eyes and small nose, the mustache under it. I drank most of my second beer and refilled my mug. The pitcher was getting light and I wanted Les to get us another one. He was such a serious man, and I knew he would get me back into my house and I wanted to make it worthwhile to him. I knew he was hurting over his kids. I wondered what it must be like to have children you have to live away from now because you no longer wanted their mother or father, and I got a nice picture in my head of his son and daughter visiting us at my house, sleeping in the guest room, or maybe even with us. I finished my beer, then poured myself some more, Lester too. He smiled at me and I held up the empty pitcher, but Les nodded at the dance floor that now held two more couples, and he stood up and took my hand and I was already feeling the alcohol, and I followed Lester Burdon out to the middle of the floor.
I WOKE UP to a patch of sunlight on my face. It came through the tree branches outside the loft window, and I turned over and kicked the sheet away. I was naked, sweating, and my mouth was so dry that when I tried to swallow, my tongue clicked a second to the roof of my mouth. I smelled coffee, which turned my stomach, and I could hear the crack of the woodfire going in the stove downstairs. I didn’t hear Les moving around anywhere. I had to pee, but I wanted something very cold and sweet to drink, watermelon juice or mango. I remembered Lester driving the Bonneville after we left the bar long after midnight. I was sitting low in the passenger’s seat, watching his face in the light of the speedometer as he drove, as he kept saying he was drunk but he wanted me, he wanted me so badly. Then we were parked off the Cabrillo Highway in the dark behind a beach shop, making love in the front seat. I must’ve been dry, because now I felt chafed, and I didn’t remember getting from there to here. When I sat up, my head felt topheavy and my eyes hurt.
I pulled on my underwear, shorts, and Nick’s button-down shirt Lester wore last night and I went barefoot downstairs. The tin pot of coffee was on the cool half of the stove, though it was still steaming, and I took a paper napkin and stepped out onto the porch. Lester wasn’t anywhere, the sun bright on the trees and brush. I only walked as far as the woodpile before I squatted and peed, closing my eyes to all the daylight, smelling the split wood. I wanted four aspirin and a Coke, an air-conditioned movie. It was Tuesday, my day off from cleaning. Maybe Les would want to go with me, maybe even see two back to back.
I was brushing my teeth on the porch, using a cup of ice water from the cooler to rinse, when he walked up the trail from the river. He was bare-chested, his black hair wet and dripping, an empty coffee cup in one hand, his T-shirt in the other. He smiled and asked me if I slept well. I was rolling water and toothpaste foam around in my mouth, and I turned away from him to spit it over the porch railing. I wanted to be in a bathroom. I wanted a hot shower, a clean mirror, and a locked door. I didn’t know how I looked when I turned back to him, but I hoped it was better than I felt. I wondered if he had a hangover like I did, but I didn’t want to ask; I didn’t want to draw any attention to my drinking. “I slept like a dead person. You?”
“I was too drunk to notice.” He pulled on his shirt, then stepped up on the porch to hold and kiss me. He tasted like coffee, but smelled like the river, like mud and moss. “I had a great time last night,” he said, but he looked kind of down when he said it, like it had happened a long time ago.
“Go for a swim?”
“Just my head.”
I followed him into the house and he poured me some coffee, then refilled his cup and we sat down across from each other at the small table beneath the window, a sunbeam lying across the tabletop. Les looked outside, his face in shadow. I started to reach across the table to touch his hand but something made me stop. “You okay?”
He looked right at me. “Sometimes I feel guilty because I get paid to roam the countryside and think about things. You know how your mind can just drift off? And next thing I know I’m thinking about Carol, and how much I’d love to see her married to someone who loved her the way she loved him.” He looked out the window. I wanted a cigarette, but was afraid if I got up for one he would stop talking.
“Once, outside El Granada, I drove up to a 7-Eleven right before they closed. Some boy had just pulled a Stop and Rob, but I didn’t know it yet, and I was getting out of my cruiser just as he came out the front door, this real skinny Filipino kid, no older than sixteen or seventeen, holding a bunch of bills and a silver revolver pointed straight up at the sky from pushing the door open with that hand. And neither one of us moved, we just looked at each other.
“I wasn’t calm, but I wasn’t scared either. There was only my blood and my breath, and his too. I could feel it. Like we were the same body. Then I asked him if he wanted to talk, and he nodded his head, still holding that hogleg up in the air. I had both my hands on the top of the door where he could see them, but he seemed stuck where he was—he couldn’t go back and he couldn’t go forward. I could hear the cashier moving around inside the store, so I told the boy to bring his gun over if he wanted to, but he didn’t have to give it to me, he didn’t have to do anything he didn’t want to do.
“And then he started to cry, Kathy. I don’t remember leaving my patrol car but next thing I knew I was standing in front of him, and he was younger than I’d guessed—twelve or thirteen—and I was unloading his pistol and he was crying so hard I put my arm around him. His back felt so thin to me and I just held him, telling him he did the right thing. Everything would be all right. The store clerk came out yelling something, but I wasn’t listening; my hands felt oily. My voice sounded strange to me. I kept saying comforting things to this boy, but it was as much for me as for him.”