“Hell right. How long you been crushin’ on Karen, George,” Kemper asks.
“Bite me,” George says.
A log rolls in the fire and embers sizzle; the flames jump at the fresh air and lick high against the brick back of the fireplace.
George takes a moment to look around at the crowd as they break off in diminishing laughter. He notes Kyle still staring at him, or Pete or overhead to the TV. Not laughing along.
“There was that other time,” Townie Pete says, twisting around in his bar stool to face the crowd, which causes all interior noise, except the crackling fire and the TV voices, to cease. Pete continues, “It was come this last here spring, what was it? This spring, I think. When the rivers were bloated and freezing ass cold. George comes in and says how he passed a bare-naked-ass man, bathing in the river, right off the main road. Great straight out in the open. Had himself a towel wrapped ’round his head like a lady out of the shower, was that it, George? And a body brush and all, scrubbing his pits. His dangler was free out in the freezing cool air.”
Bob, the daft co-worker, rises again from his green booth, thrusts his groin forward, and wiggles his fingers over his crotch, pantomiming along to Pete’s rendition of the story.
Pete chuckles at Bob and his finger dangler and continues his roast. “Everybody knows a fool would freeze his literal balls off in such arctic water. George gives us all these crazy details about how the dangler guy looked like a snowman, with a round bald head on a round neck on a round torso with round arms, round legs. ‘He was a person made out of snowballs,’ George here told us. Can’t be true,” Pete says. “Ain’t nobody else report such an insane sighting.”
“To Tall Tale George,” Sue yells.
And the entire bar, except for Kyle, raises their beers and rums and cokes and coffees to George. “To Tall Tale George,” they yell.
Except for Kyle. Kyle glares on in the same direction he’s been glaring since he sat.
“Gruesome remains of Middle Tech college student, Christine Heilan, found this morning by Tyson’s fishing hole. Her body had been, like others, split up the middle, her spine removed, and a fishing hook left in her lip,” the news says.
“Why the fuck they give us these details?” Bob yells, flinging his arm in accusation at the television.
“Because it’s after fucking midnight is why,” Kemper says. “They give more after the babies are in bed. I’m putting the Pats back on.”
And to this, the crowd cheers.
Kyle stands, throws cash on the least-favorite table, and walks out.
George waits several minutes for Kyle to leave and tilts his face to Kemper with a bemused look. “So the new guy’s a bit of a... what would you call it?” George says.
“He’s a stalka, that one, alright. I’d watch that one,” says Sue, answering for Kemper. Sue’s the Richard’s Village townie who reads tarot cards for tourists. “He’s not right in the noggin’,” she adds, tapping her temple. Sue’s a New Englander through and through, several generations deep of Yankee blood, so thick, seven heirs more and living in Texas would still carry her accent of dropped r’s and long a’s. And like any soul stitched out of old Vermont sticks and true Vermont stones, Sue knows a thing or two or ten about witchcraft and judging who’s worth your time and who can disappear down a running river. In fact, when Sue voices her opinion on anyone it’s rare, but always right. And to her pronouncement about Kyle, several men in the bar say, “Ayup.”
George considers Sue’s words and nods a couple solemn beats at her. Her throat and chin are uplit in a tint of green from her sequined top, like she might, indeed, be a true witch.
He ticks his tongue as a way of saying he agrees with her.
“Alrighty then, I’m off. Big blizzard night. Gotta get em’ powder perfect for the morning rush,” George says, standing and extracting his Duck Hunters’ Guild wallet. He throws a twenty to cover his $12.00 worth of finished food and coffee and a takeaway breakfast sandwich, which Kemper, without having to be asked, tosses to George. George pushes his thermos for filling, and Kemper obliges. George tells Kemper to keep the change.
Everyone quiets and stares at the screen when an alert sounds the “Breaking News” alarm — which must be fucking huge if the station would go so far as to interrupt this famous Pats’ game. The newscaster narrates along to a sketch now being shown. “Just in. A woman who claims to have escaped a man who kidnapped her and her friend, and who she watched slice her friend on the bank of Poison River, in the manner we’ve previously reported on other victims, has provided this sketch.”
“Oh my gawd,” Sue says in a hush.
“What the fuck?” Bob says.
Kemper, who tends to be the most sane and most sober, and therefore generally regarded as the genius of the bar, looks to George and says, “Hold up, George,” stopping George, who’s standing now and about to push in his stool. “That your man? Your snowball man, bathing in the ice river?”
George looks up to see a sketch of a man with a round bald head, round neck, round torso, and round arms, just like he saw, the one bathing in the bloated spring river.
“Holy shit,” George says. “That sure does look like him.”
“You gotta call the Staties, George? Let ’em know?” Kemper says, but with questions littering his words.
Several people in the bar mutter, “What?” with scrunched brows, questioning whether any of George’s tales could possibly have an ounce of truth.
“No fucking way that’s George’s phony bologna bare-ass snowman,” Pete says, to which daft Bob scoffs and laughs, but with less assuredness than when he told his own George tale.
George considers their comments while looking at the screen. He takes his filled thermos as Kemper hands it to him, turns, and walks to the door. He knows he saw a bare-ass man made of a stack of circles bathing in the river this last spring, just like he said, but these muggers always make him question his own tales. I know what I saw. Right?
Anyway, whatever, whatever! He yells at his own mind. You can think more on it as you snowcat tonight, don’t listen to these muggers putting doubt in you. Focus on the plan with Karen. Tonight is the night no matter what!
As George goes through the motions of slipping back into his spikes and Richard’s Mountain coat, placing his eggs-n-bacon pocket snack and thermos in coat pockets, and walking to his truck, he sets his intention on Karen, but also on the lost love in his life. Ten years ago, George had love in his life. Ten years ago, in fact, he was with his beloved Martha, a fellow Vermont duck hunter who he’d met in the guild.
One day, after one year of dating and duck hunting together in Vermont, George bit his bottom lip, as Martha perused used copies of poetry books in New York City’s Strand Bookstore, where they liked to go on mini-weekend vacations to browse poetry, for Martha, and mysteries and thrillers and fishing and hunting guides for George, and also for Martha. And sometimes historical fiction, if it involved tales of royalty. To them, amongst the “eighteen miles of books,” as the Strand advertised, they felt they were in a “heavenly displacement.” Yes, indeed, the Strand for them was a celestial atmosphere that allowed for a feeling of floating above the otherwise green-shining, leaf-littered, snow-packed, streams-rushing, beautiful but predictable, seasonal cycles of home-base Vermont.
On this day in the Strand with Martha, having near bit through his bottom lip, Martha pulled from a shelf a rough-leather copy of Emily Dickinson poems, which copy George knew she’d pull, for he’d planted it there. He’d previously rushed in ahead of her, saying he had to find a bathroom, and in the process and hurry he accidentally stomped another man’s foot. He was so nervous and wanting to surprise Martha so bad, he simply couldn’t stop to help or apologize. His entire attention became laser focused on his mission with Martha.