“Not to good, either. I don’t want to talk about it, though. How’r your folks after that fender bender you had yesterday?” he asked.
My eyes grew huge, “Shit,” I said, “I forgot to get over and talk to the Sheriff about it. I doubt mom or dad remembered. They’re fine, though. Just fine.”
“I hear your sister was in town,” Bud said, and I could hear the question.
“She’s not very—religious,” I said, and sipped. He nodded.
“What’ve you been doing with yourself?” he asked.
I didn’t know. “I work at a garage. I’m seeing this girl. I dunno. I’m okay, I guess.”
“Seeing a girl? She pretty?” he asked in that way old men do.
“Yeah. She’s pretty. She’s not so happy with me, though.”
“Why’s that?” he asked, and sipped. The bartender was watching two huge men play darts on the back wall. I looked just as one missed the board and hit the wall itself.
“I dunno,” I said.
“Is that why only so-so?” he asked.
“No. Not really. I—I dunno—I had to take my sister, Sarah, to the airport this afternoon.”
“Ah. What happened?” Bud asked. I thought about how odd it is that over beer, two people can talk about almost anything.
“She doesn’t get along with mom and dad very well.”
“Don’t come to church, neither,” he said, “knowing Susannah Kendall, that don’t sit very well.” I nodded.
“Sarah,” he said, and sipped. He thought for a moment, then said “I remember that one.”
“Yeah?” I sipped my beer. It was cold going down and stung my mouth.
“Yeah. One of the more difficult births I’ve had to deal with. Both your sisters were hard pregnancies for your mother, if I remember rightly,” he said, sipping his own, “but Sarah, she fought. It was almost like…”
“Almost like what?” I asked.
He turned and looked into my eyes, “Almost like she didn’t want to come out. She kept squirming and fighting. That’s not unusual; the problem was she wasn’t working her way out, she was trying to work her way back in.” He sipped again, and looked back at the television. There was a long pause.
“What about me?” I asked.
“You were like ninety-nine-point-nine percent of this town: easy as pie. Came right on out with no fuss and even smiled at me. Almost every baby in this town comes out like that. Take that O’Mally boy over there, for instance,” Bud said, pointing with the bottom of his bottle. I started, and looked where he was pointing. At one of the corner table, was Kevin O’Mally. His hands were on the table, and he was hunched over a beer bottle. The shadows had kept him hidden from me. “That boy still holds the record for the shortest time I ever spent in a delivery room. Seven hours. I didn’t even have time to get my gloves on good,” he said, and laughed. As if he could sense us looking, Kevin looked up. Bud raised his chin and smiled. Kevin did the same in return, then hunched again. My heart was pounding, and I couldn’t figure out why.
“How’d Sarah turn out?” Bud asked.
“She’s a lesbian,” I said, and took a long pull from my beer. His eyes got large, then relaxed.
“Helluva world,” he sighed, shaking his head. He sipped, and mumbled something.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothin’,” Bud said. “It’s just—I never thought—,” he sighed again. “You know you see a kid, and you think that they can be anything, do anything. Then something—,” he said, and mumbled.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said.
“No, you said something.”
He shook his head, took a sip of his whiskey, and rattled the ice. Then he looked at me and said “Had a talk with Jimmy Clarke today. Wanted my opinion on something.”
“What was it?” I asked.
“Them bones they found; he had the measurements and wanted a second opinion before he went to talk to Aiken about it.”
“Was there something wrong?”
“No. Those bones were from a perfectly healthy individual,” he said, then raised his glass to take another sip saying “a perfectly healthy seven or eight year old boy.”
A chill went screaming through me.
“Seen a movie once where something happened and the dead—,” he said, and paused, set his beer down, and stared off at the front door, “the dead got up and started eating folks. Helluva picture. I was a young buck at the time—I dunno, maybe thirty. Scared hell outta’ me. Slept with the lights on damn near two weeks. Still get pretty worked up about it, every now and again. Thing is,” he said, and seemed to snap out of whatever he’d been thinking, looked directly at me and said “Same chill that ran through me every time I remembered a scene from that movie and had to turn the lights on hit me tonight. Ran through me like lightnin’ today. It was like—.” I waited a few moments, and he took a swig of his beer, looked down at the table.
“Like what?” I asked, sipping my own.
“Like those bones was coming to life any minute. Like they was gonna’ get up off that table and—I dunno—like the little guy was gonna’ set up and start talkin’.”
SEVENTEEN
Things got really thick. There’s no other way to describe it. It seemed like that moment dragged for hours. Bud just stared at the bar in front of him, and I looked at the men playing darts. The beer was cold in my hand, and the sweat from it made my palm wet.
“I gotta’ take a piss,” I said, and stood up. This seemed to drag him out of his mood, too. He smiled and pointed at the back wall. Neon tubes spelled out ‘restrooms’, but only flickered blue every minute or so; other than that, it was dark.
I’ve always felt odd about hearing other people’s conversations as I walked past their table, though. I try to pretend I’m not listening, but you can’t help it; you hear these things, and they puzzle you the rest of the night. One couple I passed had a little girl at the table. They were doing that yelling at each other through clenched teeth so no one knows how angry we are because we’re in a public place thing. The little girl was doing her best not to cry while she ate a huge French fry slowly. Another table had three burly men, their beers in mugs rather than bottles. They laughed extremely loud at the girl who was taking their orders, but her expression said that whatever their joke was, she didn’t think it was very funny.
The door going into the restroom squeaked. It’s rare to find one that doesn’t. The echo of that tiny squeal seemed to be as loud as a jet taking off. A man said “Excuse me,” as he came out; I’d almost knocked him down with the door. He shouldered past me and when the door closed behind him, I was alone. There’s something very creepy about being in a public bathroom alone. The muffled music outside, the dripping sounds from the urinals; the whole thing makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up for a second.
I took the smaller of the stalls. I’ve never known why, but I don’t like peeing at the urinals, especially if other men are in the room. Something uncomfortable about not knowing where to put your eyes: some men stare at the wall, some look at the ceiling—some have animated conversations with other men right next to them. I’ve never gotten the hang of when it’s okay, and when you shouldn’t talk in the restroom, so I just always choose the stall. The door doesn’t shut all the way, behind me, though. I spent almost five minutes trying to fix the thing, my body screaming at me the whole time, but nothing worked. Finally, I gave up, turned around, and relaxed.
The door squeaked open right at that moment. Somehow, I’d known it would. Someone coughed and walked to the urinals. From under the little dividing wall, I could see someone’s sneaker. It was one of those black canvas high-tops that all of us kids from Placerville used to wear. That brought back memories; my mother had always wanted me to wear something else, but those were all I’d wanted. One time, she’d even gone so far as to buy my school shoes without me. She’d brought home these white leather sneakers with all kinds of colors and designs on them. She’d said “They’re so bright and colorful. That’s ‘cool’, Mikey!”, and I knew the moment she said the word cool what she’d done; she’d talked to some of her friends. My mother never used the word cool to describe anything other than temperature except that once. That year, instead of throwing my old high-tops out, I hid them just up the road at the bus stop. I’d wear her shoes to the bus stop, slip into the old shoes, then change back at the bus stop before going home. I’d thought I’d be the only one, but I found out within weeks that quite a number of the parents had done the same thing, and most of us kids had responded in the same way. There had been black canvas high-tops hidden all over the town that year.