Redemption

“You trying to make a decision?”

He picked up the wedding ring that he had been twirling on the dark oak bar and held it in his fist.

“Already made it,” Alvin said without looking at him. The man was tan, with lean, muscular arms, not a weightlifter but maybe a yoga enthusiast, and wrinkle-free, both his shirt and his face. He worked hard to look like he didn’t care what his hair looked like—the kind of guy Alvin studiously avoided in bars.

Alvin looked at his own arms, thick forearms, browned and highlighted with gray hair, skin aged and neglected. He tossed back the remainder of his scotch, crunched the remaining ice, and banged the glass on the bar loud enough to earn another round.

“What’s going on out there?” The man said, throwing a jump ball like strangers did in bars that were looking for conversation…or something else.

“If you don’t know, this ain’t the bar to do your sightseeing in,” Alvin said, wishing he could pull back the harshness of his words.

“Alvin McNeil,” he said as a concession.

“Parker Bell,” he took Alvin’s hand.

“Parker?”

“Family name.”

So was Alvin. A name he hadn’t used for decades, a name he hid behind because the world knew him as “VinMac.”

“So, you aren’t sightseeing?” The man who might be Parker Bell said.

“I’m working,” he said, wrapping his hand around his scotch, needing help to get out of this conversation. He drained the glass again and nodded to the man – Parker – and stiffly rose to leave.

“You going out there?” The man looked at the empty glass and then at Alvin. “What kind of work?” His tone, a concerned citizen, his face more on the panicked side of concerned.

“Journalist,” he said and looked away. It was true enough to be believable.

Alvin McNeil was a journalist; had been a journalist. More than that, an investigative journalist with a loyal following, a self-made man who rose too fast through the networks, flew too close to the sun, and fell hard. But he got up, reinvented himself as VinMac, and became a unique voice in a crowded market of podcasters and influencers. If he had flown too close to the sun in his first career, he had spontaneously combusted in his second.

He hadn’t been VinMac in a decade; wouldn’t be him again until they wrote his obituary, and that could be sooner than later if he stepped outside…or if he stayed inside, hiding in this bottle. The bottle called for him, it always did after the first few went down fast, but the man on the bar stool next to him might be the tie breaker—time to leave.

“I’m an investigator, of sorts,” Parker Bell said. “Not like you,” he said and stopped himself. “I mean, not experienced like you.”

Did this man with a made-up-sounding-name know who he was? Alvin McNeil’s face was known to the public at one time, VinMac, more of a known voice, but neither had been relevant for long enough for the world to forget both. Fame lived a may fly lifetime.

The bartender hovered, waiting for instructions, and Parker Bell gave them to him: “Another round, on me.”

“Investigators, journalist, or private, don’t sit in bars waiting for a story.”

“Maybe you are the story,” the man said, and Alvin McNeil feared it was the only honest thing he had said all night.

Which story would he tell?

The one about a naïve rookie who would follow any story, anywhere, to get his thirty seconds of airtime. The rookie who always got the story. Until he wasn’t a rookie, and he started getting phone calls. He took them, leaving a trail of pissed off station managers who had given him a chance that he used as a springboard. Everyone did, everyone did, or they spent the rest of their lives as a small fish in a dried-up pond.

“I was the story,” Alvin said, the words sounding like a car that had hit a patch of dark ice. “If you want to pick it up, we can go outside, I’ll introduce you to some people who are far more interesting.”

“You know them?”

Alvin did. “Not as in, ‘Hey, let's get together and have a beer’.”

Parker waited, sipped on his beer, and Alvin let him wait. This bar was good for waiting.

The owner, a casual acquaintance he called friend, was a sports guy, memory like a computer, who aspired to become a sports host, but had the drive of a guy slinging beers for life. As an interior decorator, his tastes ran towards mid-nineties high school bedroom posters.

He had paid as much attention to the framed posters as they deserved, but now studied them at the expense of answering Parker Bell’s cross-examinations, shrouded in small talk.

Each booth along the wall opposite the bar had a theme, one honored Tiger Woods with pictures of him as a child prodigy, winning the Masters, and strangely, framed photos of him with Elin Nordegren.

A montage of Bo Jackson in shoulder pads with a bat behind his neck, Royals and Raiders action shots, and one of him breaking a bat over his broad shoulders. Signed memorabilia that appeared to be ordered, not collected.

He couldn’t see the booths farther down the aisle. He fought the urge to step off his stool and investigate each of them. He didn’t remember ever looking at them as he passed them on his way to his stool.

He stepped off his stool and studied each booth. Not all sports. One honored the Beatles. Another Farrah Faucet, all teeth, hair, and breasts in a red one-piece bathing suit; a must-have for every coming-of-age boy in the seventies.

Parker Bell followed him, mirroring his steps and following his gaze, like he was afraid to wake a sleepwalker.

“You leaving?”

He shook his head, standing in front of a booth with two couples looking up from their burgers and beer, expectation, or fear in their eyes.

The booth's theme was a combination of sports quotes, poetry, and movies. Robert Redford in The Natural. Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams. Bull Durham with Crash and Annie superimposed over “Nuke” Laloosh.

He stared at a cartoonish poster of a broad-shouldered baseball batter, defiance in his eye, and a sneer curled lip, “That ain’t my style.”

Parker Booth touched his shoulder and whispered, “Alvin, let’s finish that drink.”

The four looked at him and then at the posters in their booth. One finally said, “Can I help you?”

A man yelled something inaudible outside, and voices rose in unison, a reaction to an action, or an organized chant, far enough away to hear the intent, if not the words. Alvin took a step towards the door, looked out the window, and then opened it enough to let the sounds of protest drift in.

Across the street, crowds streamed towards a raised platform with a huddle of agitated speakers. Too familiar a scene.

That was his problem a decade ago; he chose a prism of one side against another, right or wrong, good or evil. That was like blaming a forest fire on the trees. The people were the fuel, but he had gone after the flame and got burned.

“What was that all about?” Parker said, like a concerned friend, an intervention from somebody who cared enough about him to pull him back from the precipice.

“I don’t know. I’ve been in this bar too long without understanding what it was telling me.”

“Those?” Parker Bell pointed at the “Tiger Woods” booth. “Bob, over there,” he pointed at the owner, “likes to dwell on what could have been.”

“That’s refreshing – I thought I was in a Twilight Zone episode where every street sign screamed, ‘LOOSER.’”

“That’s why I chose this place.”

“You chose this place?” Alvin challenged.

“There were other places we could have randomly run into each other.”

“Why here? Why me?”

“This is your safe place, like a hermit crab’s shell. Why you? Alvin McNeil needs to let VinMac out of that shell.”

Vin had almost walked out of that door and back into the world that left him divorced, nearly homeless, and burdened by a guilt too heavy to carry out that front door sober.

His ego got him fired; maybe that was harsh. He was downsized as a liability in an industry that was drowning. After almost twenty years as a journalist, an anchor – okay, co-anchor – a respected name in the media, he and his industry were dying.

“You crawled back inside the shell.”

The western sun sliced through the tavern window, sparking the floating dust particles and making them more than they are, just specks of dust floating in time, caught in the light of the sun shining into his no-name bar. Alvin McNeil didn’t want VinMac back.

“What do you see out there?” Parker Bell asked.

Alvin didn’t have the energy to play these games; unraveling riddles because some guy wanted him to come to the conclusion he had already made.

“Same people, different subject of their ire. Dopamine-fueled outrage, or is it outrage-fueled dopamine?”

“Maybe.” He stared out the window at the crowds. He had been out of the game too long. The game was out there, and until he walked out that door, he was just another sidelined has-been.

“Look,” he pointed at something Alvin didn’t see, “we recycle our gods when they grow too powerful for us and start acting like gods: our entertainment, our information, our toys, and politicians. Hell, even our coffee. We love an emerging idea; we hate it when they get too successful.”

Somehow, this guy was moving the needle from irritating to intriguing. At least he knew how to push Alivin’s buttons. VinMac’s buttons.

“You asked me what I see out there?” Alvin didn’t take his eye off the growing crowd, setting down roots with tents and tarps and lawn chairs that had a Fourth-of-July picnic event vibe to it. “A chance to chase away the ghosts from my past and find a way back.”

He wanted to believe he had been coming to this bar for weeks, watching, waiting, making mental notes and washing them away with scotch. He couldn’t say the word to himself, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to let this guy psychoanalyze it out of him.

“Find a way back,” he repeated. Restarting the thought in hopes of it going somewhere.

“I guess it depends on what you plan on doing with those ghosts,” Parker said, and this time he turned from the window and met Alvin’s eyes and held them, challenging him.

“I’m not even sure anymore. Years ago, I would have said revenge. Find the people responsible for the deaths…”.

“You didn’t cause those deaths,” Parker said.

“I was there and…” Alvin shook his head. “If you weren’t there, you can’t know how it feels.”

“Oh, I was there, and I know how it feels.”

Alvin looked up too quickly, and Parker didn’t flinch.

“I was part of the Counterterrorism Division, in charge of the Joint Terrorism Task Force on Domestic Terrorism. It happened on my watch.” A sardonic laugh, and he shook his head until it morphed into an accepting nod. “It happened on my watch, and I’m finding my way back.”

“That’s why you are here? You investigating me?”

He laughed—a belly laugh.

“I’m here because I need what you have. I need what you know, and I need what you have burning inside of you.”

“And what do you have for me?”

“A chance for redemption.”

He turned, walked back to his bar stool, and sat. Took a drink.

“For both of us.”