Soul

The sun had set long before the tires blew out. 

A wash of flamingo pink and tangerine hues bathed the long stretch of road that seemed never ending. The desert was cruel, unidentifiable animal carcasses strewn off the side of the concrete with little care. Some, Wes assumed, had been eaten by vultures but the majority of the roadkill he saw had been left to decompose in the dry desert heat.

The car had been shoddily fixed at a gas station back in Louisiana by a man with a face tattoo who seemed to know very little about cars. He had barely gotten past Lafayette when the front started to smoke and he pulled hastily into the nearest gas station. The man carried himself with confidence, jutting out his potbelly as he explained the long list of repairs.  Wes obliged to any and all fixes, including four new tires. Wes had overpaid the man. That, he knew now as he approached the New Mexico, Arizona border and smoke rose from the back two wheels. Within the hour, the car was undriveable.

Wes contemplated his options as he looked at the expanse of land beyond him. A cerulean hue began to blend itself into the painted sky marking the end of day. There were no phones, no passing cars, only the desolation of barren land. Wes drove the car to the side of the road, a generous term he thought since the road was more dirt than concrete. He gathered his menial belongings, a briefcase, a blazer that made him feel important, and a small stash of food he had purchased along the way.

As he began walking, he inhaled the desert heat, all-consuming and suffocating even in the evening. Dust from a storm long gone circled around tumbleweed and odd-shaped succulents, far-out creatures from the Chestnut oak trees of Virginia. Wes stumbled along holding a glimmer of hope that someone, anyone really, would see him and take pity on his stilted gait. He knew he had been injured back in Boston but had no time or patience to get it looked at. Now, he felt the pain race down his leg and into his ankle.

He walked and walked for hours until the sun truly disappeared into the cerulean sky lit only by the stars and a faraway light. Wes walked towards the light, hopeful that someone, or something, would be of merciful help. It was then that he stumbled upon the bar.

But, to call the place a bar would be like calling a horse a donkey.

The shiplap exterior had been worn down by years of drunkards climbing on the shingled roof kicking blackened chunks over the side of the gutters. Unplanted succulents guarded the windows like knights in shattered round pots. When you first looked at the place, you’d assume it was abandoned, a relic of a time filled with cowboys and gunfights, bar brawls that never seemed to materialize these days. People had become polite after the war, more jovial and willing to compromise. Those that didn’t, well they were cast to places like this.

Wes had no interest in chit-chat, he flicked his tongue around his dry mouth. He was parched, had been parched for some time now. The longer he stared at the broken shiplap and saloon doors, the more enticing swinging them open sounded. 

And yet, something deep in his intestines gurgled up towards his heart and into his sandpaper throat. It was the same feeling he had back in Jacksonville when he decided it was necessary to skip town, the same guttural twist that had ensued when he had lit the match back in Chincoteague, the blaze enveloping him like a warm blanket on a summer day. He could never decipher these feelings, the way people looked at him with slight offense. Had they known him or could they infer?

Wes walked himself straight through the saloon doors half expecting to be transported to a John Wayne western. He looked around at the half-empty space, mostly filled with what he presumed were transients, parched from the long road behind them. The space was dark, filled with outdated and kitschy furniture almost mocking the trope of the Western with small spruces of modernity. A telephone booth sat in the corner and a large radio overtook two barstools. A song Wes recognized played but he couldn’t pinpoint where he knew it from.

“Can I get’cha something?” a deep voice bellowed.

Wes had been trying to absorb the scenery of the bar that he almost forgot that his tongue stuck to the top of his mouth, dryer than the desert. The omnipresent voice came from a bartender, shorter than Wes, though most men were. His hair was slicked back with pomade, cheap pomade as far as Wes could tell since one strand stood slightly higher than the others. His eyes gave Wes pause. The right looked like the tangerine sunset Wes had marveled at before entering the saloon doors. The other looked to be the color of the cerulean hues that had darkened such beauty.

“Whiskey and coke,” Wes said, sitting himself down on the barstool.

From the corner of the room, he heard a low grunt. It came from a man with a beard like a pirate, scraggly and filled with unbridled knots. He was one-legged, using a cane to support himself as he charged towards the bartender.

He spoke with such fervor that Wes almost stumbled over himself, too frazzled to hear such a commotion from what seemed like a transient, quiet bar. Half of what the pirate man said was muffled by his lack of teeth and rotted, swollen gums.

“Don’t drink his elixirs,” the man said, pointing his cane accusingly at the bartender. 

He slurred his words, coughing intermittently as he stared at the bartender with a hatred Wes had felt quite often in his young life.

“He’ll trick you,” the man said, grabbing Wes’s shoulder with as much might as he could muster. He was frail, much older than any other patrons. Wes wondered what chaos he had seen in his life to make him such a loon. Had it been the war that had caused his mind to go or the economic collapse when he was a child? 

Then, as Wes looked the old man in his eyes a fearful thought popped into his head and he backed himself away. Would Wes end up like this man, berating the youth at some transient bar in the middle of nowhere? A look of fear penetrated his stare, Wes no longer remained stoic or appeared the approachable young buck he believed himself to be and somehow, in some way, this look had spooked the old man because he hobbled back to his corner where he clumsily sat in a broken wooden chair.

“That’s Old-Man-Morley,” the bartender said, looking at Wes intently. 

He seemed keen on assuaging his fears.

“He’s a bit,” the bartender paused and took his index finger to the temple of his head, spinning it a few times, “not there.”

Morley shook his cane at the bartender, slouching into his chair and coughing again and again before staring out the small window of the darkened saloon. His eyes never seemed fixated on one particular place, darting from inside to the outside of the bar, his wrinkled body slumped.

“He’s right though,” the bartender said matter-of-factly, rubbing the same glass he had been since Wes had walked in. The bartender smiled, his pomade releasing the strands atop his scalp. “Don’t sell none of that whiskey here.”

Wes paused, the wash of fear that he rarely felt coating his parched skin.

“Pardon,” Wes said with polite uncertainty, “this is a bar, correct?”

Wes looked around, making sure that he had not stumbled into the wrong kind of establishment, though he wouldn’t have minded that either. Wes was not conservative, despite his suitable and gentlemanly appearance.

The bartender cackled at the question as if Wes had been a comedian, fishing for pity laughs from an uninterested audience.

“Why, of course this is a bar!” the bartender yelped. 

He then turned his face into a sharp smile and said, “But,” he said with flair, “we don’t serve alcohol here. We serve souls.”

The bartender poured a clear liquid in the glass he had been polishing as the lights reflected a dim shadow. Wes pondered the insanity of the place. He had known the South to be filled with money-hungry mystics searching for an extra buck. They’d told him his future from a crystal ball–often ending in a shuttering demise. There had been the witches whose dark circles outlined their moon-like eyes. They had casted spells and hexes on men in faraway lands for scorned lovers, promising revenge and retribution. He had seen the girls whose eyes rolled back in their heads, promised to be possessed by an evil spirit, paraded around by a man dressed in white and black. 

And yet, this mysticism felt less like a carnival and more like a casino.

“Souls?” Wes said with interest.

The bartender grinned, glaring into the glass. He spoke with a cadence and poise that had been absent when Wes had first asked for his drink. He stared into the man’s eyes.

“We attract the outlaws, those whose lives have taken a turn,” he paused looking up at Wes who showed no obvious emotion. “You, I presume, are running from someone, or something that will, let’s be honest, catch up with you.”

He looked at Wes again, pale faced and nauseous.

“I presume they already have. Nails in the tires?” he said.

Wes grew hot in the face, the bitterness of his past bubbling up in his stomach. He felt his insides churning like butter. In one swoop, he grabbed the bartender by the collar, holding him above the drink.

“How the fuck do you know any of this? Who do you work for?” Wes rambled, choking the boy. “Who came here? Killeen or O’Toole? I know one of them would rat me out those…” he trailed off.

The bartender spoke with gasps, “Nobody came but they will.”

Wes let him go, his limp body hanging on the bar.

“How do you know?” Wes asked.

Old-Man-Morley coughed in the corner, watching the whole ordeal unfold, muttering words to himself. Wes found it strange that the man never tried to leave, his body seemed tethered to the chair.

“They always come,” the bartender said, still catching his breath. “I told you, we attract the outlaws.”

The clear liquid still sat atop the bartop. The bartender held it in front of Wes. 

A deadly silence filled the barroom.

“Soul for a soul,” the bartender said.

Wes looked at the bartender with guttural fear. Wes looked at the glass and said, “what will happen to me?”

The bartender pushed the glass closer to Wes.

“Well, you’ll live,” the bartender said. “But with that comes the consequences of being alive, of living someone else’s life and escaping your own.”

Wes looked at the bartender puzzled by his philosophic rant.

“What consequences?” Wes asked.

“Well someone, maybe someone undeserving of such pain, could absorb your sins, your terrors.” The bartender placed a lemon on the glass. “And you, well, you have no clue what you could be getting into.”

Wes looked deeply into the glass, his ears ringing.

A car door slammed outside. He knew they had found him and he knew that he’d be fishmeal within hours if he stayed. He looked at Old-Man-Morley, his bargained soul tethered to the bar for, what Wes presumed, was eternity. Footsteps pounded against the deep desert sand. Wes looked at the bartender.

“Drink up,” the bartender said, winking with his sunset eye.

And so, with one gulp, Wes swallowed the bitter liquid.