On The Day

A swallow flitted by just overhead and snatched me up from the daze I had fallen into. I sat on the balcony of my apartment and worked on the last of a fiction story for a serial job in the paper about a man who had shot himself and lived, the true account of which I had come across in an old medical journal, and I was having a dreadful time with the ending. That the whole damn piece was a load of rot and no ending in the world could make it hold water crept persistently into mind, and I knew it was time to put it up for the day, deadline be damned. I was spent anyway.

It was a cool evening for June and the sky was fading from a brilliant red to a dull violet as dusk fell. I decided I needed a drink so I stepped inside and poured a bourbon. I tossed it down and poured a bigger one with ice to drink slow, then went back outside and leaned over the railing and looked out at the neighborhood.

The apartment building was on a wooded street three blocks from Main Street, in a town near the Kansas-Missouri border, and every Friday and Saturday night if you listened you could hear the main drag come to life and you could see the aura of warm light cast up into the night by the bars and cafes. I fell back into the chair and looked up at the first of the emerging stars and felt the warmth of the whiskey radiate from my stomach.

A quiet breeze rolled gently over the leaves of the trees and on down the block, carrying on its breath the sickening sweet aroma of bindweed that made me think of home. I listened with closed eyes as it passed by. Drinking on a balcony is a nice way to spend an evening alone, so long as you are not lonely. Well I was beginning to feel lonely. So I stepped inside and flipped on the light and poured one more bourbon to put up before going for a walk. 

Stepping out the doors of the ground floor lobby onto the sidewalk, I looked up again at the stars which were now in the hundreds of thousands poised in stillness across the cloudless sky. I started walking at a good clip. When I got to Main I strolled slow up the lively street, looking in through all the big warm-lighted windows as I passed by. I headed for the bar Abe and me used to spend time at. Marty’s was his favorite bar, real friendly place, always with familiar faces and sometimes new ones. 

My brother Abe took his life four months ago on the day, and though I never cared much for friendly places, I had taken to going there when I got to missing him bad.

I came up to Marty’s and stepped through the door and into the beating heart of it.

“Hey there,” the little old woman said when she spotted me. She owned the place. Her name was Gertrude and she worked to stay young. She was a salty old bird but very sweet in her own way. 

One hot night two summers ago, Abe and me and this other big bastard were closing it down. The air was heavy in anticipation of the sweltering day that would follow it. I remember because we all had a good sweat going that night and breathing felt like being in the engine room of a steamship at full tilt. Not like tonight. 

Anyway, we were the only three left come closing time, and that whole damn night this big blockhead was trying to stir it up with anybody who looked at him wrong. And he was pretty big and the night was stifling, so he had a hard time getting a rouse out of anyone. Abe and me paid him no mind and he hadn’t bothered us until right then at closing. He came over and clapped us both on the back and took up Abe’s beer from the bartop and finished it off. Then he asked if we needed anything to drink for the road that he’ll serve it, and we said no. 

“I think I’ll give him one for the road,” Abe said.

“Don’t worry about it.” I said. “No good hitting a drunk. Let’s see where he goes with it anyway.”

I’d seen Abe hit plenty of people big and small, and some got up slower than others. He boxed at the gym downtown weeknights and occasionally up in Kansas City in tournament bouts. I was his cornerman for the smaller-time gigs. He was a damn fine fighter.

“Well I’m gettin’ me one more,” the big bastard said as he made his way around back of the bar. “Gettin’ me one more and to hell with this place.”

He labored something awful trying to walk straight.

Well, all this time Gertrude, who was the only one on that night, was inching toward the billy club she kept on a nail between the liquor shelf and the beer cooler. Rising from the barstool I looked at her and nodded toward him. She shook me off. I sat back down. He lumbered behind the bar, grabbed up an empty mug and went for the tap, shoving Gertrude aside like nothing, like she was less than a nuisance, and right then Gertrude snatched up that baton as fast as I’d seen anyone move, and she reached up and clubbed him once across the side of the head above the ear. It sounded like dropping a cantaloupe onto concrete. His knees buckled and he sat down heavy against the cabinet. His eyes were open but he was down for the ten-count. All he could do was keep groaning and belching.

“Boys, help me get this big bastard outside,” she said coolly.

Abe and me got under his arms and hauled him out to the street and sat him against the brick wall.

“Alright then. Take care, you two,” Gertrude said. “Have a gin with me before you go. No? Okay then, come back soon, and you boys take care of yourselves, hear?” —the big man piled up against the wall groaning and belching and threatening to beat the hell out of whoever hit him all the while.

“What’s it tonight, Harry?” asked Gertrude when she saw me come in. She was set up close to the door holding a Frank Leslie novel folded back on itself. Two kids tended bar.

“Bourbon and a little ice, thanks.”

She got up and made it and brought it over. 

The air inside was thick and had the sour smell of drunkenness. I sat in an empty chair at a full table up front by the big street window. The place was pretty well packed. Unusual but not unheard of for old Marty’s. I sat with four strangers, an old man and a younger one who had both sweated through the underarms of their t-shirts, a wide old vacant looking woman, and a young girl who was strikingly beautiful. That’s how it was at Marty’s, everybody sitting with everybody. I recognized the old man and woman as regulars and I nodded toward them. 

As I took the seat, the girl slid her chair closer to me. She wore a deep blue sundress with white daisy print. Her long dark hair hung down past her breasts. I could tell she was tipsy by her eyes and by her smile. 

“Haven’t I seen you in here before?” she asked.

“Could be,” I said.

“I have,” she said. “You and another boy. Are you brothers?”

“Sharp eye.”

“Did he come along with you?”

“Not tonight.”

“Too bad.”

“What’s the drink?” I asked.

“A Tom Collins,” she said and closed her lips around the straw. “Here, try it.”

“Thanks, I’ve got one.”

“It’s really good,” she insisted.

She held the straw under my mouth, and I drank until it slurped empty on the bottom of the glass. She watched me, softly grinning. Then she smiled wide.

“You were thirsty, were you?” she asked, leaning closer.

I nodded. “You were right,” I said. “It was very good.”

“Let me try yours.” She took the glass of bourbon, a double pour, from my hand and tipped it up and drank until only the ice was left. She grimaced and wiped her mouth with her forearm and put the glass back in my hand.

“You must’ve been very thirsty,” I said.

“That was terrible,” she said. “But when you’re thirsty enough…”

“It’s lucky we met or we may have both died of thirst.”

 She smiled. It was white and full and just crooked enough, and her eyes were a shade of green so that I knew I’d never seen her before because I would’ve remembered. She was something.

Her hand rested on my leg under the table and my arm went across the back of her chair and we made eyes at one another.

The old motherly woman at the table was very quiet. She wore a thin perpetual grin along her mouth, and she gazed on at the old man while he talked to those around him, and she seemed to be somewhere else within herself. The younger man across the table turned toward us and shouted for my attention. He had been watching the girl out of the corner of his eye from the moment I sat down. The young man shouted again in my direction over the noise of the crowded bar. I could tell he was pretty loaded and you saw right away he was bent out of shape about something. He shouted a third time and pounded on the table. 

“Would you cool it, Ramos?” the girl said.

“Is he deaf? What is your name, cabrón?” Ramos shouted.

“Harry,” I answered.

“Harry?”

I nodded and turned away.

“Sonofabitch,” muttered Ramos.

I looked back toward him.

“You have a big mouth,” the girl said to him.

“My friend was sitting there, cabrón,” the young man said.

“You talk too much for your own good,” the girl said.

“I’ll find another seat,” I said to the girl.

“Stay,” said the girl, draping her arms around my neck. “Let him find one.”

“Hijo de puta,” muttered the young man.

“Settle down,” I said.

“Tell me that again, cabrón.”

“You’ll do nothing,” I said.

“You think no?”

“Listen, I’m sorry. Why don’t I get us another round?” I said.

“I get my own drinks,” said the young man, “and this is not your table.”

“That is because it is my table,” said the girl. “You make an ass of yourself because you can’t handle your liquor.”

“But—”

“You look silly,” continued the girl before he could speak. “That face you’re giving. I would check in the mirror before going anywhere in case you run into a woman sorry enough to give you the time.”

His eyes darted back to me. He sure looked like he wanted to hit me then. He had small dark eyes. I hadn’t given it any thought that this girl might have a man, though a girl like her could have a following of many men who trick themselves into thinking she is theirs, this young man evidently being one of them.

I figured now, as hot as he was, he would stand up and then tell me to stand up and we’d either go outside or just have at it across the table. I sure didn’t want to fight. My blood was warm in other ways.

Well, he went ahead and stood up, knocking his chair over backward. I leaned away from the table so I had room to move, and, watching him closely, I could see he wasn’t going to take it further. Though it’s hard telling what a man with a hurt pride will do in the presence of a beautiful woman, with a head full of liquor to boot.

He glared down at me for a while, me looking back. Then he turned and went over and stood against the bar.

“What an ass,” muttered the girl.

“He’s quite in love with you,” I said, half kidding.

“The hell he is. We’re family. He’s my older cousin.”

“I see,” I said, standing up.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” she asked.

“Refills. I’ll be back” I said, smiling.

“I won’t move.” 

I hit the john and then found space along the bar away from the cousin and leaned on one elbow and looked back at the table where I was sitting. A tall pale, plain-looking boy was standing over the girl with a full drink in each hand, and they were talking. Or he was talking. She seemed not to notice he was there. She was looking all around the place, searching the crowd, looking everywhere except the poor fellow standing over her. When she spotted me across the room, she smiled big and raised her empty glass and tapped her wrist where a watch would be if she wore one. I waved back. The boy saw this and frowned, then he set the drinks down on the table and walked straight out the front door. 

She was something, alright.

Out the big window behind her was the dark lively street lit up by the lamp posts that ran up and down either side, and the scene within the bar danced across the wide pane of glass and mixed together with that of the cool night without.

 I got our drinks and headed back to the table. When she saw me coming she plopped her chin in her hands and made a playful face.

Before I could sit down there was a loud crack from the back of the barroom like an old jalopy backfiring. A few heads turned but the chatter went on unbroken. Three more sharp cracks followed in close succession and I saw a fat man collapse over a table and fall to the floor with a clatter of broken glass. The place fell quiet then. A woman shrieked. I saw a small wiry man shoving his way toward the front door. The panic came on quick and in no time flat everyone was pushing tightly toward the door en masse. Through the panic I saw the fat man on the floor. He was still, his white button shirt soaking through with blood. His face was waxen like a painting. I turned back around and saw that the girl I had been sitting with was gone, and the others, too. Lost in the scramble.

Outside, the mob dumped into the street and shed its frenzy as it dispersed out into the night. I stood for a moment and watched the people, just to see. Then I made my way back to my apartment building, walking slowly and without purpose. When I got there I stood before the glass doors and looked in at the familiar fluorescent-drenched lobby. I turned on my heels and kept walking. I didn’t know where to. There were no lights between the blocks on the side streets, and under the trees, out from under the silver light of the moon, the shadows hung like curtains. I passed in and out of their absolute darkness as I went up the sidewalk. The sirens of first responders whined relentlessly through the air, growing slowly fainter as I walked on, though I wished to god they would just stop.

At last, as I came up to the end of the street where it forked off in different directions through the neighborhood, the sirens cut out altogether. And it was very quiet again and it felt nice to be lonely and alone.