Walsh

    A gas station made sense for his first stop in the city, but as he opened his wallet, he saw one lonely bill. He figured it best to save the twenty. Gas could wait if he was already here. 500 miles from Vicksburg had been enough to drain all but twenty dollars of the money he’d made on his last fencing job. A beer would help put him at ease he decided, and an easy spirit was well worth the price. Walsh determined that a place with a name like Barfly’s would surely be providing alcohol at this hour and would welcome anyone with some cash. He put the truck into park, but didn’t get out, grabbing the wheel with both hands and closing his eyes. He could almost hear her voice telling him how stupid he was for driving 8 hours just to end up at a bar.

“It’s seven days a week, you’re drinkin’ now. God help me if I have a son who drinks like his daddy…”

“Listen. You don’t go tellin’ me how I’m supposed to live. I’ll do what I damn do want to. I don’t need you...”

“Boy, you,” she grimaced, a theatric level of rage preventing her from finishing her thought.

“I’m just drinkin’ to have a good time, Mama,” he slurred.

“God, son, you just don’t think sometimes.”

He couldn’t afford to leave a tip. He got back in his truck, feeling the familiar lightheadedness. He wasn’t sure it would help him find Ronny, but he knew it would help him. In the parking lot of Barfly’s, he pulled out the crumpled business card he’d received from an out-of-towner some time ago.

“Well this was a good time, boys. If you guys are ever up my way, let me know. We’re always looking for servers anyways. Wouldn’t be a bad gig. Here, I’ll give you this. Call the restaurant and ask for Ronny. Well, I’ve got to be going. Thank you gentlemen for showing me around,” the stranger said with a salute.

Walsh and some friends had taken him around to their local spots a while back. He was just passing through and decided to let loose for the night before making it back home to his wife and two sons. He’d found Walsh at Turpentine’s on Lexington. The boys were already out of their minds, and the traveller figured they’d know where to go to tune the world out for a bit. 

He could barely make out the faded number on the black and red card. 

“I’m lookin’ for, uh, Ronny,” Walsh said. 

“Wrong number,” he heard before the call ended. 

He looked at the card and tried again with a unique combination of the vague numbers. 

“Is this the Red Troupe?” Walsh asked.

The second person hung up before saying anything.

Walsh was unfazed, figuring that if he made enough calls, he’d find his lost friend.

He typed in an eight instead of the nine and put the phone up to his ear.

“I’m looking for the Red Troupe.”

There was a pause on the other side of the line.

A deep voice responded back, “Yes, sir. I’m the Red Troupe. How can I help you today?”

Confused but hopeful that he’d received a response, he continued, “I’m looking for Ronny. He was back in Vicksburg, Mississippi a while back with some of my buddies and me. He said to call his restaurant if I was ever here in Austin. And well, I’m here.”

“Well, sir. Let me give the phone to Ronny for you then.”

“Yeah, let me talk to Ronny please.”

A high-pitched voice came on the phone. “Yes? This is Ronny.”Giggles rang out in the background. Walsh’s stomach hit the floor. 

“You fuckin’ kids. Go fuck yourselves.”

He threw his phone against the dash and heard the screen shatter. 

“Yeah, it’s a cool little place. We’re right in the middle of it all down there. Chaotic, but it’s fun.”

Walsh walked back into the dive bar, asking for directions to downtown. He started towards the center, hovering now on “E.” 

Walsh would’ve pulled into any free parking he could find. He saw it as a sign from God that the saloon with the horseshoe sign only required patrons to pay for the drinks. With his blood still boiling from the phone calls, he began walking around, thinking maybe God would offer him another blessing. Still, it would only be the second he could ever remember receiving. Two hours went by, and the sun and the man’s hope began hanging low. It was at three hours, he started asking anyone on the streets if they’d heard of Red Troupe. The first few strangers were dazzled by his charm. He’d crack a mildly inappropriate joke, pat their shoulders like an old friend. Nothing brought him closer to the restaurant. 

In his mind, Ronny would be waiting at the gates of Austin for him, ready to offer him a job and a place to stay whenever he was ready. Walsh couldn’t quite understand why things weren’t falling into place as he imagined. He really thought that Ronny had liked him. The self-deprecating thoughts troubled him deeply around the fourth hour of searching through the city for the lost restaurant. He began begging strangers for information about Red Troupe, to which he kept receiving the response that they had no money. Walsh couldn’t figure how this was relevant to his request. 

A middle-aged couple were the first people in a while to stop for Walsh. The man wore shorts and sandals with a shirt that seemed too fancy for the rest of his attire. He told Walsh that he’d heard of the restaurant and that it was home to some of the best pasta in the city. They’d closed their doors five years ago. 

Walsh said nothing. He walked away from the couple, down the sidewalk of 2^nd Street. The world was spinning in a blur of orange streetlights and blinding headlights. He stumbled around, intoxicated by the crumbling of his life around him. 

He couldn’t stop his body from shuddering, but as he looked ahead of him he could see his good luck sign framed by the night sky—a horse shoe sign leading him to bliss. Without enough gas to get him around and without the 500 mile-long hope of getting a job far away from Vicksburg, Walsh prayed he had enough cash left to escape the sharpness of the pain he was feeling. 

“How much you charge for a shot of Jaeger here?”

“All shots are $5. You want one?” the bartender said without looking up from the drink he was making. 

“I’ll take two.”

A radius of two people on either side of Walsh leaned over trying to listen to his story of the time he got blackout drunk and tried to ride a surfboard off the roof. Half the bar was enthralled by what they saw as the authentic aesthetic of Walsh with his roughly-cut jean shorts and stained cutoff t-shirt. His leathery skin along with his rough attire made him their sage. Walsh basked in this attention, and for a moment, it allowed him to submerge all of the hurt of the past week under that one ounce of liquor. Mama’s passing. The late payment notice. The incredible loneliness of that house without her. He drove as far away as his truck and his wallet would let him but could feel the presence of the dark claws of the grief in his peripheral. It was always easier to leave. 

Strangers began offering to by the storyteller drinks, something Walsh was accustomed to back in Mississippi, given his charisma. His words started coming out more and more scattered until plots were hard to find in the string of sentences he offered. Yet Walsh kept announcing his stories to the bar, fearing the moment that often occurred when he was this far gone, in which he would fall silent and be unable to escape his own mind. 

“Alright, bud,” a man next to him said, laughing as he pat Walsh’s arm. “Looks like you’ve had enough. I think you’d better head home, okay?”

“Hey!” Walsh screamed slapping his arm away. “Don’t tell me— what I need to do— bud,” Walsh said mockingly. “I’ll go home —whenever I want to, okay?”

Most eyes in the small bar now turned back towards their oracle. They now saw their error, one that many have made: mistaking a drunk for a prophet. The man just looked at Walsh without saying anything. His eyebrows fell as if he could see all of the stories Walsh decided not to tell the group tonight.

“You okay, son?” the man asked.

Walsh’s face showed what he was about to do before his fist did. Forehead and mouth contorting into an odd formation that only the tortured know. The older man rubbed out the pain in his jaw as he watched Walsh leave out the front door, hands on his face. It was always easier to leave. 

As he exited the bar, the man checked his face in the mirror, seeing drops of blood in his ever-graying stubble. When he heard the engine of an old pick up start up, he quickened his pace. There was Walsh, looking over his shoulder, cautiously backing up. The man began banging on the hood of the truck to get his attention.

“Boy, you’d better not. I saw how much you were putting back.”

“You don’t know how much I can put back, old man,” Walsh yelled back, continuing to tap the accelerator. 

“It’s your eyes,” the man yelled back.

The truck stopped. 

“My eyes?” he laughed. “Looks like you a lil’ wasted yourself, huh?”

“No, your eyes. You’re sad, boy. What is it?” The man felt the truck jolt as it was put into park. “You lose someone? Brother? Sister? Wife?”

Walsh looked at him fiercely now, his mouth and eyebrows showing anger, but tears welled up in his eyes. He slowly shook his head— half unbelieving, half responding to the man’s guesses. 

“What’s it to you? You don’t know me, man? Just let me get outta here.”

“You got somewhere to go?” He paused. “I didn’t. Brother. Back when I was 25. Dad. The year after that. I didn’t know what to do with myself, so, you know, I’d come to a place like this,” he said, “I’d get so drunk I’d forget my own name because when you don’t even know your name there’s no way you’ll be able to feel that pain, right? That’s what I thought too,” the man continued as tears began pooling in his eyes as well. “Boy, it’ll follow you wherever you go if try to suffocate it,” he said, shaking his head.

Walsh had turned away his face, looking off to the side, hands still on the wheel. The engine whirring in the background. 

“Mama.”

The old man just nodded knowingly. 

“Life is cruel, I’ll tell ya.”

“Yeah,” Walsh said in a choked voice.

“I heard in there you’re from Mississippi. You have family ‘round here?”

Walsh shook his head.

“Just back in Mississippi?”

Again, Walsh shook his head.

“Mom was all you had?” he asked, already nodding.

Walsh just kept staring off towards the highway nearby. 

“I don’t know what to do, man. This city was my last chance, I think. I left everything back there, and now, I’m fucked. I’m broke. Don’t got a job. Fucking stupid,” he shouted as he banged his head on the wheel. The man opened the door and pulled out the drunken 45-year-old boy. He wrapped him up in his arms.

“If I know anything it’s that, yes, life is a mean ol’ son of a bitch, but good for us screwed-up men, last chances don’t exist. You’ll be fine, boy.”

Walsh was convulsing under the embrace of the stranger.

“Just give it some time, son.”