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Eddie’s Tavern.

This is where I come to try to forget my pain. There’s so much of it here that isn’t mine, it should make me feel better, but it doesn’t.

And yet here I am, same as always. Saturday night at Eddie’s.

There’s no neon sign out front, nothing to advertise this as a place to come drown your sorrows, and that makes sense because sorrows aren’t drowned here, not all the way, only pushed under and held for a while.

The moon is a nicotine-stained fingernail as I step out of my truck, ponder the feel of my gut straining against my belt, and ease the door shut behind me. I’m getting fat, and I suppose as they say, like death and taxes, I’m shit out of luck if I expect to be surprised by it. Man eats as much chili as I do without chasing it down with a few laps around the barn, well…weight doesn’t evict itself.

I start on the path to the tavern door and see pale orbs behind the smoked glass turn in my direction. Nothing slips past these people, quiet or not. The door doesn’t creak, though it’s old enough to have earned that luxury. Instead it sighs. I sigh too, but I don’t share the door’s regret. For me, I’m just glad to be out of the cold and among friends, even if they mightn’t look at me the same way. Even if, in the dark of night when sleep’s a distant memory, I really don’t think of them the same way either.

All the usual folks are here.

The pale willowy woman with the figure that could have been carved from soap, that’s Gracie. She inherited this place from her Daddy, and considers it less a gift than another in a long line of curses from a man who dedicated his life to making hers a living hell. Leaving her the bar was his way of ensuring she’d stay right where he wanted her, in a rundown hole with no prospects and surrounded by friends not her own. Gracie has no love for anyone, least of all herself. She’s still got her looks, though they fade a little every day, and she’d get out of this place in a second if she thought the city would take her. I’m sure it probably would. Take her, grind her up, and spit her out to die on some dogshit-encrusted sidewalk a thousand miles from home.

Chances are a pretty girl like that with little world experience would end up missing, or turning tricks in the back office of some sleazy strip-joint to keep her in heroin. No, a girl like Gracie is better off right where she is, polishing glasses that stay so milky with grime you almost expect to see smoke drift out of them when she picks them up. She might be miserable, but I figure that’s her own doing. Her overbearing father’s influence is just an excuse. He’s dead, after all, and buried out back. There’s nothing to stop her selling this dive, except maybe a burning need to prove herself to his ghost.

At the bar sits a naked man. That’s Cobb. Cobb says he’s a nudist, and is waiting for the rest of the colony to come apologize for treating him so poorly. What they did to him is unclear, but he’s been waiting almost three years now so most of us expect he’s going to die disappointed. Cobb has big ears, a wide mouth and a line of coarse gray hair from the nape of his neck to the crack of his bony ass. He looks like a hungover werewolf caught in mid-transformation, and knows only four jokes. His enthusiasm doesn’t diminish no matter how many times he tells them.

“Sheriff…” he says with a wide grin.

Here comes the first of them.

“A sailor and a penguin walk into a bar…”

“You’ll have to take the back door,” I respond, feeding him his own punch line.

“Shit…I told you that one?”

“Once or twice.”

Two stools down, sits Wintry McCabe, a six foot six giant of a man who could probably blow the whole place clear into the next state if he sneezed. He’s mute though, so you’re shit out of luck if you’re waiting for a warning. Gracie asked him once how he’d lost his voice and that’s how we all found out that even if he could talk, chances are he wouldn’t say very much. Near the top of the Milestone Messenger (our weekly rag), in the tight white space beneath the headline, he wrote, in blue ink and childish handwriting: WENT UP THE RIVER. COST ME MY WORDS. Then he smiled, finished his drink and left. After he’d gone, we speculated what the Messenger’s new and intriguing sub-header might mean. Cobb reckons Wintry lost his tongue in a fishing or boating incident. Florence thinks he did something that affected him spiritually, something that forced him to take a vow of silence as repentance. Cadaver believes Wintry’s done hard time, was “sent up the river” and someone in there relieved him of his tongue. I favor this theory. He looks like a man with secrets, none of them good. But Wintry has never volunteered any clarification on the subject; he hasn’t written a message since, and he seldom opens his mouth long enough or wide enough for us to see if that tongue’s still attached. If he can’t communicate what he wants with gestures, he goes without. That’s the kind of guy he is. But while it remains a mystery why he’s mute, we at least know why he’s called “Wintry”. He got the name on account of how he lives in an old tarpaper shack on the peak of Grable Mountain, the only mountain within 100 miles that has snow on the top of it no matter what the season. As a result, even when there’s suffocating heat down here in the valley, Wintry’s always dressed in thick boots, gloves, and a fur-lined parka, out of which his large black hairless head pokes like a turtle testing the air. Tonight, he’s testing a Scotch, neat. And while may not be able to talk, he sure likes to listen.

He’s listening to Florence Bright now. She’s sitting sideways on her stool, her pretty ankle-length dress covering up a pair of legs every guy in town dreams about. She’s wearing a halter-top to match, the flimsy cotton material hiding another pair of attributes every guy in town dreams about. Flo is the prettiest gal I know. Reminds me a little of Veronica Lake in her heyday, right down to the wavy blonde hair and dark, perfectly plucked eyebrows. Florence has the dubious honor in this town of being both a woman in high demand, and a woman feared, but guys get drunk enough they forget they’re afraid of her. Everyone thinks she murdered her husband, see, and while I don’t know for sure whether she did or not, it’s enough to keep me from sidling up to her in my sad little lovelorn boots. Wasn’t much of a justice system here at the time, and I did what I could investigation-wise but wasn’t a badge inside the city limits or out that could pin the blame on Flo. Nothing added up, and I have to wonder how many male–hell, maybe even female–cops were just fine with that. Wonder how many she sweet-talked into forgetting themselves. After all, we had a woman obviously abused by her husband, then said abuser turns up not only dead but so dead even the coroner coughed up the last bit of grub he’d poked into his mouth when he saw the body. Something wasn’t right. That, or someone didn’t do something they should’ve. More than once I’ve put myself under that particularly hot spotlight but quit before I get too close to things I’d rather not see.

So that’s Flo, and looking at her there, the last thing you’d ever call her is a murderer. Of course that might just mean she’s cold-hearted. But whether or not she knifed Henry Bright to death, doused his body in kerosene and lit the match, I have to admit I get a stab of envy every time she laughs and touches Wintry’s elbow. Long time since I made a woman laugh. Long time since I did anything to a woman but make her weep.

I take a seat at one of three round tables spread out between the bar and the door. The abundance of space and lack of furniture make the place seem desolate and empty no matter how many customers it has, though the seven people here now, myself included, is about as busy as it gets. Except on Saturday nights, of course, when we expect one more. The poor lighting, courtesy of two plain bulbs hooded by cracked green shades, does nothing but spotlight dust and crowd everybody’s table with shadows.

At the table across from me, a young man in a plaid shirt sits sweating and scowling at me through his dark hair. One hand holds his bottle of beer in a white-knuckle grip; the other is under the table. Probably on a gun. That’s Kyle Turner, and he’s wanted me dead since the night I murdered his parents. That was last summer. Every Saturday night since, the kid’s been in here, trying to talk himself into using that Magnum .357 of his to ventilate my skull, but so far he hasn’t been able to draw it out from under the table. So he just sits there glaring, and has Gracie drop the beer down to him at his table so he doesn’t have to get up and reveal the piece he thinks I don’t know about.

Someday he might get the guts to do it, and they’ll probably kick him out of here, but only for disturbing the peace, not because he’ll have disturbed my brain with a few warm rounds of the kind not meant to be served in bars. I admit I get a bit of a kick out of seeing him though, and if he weren’t there I’d surely miss him. His hatred of me makes me feel a little like Wild Bill Hickock.

I know nodding a greeting at him will only aggravate him further, so instead I look the other way, away from the bar, back toward the door and the table shoved right up against the wall to the right of it. Cadaver is sitting there, lost in the shadows, though I smelled him as soon as I came in. I didn’t offer him a greeting because you’re not supposed to unless he offers you one first. It’s a tradition that precedes my patronage here, so I honor it without knowing why.

“Evenin’, Tom,” he says, in that voice of his that sounds like someone dragging a guitar pick over a bass string. He’s got a box where his larynx would be, which I guess is the cost of sixty years of smoking, and his face has sunken so deep you can almost see the contours of his chipped fillings beneath the skin. He’s got a cataract in one eye, the lid is pulled halfway down over the other, and an impressively wide scar bisects his face from forehead to cleft of chin. He’s a sight, and knows it, which is why he favors the dark, where he counts the pennies from his pocket and places them in rows, over and over and over again, until the sound of those coins meeting each other starts to feel like a measurement of time.

An ugly man, for sure, but damn he smells so good he makes me ashamed of my cheap cologne. Makes me wish I’d remembered to buy a nice bottle of Calvin Klein or some such fragrance. Something expensive. You can tell a lot by the way someone smells. Cadaver uses his to hide the smell of death.

“Evening,” I tell him back, and feel more than see his twisted smile.

“Wonder who’s drivin’ tonight,” he says, each word separated by a crackling swallow. It’s wrong of me to say it, but I wish he wouldn’t talk. Man without a human voice is better staying quiet, and I know that grinding electro-speak gives everyone else the creeps too.

“Wish I knew,” I say, and turn to the bar. “Gracie?”

“Comin’ up.” She tosses on the bar the soiled rag she’s been using to wipe the counter. “Hot or cold?” This is her way of asking if I want beer or whiskey. A strand of her auburn hair falls across her eyes as she waits for my reply, and she whips it back with such irritation, I’m suddenly glad she doesn’t have a kid to use as a piñata for her misery.

“Both,” I answer, because it’s that kind of night.

***

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