2

As if I’ve asked her to wash my damn car, Gracie sighs and sets about getting my drinks.

I drop my gaze to the mirror behind the bar and see Wintry raise a hand. His reflection waggles its fingers, keeps waggling them like a spider descending a strand of silk, until the hand is out of sight, then he nods twice and goes back to his drink.

“I heard,” I say to his broad expanse of back. “We could do with it.” I glance over at the kid, see his puzzled expression surface through the anger before he catches me looking and quickly goes back to scowling. His arm tenses, and I wonder briefly if I’m going to feel a bullet rip through my crotch, or my knee. The way that gun is angled makes me wish he’d just take the damn thing out and go for a headshot. But I guess he wants to make me suffer as much as possible.

“Wintry says rain’s coming,” I explain, careful to make it seem like a general announcement so the kid doesn’t decide I’m trying to make a fool out of him by implying he didn’t get it.

“Started already,” Cadaver drones from the shadows.

“Weatherman says it’s goin’ to be a storm,” Cobb intones, his buttocks wriggling as a shudder passes through him. “Hope I can bed down in here if it does.” This last is directed at Gracie as she rounds the bar, a bottle of Bud in one hand, a bottle of whiskey in the other.

“This ain’t a boardin’ house, Cobb,” she says over her shoulder, puffing air up to get the errant lock of hair out of her eyes. I’m struck by the sudden urge to brush it out of her face for her, but she’d likely jerk away and tell me to mind myself, and she’d be right of course. Long ago I learned that men and women’s ideas of polite isn’t always the same, and never will be as long as we guys feel compelled to consult our dicks every time a woman walks into the room. “But there are plenty of empty places on Winter Street. I’m sure Horace and Maggie’d show you someplace to lay your bones. Hell, if you dog Kirk Vess’s heels, I bet he’ll lead you to shelter.”

Vess is our town lunatic, a card Gracie has played in the past just to get on Cobb’s nerves.

“I’m sure.” Cobb’s repulsion at the idea is clear, but everyone here knows he’s fighting a losing battle if he thinks he’ll get Gracie to cave. “I can pay you though.”

Gracie puts down my drinks, brushes dust off my table and looks into my eyes for the tiniest of seconds, enough to let me know that the superhuman precognitive sense unique to women has alerted her to what I’d just a moment ago been considering. And the message is: Lucky you didn’t.

She heads back to the bar, a lithe woman dressed in drab clothes designed to make her look less attractive. I’ll never understand that, but then again, the day men understand women is the day we may as well go sit on our plots and wait to be planted.

Or maybe I’m just not that bright at the back of it all.

“You can pay me by puttin’ some clothes on,” she tells Cobb. “Maybe if you were covered up, you wouldn’t need to fret about the rain.”

“I’ll put you up,” Cadaver offers in his robot voice, and Cobb turns slowly around, his bare ass making squeaking sounds against the top of the stool. I wonder how much Pine-Sol Gracie uses in any given month on that chair alone. It’s the only one she allows him use. Just that chair, or his squeaky ass goes on the floor.

There’s a look of consternation on Cobb’s heavily bearded face when he turns fully around, his small blue eyes squinting into the shadows, as if seeing Cadaver will lessen his distaste at the idea of spending the night with the man. His chest is a mass of silvery curls, thickest along his sternum where it leads down over a swollen belly to a frenzied explosion of pubic hair, from which a small stubby penis pokes out. We’ve been seeing Cobb and his tackle for three years now. We should be used to it, and I guess for the most part we are, but every time his dick eyeballs me, I want to ask him if chestnut leaves are considered clothing by whatever governing body inflicted his nakedness on us in the first place. But I keep my mouth shut and avert my eyes, to the kid, who’s doing a good job of looking like he may rupture something at any minute, and finally focus on my drink.

There’s a thumbprint on the shot glass too large to be mine.

“That’s mighty decent of you,” Cobb says eventually.

“Don’t mention it.”

Over Cadaver’s pennies, I can almost hear the hamster wheel spinning in the nudist’s head. Then he says, “But you know what…? I’ll just call my wife. She won’t mind comin’ to get me. Not at this hour. Not at night.” He claps his hands as if he’s just stumbled upon the cure for world hunger. “Hell, she’ll have heard there’s goin’ to be a storm, so she’ll have to come get me, right? No woman would make her man walk in this kinda weather.” He’s looking for support now, and not for the first time I envy Wintry’s muteness, because everyone here knows that getting Mrs. Cobb to come get her husband isn’t going to be as easy as he seems to think. The day he abandoned clothes was the last time anyone saw Eleanor Cobb in town. Naturally, we worried, but a few weeks after her husband’s ‘unveiling’ I checked on her. She’s fine, just laid up with a terminal case of mortification that I don’t see ending until Cobb starts wearing shorts, or that chestnut leaf. Why she stays with him at all is another one of those mysteries.

“You could always start walkin’ now before the worst of it hits,” Flo chimes in. Her voice is husky, perfectly befitting a crime noir femme fatale. It makes my hair stand on end in a good way. “No one ever drowned in the rain.”

Cobb ignores her. He’s got a drink before him and intends to finish it. He squeaks back around to face the bar. “Can I use the phone?” he asks Gracie, and this at least she’s willing to allow, even though it’s a payphone and no one should need permission. But this is Gracie’s place, and things run differently here. Stone-faced, she scoops one of the nudist’s dollars off the bar, feeds it into the till, and drops four quarters into his outstretched palm. With a grin of gratitude, Cobb hops off his stool and heads out to the small hallway that leads to the payphone, and the restrooms beyond.

No one says anything.

There is silence except for the clink of Cadaver’s pennies.

A few moments later, Cobb starts swearing into the phone.

No one is surprised.

I raise my glass with a muttered: “To Blue Moon,” in honor of the man who can’t be here, and take the first sip of whiskey. It cauterizes my throat. I hiss air through my teeth. Flo goes back to talking to Wintry, leans in a little closer, one leg crossed over the other, one shoe awful close to brushing against the big black man’s ankle, and there’s that envy again. But I remind myself that she’s probably only cozying up to him because he’s mute, and therefore unlikely to ever ask her about her past. For the second time in a handful of minutes, I’m covetous of Wintry’s condition.

Cobb slams down the phone, curses and stalks back to the bar, his flaccid tool whacking against his thigh. I close my eyes, pray my gorge can handle another night of the old man’s exhibitionism and concentrate on refilling my glass.

“She weren’t there,” he mutters before anyone has a chance to ask, and slaps a hand on the counter. “Fill me up, Gracie,” he says. “And make it same as Tom’s. It’ll keep me warm on the walk home.”

I almost expect Cadaver to remind Cobb of his offer, but Cadaver is ill, not dumb. He says nothing, just keeps on counting those pennies.

“You make it sound like you can just walk outta here as you please,” Gracie says scornfully. “You take a blow to the head, or is all the drink just makin’ you dumber?”

“He ain’t the boss of me,” Cobb says, scowling like a sulky teen. There’s no passion in his voice, no truth to his words. Everyone here knows that, just like we know a little brave talk never hurts, as long as you only do it among friends.

“You reckon he’ll show up tonight, Tom?” Flo asks, twirling a lock of her hair around a fingernail the color of blood.

“I reckon so.”

She sighs, and turns her back on me. Flo wants hope, wants me to tell her that maybe tonight will be special, that maybe for the first Saturday night in years, Reverend Hill isn’t going to come strolling in that door at eleven o’ clock, but I can’t. I realized a long time ago that I’m a poor liar, and despite the gold badge on my shirt, no one should look to me for hope, or anything else.

From the corner comes a sound like a dead branch snapping. It’s Cadaver clucking his tongue. Seems a coin slipped off the top of one of his miniature copper towers.

Gracie goes back to pretending she’s cleaning the bar.

Cobb grumbles over his beer.

Occasionally I catch Wintry looking at my reflection in the mirror. What I see in his dark eyes might be concern, even pity, but if I was him, I wouldn’t be bothering with the mirror, or me, not when Flo’s breathing in his ear. Besides, I’m not looking for sympathy, only solutions, and I don’t reckon there’s any to be had here tonight or any other.

The heat from the kid’s glare is reliable as any fire on a winter’s night.

These are my friends.

***

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