reb/10-30-13
Happy
Hour
Keith
spit on the sidewalk and wiped his mouth.
He didn’t see her damn Toyota in the lot, but the bitch had gotten
tricky these days. He pulled open the
glass door, too hard, letting it bang, noisy, and thought about how he’d be framed
in the daylight coming into the bar. Not
to be cautious. Him coming in would
scare the shit out of any guy cheatin’ with Arlene.
The
bar was empty, except for Darren back by the cash register, and some piece of
shit sitting at the bar, leaning over a legal pad, a half-ass double pyramid of
empty Busch Light cans beside him. Keith
walked up to the bar, making sure his boots clacked loud and hard, leaned over
so he looked way more than 6-3. “Darren,
darlin’, where’s that whore of a girlfriend of mine?”
The
piece of shit tapped the Touchtones on his phone and the juke box got
louder. “Every time that I look in the
mirror / All these lines on my face getting clearer / The past…”
Darren
stepped up. “You’re early today,
Keith. Not sure I’ve ever seen you here
before dark. Regular? Shot of Jack and a Bud bottle?”
Keith
leaned in a little too close. “Now I
don’t think I asked for a drink, did I?”
The
guy tapped his music a little louder still.
“Half my life's in books' written pages / Live and learn from fools and
from sages / You know it's true / All the things you do, come back to you…”
Keith
looked over. “And what is this shit,
going on in my favorite bar?” He pointed
at the legal pad, scrawled with notes and diagrams. He reached over to take the pad, but the guy
put his hand down across it, and it didn’t move at Keith’s tug.
“Just
trying to figure out the world,” the guy said.
He finished off his can of beer, and in one fast motion reached into a
shallow bowl set on the bar, grabbed something and bit hard. There was a strange grinding noise in his
mouth. He dropped the headless body on
the floor.
Startled,
Keith pulled back his hand and glanced at the bowl. It was pulsing with live crawdads. Darren popped another beer and set it in
front of the guy. “What the fuck?” said
Keith. “Did you just eat that thing?”
The
guy had picked up his pen to continue writing.
“Bit off its head. Just a thing I
do.”
“Well,
it’s damn gross. And I don’t want to see
shit like that in my bar.”
Darren
muttered, “Keith, let me get you that shot.
On the house…”
Keith
ignored him. “I said, I don’t like it.”
The guy turned to
Keith. “I need to do that after every
beer.”
“Eat a damn crawdad?”
“No, doesn’t have to be
a crawdad. I just need to kill something. I guess I should just avoid beer, but I like
beer, probably too much, could even be a character flaw, but as long as I keep
something handy to kill, everything is fine.
Something socially appropriate, that is.” He sipped his new beer.
Keith felt his neck and
face get red. “I don’t like being played
with, not by some…”
Darren set a shot of
whiskey in front of him.
The guy sighed.
“Werewolf. I’m a werewolf.”
“The fuck you say…”
“Yeah. Not sure why, but that exposure to the full
moon, as derived from popular folklore, seems not operative in my particular
situation. Oh, I can change when the
right mood hits me, but really, it’s beer.
About every 12-16 ounces of beer, I have to kill something, or my
metabolism pushes me right into the change.”
Keith snorted. “You mean if you don’t crunch up some little
critter, or swaller a damn goldfish, you’d go all Lon Chaney, or Werewolf of
London, all that crap?”
“I appreciated the
colorful classic movie reference. And
your paraphrase of my explanation is essentially accurate.”
“So you’d like have
Wolverine claws, all shiny and sharp and shit, and big ol’ wolf teeth, and go
for my throat?” He picked up the whiskey
and downed it smooth.
The guy was humming
along to the words of the song, “Sing with me, sing for the year / Sing for the
laughter and sing for the tear / Sing with me, if it's just for today / Maybe
tomorrow…” He glanced up at Keith. “No, not throat. For you, I think I’d pass on the throat and
just slice open your belly, let your guts drip to the floor, and howl a couple
times while you crawl toward the door.”
Keith picked up the
bowl of crawdads and tossed them out into the room. “That’s what I think about this whole pile of
bull crap.”
“Ah, shit, no, no,”
said Darren. “They’ll still be alive. I’ll go get them. Just keep your seat.”
The guy smiled at
Darren. “You still got that coat with
you? The one you wear in the walk-in
cooler? The cooler that locks from the
inside?” Darren nodded and whimpered. “Good to hear it.” He finished his beer in one long swallow.
Keith half-faced
Darren, that trick he knew to distract before he threw a punch. “Don’t know what you need a damn coat for,
day like this, but maybe one more shot…” he said, and twisted to nail the guy
in his jaw. He blinked in surprise when
his fist didn’t connect, but just stopped in the guy’s open palm, a few inches
from his chest. He stared at the guy’s
face, at the eyes that seemed to flash.
He stumbled backward over a barstool, and almost went down. The guy was making some funny noises deep
down in his throat. Keith took two steps
back and looked at the door.
“Oh my god, oh my god,”
Darren was yelling, as he stepped from the bar toward the swinging kitchen
door.
The guy took a deep,
deep breath, then his hand moved faster than Keith could follow. It wound up a clenched fist beside his own
face. They all heard a loud crunch. The guy opened his hand. “Horsefly,” he said. “Darren, I’ll be needing another beer.”
Keith backed to the
outside door. He paused and
laughed. “You all are fucked up.” He laughed again, his voice cracking.
© 2013, Robert E. Boon
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