IT GOT DARK EARLY NOW. Even though I still mostly worked the first shift, it was as black as nighttime when I got off. There were no lights out back by the dumpster behind the Cave where I parked my car.
“Wait a minute and I’ll walk you out there,” Rafi said when he came to relieve me. He was pulling half a dozen Buds on tap for a sullen-looking group of men who had been shooting pool all afternoon.
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “I’m only going twenty feet to my car.”
The alley was lovely in the dark. The door of the Cave glowed with yellow light whenever anyone opened it to go in or out, and the music from the jukebox spilled out into the quiet. The air smelled like the chilies that were roasting in the kitchen at Tia’s. The noise of the cars going by on Thornapple Street was muffled so it sounded like ocean waves against a beach.
A shadow moved next to the dumpster, and I saw that Stinky was standing by my car, just looking at it.
“Oh,” I said. “You startled me. What are you doing just standing out here by yourself?”
He didn’t answer for a minute, but turned his eyes slowly from my car to me.
“Where’s your boyfriend, Danny?” he finally said, and I could tell from the sound of his voice that, even though he hadn’t been in the Cave at all that afternoon, he was already drunk. It occurred to me that he probably frequented other bars as well.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I imagine he’s around somewhere.”
“He’s not around right now.”
“I’m sure he’s around somewhere,” I said again.
“He leaves you alone a lot,” Stinky said, coming closer to me.
“Well, we live together now,” I said. “We don’t need to spend every minute with each other.”
I headed toward my car, but Stinky stepped between me and it. He was close enough now that I could smell the odor of stale beer on him.
“You females all say you want to be independent,” he slurred, “and that you want your space. But what you really want is a man with you all the time, giving you attention. Giving you what he’s got.”
“Danny gives me plenty of attention.”
Stinky reached out and put his hand on my arm. “He’s not giving you attention right now.”
I started to pull away, and his grip tightened. I felt a flutter of panic.
“Let go of me,” I said in my most no-nonsense voice. I didn’t want him to know I was scared; I thought that would make it worse.
Instead of letting go, he grabbed my other arm and squeezed harder. I felt his fingernails bite into my flesh, breaking the skin.
“Why don’t you scream?” he whispered. “Maybe because you don’t really want me to let go?”
I tried to think of something to say that would make him release me, but I felt frozen, not able to move or to speak or to think.
“I bet you’d look really pretty down on your knees,” he said.
“Let go,” I said again, and tried to yank my arm free, but he held on and pushed me backward against the car.
“You’d like it,” he said. “I’d make you say that you like it.”
His face was so close to mine now that I could smell the stench of his breath. I brought my knee up with a quick jerk like Uncle Joe had taught me, but he blocked it with his leg and then laughed.
“Oh, yes,” he hissed. “I’d make you say you like it.”
I was frozen with panic. This was nothing like the high-school boys back home, who were just hoping to get what they could get. Stinky, I knew, wanted to hurt me.
“Whatcha doin’, Stinky?” It was Jake, materializing next to us in the dark from out of the Cave’s door.
“Just having a little private convocation here,” Stinky said, dropping my arms.
“Oh, yeah? Whatcha talking about?” Jake stepped closer to Stinky so that Stinky had to take a step back.
“Don’t you know what private means?” Stinky sneered.
“I know I’ll kick your ass in about two minutes,” Jake said. His voice was very quiet.
Stinky didn’t say anything for a minute, but then dropped his eyes from Jake’s face.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Stinky said to me, and ambled slowly down the steps into the back door of the Cave.
I unlocked my car.
“God, he’s a creep,” I said to Jake, trying to sound calm, but my voice was shaky. “Thanks for being all knight-in-shining-armor for me.”
Jake didn’t smile. He lit two cigarettes and gave me one. I was glad he couldn’t see my face in the dark.
“Don’t come out here by yourself in the dark,” he said.
“It’s okay,” I said, trying to steady my voice. “I could have just yelled, and somebody would have heard me.”
“I know,” he said. “I know that. But you don’t need to be out here by yourself when it gets dark so early. I don’t want to have to be bothered hanging around beating up drunks for you.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. I tried to laugh, but it came out as a cough.
“Just promise.”
“I promise.”
He watched me get into my car and fumble with the keys before I could get it started. He stayed in the parking lot looking after me, and I could see his silhouette against the light from the back door until I turned out on to the street. I drove a block and then pulled over and vomited into the grass by the side of the road.
Danny wasn’t home when I got there. I took a long hot shower, but I could still smell Stinky.
The sixth labor of Hercules was to destroy the Stymphalian birds.
The birds were the creatures of Ares, the god of war. They had terrible razor-sharp metal claws and metal beaks and metal wings, from which they shot out their metal feathers like arrows to kill men. The bloodthirsty birds then feasted on the flesh of the dead. Flocks of them had settled on Lake Stymphalos in Arcadia, so that even in those idyllic valleys of imagination, the servants of war were lurking.
In the end, Hercules did not destroy the Stymphalian birds, but managed only to shoot some of them and drive the rest away by frightening them with the noise of a great brass rattle given to him by Athena. Like Ares himself, the birds of war—no matter how savage—were cowards at heart. They fled Arcadia and settled on the island of Ares. They were there when Jason and the Argonauts had to stop on the island during their quest for the Golden Fleece. Again the ravenous birds shot their razor feathers at the heroes, screaming down at them from the sky. But again the heroes were able to fend off the birds by frightening them with the noisy clashing of spears on their shields. The birds scattered and fled. But they were never destroyed.
The Greeks knew that the birds of war, cruel and cowardly, still lived, waiting for their chance to feast on the flesh of the dead. They were never very far, even in Arcadia.
I developed a callus on the end of my right index finger from opening beer cans and another one down the side of the same finger from opening twist-open beer bottles. In the downtown world of bars and night cafés, these twin calluses were marks of honor.
Now sometimes on Friday or Saturday nights, I would work along with Vera when things were busy. The space behind the bar was small—only three or four feet deep—and when two bartenders were working together, they had to coordinate their movements and be always aware of one another to keep from constantly colliding. And it was inevitable that someone sitting at the far back end of the bar would be drinking beers stored in the coolers under the far front end, and vice versa. Even with my calluses of honor, I was still a novice at double-bartending and could be clumsy sometimes working around another person.
But Vera was a pro and could dance down the whole length of the bar opening beers, making change, pulling drafts, ringing up tabs, and keeping disparate conversations going with different people all along the way, with only the slightest touch on my shoulder as she slipped past behind me. When she wasn’t behind the bar, Vera mostly seemed tough, but when she was working, you could see how elegant she was, how graceful. When she and Rafi worked together, it was like watching a ballet. There were nights when between the two of them they served a thousand beers.
So when I worked with Vera, I relied on her skill to keep us both from ending up black and blue. The hubbub could be intense, especially if the band was any good and the bar was crowded. And yet even in the midst of all the commotion, one word—no matter how softly spoken—could catch my ear like a gunshot. A girl sitting near the tip jar said, “Danny.”
I heard her say it to her friends. Vera heard it, too. I could tell by the way she missed a step in her flight from the Rolling Rocks to the PBR and by the way she didn’t make eye contact with me.
“Another round?” Vera asked the girl and her friends, even though they still had half-full bottles. She did that twice more so I wouldn’t have to serve them and so that maybe they would leave sooner, before Danny showed up. After a while, they were gone.
Later, after we closed and I was restocking the coolers and Pancho was sitting in the corner shuffling the cards for rummy, Vera looked up from where she was filling out the deposit slip for the bank bag and said to me, “It’s a common-enough name.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. But I thought to myself that Vera was right.
There are many skills involved in being a good bartender, and Vera had them all. She had a way of making me feel safe just by being near her. It seemed like nothing bad could happen while she was there, watching over us all with eyes that had seen everything already. My worries were held at bay by Vera’s calmness. Even the menace of Stinky faded into the background when I was working with her. I hadn’t seen Stinky since Jake ran him off, and his absence seemed sinister, like he might be lying in wait somewhere just out of sight.
But Vera, solid and comforting, made me feel braver.
“Stinky sure hasn’t been around lately,” I said to her later.
“And he won’t be,” she said. “I’ve permanently banned him.”
“How come?” I asked, wondering if Jake had said anything.
“He told me he decided he was going to tip only every other round,” Vera said. “And I told him I had decided that he could go to hell.”
The Trojan War raged for nine years, and the stories of it are drenched in death. In The Illiad, Homer tells us that the earth streamed with blood and the funeral pyres for the fallen warriors burned continuously.
Our war was nothing like that war. Our war seemed to happen mostly inside the TV and mostly at night.
We watched the reporter on our screen, dashing in a snappy, many-pocketed vest as lights like fireworks rose in the night sky behind him. These were the Scud missiles being launched. We never saw them land—just flashes of light in the featureless dark. We never saw anyone dead. The war we saw inside our televisions every night was clean and rather quiet. It stayed inside that box.
In January, Tom got inside the box on account of an antiwar city ordinance that he was promoting to make the town a safe haven for military deserters. We watched Tom being interviewed on the ten o’clock news, talking about opposing the war. It was clear from the beginning that the television interviewer thought Tom was nuts, a traitor, a fool.
“We have no right to kill people just because they have oil and we want it,” Tom said.
“What about the argument that we’re bringing civilization to a barbarous people?” the TV interviewer asked. “The argument that we’re bringing them peace?”
“In the nose cone of a missile?”
“Many in the United States government assure us that this will bring lasting peace to the Middle East,” the interviewer said. “This will be the war to end all wars there.”
“What Middle Eastern war has ever done that?” Tom asked. “The one in 1919? The one in 1920? In 1953? In 1963? The Crusades?”
The interviewer remained impassive. “Perhaps it isn’t particularly useful to dwell on the past,” he said. “Nineteen sixty-three is awfully ancient history. The president assures us that this war will usher in a new age of peace and prosperity for the region.”
“We will bomb the world into peace?” Tom asked.
“Can you explain for our viewers why you are opposed to liberation and democracy in the Middle East?” the interviewer asked.
Over the next few days, the local newspaper featured a series of letters to the editor that fairly frothed in vitriolic indignation at Tom’s remarks. Most of them suggested he be imprisoned for treason or shipped back to Russia where he came from, which made Tom laugh because he was, in fact, from Kansas.
One Friday, there was a protest outside his store—a dozen or so people holding signs and American flags and singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” in the cold sunshine. It was organized by one of the local churches. My ex-neighbor Orla was in the little crowd of protestors, holding one end of a banner that said, “Psalm 109: 9–13.” Her husband, Lem, was one of three people kneeling on the sidewalk, eyes closed and hands clasped in fervent prayer. They had planted themselves directly in front of the Che poster—“Better to die standing than to live on your knees.” We watched them out the front windows of Tia’s.
“What’s Tom doing?” Charlie Blue asked, coming out of the kitchen and wiping his hands on a dishtowel.
“He brought them coffee awhile ago,” Jake said, “but they wouldn’t even talk to him. Then he had to leave to take Rosalita to a checkup. I’m watching the store for him.”
We all looked at him.
“What?” Jake said. “I can see the store from here. Nobody’s going in there now anyway.”
“What does ‘Psalm 109: 9–13’ mean?” Rafi asked.
Pancho closed his eyes and in a deep, solemn voice recited, “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow. Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg; let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places. Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; and let the strangers spoil his labor. Let there be none to extend mercy unto him, neither let there be any to favor his fatherless children. Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name be blotted out.”
“Jesus!” Rafi said, sounding surprised—maybe because people were actually praying for Tom’s death out in front of his store or maybe because Pancho could apparently quote Bible verses extensively, a talent formerly kept hidden.
“I looked it up earlier,” Pancho said.
“Jesus,” Rafi said again.
We watched them until dinnertime, when they packed up and went away.
The war started to come home to me now in a way that it hadn’t back when Hank had taken to wearing his army jacket in the summer heat. Now the low-scudding clouds of winter seemed ominous, and the feeble, winter-gray daylight had a waiting quality to it, like it was just barely holding at bay the flocks of Stymphalian birds that would be let loose on us as soon as the sun set. I thought I could feel them waiting for us behind the sky. I thought of Pancho lying on the dock staring up at the sky.
Sometimes it was frightening to be in the bookstore. Tom had become a lightning rod. Every day, irate people drove by and yelled things out of their car windows or came into the store itself, angry or sullen or righteous. He met them with an equanimity that often just enraged them more. He said he relished the opportunity for conversation. But at the end of the day, he sometimes came into the Cave for a beer, and his eyes looked very, very tired. Some of the professors stopped sending their students to the Hammer and Sickle for their textbooks. Tom spent so much money that month repairing broken windows in the store that he had to have a special meeting with his loan officer at the bank to get the money to pay the glass company. I began to think he was awfully brave.
Stinky drove by and shouted just about every day, but as far as I know he never had the nerve to go in and speak to Tom face to face. He must have done his drinking at one of his other regular bars because he never tried to come back into the Cave. Hank never mentioned Stinky’s name and was always carefully quiet if anyone else did. He knew that Vera was keeping a suspicious eye on him, and he made sure to tip well and to keep his mouth shut.
Socrates says that the entrance to the cave is a long way up from the place where the prisoners are kept. The tunnel is dark and gets darker and colder the farther the freed prisoner travels from the fire. For a long time, he only gropes his way through. The freed prisoner keeps going forward, though, feeling his way in the darkness. Socrates doesn’t tell us why. It must be a lonely time and a frightening one for the prisoner. But perhaps he understands that there is no other way out.
I started to feel it was part of my job to protect Tom, although I wasn’t sure how to go about doing that, other than sitting around on the couch in the bookstore and waiting for something to happen. I wasn’t the only one, it seemed, who felt this way, and one or two of us were almost always hanging around the store. Although we didn’t come right out and say it to each other, our paranoia was getting to us, and conversations that seemed casual weren’t casual at all.
“I thought I’d just go over to Tom’s for a while,” Charlie Blue would say during the lull between lunch and happy hour. And we would watch out the plate-glass window of Tia’s until he came back. And then, not too much later, Jake would get up and stretch and not say anything to anybody but would amble across the street and disappear inside the bookstore door. Or just about at Tom’s regular closing time, Rafi and Vera would exchange a look and Rafi would head out the back door and reappear awhile later.
“Everything okay?” Vera would nonchalantly ask, and Rafi would nod and she would try to look like she hadn’t been worried.
I was sitting on the front steps of the bookstore one morning at opening time when Tom drove up in his beat-up old car. He smiled with his kind, tired eyes when he saw me.
“It’s sweet,” he said, “and I appreciate it.” His voice was soft, and he reached out a hand to help me up. “But you-all don’t have to watch over me, you know.”
“I know,” I said. But I went into the bookstore after him anyway and stayed there all morning.
To cheer us all up, Rafi started making a special after-work drink at the Cave that involved running a pint of rum through the coffee maker to heat it up and then mixing in sugar and a squirt of lemon juice from a lemon-shaped plastic bottle he kept in a corner of the cooler. The warm steam from the rum would hit all the soft tissues in your mouth and nose and make them tingle before you even took a drink, and the lemon juice cut the coffee-maker grease almost completely. After we locked the doors at night, we would whip up a batch and sit together at the corner table and close our eyes and sip slowly and sigh.
I sat next to Danny, leaning into him, not even playing cards but just watching the game and shooting the breeze. We talked about various things: the worst beer we ever drank and the best place to drink it, the time Pancho accidentally peed on an electric fence, possible names for Tom’s baby, Greek mythology, what we would like to eat right now if only someone would bring it to us.
“If one of y’all would go get it for me, I wouldn’t mind a nice dish of Blossom’s homemade peach ice cream right now,” Vera said.
“Brr, too cold for that,” Danny said. “I want something warm—a nice big plate of barbecue.”
“No barbecue places are open at this time of night,” Pancho said. “Only Clyde’s.”
“Charlie Blue might still be over at Tia’s, and we could ask him to bring us some burritos,” I said.
“No, he left early,” Rafi said. “He went to our house to practice some with Billy Joe.”
“Only Clyde’s,” Pancho said again.
“I have nothing against chicken and biscuits,” I said. “That just might hit the spot.”
“It’ll do,” Danny said, “as long as I’m not the one who has to go out into the cold to get it.”
“Come on, Pancho,” Rafi said. “I’ll go with you to help carry it back.”
Vera and Rosalita both added their orders.
“What about you, Tom?” Rafi asked. “Want anything?”
Tom was sitting next to Rosalita, one arm around her, leaning back against the wall, his eyes looking drowsy.
“Nothing for me,” he said sleepily. “I’ve already got everything I want.”
In the tunnel leading out of the cave, the freed prisoner walks for a long time in absolute darkness.
In early February, on a bitterly cold morning, our phone rang just at dawn. Danny crawled out from under the blankets and went to the kitchen to answer it. When finally he came back to the bedroom, his face was gray and his voice was shaking.
“That was Rosalita calling from the hospital,” he said. “Somebody shot Tom last night. He’s dead.”