It was mid-April and streams cut beneath soiled banks of snow and ran along street-side curbs into storm drains. Isaac stepped carefully to keep the mud from his polished boots. When he arrived it was still early and the bar was almost empty. An acoustic guitar, a bass guitar and a lap-steel plugged into an amplifier rested on stage in front of a drum set. Isaac recognized the front man and lap-steel player seated on stools at the bar, their backs turned to the door. The bartender nodded to Isaac and Isaac nodded and removed his hat. He took off his sheepskin coat and situated himself against a wall without windows so as best to observe the stage and the other side of the room, where most of the patrons would sit. He sat down at a high, sturdy wooden table, choosing a place with a glass ashtray though he had not smoked a cigarette in almost twenty years. He sat for a moment and observed the quiet room. An older woman he recognized and a haggard-looking man he did not were playing slot machines at the back. There was worn green carpet beneath his boots and a scuff ed hardwood surface serving as a dance floor. The stage was low, no more than a foot off the floor, and crowded with instruments and amplifiers. On the far side of the room there were small square-paned windows between wine-coloured curtains. A grey-haired waitress greeted Isaac by name and brought him a half-pint glass and a pitcher of pale draft. When she off ered him a menu he smiled and declined. He filled his glass and wondered whether the girl would come that afternoon.
It would be two years that July since he first saw her. Though he did not know precisely he put her between the ages of twenty and twenty-five. Once or twice a month she would come and sit on the opposite side of the room with other men and women of her approximate age. Isaac found it curious that the young women outnumbered the young men. He could not fathom that these men would let the women who sat at their table pay for their own drinks. If he could not help but think of these young women as girls, surely the men in their company were no more than boys. He knew that the man he was several decades ago would have felt diff erently about the girl than he felt now. He could approximate the time, some twenty years ago, when the change in him had occurred. It happened around the same time that women stopped thinking of him as a handsome or desirable man. He watched now as the front man and the lap-steel player took the stage and tuned their instruments and spoke of key signatures and song titles. Eventually they were joined by the others and performed Hank Williams’s rendition of “Lovesick Blues,” the tune with which they always began.
This was the time Isaac most enjoyed, the afternoon in its potential and him left to contemplate what may transpire. He knew some other old-time regulars would eventually approach him and join his table, another old man, or an aging couple with which he was acquainted. They would laugh at the front man’s swagger and his banter and applaud solos and if someone were to sit in for a number, this would be occasion for further applause. They might share a pitcher, speak of the weather or the milestones of grandchildren and if wallet-sized photographs were produced, Isaac would examine them for evidence of bloodline and personality. Together they would look with approval at the young couples on the dance floor, or eye the older ones and wink. To exercise his independence Isaac would rise on occasion and make his way to the slots, methodically inserting quarters until he reached his three dollar limit. He would return then to the table with a sense of self-control he wished he might have been able to exercise with as little eff ort in other aff airs.
Gradually the bar began to fill. Isaac looked back toward the entrance as a woman his age entered, followed by a man who had held the door for her. The two were dressed in western shirts with matching embroidery. When they saw Isaac they waved to him but did not approach. They sat down behind him, at the back of the room, and the man went off to the bar and when the woman saw Isaac looking in her direction she winked at him.
“You sly old devil,” said a familiar voice and Isaac turned and Lloyd grinned at him. Lloyd’s greying beard was newly trimmed. He wore a navy-issue sweater with a collared shirt underneath and a brand new ball cap perched on the crown of his head. Isaac greeted his old acquaintance and shook his outstretched, calloused hand and Lloyd set the half-pint in his other hand on the table and sat down next to Isaac without being asked. Isaac turned to face the stage and it was then he saw that the girl had arrived and was sitting in a crowd of young people on the other side of the room.
On a crowded afternoon the previous fall, when the young people were more numerous, someone had introduced him to the girl and her party. Isaac had spoken to her twice. She had remembered his name from the first of these occasions and had smiled at him, warmly, on the second. By all signs she was unmarried, which was not uncommon, but which troubled him nevertheless. He did not know whether this caused the same concern in her as it did in him. He knew only that the girl wore horn-rimmed glasses, spoke softly, held her hands in her lap when she sat, curtsied to her partner as a song ended, never dancing with the same partner twice in a row. Though she could waltz, she favoured the two-step and the jive, shied from that formless dance in which partners press closely together, sway to ballads and whisper in one another’s ear. When she danced with a young man who was not her equal on the floor, Isaac had seen her discreetly take the lead. When the girl would be asked to dance by another man, no matter Isaac’s knowledge of him or his opinion as to the man’s moral character, Isaac would feel a strangely bitter sense of relief, of things being as they should.
When she danced and the burden of her would lift from Isaac’s thoughts, or at other times, his mind at ease, he would think then of his older brother. It was not that he still mourned Roland or missed him particularly, but strangely his brother had come to inhabit his thoughts in a way he never had while living. Isaac attributed this to the sentimentality of old age. Roland, dead some nine years now, had never learned to speak. After their mother passed on he had spent the last two decades of his life in a home in a neighbouring town. In the early years Isaac had visited. He would sit at the table where Roland was served his meals and watch his brother take infrequent sips from an endless cup of decaf. Roland would smile mysteriously at these times, glancing at him with something Isaac chose to interpret as the acknowledgment of a common origin. As the years passed these glances grew less meaningful and when recognition gave way entirely to indiff erence, Isaac stopped visiting. He felt relief at this, for after nine years he could no longer tolerate the way in which his brother was addressed by the staff of the home, well-intentioned caregivers who spoke to a man twice their age as if he were a child. Though he had never wiped himself, nor bathed of his own volition, nor so much as danced with a woman, Isaac knew that Roland was not a child in his old age if he had ever been one. He knew Roland would have lived a much diff erent life had he been given the opportunity, and Isaac respected him for who he might have been.
He had long come to accept that his brother could not be held accountable as others were held accountable. This acceptance was bound up inextricably with an image of the kitchen table overturned, warm red smeared on the fainter red and white of his mother’s gingham apron. He could not now ascertain if this had been blood or the remains of an upset rhubarb pie, for each had precedent and each was equally calamitous in Isaac’s childhood recollection. As a grown man he could not accept that Roland was deemed a child and spoken to as such. He knew his brother had endured fifty-some odd post-pubescent years of masculine urges and scoldings and the erratic nocturnal manifestations of frustrated desire. Isaac at least had work—long stretches of highway with predetermined destinations, physical and mental exhaustion, the repetition of tiresome but nevertheless necessary and even useful tasks. This among other pastimes, even on occasion the companionship of women, and always a few friends, acquaintances, who if they did not understand the nature of his reticence, spoke to him at least in the terms of their common adulthood, of time spent working, longing and sometimes being satisfied.
For eleven years before Roland’s passing, all that remained of the place in Isaac’s life once occupied by his brother was a birthday card, signed with his brother’s name by the staff of the home, accompanied by a gift certificate for a chain of coffee shops Isaac had not patronized since he quit smoking. These tokens, and memories of a childhood shared with his brother, would come upon him at times when he was otherwise at ease. He had long forgotten the date of his brother’s birth and could not bring himself to ask. Out of a steadfast sense of obligation that ended only with Roland’s death, he would reciprocate his birthday card with a card for his brother at Christmas. His brother had always taken some pleasure in music. And the card would, on better years, be accompanied by a recording of something he hoped that Roland might enjoy.
Isaac himself sought out music on AM radios and in bars. He would tap his foot inaudibly, could mouth the words to hundreds of songs so long as they played, could hum something resembling the tunes to as many though he had never owned a record. If he heard a melody he had not heard in years, he would feel the pleasure of recognition, as if chancing upon an old acquaintance in a motel bar or walking the streets of a distant town from a favourable time in his past. He could dance with a confidence that came from a certain degree of practice, beginning with a long ago series of afternoon lessons given by a red-haired sitter in the years when his mother worked and his father was at war. He could remember dancing with this girl, who was years older and a head taller. He could recall the feel of his hand on the back of the girl’s cotton print dress, though he could not remember the names of the songs to which they had danced or who sang them. Given the presence of a jukebox in a truck stop or an all-night diner he would make selections at random or ask an idle waitress to choose her favourite tune. In 1959, at the suggestion of a girl he was seeing at the time, he had taken to styling his hair in the pompadour style of Elvis Presley. It suited him and he saw no reason to change and though his hair had since grown pale and thin to the degree that what remained was hardly worth the eff ort, he still kept a fine-toothed comb in a brown leather sheaf in his back pocket so that he might maintain this ghost of youthful vanity.
Among the young men who would frequent the Flank and Spur on Sunday afternoons was one who wore his hair in the same style and would sit in the company of the girl. Isaac noted that this young man took to the floor on occasion, but he could not determine whether his pomaded hair and his mother-of-pearl button-down shirts tucked into dark pressed denims gave him any particular success with women. If the young man had been a slightly better dancer, if Isaac had been able to discern in him something of character, he might have wished him to court the girl. On two separate occasions he had noticed an alarming vacancy come over the young man when he had too much to drink. This was upsetting given his youth, and did not bode well for when true hardship befell him. The girl had nothing of the boy’s showiness, nor the harshness of appearance of some of the other young people. She did not seem to aff ect the style of another era and yet her long plaid skirt and her cream-coloured sweater set her apart from the time in which she lived. There were colleges and universities in the city and he heard the other regulars talk to the young people of programs and degrees. He did not know whether the girl was a student. When the band quit, she would leave, alone, or with a group of her companions. Isaac had overheard once that she had to get up early on Monday mornings though he knew not why this was the case.
His thoughts were interrupted as an old woman approached their table, beaming at Lloyd, her wrinkled face framed in tight, white ringlets. She bore a wicker basket filled with tickets, a can with a slot in its lid and a hand-written label that read Children’s Charity Hospital 50/50. Isaac knew that Sheila was nearly eighty, though he would not have believed her to be so old if she had not told him herself. She was forthright with her age having lived long enough so that the number of her years was not an embarrassment, but a point of pride. Lloyd reached into his front pocket and retrieved a five dollar bill and folded it and slid it through the slot in the can. Sheila took a roll of tickets from the pocket of her cardigan and counted them. She felt each perforation with the tips of her fingers as if she could not trust her eyes.
“Good luck,” she said to Lloyd, and placed his tickets on the table and placed their mates in the wicker basket.
“I’ll need it,” he said and lifted his glass to his lips and turned back toward the stage.
Isaac asked for his usual two dollar’s worth and she presented him with four tickets, laying her hands upon his. He might have thought she was flirting had he not known she favoured the company of his roommate, Aubrey, who had stopped coming to the Flank and Spur some months ago for reasons he would not discuss. He folded the tickets and placed them in the breast pocket of his shirt. Her touch left behind the heavy scent of a floral perfume—lilac he supposed, though she had moved on to the far side of the room before he thought to ask.
Isaac watched as an unshaven man of thirty years or slightly more, in cowboy boots and a black t-shirt with a motorcycle on the front approached the girl and asked her to dance. She agreed, hesitantly, and the two jived to a Carl Perkins tune. When the song ended the man’s hand remained on the girl’s arm. With his other hand he gestured to the empty stools at the bar. The girl forced a smile, shook her head. The man released her arm, muttered something and walked away. It occurred to Isaac then that the crowd was drinking more than usual, more than the occasion called for, as sometimes happened on Sundays that followed the receipt of government cheques. The pitcher on their table was empty and Isaac felt the strain in his bladder. He turned to Lloyd and excused himself and got up and made his way across the room. At least one man had emptied the contents of his stomach in a rest room stall and the talk at the urinals was exclusively of women and of desire for them. After he had urinated Isaac went to the sink and as he washed his hands and found himself standing next to the man in the motorcycle t-shirt. The man ran his hands through his dark, close-cropped hair and examined his teeth in the mirror.
“I don’t intend on leaving this bar alone,” the man said. “I intend on having some company.”
Isaac was uncertain whether the comment was addressed to him. He turned off the faucet and reached toward the paper towel dispenser before he saw that it was empty. He shook the water from his hands and then wiped them on the back of his pants. The man in the t-shirt turned to him.
“You know what I’m talking about old-timer. I’ve been watching you,” he said.
Isaac turned and walked out of the washroom without acknowledging the man. When he got back to the table the empty pitcher had been replaced by a full one, his glass filled. He turned to thank Lloyd but the band counted in an upbeat tune and Lloyd suddenly rose to his feet and went to the table at the back of the room and said something to the man seated there. The man nodded his assent and Lloyd smiled and extended his hand to the man’s wife who accompanied him to the dance floor. He looked at Isaac and called out something as they passed but Isaac could not hear him over the sound of the band. Before Isaac could empty his glass he had grown tired of the taste of the draft and the bitter feeling of it in his throat. He watched as a man not quite as old as him did his best to charm two younger women at a neighbouring table. The song ended and Lloyd escorted the woman back to her seat and pulled up a chair and joined in conversation with her and her husband. The man in the motorcycle t-shirt sat at the bar behind them. Isaac watched as he lifted a shot glass of whiskey to his lips, and then another, as if he had abandoned his earlier intention in favour of a less ambitious pursuit.
There was an intermission and the front man of the band, perhaps twenty years younger than Isaac, went over to the other side of the room and seated himself next to the girl. The front man was solid and brazen in a leather vest and western tie, a short man, the same the height as the girl. He was too old for her but he was a talker and a dancer when the opportunity allowed. Isaac had tried to like the man for years and had failed. Now the front man said something and the showy young man laughed and the others laughed and the girl laughed as well. She wore her hair down to her slender shoulders and when she turned her head Isaac noticed the peculiar blonde streak behind her left ear. It did not seem natural and he wondered what had brought her to style it in that way.
The streak reminded him of one seen in his childhood. A thunderstorm had passed through the lowland where his family lived and left a blackout in its wake. A neighbour of half a mile’s distance, a lineman, was sent to repair the line after the storm had passed and an unlikely surge had killed him instantly. Then came rumours and sightings of a sudden milk-white streak through the raven hair of a woman from town, a distant cousin of Isaac’s mother. Grief arising from trauma was known to cause such signs and this would have been of little consequence had the young woman been the widow of the deceased and not her sister. Those close to the widow spoke of her grief and the strange transference of its physical manifestation. Others speculated as to the true reason for the mark, observing that the accident had not brought the sisters closer but caused a rift to grow between them. More peculiar was that the mark was said to stretch from root to tip though it appeared only days after the storm had blown out to sea and dissipated somewhere over the Atlantic.
The streak in the girl’s hair was a softer flaxen upon chestnut brown. Though Isaac was not predisposed to aff ectation he found himself drawn to this mark in her shoulder-length hair. He was not so old that he could not imagine that hair upon the pillow of his ancient bachelor’s bed. And yet he was long resigned to such yearnings becoming nothing more. If not steady companionship or wealth, he had his faculties and seven decades very little of which he was ashamed. A lapse in the control of his bowels a year previous had shaken him—made him question the value of his existence as it took from him what dignity he once possessed. He had learned then that certain skills acquired in youth matter more than those acquired later on. With the help of a specialist and a prescription this hateful time had passed, miraculously, leaving him content to live and to think about the girl for some time to come.
Whether it was right for the girl to have such a place in his thoughts was not a question that vexed him as it might once have. He had come to know himself and those appetites that must be sated and those that must be dulled through deception as a man starving fills his belly with water from a clear stream until he is fed or until he dies. So long as he respected the limits of his tolerance for drink he would maintain control. He wondered whether he would think of her diff erently if she were married, if she were the wife of another man, a man who worked and whose children she bore? Isaac had known no children of his own, nor nieces or nephews, his parents having forgone attempts at further progeny after one child slow and silent and another nearly silent. He knew he was old and possessed of an inward pride and sensibility that many men lacked. He could have asked her to dance and it could have been no diff erent, for those who witnessed, from an elderly man asking a young bride to dance at her wedding, a daughter, the daughter of a brother, of a childhood acquaintance, the daughter of a man he knew but for whom he did not care. He knew she might turn him down, or she might accept out of pity. He did not think it foolish for a boy or a young man or woman to fear. He wondered whether this was the case for a man of his years who knows better what he stood to lose and how easily it might be lost.
Mercifully the intermission ended and the dance floor became crowded once more so that he could only see across the room for brief intervals between songs. Lloyd returned to the table and emptied the rest of the pitcher into his own glass and looked at Isaac and then toward the stage. The front man, now loose and confident with drink, made no attempt to disguise the lewdness of his banter. Lloyd leaned in toward Isaac and in an air of confidence he stated as plain and scientific fact it was impossible to croon and strum a guitar and dance with a woman at one and the same time. Isaac nodded his assent and though he knew the remark was intended as a jest he took comfort in it still. He did not think himself necessarily qualified to pass judgement, but he thought maybe the band was not quite as good as it might be, that maybe they did not take the care that they should because they had played there for at least ten years and no one was going to deny them their complimentary refreshment or their modest take. He had never strummed a guitar nor had he ever had a sincere desire to do so, and the act struck him as garnering more attention than it deserved. The girl danced several times, once with a much older man, and Isaac took pleasure in the grace of her movement and the fact that she was dancing. He knew only a few numbers remained, maybe two or three, before the band said goodnight and packed it in and if he was going to ask the girl he could not aff ord to wait. Instead he asked Lloyd for a cigarette and a light. The cigarette between his lips, Isaac held Lloyd’s Zippo to its tip, turned its wheel and inhaled deeply. A wave of nausea washed over him. He was loath to waste even a cigarette, but he extinguished it in the ashtray as he struggled for his breath. Lloyd looked up at him, chuckled, and turned his attention to the band. Isaac took the tickets for the 50/50 draw from his breast pocket and laid them on the pack of cigarettes next to the empty pitcher, having decided to leave before the band could finish. He put on his hat and his coat, worked his way through the crowd, not acknowledging anyone at all. In protest of he knew not what exactly he headed to the door and was thwarted as the band concluded their number and bid the crowd goodnight. He made it out into the April gloom before the applause had subsided but this did not console him. He cursed loudly and made his way across the lot indiff erent to the mud that soiled his spit-polished boots as the door banged after him. His utterance did not meet its mark and he uttered a second livid invective against all circumstance. This time he was overheard by a dark-complexioned man who emerged from the shadows of the building wearing a thin and soiled nylon jacket bearing some illegible logo With an earnestness that matched that of Isaac’s declaration the man asked him for nothing less than a whole dollar. Isaac knew he had the means and that he had squandered many times this in the hours just passed in the bar. He said nothing to the man and responded with a gesture that indicated his unwillingness to comply. The man wished him a good night in a manner if not sincere than with an air of sincerity so polished and infinitely rehearsed and natural-seeming in its execution that Isaac was almost convinced the man was not trying to manipulate him, a feeling he had experienced countless times before when he had declined to give up his spare change. He felt this for an instant and then it passed and for whatever reason he decided to take the man and his gesture at face value and reciprocated the expression of good will. Isaac walked on into the night. He felt that the air was cold and damp but he did not feel the bite of it.
Aubrey was at home watching a movie and greeted Isaac without looking up. Isaac wanted to be alone but he took off his boots and his coat and hat and laid his coat on the arm of the chesterfield and sat down. He contemplated the indignity of having to share a flat with another man at his age, even one as benign as Aubrey. Then he felt ashamed when Aubrey asked him if he wanted something to eat. Aubrey got up and went into the kitchen and as Isaac watched the movie he could hear him moving around. The movie was sentimental, maudlin even in the manner of Sunday night made-for-TV movies, about a middle-aged woman who worked as an orderly in a maternity ward and her retarded sister. Isaac felt his eyes begin to water and by the time Aubrey returned he had fought his tears and had won. Aubrey set down two plates of eggs and peameal bacon and walked out and came back again with a ketchup bottle and two mugs of milkless tea. Isaac thanked him and when Aubrey, who had once served as a cabin boy for a Vice-Admiral, asked him how it was tonight, Isaac said it was the same as always. The two men watched the movie in silence and ate their supper. Sometime between finishing his eggs and the rolling of the credits Aubrey nodded off. Isaac turned off the television and sat in the near-dark for some time. Eventually he picked up the plates and the mugs and brought them to the kitchen and put them in the sink and put the ketchup bottle in the refrigerator. He filled a glass with water from the tap and took an Aspirin from the bottle in the cabinet over the sink. He stood in the living room drinking the water. Snowflakes began to fall in the light of the street lamp outside the second story window. He put the glass in the kitchen sink on top of the plates and went into Aubrey’s room and took a blanket from the unmade bed and when he lay it over Aubrey, Aubrey turned over on his side and murmured in his sleep. Then Isaac went into his own room and took off his socks, unbuttoned his shirt, unbuckled his belt and took off his pants and placed them over a chair in the corner of the room. He got under the blankets of his bed. He thought about the girl for only a moment. Before he fell asleep he speculated, not with indiff erence, as to his waking in the morning.