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The bar was beginning to overflow now with souls seeking
relief from a hard week at work or the unemployment line. Silhouetted patrons
and amalgamated conversations, along with thick cigarette smoke, drifted through
the room like packs of Baskerville hounds haunting through tendrils of fog
across a boggy moor.
Though not usually feeling comfortable with large,
ever-growing crowds, Sandy was able to push them out of her mind, choosing
instead to occupy herself with girlish fantasies of John, kissing him, touching
him--that is until someone caught her eye. She had noticed earlier, as the
tavern’s occupancy began to swell, that a tall, svelte man with fine dark hair
pulled back into a pony tail had taken an interest in their table. He sat
concealed among the spatters of color and deep shadows at the booth under the
neon signs occupied earlier by another couple. The man kept pushing back shots
of one sort of hard liquor or another then chasing them down with a swallow of
beer, all the while never taking his eyes off the threesome.
John hadn’t noticed, being too caught up in looking in her
direction (she would not let herself believe that he had been looking at her the
whole time) and Bill had his back to the man’s booth. But she had noticed.
There was a certain familiar agitation in the way the man
almost threw back the vials of liquor, the way he fidgeted in his seat, never
once taking his eyes off of them. The way his silhouetted hand would
deliberately grip the beer bottle as though tightening them around someone’s
neck. Someone he didn’t like. And the man seemed to take pleasure in the
knowledge that Sandy knew they were being watched and was growing uneasy. If a
shadow could grin, showing its even blacker teeth, this one was grinning.
John must have noticed her quick and troubled glances out
into the smoke-filled room. “Is there something wrong, Sandy?” he asked. He
looked in the direction that she was looking in, but there were so many people
doing so many things that he was unsure of what or who in particular she was
looking at.
As she was just about to ask if either John or Bill could
place the eclipsed stranger, five men entered the bar and surveyed the crowded
room, stopping in Sandy’s line of sight. She turned and bobbed her head to try
and see past the group but to no avail. Finally, apparently after deciding that
it was indeed worth their while to stay and gawk at the tight jeans and firm
breasts, they took seats at the bar and began their observations like perched
vultures overlooking a herd of animals, searching out the weakest prey.
Now the booth was now empty. During the interim the stranger
had disappeared.
Though she still could not place the man, she felt a
sickening sensation in the pit of her stomach.
“Sandy?” John inched a little closer to her.
“Sandy, are you okay?” Bill asked. “Those rum and Cokes
finally getting to you?”
“No, no I’m fine. I-I just thought that the man that had
been sitting in that booth over there was staring at me—at us. But he must’ve
left when I wasn’t looking.”
Both Bill and John looked over at the empty booth. “See,”
Bill said to Sandy, “you generate more interest than you think. Even if it is
only whacked out drunks and shy, well-mannered college professors who take
interest.”
“I’m not shy,” John insisted as he picked up and drank
the last of his third Coors Light.
Though she didn’t want the evening to end, she no longer
felt at ease in the crowded bar with an inebriated man somewhere in its shadows
eyeing her up. Until moments ago, she had actually forgotten about her scars,
but suddenly she felt as though everyone in the bar knew her secret and was now
staring at her in disgust.
“I really hate to call it a night,” she said, “but its
been a long day, and I think I am beginning to feel a little tipsy. I hope you
don’t think I’m wimping out on you. I’ve really enjoyed myself.”
Bill feigned offense. “Geese, if you two wanted to be
alone, all you had to do was ask.”
“As much as I hate to admit it,” John added, “it’s
been a long day for all of us.” He then turned to Sandy, and in defiance to
Bill’s remark about his shyness, he asked, “Can I give you a ride home?”
Sandy, too, was astounded by John’s burst of audacity. It
left her speechless. She desperately wanted to spend every spare moment possible
with him before their inevitable departure, but she also did not want him to
know that she lived a waif’s existence above a bar. He, after all, was a
college professor who probably lived comfortably well, having a delightful home
with a big yard and a new car parked in the attached double garage, a dog named
Sparky and maybe even a parakeet or two. But after only a brief silence, an idea
came to her that would afford them at least a few more moments together. She
smiled at John and said, “I’d like that.”
At 10:15 p.m. John, Sandy and Bill said their good-byes outside the
Mediterranean and parted company—Sandy and John in his Nissan Maxima and Bill
alone in his Ram.
Sandy had told him to take her across the river to the south
side of town, passing right by her apartment building along the way. A steady
flow of patrons both entered and exited the bar below her flat as though it was
an ever-busy ant colony. A reverberating bass beat thumped at the widows of the
Maxima as they drove by, swelling as a bar door opened and diminishing only
slightly when it finally closed shut. How anyone could listen to music that loud
without their ears bleeding profusely and risking permanent brain damage Sandy
could never understand. She resisted the urge to look over as they drove past,
choosing instead to examine the floorboards.
As fate would have it, a train leaving the only steel mill
left in town sluggishly lumbered through the downtown tracks catching John and
Sandy at the crossing, affording them a few more precious minutes of
conversation. (Actually, the train came through town at almost the exact same
time each evening—a fact that Sandy knew well and took full advantage of). They
laughed and joked and slipped into ever more comfortable spirits as the minutes
ticked on as if they were not merely new acquaintances but had known each other
for an eternity.
After the train had made its way through the downtown, and
they crossed the Allegheny river which cut the town in half, she had him turn
right down West First Street. It was a grand boulevard with old money oozing
from between the bricks of each mammoth house and falling from each gnarly
sycamore. In the early nineteen hundreds it was where everybody who was anybody
in the oil industry of the area lived. Now, besides the few houses still in the
hands of the families that built them, the rest, being far too big for anyone to
afford, had long been partitioned off into apartments. After having taken John
as far as she could without making him suspicious, she had him pull curbside.
“Well, this is it,” she said earnestly hoping that her
tone was convincing.
“Boy, you sure must like to walk,” John said, taking
notice of how far he’d driven. “What is it, two—two and a half miles to the
bar?”
“It’s a small town, John. Nothing’s ever as far away as
it seems.”
John smiled sheepishly then looked beyond her to the
oversized and many-gabled house that sat on a steep bank of ivy and darkness.
All of its numerous windows were extinguished, and it was cloaked in long, deep
shadows giving it a menacing appearance with an increasingly murky night sky as
its backdrop.
“It’s not all mine,” she chuckled, reading the look on
his face. “I live in one of the upstairs apartments.”
“It’s a big house. How many apartments are in it?”
“Don’t know really. Six or seven, I think.” God she
hated lying to him. She hated lying, period.
He glanced at her then looked back up at the old house
quizzically.
She too looked up at it and prayed desperately that he
wasn’t going to ask to come up for coffee. Being caught in a lie would be too
humiliating to endure. She was truly taken by John, but as much as she could
fantasize about it, she knew that she could never have him. That was why she
hated to see the evening end. Whatever happened now didn’t matter because he
would be gone by next week’s end, and she’d just be a memory if even that.
And besides, he still didn’t know about her hidden deformities. If she were
ever fortunate enough to feel his body next to hers, there was no guarantee—in
fact she knew absolutely—that he’d never be able to get past her scars. They
were hideous, and she knew that naked she was just shy of looking like
Frankenstein’s monster. She felt the old, depressed, sorry-for-herself Sandy
creeping upon her. With all her strength she repressed a sough.
For the first time since they entered John’s car neither
said a word. It was an unnerving quiet. The silence was deafening.
She desperately searched for something to say to fill the
void. All she could come up with was, “Big, huh?”
“Excuse me.”
“The house, I mean.”
“Yeah.” Like a shy teenager, John traced an imaginary
line on his steering wheel.
Finally, he sucked in a deep breath, turned to Sandy and said
reticently, “Look, I really had a good time tonight. More than you could ever
imagine. The past few months have been pretty difficult for me, today being
especially bad. It was nice having someone to talk to. I-I mean besides Bill,
that is.” His smile was wide and unquestionably sincere.
“I had a terrific time, myself,” she replied.
“I hope Bill didn’t offend you with anything he said. He
means well.”
“No, he’s as harmless as a kitten. He just talks big.”
“Yeah.”
More silence.
Sandy’s heart pounded.
An old rattle-box sputting black exhaust drove slowly by them
and turned up the next street.
Finally, she said, “Well, thank you for the ride.”
“It was the least I could do. Really. I thoroughly enjoyed
your company tonight.”
“You’re a terrific guy, John Walker. I don’t know how
on earth your wife could have—even for a second—looked at another man.” She
leaned over and quickly kissed him on the cheek, and before John had time to
react, she was out of the car and across the sidewalk to the base of the steps.
When she got half way up the incline she turned and watched
the Nissan slowly pull away. She continued the long flight of bricked steps
until John was two blocks up the street, then, hidden in the night shadows, she
turned and descended back to the street.
With shoulders sagging and an aching loneliness in her gate,
Sandy began walking back to her apartment on the other side of town.
But she was completely unaware that something as oily-black
as the penetrating night shadows that concealed it had just turned the corner
and was stalking behind her, closing the gap.
©2004 StoriesByEmail.com
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