Welcome to more memories. Now we get to the meat of things. Get ready to meet someone.
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NOTE: Check out my other stories in the Sci-fi / Fantasy Section Crown Vic to a Parallel World From Whence I Came Stolen Love
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Wasted Life a Law Edwards Mystery by Sam Stefanik
7 An Angel from Iowa
I entered the backroom bar to see a new barman at the far end. He was a tall, strapping man with messy blond hair. He leaned on the barback and stared at the floor. I sat in front of him and slapped the counter for service. "Gin and tonic!" I shouted like I always did.
The new barman flinched from my barked shout and straightened away from the wall. He stepped up to my place but kept his eyes glued to the floor. "What can I get for you?" He asked like I hadn't already given my order. His voice was listless, like he barely had the energy to push the words from his throat.
"Gin and tonic." I repeated.
"How do you want it?"
"In a glass."
"Yes, sir." The barman said and started to move away.
I slapped the bar again to arrest his progress because I still hadn't seen the man's face. "Look at me." I demanded.
The barman raised his head and looked at me. His face was pure sadness, pure sadness and a pair of piercing hazel eyes that were so direct, they seemed to look through me. The barman's gaze and the intensity of his presence was overwhelming. I lost myself in the limpid blue-green pools of his eyes and all thought left my mind. I must have stared for a while because he spoke first.
"Sir?" He asked with his dead voice.
I shook my head to jerk myself out of the place I'd been lost. I had to grasp for what I'd wanted to say. I slapped the bar again and pointed in the barman's face. "Look your customer in the eye and he'll trust you. If he trusts you, he'll drink more. If he drinks more, he'll tip better. Then you make more money, and the house makes more money. Get it?"
"Yes, sir." He agreed, but he still sounded like lacked purpose.
I drove my point home with some more sharp instruction. "Don't let me see your eyes on the floor the rest of the night."
"Yes, sir." He replied more firmly.
The barman struck me as a man who could take orders but who struggled with initiative. I watched him walk away to get my drink. I watched the muscles in his powerful back as he moved and the effortless grace of a body that does exactly what its owner tells it. I watched him come back. I noticed each individual muscle in his arm as it flexed and corded so his large, calloused hand could set my drink on the bar. The man took his hand from my glass, looked me dead in the eye, and smiled. In that smile, I saw heaven. In that smile, I saw perfection, and he was a bartender.
My eyes followed the barman for the rest of the night. I didn't watch him out of erotic desire. I watched him out of admiration for a living, breathing work of art. He should have had a gold square pinned to his suspenders that read, `the ideal man.'
All that night I sat on my stool and drank the worst gin and tonics I'd ever had, because he was a lousy bartender. His beauty more than made up for drowning the gin and forgetting the lemon. By the end of his shift, I had every angle of his taught physique burned into my mind's eye.
I memorized his chiseled torso and the comic-looking pair of green and yellow plaid suspenders that draped over his square shoulders to button onto his too-short black slacks. I remember everything from the way the light played on his face, to the hollow at the base of his throat, to the path of the blue veins that traced down his strong arms. I remember that his tan extended to the top of his bare feet. I can even see his habit of rubbing his palms together whenever his hands were idle for too long.
It wasn't just attraction to his form that drew my undivided attention, it was everything about him. He was imposingly tall with broad shoulders, shoulders so wide they could have been a yoke for a team of oxen. He projected confidence with his newly erect posture. He wore the natural ruggedness of a musculature built from hard physical labor. He had calloused hands and a deep outdoor tan. His features and manner were sweetly innocent, but his resonant baritone voice suggested virility.
Everything about the man fit together to make him supreme. If white wings sprouted from his back and a glowing golden halo appeared above his glowing golden head, I would have accepted him as a messenger of God and genuflected in reverent worship. Every time he looked at me, I shivered and overheated. Every time he looked away, my eyes followed him. I watched him until closing time.
When that time came, Madam Mitch selected her bedmate from amongst the `knights.' I'd long been told that she and her nightly partner never did anything. Mitch just didn't like to sleep alone. With the Madam's presence withdrawn, the bouncers herded the stragglers into the street. The residents retired to the garret rooms far upstairs on the third floor, and the non-residents left by the back door. Deafening silence settled on the normally raucous place. The doors were locked, and I was alone with him, with the angel who was a barman.
The man had stayed at the bar after it closed to thank me for the advice I'd given him at the start of the night. He showed me all the money he'd made. He shoved two big handfuls of crumpled bills under my nose like a kid with an overly successful lemonade stand. He was proud and grateful and shy, and more than a little sad.
The big, powerful man with the innocent, bashful manner confused and compelled me. I asked, and he told me his story. The angel spoke to me, thanked me despite my obvious flaws and deep scars. He sat next to me, close enough that I could feel the heat of his body and could breathe his earthy, masculine scent. We looked at each other in the bar-back mirror because that was the only way I could look at him and still speak. We talked about him.
"You don't belong here, do you?" I asked.
"I'm from Iowa." The barman explained to the silvered glass in front of us. "My family has a farm there. We...uhm...they grow corn and have an apple orchard."
I asked the obvious question. "What happened?"
"I...uh...I had to leave. My father...he...he saw me...caught me...with...a hired hand...a man. I'm not allowed back." The barman choked on the bitter words and a single tear slid down his right cheek.
I didn't know what to say. There was nothing I could say. I refused to throw platitudes at him, and I didn't know the man well enough to offer advice. I remained silent. The barman rubbed his palms together. The callouses sounded like coarse sandpaper against each other. He finished and set his palms down on the bar. After that initial hesitation, the words seemed to come easier.
"I hitchhiked in trucks carrying crops to the east. The drivers would usually give me some money or something to eat for help loading and unloading. I'm not really good at anything off the farm, but I'm strong. My father used to say if the draft horse ever came up lame, he'd hitch the plow to me."
The barman smiled at the memory, then he grimaced as few more tears followed the first one. I had an impulse to comfort him, to tell him everything would be alright, but I knew what a terrible lie that was. I held my tongue again while he rubbed his hands again.
When he could speak, the barman told me all about the farm, his five brothers and three sisters, and his loving mother and father. He spoke of the people he'd met on the road, how he got and lost a string of jobs, and the fact that he had no aptitude for anything that doesn't have to do with coaxing life from the earth.
We laughed over the tray of dirty dishes he dropped as a diner busboy, that he dropped them while he was distracted by an attractive customer. He explained how that same attractive man had followed him into the street after he was bawled out and fired. That attractive customer turned out to be Charlie, the man of many talents who worked at Madam Mitch's. Charlie brought the fired busboy to Mitch, who gave him a job and a place to live.
The barman and I felt sad together as he told me how much he missed his home, his family, even the father who banished him. He told me that his father was a good man and a good father, and he admired him still. We talked until morning. He helped me understand him and that made him human. In his humanity, I admired him even more.
As the sun rose and blazed through the un-curtained eastern windows, the barman moved from the dark bar to stand in the first light of the new day. He looked outside with unfocused eyes and stretched his powerful body. The sun turned his skin to burnished gold. He spoke to the sunrise, like it wanted to hear his story as badly as I did.
"If I was home, I'd have already fed the horses and I'd be hitching Old Jack to the big wagon. It would be full of baskets. My brothers and me would be picking in the orchard today. Then I'd saddle the mare for my father. He'd check on the corn to look for blight and try to figure out the yield. It's important to know how good the crop will be." The barman stopped his story short, and his voice drew down to a miserable whisper. "I guess...I guess that's what they are doing...just without me."
The barman turned away from the sun and from me. He sniffed and scrubbed at his eyes with his closed fists. He looked back and tried to smile. The smile he wore was the saddest thing I'd ever seen. "I'm sorry." He said and sniffed again. "I've kept you up. I guess you need to go. You'll have to be at work soon."
He escorted me to the front door, unlocked it and held it for me. "Thank you, again." He said.
I paused on the threshold with a question. "I just realized; I don't know your name."
"I'm David," he said and leaned his rangy body against the edge of the open door, "David Ploughman."
I laughed at what I thought must be a joke. The barman stared at me and didn't laugh. I swallowed my amusement and asked the necessary question. "You're a queer farmer and your last name is Ploughman?"
"Yes," he nodded sincerely, "is that funny?"
I shook my head and waved to him as I walked down the marble steps into the street. The door shut and I nearly laughed my lungs out. "Plow-man!" I said over again and roared with merriment. "A lot of men have been plowed in that house."
I was half-way down the block with the sunrise at my back when I noticed the normal knotted pain in my stomach. I realized, in hindsight, that it hadn't been there since David brought my first drink. It occurred to me that, when I was with David, I didn't hurt. In one night, the man who's name I knew was David had started as purity, I'd admired him as art, he became a person, then evolved into a merciful angel who soothed my pain.
For the rest of that week, I felt grand. The feds didn't bother me, and the heat and stink of the city didn't matter. I knew that every evening, I'd be at the bar at Mitch's, drinking gin served by an angel of heaven. I never even made it upstairs, not any of those long nights.
Near the end of the week, the whore I'd been exclusive with for a while approached me at the bar. He was wearing nothing on his sinewy, yellowish tan body. He rubbed his smooth nudity against me like an affectionate cat might, and he asked me where I'd been. "I've missed you, Law. I've been a naughty boy and I need discipline. Why haven't you come up to GIVE IT TO ME?" He put special emphasis on the words that carried the suggestive connotation he wanted.
I tore my eyes from David to address the whore. He was nothing but a distraction to my eyes that had been opened to perfection. "Have you seen David?" I asked as if the answer to his question was a glance behind the bar.
The whore looked passed me. David was chilling a drink in a cocktail shaker. The work set off a kaleidoscope of rippling muscles that made my mouth water. "Yeah," K the whore said, "he looks like he could throw a good fuck. So?"
The whore's words raised the specter of rage inside me. I felt my right hand close into a fist. I rose from my stool to smash the whore but didn't complete the action. I knew David would see. I didn't want him to see that side of me. I didn't want him to see the animal that I was.
Instead of pounding the whore with my fists, I stepped close to him like I planned to lean in for a kiss. The whore raised his face to mine, his eyes narrowed, and his lips parted in a sensuous, bedroom pout. I moved my hand behind his head, like I wanted to cradle it for our kiss. I grabbed a handful of his silky, black hair, and jerked his head back.
The bedroom expression disappeared from K's face. It was replaced with one of wide-eyed terror. "Take it back." I whispered.
The whore answered with obvious fear. I knew that he was afraid because of my reputation for sudden, brutal violence. "TAKE WHAT BACK?" The frightened man cried.
I jerked the whore's head again and twisted his hair in my fist. I did it to cause the man pain and to sharpen his attention. "Take back what you said about David." I hissed in his face.
The whore complied with my demand. "I TAKE IT BACK!"
"Say he's an angel." I whispered.
"HE'S AN ANGEL!"
"Now fuck off." I released the whore and shoved him away from me.
The whore fled from my presence, and I went back to my seat. When I lowered myself onto my stool, I noticed that David was at my place. He held a fresh drink as he eyed me suspiciously. "Everything alright?" He asked.
"Sure." I shrugged in an attempt to minimize whatever David might have seen of the exchange between me and K. "He said something I didn't like and then got snotty about it. He understands me now."
David seemed to accept my explanation. He traded the fresh drink for the empty glass that was at my spot and moved onto his other duties without comment.
I watched David walk away from me and thought I was well justified in how I'd treated K the whore. What I'd objected to, was the implied vulgarity of the whore's suggestion that David could `throw a good fuck.' I'd wanted to break the whore's jaw instead of just pulling his hair. Angels don't throw a fuck. Animals fuck, animals like me. Angels show physical affection by making love. Even that seemed too obscene for David, like suggesting Joseph and Mary fucked to conceive Jesus.
I decided that it didn't matter. I'd made my point and the whore didn't come near me again.
A cautious knock dropped the curtain on the memory and returned me to the present. A member of the neighborhood patrol was at my door. The patrol was a group of essentially harmless, well-meaning, and hopelessly na•ve fools who, in their minds, protected the block from Nazi infiltrators. A small elderly man pushed the door open far enough to admit his grey head and enormous ears. "Alright Law?" He asked.
I lied to the old man. "Yeah, George. Everything's fine. Thanks for checking."
He ducked his head and went back to making the block safe for democracy. "I'm sorry, David." I said to the black and white face on the photo that leaned against the drinking glass. "Except, you're not David, are you? Your name is Preston."
I stood from my chair and reached down to tear the day from the calendar. "Three days left, Law, tick, tick, tick." I said aloud. I shut the lights off and went to bed.