Robert Parker - Night Passage

He stayed the night in Flagstaff, 250 miles north of where he had been born, and went to the motel bar for supper. He ordered scotch on the rocks and a chicken breast sandwich on a croissant. There were a couple of guys in plaid shirts and those little string ties they wore in places like Arizona, the kind with the silver hasp where a knot should be. Both bartenders were women wearing white shirts and black ties and short red jackets. One was a fat blond woman, and the other a more slender dark-haired Hispanic girl who would be fat in five more years. Beyond the bar was a room with tables and a dance floor, and the setup for a disk jockey. No one was in the room yet. An unlit piece of neon script over the disk jockey stand spelled out “Coyote Lounge.” He sipped a little scotch, felt the heat spread from his esophagus. A tall well-built man in his thirties came into the bar wearing a big Stetson hat and earphones. He seemed to be bouncing slightly to music that only he heard. He had on a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up and tight jeans and two-toned lizard-skin cowboy boots. The tiny tape player was tucked into his shirt pocket and the slender cord ran up under his chin. He looked as if he’d just come in from a shower and a shave and his cologne came into the bar ahead of him. Clubman, maybe. Jesse watched him. There was nothing particularly interesting about him except that Jesse watched everything. The cowboy ordered a nonalcoholic beer and when it was served he left the glass and picked up the bottle and carried it with him as he walked along the bar looking everything over.

“When’s that dancing start?” he said to one of the bartenders.

He spoke loudly, perhaps because he needed to speak over the music in his ears. He drank his nonalcoholic beer from the bottle, holding it by the neck.

“Nine o’clock,” the Hispanic girl said. She had no accent.

The cowboy looked around the bar at Jesse, at the two guys in plaid shirts drinking beer, at the two bartenders.

“Anybody know a happening place around here?”

One of the beer drinkers shook his head without looking up. Nobody else even acknowledged the question. Everybody knows it, Jesse thought. Maybe it’s how loud he talks. Or how he looks like a model in one of those western-wear catalogs. Or the way he walks around in the little backwater bar, like he was strolling into the Ritz. Whatever it was, everyone knew he was a guy who, encouraged by an answer, would talk to you for much too long. The cowboy nodded to himself, as if his suspicions were confirmed, and walked into the empty dance hall and walked around it, looking at the caricatures of dapper semi-human coyotes hanging on the walls. Then he put his half-finished bottle of nonalcoholic beer on the bar, surveyed the bar again, and walked out.

“Takes all kinds,” the blond bartender said.

A jerk, Jesse thought. A good-looking jerk, but just as lonely and separate as the homely ones. His sandwich came. He ate it because he needed nourishment, and drank, two more scotches and paid and went to his room. Nothing was going to happen when they opened up the dance floor that Jesse wanted to watch.

In his room he got the travel bottle of Black Label out of his suitcase and poured some into one of the little sanitary plastic cups he found in the bathroom. The walk down the hall for ice seemed too long, so he sipped the scotch warm. He didn’t turn on the television. Instead, he stood at the window and looked out at the high pines that rimmed the hill behind the motel. He’d grown up in Tucson when The Brady Bunch was hot, and while it was only four or five hours away, it could have been another planet. Tucson was sunlight and desert and heat, even in January. Up here they had winter. It was 7:45, getting dark. He was still in the same time zone. Jennifer would be home from work. Actually she’d probably be fucking Elliott Krueger about now. He let the images of his wife having sex roll behind his eyes as he stared at the now-dark windowpane and sipped his scotch. His reflection in the windowpane looked somber. He grinned at it, and raised his glass in a toasting gesture. Go to it, Jenn, fuck your brains out. It’s got nothing to do with me. The bravado of it, buoyed with the scotch, made him feel intact for a moment, but he knew it was scotch, and he knew it was bravado, and he knew there was nothing behind the smile in the empty window.

Hasty Hathaway had never really worked. His father had made a great deal of money in banking, and while he spent time in his office at the bank he’d inherited, he was mainly busy with being the most prominent citizen in Paradise, chairman of the Board of Selectmen, Commander of Freedom’s Horsemen, and president of the Rotary Club. He stood now in his bedroom with the closet door open, thinking about which jacket to wear. His wife lay in bed in her nightgown watching him.

“What about the blue seersucker?” he said.

“Blue looks good on you, Hasty,” Cissy said.

“New chief of police is arriving this week,” Hasty said, “from California.”

“Didn’t you meet him already?”

“Chicago. Burke and I went out to interview the finalists. Stayed at the Palmer House.”

Hasty pulled out the blue seersucker and put it on and turned so Cissy could see him.

“Good,” she said. “Are you going to wear that plaid bow tie?”

“You think I should?”

“It would go very nicely with that shirt and jacket.”

“All right, then,” Hasty said and took it off the tie rack on the back of the closet door.

“Is he a nice boy?” Cissy said.

“The new chief? Well, I hope he’s more than that.”

Hasty said. “But he is young, and looks younger than he is. And he has a good record.”

“And he’ll fit in?” Cissy said.

“Yes, we were careful about that,” Hasty said. “That was one of Tom Carson’s problems, so we were all especially alert to that. He’s one of us. Not wealthy of course, but the right background generally. College-educated, too.”

“Really? What school?”

“Out there,” Hathaway said. “One of the big ones, USC, UCLA, I can’t keep them straight. Criminal justice. He took courses at night.”

“It’s always a shame, I think, when a young man can’t get the full college experience. You know, not only classes, but football games and pep rallies, proms, intense discussions in the dorms.”

“I know, but many young men are not as fortunate as we were. They have to make do.”

“Yes.”

As he did every morning Hathaway had a bowl of Wheaties for breakfast and two cups of coffee. Cissy sat across from him in her bathrobe with black coffee and a cigarette.

He had quit twenty years earlier. They both wished she could quit, but she couldn’t, and they had concluded that there was no point discussing it. She was a tallish woman with a youthful body. She rarely wore makeup, and if she did it was only lipstick. Her blond hair was starting to show silver and she wore it long. It looked nice with her youthful face.

“Well,” he said, “have to run. Got a bank to run. Got a town to manage.”

“Busy, busy,” she said.

It was what she always said, because that was what he always said. She put her cheek up to be kissed. He kissed it and left, walking out the back door and down the driveway toward the town hall. His clothes always looked slightly unfashionable, as if he had spent money on them a long time ago and then outgrown them. The trouser cuffs were always too high. The jacket sleeves always showed too much shirtsleeve. His belt seemed too high and the waist of his suit coat always seemed a little pinched. Like her smoking, it was something put aside in the long years of marriage, under the heading “for better, for worse.” She put his cereal bowl and coffee cup in the sink, poured herself another cup of coffee, and lit another cigarette and hugged her robe a little snugger around her and looked out at the flower garden which occupied most of her backyard. She’d been flattered to marry a man from such a good family. Later maybe she’d take a bath and shave her legs.