C Box - Three Weeks to Say Goodbye

Jeter was at the bar between the two bikers, trying to get the attention of the bartender with the remote. The duster he was wearing went down to his knees. It sagged beneath his arms. Hardware- and lots of it. He called again to the bartender and was ignored as the fat man rocketed through the channels so quickly it was like a malfunctioning slide show. He blasted through channel after channel until there was a glimpse of female flesh and one of the bikers yelled, “ There! ” and he slowly circumnavigated back to it, something on one of the premium cable channels.

I didn’t want to stand next to Jeter and create more of a display than necessary. I took a stool ten feet away from him and kept my head down. I watched him peripherally, noted how agitated he was getting from being dissed. Finally, the bartender placed the remote under an ancient black-and-white movie poster of Anthony Quinn in Viva, Zapata! and turned to Jeter with bored contempt. I feared for the bartender.

I didn’t turn around and look behind me at the table of five, but tried to see who was there via the filmed-over backbar mirror. Five people, three males and two slutty-looking Anglo females. The smoke they were creating and the dirty mirror distorted the view. There were dozens of empty glasses on the table and an overflowing ashtray. The black light behind them added a garish touch, lighting up dirty fingerprints on the empty glasses, the lipstick on the girls, and the brilliant white of overlarge T-shirts on the two Hispanic males. It was boy-girl-boy-girl-boy at the table. The dark man in the middle was grinning stupidly and bobbing his head to a rhythm while a blond girl next to him stared intently at his ear and rocked up and down and I realized she was giving him a hand job under the table. The other girl, whose hair was jet-black and spiked, fingered a silver ring on her bottom lip and shot glances at the action taking place next to her. Garrett sat on the far left end of the table with a coffee mug in front of him with the string and label of a tea bag hanging over the lip of the mug. For some reason, the bored look on his face and what he was drinking struck me most of all because he had the temerity and confidence to drink hot tea in a place like this. I almost admired him for a second, but only for a second. Again, I wondered what his connection was to these gangsters and why he wanted to be involved with them.

I was heartened by the fact that the five at the table didn’t seem to notice Jeter at the bar. They were so self-absorbed that they hadn’t even looked up. I knew it would be a matter of seconds, though, before they did. Jeter was hard to miss with that damned big coat.

Getting his attention wasn’t easy. I wanted him to look at me so I could signal to him to get the hell out of there. He’d have to see me there, right?

“I’m looking for a shitbird named Garrett Moreland,” Jeter asked the bartender loud enough for me to hear. I was shocked by his brazenness. “Is he in here?”

The bartender appeared not to have heard. I glanced into the backbar mirror to assure myself that Garrett hadn’t, either.

“ Jeter! ” I hissed. “ Let’s go. ”

The biker nearest to me looked up from his drink and scowled at me, but Jeter didn’t acknowledge I was there.

“Garrett Moreland, I said,” Jeter growled. “Is he in this shit hole?”

The bartender made a point of ignoring him. Instead, he waddled down the length of the bar, asking each biker if he needed anything and going by me as if I didn’t exist. As he passed, I marveled at the quantity and misogyny of his tattoos; skulls with spikes driven through them, women impaled on the hood ornaments of late-seventies Chryslers and daggerlike penises, the American flag dripping blood into the open mouth of a caricature of former VP Dick Cheney.

“ Jeter, goddammit! ” I yelled, trying to shout above the music. “ We need to leave! ”

The biker to my right wanted another beer. The fat bartender ambled back to where he’d started with the biker’s empty glass to fill it from the tap. He never even glanced my way. While he filled the glass from the tap right in front of Jeter, I saw the Montanan do a frightening thing: He smiled.

“Either you tell me if Garrett-fucking-Moreland is in the building, you fat greaser,” Jeter drawled, “or a particular kind of hell will break out all around you.”

There was a beat of silence when the song ended. The bartender filled the glass. When it was full, he nodded almost imperceptibly toward the table in the back.

“Much obliged,” Jeter said, turning slowly around while keeping one hand on the bar. I could see him squinting toward the table under the black light.

“Jeter…” I said.

Because I was concentrating on Jeter, I almost missed the movements of the bartender, who was fishing around under the counter. And with the deceptively quick movements of a fat man who for years has concentrated solely on the speed of his arms, the bartender stepped back with a black baseball bat and raised it above his head and smashed Jeter’s hand with it. I could hear the bones break with the same muffled snapping sounds of dry branches underfoot.

I was frozen where I sat.

Jeter didn’t cry out, didn’t even pull his hand away. Instead, he turned back toward the bartender with an I-can’t-believe-you-did-that look.

Surprised that the blow didn’t bring this crazy Anglo in the silly coat to his knees, the bartender cocked back and swung again, smashing Jeter’s misshapen hand on the bar, presumably breaking every bone that hadn’t been broken by the first hit. I’ll never forget the sound of contact, like hitting a Ziploc bag filled with pretzels.

I don’t know why the bartender did it. I’ll never know or understand. All I can guess is that he was reacting to the insult and that he’d done the same thing before in similar situations in order to drive people out of the club. But like my life those past two and a half weeks, what happened next was beyond analysis.

All of us have heard the phrase “He got his head blown off.” I’m here to tell you that doesn’t actually happen. I know because when Jeter reached into his duster with his right hand and came out with the sawed-off double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun that was once referred to as a coach gun because it was the weapon of choice for stagecoach drivers, and pressed the muzzle into the bartender’s forehead with both hammers cocked and fired both barrels, well, the bartender’s head was not actually blown off. The top right quarter of it disappeared, and what was left of the mirror behind the bar was spattered with blood, brains, and chunks of bone, skin, and hair. The bartender dropped to the floor as if his puppet strings had been clipped, taking a shelf of beer glasses with him.

The sound was tremendous, and my ears were ringing. The two bikers at the bar dismounted and scrambled and passed me, running toward the door. I watched them from above, detached, as if my own soul and perspective were removed from my body.

Jeter was enraged. He stared at his broken hand for a moment, saying “Why in the hell did he do that?” before recovering and breaking the shotgun open with his undamaged right hand. The two huge, spent, and smoking shells hurtled back over his shoulders on either side of his head. He transferred the weapon under his left arm and dug into his duster pocket for two fresh shells. He reloaded and he snapped the shotgun closed with an upward jerk, turning toward the back table while he cocked both barrels. His broken left hand hung uselessly by his side.

“WHICH ONE OF YOU SHITBIRDS IS GARRETT MORELAND?”

I realized that the high-pitched noise in my ears was one of the girls shrieking.