David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

Sheesh.

So do not mess with this girl; this girl is damaged goods.

What usually happens is that on Friday afternoons a percentage of Pod C’s revenue officers meet for Happy Hour cocktails at Meibeyer’s. As is the case with most of the north side’s taverns that serve as Service hangouts, Happy Hour at Meibeyer’s lasts exactly sixty minutes and features drink specials that are indexed to the approximate cost of gasoline and vehicle depreciation involved in the 2.3-mile drive from the REC to the Southport-474 interchange. Different levels and Pods tend to congregate at different places, some of which are downtown and ape in various ways the more stylized venues of Chicago and St. Louis. The Bell Shaped Men can be found nearly every evening at Father’s, which is right there on Self-Storage Parkway and owned outright by the area’s Budweiser distributor; its function is less social than intubatory. Many of the wigglers, on the other hand, frequent the steroidal college bars around PCB and Bradley. Homosexuals have the Wet Spot in the downtown arts district. Most of the examiners with children, of course, go home to spend time with their family, although Steve and Tina Geach are often at Meibeyer’s together for Friday’s 2-H. Nearly everyone finds it necessary to blow off some of the unvented steam that’s accreted during a week of extreme tedium and concentration, or extreme volume and stress, or both.

Meibeyer’s has ash-gray laminate paneling, electric tiki torches whose origins are unknown but may date from a past incarnation, a Wurlitzer 412-C jukebox, two pinball machines, a foosball table and an air hockey game, and a small darts area prudently set off apart near the little hallway for the pay phone and restrooms. Meibeyer’s broad windows overlook Southport’s highway-side franchises and the complicated exits of the I-474 overpass. There’s been the same Friday bartender for at least the past three years, according to Chuck Ten Eyck. Drinks are somewhat expensive because Service employees do not, as a rule, drink very much or fast, even at Happy Hour, which affects what the tavern has to charge for drinks in order to stay solvent. In winter weather Meibeyer’s plows its own lot with a bladed pickup. In the summer, the bar’s neon sign, which features the semion of a disembodied trilby whose angle changes twice a second, is reflected off something unapparent before it and appears faintly, reflected at least twice, in the tavern’s front windows. Meibeyer’s brim goes up and down against the malarial light of a gathering dusk in which shelving clouds and a spike in humidity only sometimes mean real rain that hits the ground.

Being mainly single, heterosexual transfers and replacements fall right into this groove. Robby van Noght comes a lot, though not this Friday. Gerry Moeller has been here all five weeks he’s been posted at the REC. Harriet Candelaria comes but nearly always leaves after one round whenever Beth Rath happens to bring Meredith Rand, with whom Candelaria has problems that none of the transfers has the slightest inkling of the origins of. Steve and Tina Geach, who work in different groups and have different break rotations, and who are very devoted to each other and by general consensus have the sort of marriage that increases the attraction and credibility of marriage a great deal for people who are wired to be in such a close, enduring relation, always arrive together in their rust-ruddled VW microbus, and sit close together, always consuming the very same type and brand of beverage, and usually leaving the moment the bell rings for Happy Hour’s end, often showing an odd ability to embrace and walk at the same time without looking clumsy. Chris Acquistipace and Russell Nugent, Dave Witkiewicz, Joe Biron-Maint, Nancy Johnson, Chahla (‘the Iranian Crisis’) Neti-Neti, Howard Shearwater, Frank Brown, Frank Friedwald, and Frank De Chellis haven’t missed a Meibeyer’s Happy Hour night since their posting. Dale Gastine sometimes brings a date. Keith Sabusawa now always brings Shane (‘Mr. X’) Drinion, the UTEX transfer with whom Sabusawa now rooms at Angler’s Cove in a suite with two other transfers who never seem to come to Meibeyer’s. Schedule F specialists like Chris Fogle and Herb Dritz bat about.500 in terms of attendance. Chuck Ten Eyck and ‘Second-Knuckle’ Bob McKenzie (both at Peoria REC the longest) are reliable as iron and always seem to want to somehow preside. R. L. Keck and Thomas Bondurant usually come. Toni Ware and Beth Rath nearly always drop by, and, as mentioned, some of the time Beth Rath brings the legendarily attractive but not universally popular Meredith Rand. Rath and Rand work adjoining Tingle tables in Sabusawa’s group, which is tasked to utility/overflow, and the two are confidantes. Drinion, who has no vehicle, must remain as long as Sabusawa stays and no longer. According to Sabusawa, the UTEX from La Junta CA has no problem with this, and his response to Sabusawa’s invitations to come along to Meibeyer’s after shift change is always either ‘All right’ or ‘Why not.’ Meredith Rand’s deal is that she tends to come only if her husband is somehow stuck at work or out of town on business. Like Drinion, she doesn’t seem to have her own vehicle or even a driver’s license. Sometimes she catches a ride home from Meibeyer’s with Beth Rath but more often gets picked up by her husband, whom she apparently calls from the Pod in advance to say where she’ll be, and whom no one in Meibeyer’s has ever met but always simply pulls up into the lot and toots the horn for Meredith Rand, who in turn often starts gathering her things a minute or two before the car horn sounds, rather (according to Nancy Johnson) like a dog that can hear the pitch of its master’s approaching engine and assumes its position at the home’s window long before the master’s car heaves into view. She has been at Meibeyer’s for the last five weeks running, which implies that her husband has been working late or on the road a great deal. According to Sabusawa, no one knows what he does.

It is not difficult to see the way the energy and dynamics of the Pod C table change when Meredith Rand is present for Happy Hour at Meibeyer’s. In many respects, it’s a phenomenon that happens at bars, taverns, and grills everywhere when a woman of sufficient prettiness appears. Meredith Rand is one of only a handful of females at the REC that every male with an opinion on such matters agrees is totally, wrist-bitingly attractive. Beth Rath is far from homely, but Meredith Rand is a whole different order. Meredith Rand has bottomless green eyes and exquisite facial bone structure and a creamy poreless complexion with almost no lines or signs of wear, and a great cataract of curly dark-blond hair that, according Sabusawa, when worn down and allowed to frame her face and shoulders has been known to produce facial tics even in gay or otherwise asexual men. She is a cut of pure choice prime, is the consensus, not always unspoken. Her entry into any sort of Service social setting produces palpable changes, especially in males. The specifics of these sorts of changes are familiar enough to everyone not to spend time enumerating. Suffice it that Meredith Rand makes the Pod’s males self-conscious. They thus tend to become either nervous and uncomfortably quiet, as though they were involved in a game whose stakes have suddenly become terribly high, or else they become more voluble and conversationally dominant and begin to tell a great many jokes, and in general appear deliberately unself-conscious, whereas before Meredith Rand had arrived and pulled up a chair and joined the group there was no real sense of deliberateness or even self-consciousness among them. Female examiners, in turn, react to these changes in a variety of ways, some receding and becoming visually smaller (like Enid Welch and Rachel Robbie Towne), others regarding Meredith Rand’s effect on men with a sort of dark amusement, still others becoming narrow-eyed and prone to hostile sighs or even pointed departures (q.v. Harriet Candelaria). Some of the male examiners are, by the second round of pitchers, performing for Meredith Rand, even if the performance’s core consists of making a complex show of the fact that they are not performing for Meredith Rand or even especially aware that she’s at the table. Bob McKenzie, in particular, becomes almost manic, addressing nearly every comment or quip to the person on either the right or left side of Meredith Rand, but never once addressing her or appearing even to look at her. Since Beth Rath is usually one of the people on either the right or left side of Meredith Rand, McKenzie’s habit of doing this tends visibly to either annoy or depress Rath, depending on her mood.