Jack O'Connell - Box Nine

Ike passes them by like they were phone poles or parking meters. They’re all in mid-spiel about something, speaking in a throaty whisper, preaching a gospel of detached weirdness, a speedy-Zen commentary on the constant irony of this world. And as he passes, Ike wonders if he listened, would he hear a continuous story, a coherent patter carried from beacon to beacon, one mouth picking up the tale as the last one leaves off? Maybe they’re all part of some modern guild, a vocation filled with mentors and apprentices, fathers and sons, passing down, intact, the difficult art of hyperesoteric mumbling, idiosyncratic, stoned to the gills, living Burma Shave billboards, one-man Greek choruses, clad in last year’s suit and working in the new medium of insinuation and gesture.

They come in both sexes. They perpetually leer, like they’ve just heard a joke that Ike wouldn’t understand. Their hands move like first-base coaches, touching themselves on the arm, neck, behind, groin, forehead, mouth, lighting for barely a second and moving onto another body part. Their heads twitch in a countermeasure to the movement of their eyes. They all seem to have studied ventriloquism at one time in the foggy past. Their mouths don’t seem to move in relation to the volume of words that erupt into the air around their shoulders. They give Ike the creeps and he hurries down the street, eyes focused on the pavement, head hunched in toward his shoulders.

Between the growing cold and the Zone hipsters, he feels a need to get off the street for a while. Ahead, he sees a green and orange neon sign suspended out over the sidewalk. It reads “Bella C’s.” He does a quick shuffle toward the place, tries to look in the window, but it’s obscured by a handmade poster taped to the glass that shows a crude picture of a sailboat and what Ike guesses, from the stick-figure palm tree, is a desert island. Underneath the drawing are the words:

Bella C Presents

Tonight Only

“Shake-It-Up in the Zone”

A Jolly Rotten Players Production of

The Big Storm Story

tix inside/3 drnk min.

Before he can think, Ike pulls open the door and steps into the dark.

He stands in the doorway while his eyes begin to adjust. The bar has a big, open feeling to it, like there’s more to it than can be seen, a back section for banquets and private functions that runs on forever. The immediate barroom has a gutted feeling, like partitioning walls were once knocked down to make some more space for swelling crowds.

But there are no crowds here tonight. The room is empty except for a large old woman behind the bar, a thin cigar wedged just barely into her mouth. The curls of smoke obscure her face, but as Ike moves closer to take a stool, he can make out features. There’s a huge pinkish boil bubbling out on the left side of her jaw. Her hair is pulled tight and high on her head and pinned into a severe bun. She looks slightly simian, large-eyed, long-jawed. Her ears wing out from her head and stray wisps of dyed-orangey red hair shoot out among them like they were failed efforts at trying to wire the ears back to the skull. She’s dressed in what Ike’s mother would have called a housecoat. Looking closer, he sees it’s covered in this odd print of tiny tongues, something like the old Rolling Stones logo, but smaller, more common, less caricatured. Ike thinks her housecoat is one of those instances of someone reaching too far for a joke. The comic’s version of the law of diminishing returns.

The woman is intent on the crossword puzzle from today’s Spy. She hunches over the paper, removes the cigar from her mouth, inserts a stubby pencil, sideways like a horse’s bite. She’s kneading her forehead with her fingers as if the action will cause synonyms to form in her brain.

“I’ll have a beer,” Ike says, and his voice comes out too high.

The woman ignores him.

He waits a full minute and says, “Ma’am, a beer, please.”

She sighs, takes the pencil from her mouth, and says, “I can’t hear you,” in a standard, singsong, child’s tone.

Ike looks around the bar and back at the door. “Are you closed?” he asks. “The door was open and the sign was on, so I came in. Is that the story? You closed?”

“Can’t hear a word,” she says in the same maddening lilt.

“You’re asking me to leave,” Ike says. “You want me to go?”

“Levi’s,” she barks, the word sputtering out of her mouth. “L-E-V–I-S. Type of blue jean. Levi’s. That right? You’d say so?”

“Does it fit?” Ike asks.

She gives him a spastic little nod. Her mouth falls open and he sees what few teeth she has are caramel brown. She writes in the word, places the pencil behind an ear, and slides the paper under the bar. Then she grabs a mug from a back shelf and pulls Ike a beer.

“Can’t talk when I’m doing the puzzle,” she says. “Everyone knows they have to wait until I finish the puzzle.”

“Sounds fair,” Ike says, taking the mug and digging into his pocket for some bills. He lays them on the bar to indicate that she can run a tab, that he’ll be here a while, but she snaps up one of the bills and rings it into the ancient cash register at the end of the bar.

“I’m Bella,” she calls down to him. “The original.”

“Hello, Bella,” Ike says, trying for his friendliest voice. “I’m Ike.”

“I’ve never seen you in here before, Ike. I don’t know many of the names, but something about most of the regulars sticks out. A shaved head or half a shaved head. Or a tattoo. Everybody’s got a tattoo today, you ever notice that? They’ve made a real comeback. My husband had tattoos. He was a sailor. Most sailors get a tattoo, you know. That’s the business we should have gone into. Everyone wants to be marked up today.”

“I’m not a regular,” Ike says. “I’m not from this part of town. I’m just out walking.”

“Nobody walks anymore. There’s the difference. Everybody wants to get marked up, and nobody wants to walk anymore. They all sit and look at the tattoos.”

“I guess,” Ike says, and starts in on the beer. He’s starting to like the place. As weird as Bella is, he feels something maternal off her. Her place is starting to relax him. He wishes he had brought a mystery book and could settle in for a while.

“You come down here for the show?” Bella asks, walking back toward him as she mops the bartop with a rag. “It’s four bucks. And that’s on top of the three-drink minimum.”

“Yeah,” Ike says, “I saw the poster in the window. What’s the story on that?”

“The story,” Bella says, leaning in over the bar, pressing her chest down on her arms, lowering her voice conspiratorially, “is two bucks for Bella. Before we agreed, one of the little bastards says, ‘But you get to see the play for free.’ I almost spit in the little shit’s eye. Now they don’t let him do any of the talking. And they pay Bella her fifty percent gross.”

“This would be the theater company. The Jolly Rotten Players.”

“Is that an idiot name or what?”

“It’s got a ring. It’s got something.”

“A ring. Sheesh. I know what you expect. You expect me to be an understanding little old bitch under the skin, right? You expect me to say, ‘You know, Ike, under all the green hair and skull tattoos and leather and chains and drugs and sneering, they’re really good kids, just kids after all.’” She throws a hand out from her side like she was swatting away some invisible insect. “Well, that’s not Bella and that’s not them. They’re exactly the little shits they seem to be.”

Ike shrugs. “So why let them use your place?”

“Bella’s was here a long time before these little bastards were even born. You’re from the city, then you know business down here had some rough years. We were hand-to-mouth now and again. Then Archie has the heart attack and I’m all alone. I had license problems. I had break-ins. You’re too young to remember the riots down here.”