Richard Ford - Women with Men

Barney motioned to the bartender, who was a very small, thin girl who looked like she might be a Chinese too. She poured Barney a glass of red wine out of a bottle on the back bar, then picked a dollar out of the pile in front of him.

“Oh, choose one, God damn it, Lawrence,” Doris said suddenly and glared at me. “I'm tired of fucking around with you. I wish I'd left you at home.”

“Cold,” I said.

“Cold?” Doris looked stunned. “Is that what you said? Cold?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Did you hear that, Benny?” Doris said to Barney.

Barney looked up at me from his glass of wine and said, “Don't let her confuse you. I been there before.”

“Cold isn't one,” Doris said in an aggravated way. “Try to be smart.”

“Brave, then,” I said. “I mean, bravery.”

“All right, then.” Doris picked up her glass without drinking. Only ice was left in it. She sat for a few seconds without saying anything, as if she was thinking about something else. “What have you been so brave about?” she said, and turned the glass up to her nose.

Barney leaned over and whispered something in her ear, which Doris ignored.

“Nothing,” I said.

“It's an abstraction to you, then,” she said. “Is that it?”

“Mutts fuck mutts,” Barney said, and he said it seriously and to me. He suddenly grabbed my arm tight and high above the muscle. “When I get back, Lawrence, I'll show you what I mean.” He pulled himself off the stool, using my arm, and started toward the dark end of the room, where the rest-room hallway was and where the man was still talking on the pay phone. He didn't walk steadily at all, and when he got to the entrance of the hallway he held the corner of the wall and turned and looked at us. “Don't confuse love with pain, you two,” he said, and he stood for a moment, staring in our direction. I noticed his silver belt buckle was pushed off to the side in a way I'd seen some men do. Then he just disappeared down the little hall.

“Don't confuse me with your wife,” Doris said loudly, then motioned for another drink. “All boats seek a place to sink is what I believe.” And I stood closer to the bar, wanting to think of a way to get her to leave and wondering what Barney was going to show me when he came back. “I told him Esther was my given name,” Doris said in a whisper. “It's my least favorite name. But it's biblical, and Indians are all so religious, he likes it. He's pathetic, but he's a hoot.”

Doris was staring at a door behind the bar. There was a little circular glass window in the door, like a kitchen door in a restaurant. A man's large white face was in the window, looking all around inside the bar from the back room. The man had on a big hat you could see part of the brim of. “Look at that,” Doris said. She was staring right at the window, and the man's face was staring right at her. “What party is he looking for, do you suppose?”

The face was there another moment, then went away. But slowly the door opened and the man we'd just seen, with another one right behind him in the dark, looked out into the bar. He had on a sheriff's uniform. He looked one way and then the other. He was holding a big silver pistol with a long barrel out in front of him, and was wearing a heavy coat with a badge, and heavy rubber boots with his pants tucked in the tops. The man behind him was a sheriff too, though he was younger and didn't look much older than I was. He had a short-barrel shotgun he was holding with two hands and high in front of him, with the barrel pointed up.

Neither one of the men said anything. They just stepped slowly into the room, looking around as if they expected to be surprised by something. The little bartender saw them and went completely still, staring at them. And so did Doris and I. I heard one of the two or three Indians in the other part of the room say, “This machine loves me.” Then I heard the front door of the bar push open and felt cold air flood in. There were three more deputies outside, all wearing hats and heavy coats, all carrying short-barrel shotguns. None of the men looked at me or at Doris. They looked at all the Indians, then around the room at each other, and suddenly they seemed nervous, as if they didn't know what was about to happen.

One of the men — I didn't know which — said, “I don't see him, Neal, do you?”

The man with the pistol said, “Look in the bathroom.”

And then Doris, for no reason at all, said, “Barney's in the bathroom.” She pointed at where Barney had gone a few moments before.

And immediately, as if that had been their signal, two of the deputies at the front door moved across the room on their tiptoes to the head of the little dark hallway where the pay phone and the rest-room door were. One deputy grabbed the man who had been talking on the phone but had stopped talking and was just standing, holding the receiver at his side, and pushed him out of the way. Both deputies got on either side of the hallway entrance and pointed their shotguns down toward where I guessed the rest-room door was. And then the two other deputies started whispering to us and motioning with their shotguns. “Get down on the floor, get down on the floor no w !” they said.

And we all did, all of us. I got on my belly and put my cheek on the wet floorboards and held my breath. Doris got down beside me. I could hear her breathing through her nose. She made a grunting noise, and she grabbed my hand. Her glasses had come off and were lying on the floor, but she didn't say anything. Her eyes were shut, and I pulled myself close to her and put my arm over her, though I didn't see how I could protect her if something bad happened.

Then someone, and it must've been the man with the pistol, shouted in the loudest voice I'd ever heard, “Barney. God damn it. Come out of the bathroom. It's Neal Reiskamp. It's the sheriff. I've got people out here with guns. So just come on out. You can't get away from me.”

The deputy who was closest to me moved quickly, almost jumped, over to where he could get behind the two in the doorway, and he pointed his shotgun into the hallway too.

“Give me some light,” the man who was the sheriff shouted. “I can't see anything down there.”

Another deputy ran out the front door. It had been standing open, with cold and snow blowing in. I heard his boots on the snow, then the sound of a car door opening. I didn't want to look up, but I could hear feet shifting and scuffling on the floor. The wood was hard against my cheek, and I tightened my arm around Doris until she made another little grunting noise, but didn't open her eyes. The rotating beer sign over the jukebox flashed little stars across the floor.

There were no sounds from Barney in the bathroom. And I wondered if he was even in there, or if he'd gone out a window or out another door, or even — and this felt like a dream I was dreaming — if he might've gone up through a trapdoor in the ceiling and into the attic and was on the floor above us all, in some deserted room in the dark, pacing around, trying to decide what to do, how to escape, how to come out of this in good shape. I even thought about his wife, about her being robbed of her money and her rings. Then I heard a noise like more feet scuffling, and the sound of something or somebody beating on something, a wall maybe. The deputy who'd gone outside ran back in with a long black flashlight.

“Shine the son of a bitch down there,” the sheriff said. “No. Up. Up more, God damn it.” The pounding kept going on somewhere. Bang, bang. First it sounded like metal, and then I heard glass break. Then more banging. “Barney!” the sheriff yelled very loud. “Barney!” The banging kept on. The little bartender, who must've been on the floor behind the bar, began to make a high-pitched sound— eeee, eeee, like that. I thought the banging had made her afraid, because it was making me afraid. I could feel my jaw closed tight, and both my fists were clenched. There was more of it — bang, bang, bang — and then I looked up and saw that the two deputies were still pointing their shotguns down the hallway at what I still couldn't see. Their legs were spread way apart, and the man with the flashlight was squatting behind them, shining his light between one man's legs.