Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“You fuckin’ scrogged ’im, you cheap-ass son of a bitch,” the hatchet-faced woman shouts from up on her bar stool above us, frowning down at Bob and me as if we were insects she’d been interested in. “Fight fair, fucker.” She decides to toss her drink at me and does. The glass, which has gin in it, hits my shoulder, but most of its contents hit Bob, who’s grimacing, with my elbow point — excruciatingly, I hope — nailed into his sternum.

“All right, all right, all right,” Lester says behind the bar, as if he couldn’t really give a shit what the hell’s going on but is bored by it, his spoiled, impassive shoe-salesman’s mug and his green plastic bow tie — relic of some desolate Saint Paddy’s day — just visible to me beyond the bar rail.

“All right what ?” I’m holding Bob at elbow point. “Are you going to keep this shit bucket from strangling me, or am I going to have to rough him up?” Bob makes another gratifying “ Eeeeeuh-uh-oh, ” whose exhalation is foul enough that I have to get away from him, my heart finally beginning to whump.

“Let ’im get up,” Lester says, as though Bob was his problem now.

Bob’s blond accomplice hauls a big shiny-black purse off the floor beside her. “I’ll get ’im home, the dipshit,” she says. The two other bar-stool occupants look at me and Bob as if we were a show on TV. On the real TV, Bush’s grinning, smirking, depthless face is visible, talking soundlessly, arms held away from his sides as if he was hiding tennis balls in his armpits. Other humans are visible around him, well-dressed, smooth-coifed, shiny-faced young men holding paper plates and eating barbecue, laughing and being amused to death by whatever their candidate’s saying.

Using the bar stool, I raise myself from where I’ve straddled Bob Butts, and feel instantly light-headed, weak-armed, heavy-legged, in peril of falling back over on top of Bob and expiring. I gawk at Lester, who’s taking away my martini glass and scowling at me while Bob’s lady friend pulls him, wallowing, off the floor. She squats beside me, her scrawny knees bowed out, her skirt opened, so that I unmercifully see her thighs encased in black panty hose, and the bright white crotch patch of her undies. I avert my eyes to the floor, and see that my night guard has fallen out of my pocket in the tussle and been crunched in three pieces under the bar rail. It makes me feel helpless, then I scrape the pieces away with my heel. Gone.

Bob is up but bent at the waist, clutching his injured testicles. He’s missing one of his Keds, and his ugly yellow toenails are gripping the floor. His hair’s mussed, his fatty face blotched red and white, his eyes hollowed and mean and full of defeated despisal. He glares at me, though he’s had enough. I’m sure he’d love to spit out one more vicious “Cocksucker,” except he knows I’d kick his cogs again and enjoy doing it. In fact, I’d be glad to. We stand a moment loathing each other, all my parts — hands, thighs, shoulders, scratched neck, ankles, everything but my own nuts — aching as if I’d fallen out a window. Nothing occurs to me as worth saying. Bob Butts was better as a lowlife, floral failure and former back-room lady-killer than as a vanquished enemy, since enemy-hood confers on him a teaspoon of undeserved dignity. It was also better when this was a homey town and a bar I used to dream sweet dreams in. Both also gone. Kaput. On some human plain that doesn’t exist anymore, now would be a perfect moment and place from which to start an unusual friendship of opposites. But all prospects for that are missing.

I turn to Lester, who I hate for no other reason than that I can, and because he takes responsibility for no part of life’s tragedy. “What do I owe you?”

“Five,” he snaps.

I have the bat-hide already in hand, my fingers scuffed and sticky from my busted knuckles. My knees are shimmying, though fortunately no one can see. I give a thought to collecting up my shattered night guard pieces, then forget it.

“Did you used to live here?” Lester says distastefully.

This, atop all else, does shock me. More than that, it disgusts me. Possibly I don’t look exactly as I looked when I busted my ass to flog Lester’s old mama’s duplex in a can’t-miss ’89 seller’s market — a sale that could’ve sprung Lester all the way to Sun City, and into a cute pastel cinder-block, red-awninged match box with a mountain view, plus plenty left over for an Airstream and a decent wardrobe in which to pitch sleazy woo to heat-baked widows. A better life. But I am the same, and fuck-face Lester needs to be reminded.

“Yeah, I lived here,” I growl. “I sold your mother’s house. Except you were too much of a mamma’s-boy asshole to part with it. Guess you couldn’t bear leaving your leprechaun tie.”

Lester looks at me in an interested way, as if he’d muted me but my lips are still moving. He rests his cadaver hands on the glass rail, where there’s a moist red rubber drying mat. Lester doesn’t actually look much different from Johnny Appleseed, which may be why the August Inn people (a hospitality consortium based in Cleveland) keep him on. He still wears, I see, his big gold knuckle-buster Haddam HS ring. (My son refused his.) “Whatever,” Lester says, then turns down the pasty corners of his mouth in disdain.

I’d like to utter something toxic enough to get through even Lester’s soul-deep nullity. The least spark of anger might earn me the pleasure of kicking his ass, too. Only I don’t know what to say. The two Trenton Times delivery goons are frowning at me with small, curious menace. Possibly I have morphed into something not so good in their view, someone different from who they thought I was. No longer the invisible, ignorable, pathetic drip, but a rude intruder threatening to take too much attention away from their interests and crap on their evening. They might have to “deal” with me just for convenience sake.

Bob Butts and his harridan lady friend are exiting the bar by way of the stairs up to Hulfish Street. “ Naaaa, leave off, you asshole,” I hear the old blondie growl.

“This fuckin’ stinks,” Bob growls back.

“ You stink is what,” she says, continuing with difficulty, one leaning on the other, up toward the cold outdoors, the heavy door going click shut behind them.

I stare a moment, transfixed by the bright apple-tinted Disneyish mural of clodhopper Johnny, straddling his plug bass-ackwards, saucepan on top, dribbling his seed across Ohio. These bars are probably a chain, the mural computer-generated. Another one just like this one may exist in Dayton.

I unexpectedly feel a gravity-less melancholy in the bar, in spite of victory over Bob Butts. In the ponderous quiet, with the Sanyo showing leather-fleshed Floridians at long tables, examining punch-card ballots as if they were chest X rays, Lester looks like a pallid old ex-contract killer considering a comeback. His two customers may be associates — silent down-staters handy with chain saws, butcher’s utensils and Sakrete. It’s still New Jersey here. These people call it home. It might be time to wait for Mike outside.

“Ain’t you Bascombe somethin’?” One of the toughs frowns down the bar at me. It’s the farther away one, seated next to the shot-glass rack, a round, barrel-chested, ham-armed smudge pot with a smaller than standard hat size. His face has a close-clipped beard, but his cranium is shaved shiny. He looks Russian and is therefore almost certainly Italian. He produces a short unfiltered cigarette (which Boro regulations profoundly forbid the smoking of), lights it with a little yellow Bic and exhales smoke in the direction of Lester, who’s rummaging through the cash drawer. I would willingly forswear all knowledge of any Bascombe; be instead Parker B. Farnsworth, retired out of the Bureau — Organized Crime Division — but still on call for undercover duties where an operative needs to look like a real estate agent. However, I’ve blown my cover over Lester’s mother’s house. I feel endangered, but see no way free except to fake going insane and run up the stairs screaming.