Andrew Neiderman - Deficiency

It wasn't Curt.

It was Clark Kent.

Darlene Stone lifted the glass of beer up and swiped under it with her bar-top rag. Jimmy Hummel not only had spilled more than half of his glass, he dropped half his roll-your-own cigarette tobacco into the puddle of foam, and if there was one thing that Darlene couldn't stand, it was a messy bar counter when she was working the Old Hasbrouck Inn. It was her five nights a week job to support herself and her two children and compensate for marrying and divorcing Jack Stone, poster boy for deadbeat dads.

"Can't you watch what the hell you're doin'?" she snapped at Jimmy. "I don't need extra work."

The forty-nine-year-old mechanic raised his untrimmed, bushy eyebrows under the heavy folds of rust-spotted skin hanging on his forehead and wiped his thick, bruised lips with the back of his grease-and oil-laden hand. His lower lip was still bruised from the ten-second fight he had with Charlie Weinberg in the parking lot three days ago. The 240-pound hotel chef barely had extended his Popeye-like arm, but it was enough to catch Jimmy in the middle of another insult, driving him back into the front entrance and cracking the window pane with Jimmy's balding head. He shuddered and then slid down to a sitting position. It brought the whole crowd of barflies to the doorway where they teased Jimmy and gave reviews of the short-lived event that at least added some iota of excitement to their otherwise routine existence.

At least, that was the way Darlene thought of it. The truth was she had little or no respect for any of the inn's regular customers. They were almost all blue collar laborers who alternated unemployment checks with temporary work projects. To Darlene most of them were monotonous, boring, and uninspired people who had almost no ambition. Their sole objective seemed to be to meet the week's basic needs and have money to piss away at a place like the Old Hasbrouck Inn.

Tonight, a weekend evening, they had a local trio to entertain them, two men and a woman who called themselves the Outlaws. The woman, Paula Gilbert, was only twenty-four. Darlene knew this for a fact because she knew Paula from her high school days at Tri-Valley. She was in the ninth grade when Darlene was a senior. However, Paula looked like a woman in her forties. More than fourteen years of smoking gave her a hard, dark complexion, especially around her eyes. She wasn't really overweight, but her body was already shifting, putting more than it had to into her thighs and around her waist. Her once button nose, soft mouth, and crystal turquoise-green eyes framed in long auburn hair could no longer provide that innocent, sweetness to compensate for her usedfurniture look. Her voice was throaty, hoarse at times, and the whiskey and drugs she used to keep herself going were stapling shadows into her face. However, there was still just enough sexiness about her, most of it hovering in the well-exposed cleavage of her Dolly Parton bosom, to keep the goats and monkeys howling when she turned a shoulder or batted her eyelashes. Someone somewhere taught her how to work the microphone stand in a suggestive manner, too, and that was really what gave the Outlaws its cachet, for the voices of the two men, Jack Dawkins and Tag Counsel, were just a shade more than ordinary, as was their guitar, harmonica, and electric keyboard playing.

"Who the hell are you to tell me what I should watch and what I shouldn't?" Jimmy snapped back at Darlene. "I pay for everything I spill, don't I?"

"I doubt she was hired to clean up after you," the new customer, a total stranger, commented as he slid effortlessly onto the bar stool beside Jimmy. How such a handsome, strikingly good-looking man had come into the inn without Darlene noticing immediately confused her for a moment. He seemed to have just materialized. She stood there like a star-struck teenager, her mouth half open, and stared. He smiled in return, friendly, full of sincerity, a diamond sitting in rock salt.

"Huh? Who the hell are you?" Jimmy said, breaking the magical moment.

"Shut up," she told him, "or get out."

"Hey!" he moaned.

There was enough noise from the music and the chatter around them to keep most people from hearing the exchange.

"Don't pay him any attention," she said to the stranger. "What can I get for you?"

With his beautiful blue eyes, he panned the whiskey and hard liquor display behind her. She just continued to stare at him. Someone shouted for a beer down the bar, but she didn't move. He shouted again.

"Hold your water!" she screamed back. "I have another customer here."

"Well, what's he doin', givin' birth?"

There was some laughter.

Darlene smirked.

"Sorry," she said in as soft a voice as she could manage. "What did you want?"

"I'll take that Jack Daniel's on the rocks, thanks," he said nodding.

"And I'll have another beer," Jimmy said belligerently. Darlene scowled at him, turned, and got the Jack Daniel's.

"I'm dying of thirst down here," the man at the end of the counter cried.

"You're dying of more than thirst," Darlene yelled back and there was more laughter.

She found the cleanest, nicest glass and dropped in some ice cubes. Then she poured a good shot of Jack Daniel's and, with a coaster under it, she put it on the bar in front of the stranger.

"How come I don't get no coaster with my beer?" Jimmy whined when she put the bottle down hard in front of him. "I spend a lot more money here than this guy's gonna spend."

"Why would a man your age be such a pussy?" the stranger asked him. He turned, leaned toward him, and considered him the way someone might consider a contradiction.

Jimmy's eyes nearly bulged with rage. He swung his arm around to push the stranger back threateningly, but the stranger caught his hand in midair and held it there with such little effort, Jimmy felt a surge of absolute terror shoot up his spine. Even Charlie Weinberg didn't have this sort of power. He relaxed, expecting the man to release his hand, but he didn't. He squeezed it harder, the pain surging down his wrist and into his elbow.

He groaned.

"Why don't you go to the bathroom and wash your face? You're turning my stomach, and you're surely bothering our bartender," the stranger told him, his eyes not shifting, the intensity of them burning a hole in Jimmy's head. Then he released Jimmy's hand.

He looked at his reddened palm, up at the stranger, and slipped off his stool.

"Thanks," Darlene said. "I wanted to do something like that all night. Actually, all year."

"No problem."

"Hey, already!" the man at the end screamed. He held out his hands, palms up. Darlene excused herself, poured a new draft beer, and brought it down to the end of the bar. She collected the money and hurried back as if she was afraid the stranger would get up and go before she had returned.

He sat there, comfortably, smiling at her and then turning to look at Paula. Darlene saw the way he concentrated on the singer and inexplicably, she felt a wave of jealousy roll through her.

"She used to be good," she said.

"Oh?" he turned and smiled again.

"Drugs, alcohol, you know. She might have gone somewhere. Who knows?"

"She got here," he said.

Darlene laughed.

"Here? Here is nowhere."

"Is that what you think?" he asked, sounding surprised. He looked around the old tavern. The building was nearly two hundred years old. Sections had been added on over the years until it had the dance floor, the modernized kitchen, the upstairs apartments, and the expanded storage and refrigeration room in the rear. It had a fieldstone foundation and had been built at what was once the crossroads of two old pioneer trails that had been turned into county highways. Behind it ran a creek that trailed off the Neversink river, now controlled by a dam that provided drinking water to New York City.