Alice McDermott - After This

On a night of cold rain turning to sleet late in October, Ralph put an elbow on the bar and slipped his hand under the long blond hair of a girl Michael knew-Caroline. He leaned toward her and she, stepping up on the bar rail, all graceful and delicate in muddy construction boots and blue jeans and an army surplus parka, leaned toward him. They kissed, just briefly, before she stepped back and raised her plastic cup of beer. Ralph lifted his cigarette from the edge of the bar and said, through the smoke, “You guys want to pour for a while tonight?”

He never paid anyone for working but he was generous with free drinks for those who did. Michael turned to the guy beside him to see if he was game. The kid looked blanched. Michael didn’t know him very well. A transfer from Nassau Community, he was observing at the same middle school where Michael was teaching social studies that semester. Michael had introduced him to Damien’s at the beginning of the year and now the kid followed him to the place after school as a matter of course. He was a surfer and didn’t much like the upstate weather, but, Michael thought, a nice enough guy, a little doe-eyed and baby-faced-you’d put him closer to fifteen than twenty-and a heavy but inept drinker, which was the first thing he thought of when he saw the kid’s bleached lips. But then he saw the way he looked down the bar at Caroline.

Michael had passed around a bag of miniature Hershey bars in his class that afternoon, in honor of Halloween, but a lot of the kids had refused to take one-because of their acne or their efforts to be cooler than the student teacher, he couldn’t tell-so he’d brought the extras into Damien’s. He took one now and slid it down the bar to Caroline, who turned as it bumped her elbow. She had one of those wide, clean faces that seem ordinary only on first glance, and beautiful hair. The girls he lived with filled their off-campus firetrap with the smell of hot rollers and singed scalp, but Caroline still wore her hair perfectly straight and nearly waist long. She picked up the candy bar and once again stepped up on the bar rail, leaning to see who had sent it.

“Trick or treat,” Michael told her. There were probably half a dozen backs and elbows and reaching arms in the short space between them, so he leaned forward and said, “Come here for a minute.”

He saw her glance at Ralph before she stepped down again and made her way through the crowd. He could see her smiling as she squeezed through, knowing everyone, having a fine night at Damien’s. She pushed through the crowd, flushed and grinning. She put her hand on his shoulder and he put his to the back of her head, just to feel the heavy silk. It was, he understood, why he’d called her over in the first place.

“You know my buddy here?” Michael asked her because he had momentarily forgotten the kid’s name.

But she shifted her hips a little and dropped her eyes for just a second before she said, “Hi, Terry.”

And Terry looked casually away from her, sipping his beer all nonchalant to say, “How’s it going?”

The crowd pushed her closer and Michael took the opportunity to slip his arm beneath her parka and around her slim waist. “How do you know this lowlife?” he said.

Terry was still looking straight ahead, his right leg jiggling.

“High school,” Caroline said. “We went to Valley Stream Central together.” She smiled at his averted face. There was something regal about her although she was not tall. She shook her hair, brushed some stray electrostatic strands of it off her cheek. The gray fake fur that edged her hood could have been ermine. “We ran into each other his first week here,” she said primly. “When he was thinking about going back home, he was so lonely.” She pouted a little, imitating his loneliness. “I tried to make him feel better,” intimating with her smile a certain benevolence bestowed, back when he was so lonely.

Terry glanced at her from over his shoulder, his color restored.

“Fuck you,” he said.

“Nice mouth,” Michael told him even as Caroline sighed and slowly shook her head. “He does it even quicker than he says it,” she said. A few people around them laughed. Charlie Hegi, who was reaching for the bag of Hershey bars, said, “Zing.”

Now Ralph was in front of them, a bottle of tequila in one hand and four shot glasses in the other. “Play nice, children,” he said. Terry swung off the bar stool and immediately someone else took his place. A big guy, made bigger by his long doughboy coat. Bad skin and short arms and a ponytail that smelled unwashed. Bean was what they called him. He seemed to expand to fit whatever space was left for him, bellying up. “Hey, Ralph,” he said, with that false belligerence guys like Bean substituted for wit. “Where the fuck are your decorations? It’s Halloween, man.”

Ralph shook his head. “Don’t need them,” he said. He lifted Bean’s cup out of his hand, refilled it. Handing it back, he added, “They don’t make decorations as ugly as some of you assholes.” And then, leaning forward, “You know what this place used to be, man?” He bared his teeth, a kind of smile. “This place used to be a fucking funeral parlor, man.”

Bean took this in for a second, narrowing his small eyes, and then said, “Bullshit.”

“The trapdoor in the garage is casket-size,” Ralph went on. “Go look.” He gestured toward the center of the room, toward the jukebox and the bulk of the crowd. “From the turn of the century to the forties,” he said. “One dead body after the other laid out right here. This place has so many ghosts I can’t sleep at night. You want me to put up decorations?”

“Yeah, man,” Bean said, none of it sinking in. “It’s Halloween.” But the chubby girl who had edged in beside him, Debbie, held out her empty plastic cup and said, “You told me this used to be a speakeasy.”

Ralph took her cup and filled it, shaking his head like he was the weary professor and she some dumb-ass student who hadn’t done the reading. “My grandfather was the undertaker,” he said patiently, “but my father was the bootlegger.” He handed her the cup, took her dollar. His earring caught some light. “During Prohibition,” he said, and then looked at Bean. “You know what Prohibition is?” and Bean said, “Shit, yeah. I’m a fucking history major.”

“Yeah, well,” Ralph said. He slapped the dollar into the register. “During Prohibition,” he said, “my father had something going with some Mafia guys to ship booze from Canada-in coffins. Most of it went downstate but my dad kept enough of it to get a little side business going with a speakeasy-you know what that is, Bean?” And Bean, who had a mouthful of beer, swallowed it before he nodded. “They served the stuff right next to the stiffs,” Ralph said. “I kid you not. My grandfather would stuff ‘em and truss ‘em and then as soon as the last mourner left, my father would bring in his customers and get them stiff, too. His biggest challenge, he said, was keeping the cigarette butts out of the coffins. One time he came down here in the morning, just as the dead guy’s family was coming in to close him up for good, and, holy shit, he sees the corpse has a shot glass on his forehead.”

Ralph plucked a few empty cups out of hands and refilled them, collected his money. “This is a fucking funeral parlor,” he said, his arms outspread. “What do I need Halloween decorations for?”

“It’s not anymore,” Bean said, but uncertainly.

Ralph shrugged. He’d grown tired of the subject.

And then he looked at Caroline, who turned on her smile the way you flick on a lamp. Michael had driven home with her once, Thanksgiving vacation, a whole carload of them. She lived in a split-level, the shingled part painted pink. There was a saint in a stone grotto between some bushes, a boat on cinder blocks in the driveway, and her mother already waiting for her behind the aluminum-and-glass storm door. Someone had made a joke about Mom radar.