Mister
A cold and dark knife edge of a gust skirted a two-way pavement and across to an endless horizon of sallow grass fields. The few hours of true night between twelve and the bruising sky of dawn where there was a pervasive, present silence and lunar shading that fell stagnant on all things save one. A man walking the road, no purpose to his travel. Where he had been as unknown as his tomorrow. He happened upon a bar, a dive middle in all the vacancy. It should have been abandoned and by then would have were it not for a last few reprobate guests, their trucks resting long on the gravel as though they were growths symbiotic to the mortar. A single street lamp hung low with its trunk misshapen with collages of nails and tears of paper ingrown in the rotting wood and its jaundiced light dampened neon catcalls for alcohol consumption. OPEN. The brightest beacon in that lonesome square of an earth he hadn't yet been acquainted with.
He stopped, turned, studied its face. Gaudy luminescent tubes bending about foreign monuments and bars on the windows like a prison he once visited, though he couldn't remember when. He passed through the door and took his seat at a round table sequestered to the left where the cigarette smoke drifted a miasma and he was there a barely seen interloper amongst strangers. The bartender, stout and hirsute. He kept a revolver underneath the counter and his ears were tuned to the inane yammering of the patrons, only two left hunching on the bar stools deep in their caps and their mugs. They didn't notice him for a while, longer than what would have been normal even for that time of night.
With his grubby decorum the bartender called to the man, asking him of his drink. Nothing. He called again, louder. By then the two guests had dimmed their conversation and turned heed toward the man. His burying hair and his disparate attire. He wore blue jeans, that much they could see. And a maroon hooded jacket beneath a black overcoat wide in the lapel. Bum clothes, likely stolen. Traveled and lived in for long nights sleeping in allies and the backs of freezing cars. Unwashed like his skin and stinking. There were trenches of dirt curving under his eye sockets and above his brow and they matched the rut of his face that was like butcher paper wrapped over a plaster skull, wrinkled and gaunt underneath his beard. A pointed rat snout of a beard coiled with gray wires hanging from his chin and his lips and sprawled out on sunken cheeks with patches of varying lengths. At his crown was an explosion of filth and mange that curled about the sides and sloped down concealing better features. His age was imperceptible.
He finally spoke a mutter of few truncated syllables chewed moist out the side of a toothless fissure. The bartender could only halfway parse the grunt but he didn't ask again and he poured for him a cheap glass that he bothered to hand over to the table. Set on a flattened and deteriorated coaster. "You got money?"
The man's straw fingers went inside his coat and rustled and searched til he fished out a wad of derelict bills. He looked at the wad and slowly the talons protruding from his cut up gloves wrapped like wool gauze separated the individual papers. "Just give me five." A crumpled bill he raised with two fingers lifted laboriously, his aim never raising higher than the table's end. With the exchange taken the bartender returned to his post. The other two kept on the man. Barely a man at all. An itinerant estate so overgrown and inward it shrugged off its own humanity. One started speaking. He knew already what would happen but he was drunk and loud so he asked anyway. "Hey. Hey, mister. Whass your name? Tell me your name."
Not even a gesture.
"What's yer name? Ya hear me? Just wanna know who you are is all."
":Leave em be."
"Look, I'll tell you my name. My name's Hank. Ya hear that?"
The man twisted his head an inch.
"Let the man drink, okay."
"I'm just talkin. Look, he likes it. He's smiling."
He was not smiling.
"Hey, where'd ya get that money huh?"
"Come on."
"No, thiss is important. Didja steal that money? Be honest now."
The man took hold of his mug and his attention was on it alone.
"I'mma working man, see." He hesitated. At some point he had stood and was lunging toward the distant table. He looked down. His boots and the lacerated, sticky floor. He was tired. What was he saying? Color bled from one filament to the next and behind his temples were soggy daubs of cotton. He remembered, the filthy lecher. It was important and he prepared the diatribe again and raised his head. But the man was standing now. Standing and nearer. To the right the bartender was frozen, mouth agape and hands clenched mechanical. In an instant he would be gone and the man would be nearer still. No sound made by the lurch apparent and he stepped back and hit the now vacant stool behind him and fell on his backside, mug still clutched but emptied. Terror. He tried to shout but there were no words to be uttered nor anyone to hear them and the lights were dimming and the sirens cawing and the structures he had held close were dissolving from inside as though they were specters hallucinatory and fluid and the man was standing before him, his whole face like an ogling maelstrom where the stars bent and swiveled and there was shaking and drooling and at the end he closed his eyes and then was gone.
When the man left he didn't shut the door. No one was inside to care or notice. He passed by trucks whose keys would not be found nor their owners. They were not there. Not dead, not missing. Away. Taken by the cold wind never to be retrieved. In time even the memory of their lives would drift and it would be as though they were never there at all and the roof would bow and the foundation crumble. As he passed the signs shuttered and faltered and further on the light was erased entirely and the moon laid claim again to the elongated columns of shadow reaching ahead of him. He followed them, a proof he'd never grasp. A homeless shamble on the pavement kept straight and constant to traffic lines beholden to an empty destination. He walked the road.
He stopped, turned, studied its face. Gaudy luminescent tubes bending about foreign monuments and bars on the windows like a prison he once visited, though he couldn't remember when. He passed through the door and took his seat at a round table sequestered to the left where the cigarette smoke drifted a miasma and he was there a barely seen interloper amongst strangers. The bartender, stout and hirsute. He kept a revolver underneath the counter and his ears were tuned to the inane yammering of the patrons, only two left hunching on the bar stools deep in their caps and their mugs. They didn't notice him for a while, longer than what would have been normal even for that time of night.
With his grubby decorum the bartender called to the man, asking him of his drink. Nothing. He called again, louder. By then the two guests had dimmed their conversation and turned heed toward the man. His burying hair and his disparate attire. He wore blue jeans, that much they could see. And a maroon hooded jacket beneath a black overcoat wide in the lapel. Bum clothes, likely stolen. Traveled and lived in for long nights sleeping in allies and the backs of freezing cars. Unwashed like his skin and stinking. There were trenches of dirt curving under his eye sockets and above his brow and they matched the rut of his face that was like butcher paper wrapped over a plaster skull, wrinkled and gaunt underneath his beard. A pointed rat snout of a beard coiled with gray wires hanging from his chin and his lips and sprawled out on sunken cheeks with patches of varying lengths. At his crown was an explosion of filth and mange that curled about the sides and sloped down concealing better features. His age was imperceptible.
He finally spoke a mutter of few truncated syllables chewed moist out the side of a toothless fissure. The bartender could only halfway parse the grunt but he didn't ask again and he poured for him a cheap glass that he bothered to hand over to the table. Set on a flattened and deteriorated coaster. "You got money?"
The man's straw fingers went inside his coat and rustled and searched til he fished out a wad of derelict bills. He looked at the wad and slowly the talons protruding from his cut up gloves wrapped like wool gauze separated the individual papers. "Just give me five." A crumpled bill he raised with two fingers lifted laboriously, his aim never raising higher than the table's end. With the exchange taken the bartender returned to his post. The other two kept on the man. Barely a man at all. An itinerant estate so overgrown and inward it shrugged off its own humanity. One started speaking. He knew already what would happen but he was drunk and loud so he asked anyway. "Hey. Hey, mister. Whass your name? Tell me your name."
Not even a gesture.
"What's yer name? Ya hear me? Just wanna know who you are is all."
":Leave em be."
"Look, I'll tell you my name. My name's Hank. Ya hear that?"
The man twisted his head an inch.
"Let the man drink, okay."
"I'm just talkin. Look, he likes it. He's smiling."
He was not smiling.
"Hey, where'd ya get that money huh?"
"Come on."
"No, thiss is important. Didja steal that money? Be honest now."
The man took hold of his mug and his attention was on it alone.
"I'mma working man, see." He hesitated. At some point he had stood and was lunging toward the distant table. He looked down. His boots and the lacerated, sticky floor. He was tired. What was he saying? Color bled from one filament to the next and behind his temples were soggy daubs of cotton. He remembered, the filthy lecher. It was important and he prepared the diatribe again and raised his head. But the man was standing now. Standing and nearer. To the right the bartender was frozen, mouth agape and hands clenched mechanical. In an instant he would be gone and the man would be nearer still. No sound made by the lurch apparent and he stepped back and hit the now vacant stool behind him and fell on his backside, mug still clutched but emptied. Terror. He tried to shout but there were no words to be uttered nor anyone to hear them and the lights were dimming and the sirens cawing and the structures he had held close were dissolving from inside as though they were specters hallucinatory and fluid and the man was standing before him, his whole face like an ogling maelstrom where the stars bent and swiveled and there was shaking and drooling and at the end he closed his eyes and then was gone.
When the man left he didn't shut the door. No one was inside to care or notice. He passed by trucks whose keys would not be found nor their owners. They were not there. Not dead, not missing. Away. Taken by the cold wind never to be retrieved. In time even the memory of their lives would drift and it would be as though they were never there at all and the roof would bow and the foundation crumble. As he passed the signs shuttered and faltered and further on the light was erased entirely and the moon laid claim again to the elongated columns of shadow reaching ahead of him. He followed them, a proof he'd never grasp. A homeless shamble on the pavement kept straight and constant to traffic lines beholden to an empty destination. He walked the road.
Comments
Post a Comment