his thumb slipped behind her belt, walk her to the stairs.
It never occurred to Michael Keane, to any of them, it seemed, to
wonder what women saw in Ralph Damien, this middle-aged townie
with his low-slung jeans and paunch and long hair (and—after the
Christmas in Aruba—a diamond earring at a time when no middleaged men, no men they knew of, wore one). The hours Michael had
already spent in those green-walled classrooms had given him his own
pretty clear idea of what the next few years would be like, but he
wasn’t quite ready to believe that he’d be there, polyester dress slacks,
frayed button-down, knotted tie, at thirtyfive or forty. Better to
imagine vaguely a life like Ralph’s, to imitate his weary smile, his cool
squint, his way of palming the cash register or the beer pull. His
nonchalance when he returned from upstairs with the girl in tow and
either threw on the lights for last call or bought shots all around, or
just took up one of his own bar stools for the rest of the night, the
girl’s hips in his hands, her rump pressed firmly between his skinny
legs.
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 splitlevel, 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.
Ralph touched his crotch, shook his head, and then turned to
reach into the cooler for two long-neck bottles of beer. He made his
way around the bar just as Caroline moved to meet him. He took her
under his arm, the two beer bottles resting just over her shoulder, and
had his face in her hair before they’d reached the stairs.
Bean murmured, “Oh man,” as if he were in some mortal pain.
Charlie Hegi had bowed his head and was twisting the Hershey
wrappers into little bows.
Michael stepped behind the bar, but for a moment no one was
ordering.
Then Terry returned. “I’m leaving,” he told Michael, as if he were
obliged to. Michael shrugged. He felt sorry for him, in his studentteacher clothes. By the look of his eyes, he’d either been crying
somewhere or throwing up.
He put a shot glass on the bar. “Have a drink,” he said. “And take
off that fucking tie.”
“The guy’s a creep,” Terry said after he swallowed. “He’s old
enough to be my father.”
“He’s old enough to be dead,” Bean said. And then added, “He
probably is,” pleased with himself. “Probably sleeps in a coffin.”
Terry said again, “He’s a creep.”
But Charlie Hegi looked up to the ceiling. His teeth were full of
chocolate. “He’s a lucky son of a bitch at the moment,” he said.
The place got busy then and Charlie stepped behind the bar to
help out. Michael was pouring drinks and shots and slapping the cash
register with the flat of his hand and the more time Ralph took with
Caroline upstairs, the more the place became his own. What he was
thinking of, he found himself telling a girl with a small face and short
hair and dark eyebrows that were alternately appealing and
weird, was teaching for a year or two and then heading south, maybe
Ft. Lauderdale or Daytona, maybe even Key West, to open a bar on the
beach—work his tail off over Christmas and spring break and then
kick back the rest of the year, go fishing, travel, maybe write. Not for
him, he said, polyester pants and short-sleeve dress shirts and the
scorn of thirty inbred seventh graders for the next forty years. Not his
old man’s Robert Hall suits five days a week, either, and the Long
Island Rail Road to the city, the subway to the cubicle. Someone else’s
shot glass on your forehead when you’re dead.
The girl was pretty enough, petite. She said something about
wanting to be an artist as well as a kindergarten teacher. When Ralph
returned, he slapped Michael on the back and said, I owe you, man.
The scent of the pot they’d smoked was on him and Caroline took a
bar stool in the corner and drank another beer, her hair still mussed in
the back and her lips kind of blurred. Her friends seemed to stay away
from her, but Ralph walked to that end of the bar every chance he got
and leaned there next to her, watching the crowd, playing with her
hair, not saying much.
Michael left with the short-haired girl. She was from Commack.
In his room they smoked a joint and listened to Pink Floyd and then
he showed her some glow-in-the-dark chalk he’d bought for his class.
He wasn’t sure what he was going to do with it yet, he told her, he just
