The Parallel Apartments (50 page)

The jailer appeared at the cell door.

“Borger,” he said, “you're done here.”

On the way to freedom, the jailer handed Lou his jeans. Lou dug around in the pockets.

“Here's my pencil,” said Lou.

“What luck,” said the jailer.

“And, by god, here's my goddam billfold. Lord, here is my four dollars. That means beer and freedom, amigo.”

Of course his driver's license wasn't there any longer.

“Looks like I'll be walking to Kelly's, though.”

“Tell Dot I say hello,” said the jailer.

“Or maybe I'll just go on home,” said Lou, sighing dramatically, remembering the oath he'd made barely ten minutes before.

On the walk home from the jail Lou passed the impound lot where they'd brought his truck after he'd driven away from Kelly's soon after closing time and purely by accident driven into a divan that some clod had carelessly left up on the sidewalk for the trash man.

Behind a tall chain-link fence coiffed with barbed wire, way in the corner of the lot, hemmed in by a scorched tractor and a police car with an arrow sticking out of it, was Lou's truck, a 1953 Ford. One door ajar, one tire flat, one light smashed, one fender staved in, one side-view mirror hanging by a shred of rust, one puddle of oil in the dirt, six crimped cans of Pearl wedged between the dash and the windshield.

Lou'd gotten ten or twelve DUIs in the past, but this was the first time they'd ever taken his truck away. Or his
license,
for chrissake.

He took out his comb and scraped it across his scalp, pulled out his money and counted it again. He did not take out his oath and re-read it; he instead calculated how many cans of beer four dollars could buy. At least twenty if he bought them at the grocery store, many fewer if he bought them at Kelly's. If he couldn't drive, then what harm were a few beers?

“What harm?” Lou shouted in the direction of the metal shed that sheltered whatever individual was in charge of the impound lot. But no one emerged, with or without a retort. Lou picked up a mashed spark plug off the sidewalk and threw it over the fence. It bounced off the roof of the shed
and landed in some yard dog's water dish. He picked up a paper cup and threw it, but the wind caught it and placed it back where it had been. Lou crushed it with the heel of his boot.

Lou stopped at a railroad crossing to wait for a pokey train to pass.

As the cab finally went by, the cab man, who looked like he had met with neither soap nor comb nor luck since youth, stared at Lou as if he knew Lou was fixing to break his oath.

“I may be foul and matted and cursed, but I am a man of my word,” the cab man seemed to say.

Lou stood for a moment, watching the end of the train shrink in the distance. He took out his oath and read it again, wishing he'd been more precise in the wording.

Okay, then, I'll go right home and tend to my affairs. I'll march right past Kelly's. Maybe I'll march right on past and stop for a haircut at Pendrick's, then pick up some Cheez-Its at Murra's, then go right on home and fry that pork chop waiting for me in the freezer.

Lou marched into town. When he reached Kelly's, at the corner of Spindrel and Farquhar, he marched right on past without even looking at the barroom door. He stopped for a trim at Pendrick's, tipped Pendrick a quarter, then stood outside the barbershop, stretching and breathing in the moist, coastal perfume of freedom in Texas City, Texas, USA.

Lou glanced back down the street just in time to see his old pal Dot go into Kelly's.

“Dot!”

He walked quickly back the way he came. He paused for an instant in front of the bar.

What if I just enjoyed a Coca-Cola and maybe said a quick hello to old Dot? That wouldn't break my promise, would it?

Lou took out his oath one more time. He was so sweaty and the air so humid that Leghorn's notary stamp had not dried; in fact, the whole envelope was now limp.

A little boy walked by. Lou looked at him, pointed to his paper, and said, “Nothing here about how I can't go into a saloon.” The boy ran away.

Lou went in.

He stood inside the door and waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark. Presently he could make out the people sitting at the tables, and the ball
game flickering on the coffin-sized TV console that Kelly's father, Bogue Miller, had gone to some trouble to hang from the ceiling before he died. Ah, there's Kelly's Gidget sculpture, emerging from the dark like a sunrise. And the figure of Kelly himself, tapping draft beer behind the bar.

Kelly was in his early thirties but looked ten years younger. Bamboo-skinny, big-eyed, plush-lipped, his melon-like head shingled with stiff plates of red hair, his skin so pale he appeared to fluoresce in the dim bar. This hangdog mingle of features begged insults, flimflams, and beatings. But only newcomers and fools were ever led on by his meek appearance; the regulars knew Kelly's aspect belied a belligerent, uncharitable nature that best went untested. There were plenty of tough folks in Kelly's, with a lot of time spent in jails and other locked places, but they did not antagonize Kelly, partly out of respect for his deceased father, and partly out of respect for their own health. Kelly carried around a big rusty socket wrench, with which he had over the years splintered many a wagging jaw. When he was in junior high he'd maimed a classmate with a winch chain over an autographed Stan the Man baseball and got shipped off to reform school. It happened to be the same place that Lou had been sent for impregnating his girlfriend, Charlotte; he and Kelly arrived on the same day. Though they'd never been friends, it was Lou whom Kelly had chosen to accompany him on his escape a year later, mainly because Lou was good-sized and strong, and would be able to carry a big bag of Kelly's clothes. Kelly was something of a clotheshorse, or at least thought himself so.

Kelly certainly hadn't changed much in three weeks. Today he wore 1930s-style suspenders over some kind of shiny shirt. He looked like a dolphin that also happened to be an attorney.

Kelly had taken over the joint a couple of years before, after his father died following a sea-nettle sting. Bogue had been a truly fair and generous man, who had over the years extended to Lou, and quite a few other patrons, carelessly generous tabs. Lou's tab had amounted to $4,940, or at least that was the number Lou recalled Bogue last mentioning to him, which had been about a month before the sea nettle lanced Bogue's beer belly.

Kelly had never brought up the subject of the delinquent tab to Lou or to any of the other betabulated patrons after he took over, so Lou figured the numbers had been mercifully lost in probate. Or maybe Bogue had never written the numbers down in the first place; maybe he'd just been a
specialized idiot savant and kept the sums in his head and they had been buried along with the rest of the man. Either way, it looked like the days of bar tabs were over: Kelly, on his first day as the new owner, announced in his high-pitched Piney Woods bray that no one gets a tab.

“Nobody,” he'd whinnied.

“Even Dot?” somebody said.

“Nobody.”

Bogue hadn't kept a tab on Dot; he just gave her whatever she wanted, and had done so ever since she first set up business at the jukebox end of the bar, ten years before. Bogue claimed that it was just sound business to underwrite a whore's drinks, but his real reasons were probably much more soft-hearted—everyone knew he adored her.

“I worry, I
worry
,” Bogue would fretfully say to anyone who was too drunk to escape a conversation with him whenever Dot was out on a service call or just taking the day off. “She's like my only daughter I never had instead of the son I did. Oh
me.
”

Dot's eyes were just like Sophia Loren's, and she moved with the grace of Audrey Hepburn. Dot was legendarily rumored to have entered the service industry because she liked it. She said it made her wealthy enough to be able to pursue her hobby, which was collecting first editions of fiction by women.

One day she brought in a nice
Mockingbird
to show Bogue, but he wasn't there. Kelly was there instead. He pushed a Tom Collins across the bar.

“Daddy's dead. Funeral's at Emken-Linton. This is your last one on the house.”

Paying for her own drinks—expensive, complicated mixed beverages, the recipes for which Bogue had often had to look up in a tattered copy of
Cocktail Boothby's American Bartender
—forced Dot to raise her rates, which in turn made her less accessible and more desirable. These circumstances excited discontent among the patrons, a state to which Kelly responded not by refelting the pool table or sharpening the darts or updating the jukebox, but by raising the beer prices, rationing the swamp cooler, taking away the baskets of free pork skins and substituting nickel baskets of humid popcorn, and, most memorably, removing the free-coffee station and in its stead installing a knee-high cinder-block postament upon which he had placed a life-size fake-marble sculpture of a nude, ill-proportioned Gidget lying
Madame Récamier
on a fake-marble surfboard, the whole installation footlit with soft incandescents.

Lou stepped down into the barroom. He felt the spongy give of spilled stale popcorn underfoot. He detected the vague vetiver base note of Dot's Chanel No. 22. Dot herself was nowhere to be seen, but her purse was on the bar next to one of her leather diaries and a fancy-looking mixed drink.

Many of Lou's friends and acquaintances were sitting around, drinking beer, watching a Braves-Giants game, and rapidly eating what looked like beer nuts. Scattered among the patrons were half gallons of milk and rolls of paper towels. This was all new in the last three weeks.

Lou sat down at a table with his old drinking buddies Doak Boyle and Tom Vlodzny. On one arm Doak wore a cast with hundreds of little dollar signs drawn on it in Magic Marker.

“What's the good word, Lou?” said Tom.

“What's this? Eggnog?” said Lou, picking up a milk carton and sniffing at it. “And, what, no popcorn? What're these things? What's got into Kelly? What happened to you, Doak? Where's Dot?”

“I wasn't ready for a pop quiz,” said Doak.

“It's not eggnog,” said Tom. “Milk.”

Doak took the carton out of Lou's hand, took a big pull, ate a handful of the beer-nut things, drank half a bottle of beer, then pointed to a roll of paper towels. “Hand me that Bounty.”

Lou handed the roll over. Doak pulled off a few sheets. He swabbed his forehead, dabbed at the tears on his cheeks, and blew his nose. Finally, he took a deep breath. Then he ate another handful of nuts.

“Beer nuts're a pretty extravagant change for Kelly,” said Lou.

“These're little peppers,” said Tom. “Pequins. Tasty. Warm. Habit-forming. The milk's to cool yourself down and neutralize the digestive fireworks. Works better'n beer. Bounty's for stanching the sinuses, and for swabbing the brow.”

“That right,” said Lou, tossing a modest handful of peppers into his mouth. “That was charitable of Kelly.”

“Not really,” said Doak, panting and wiping the sweat off his neck. “The pequins and the Bounty are free. But the milk's five dollars a carton.”

“That's criminal,” said Lou. “I'll bring my own damn milk if I need it, a dollar a gallon. Or I just won't consume little dry peppers. They're pretty fair, though. And warm.”

Anita, the waitress, appeared at the table with another bowl of peppers and a beer, which she set before Tom.

“I seen you had come in, Lou, want me to find a Pearl for you?”

“Thank you, doll,” said Lou. Gums scorched, throat anesthetized, he reached for Tom's beer. Tom snatched it away and hid it under the table.

“Mine,” said Tom.

“Warm, huh,” said Doak.

“Kaw,” said Lou, reaching for Doak's milk. Doak took it away and hid it under his arm. Tom did the same with his milk.

“Eik,” said Lou, standing up, looking around desperately. Everyone in the bar grabbed their milk to protect it from theft. One man took a small revolver out of his pocket and set in on a table.

Lou staggered up to the bar, behind which Kelly was standing on a small stool, tacking a Deutschmark to the ceiling.

“Ik.”

“Lou,” said Kelly. “Howdy. Did your time? How was it? See old Leghorn? Good, good. That's fine. We're sure happy to see you here at the saloon.”

“Nlk,” said Lou, finding his last two dollars and slapping it onto the bar.

“What? Tequila? Coming right up.”

Lou shook his head. Tears and snot ran freely. His eyes were nearly swollen shut. Terrible, sharp metal doors slammed in his intestines.

“Ik.” Lou stabbed his money with his finger.

“Oh, milk?”

“Gnnnn,” said Lou, nodding like a pumpjack.

“Surely. Quart? That'll be $5,091.55.”

Kelly unfurled a long roll of cash-register paper with tiny pencil markings on it. At one end it said LOU BORGER in big block letters.

“I'll start with these two dollars,” said Kelly, snatching up Lou's money. “And believe me I will collect every motherloving cent from you, Lou Borger. And every other gin-soaked pecker in here.”