Women with Men (14 page)

The poker machine clicked and dinged back in the dark. A man was talking on the pay phone by the bathroom, and I heard him say, “That's in Lethbridge. That's an hour and a half away.” The bar felt empty to me, and I realized I was wrong
about ever being in it before. I turned around and looked at the one window. Beyond the neon sign, snow was coming harder, and I saw headlights of cars going by slowly. I wondered if the snow could make our train late. I heard two car doors close outside and looked at the door, expecting it to open, but it didn't.

Barney motioned to the bartender, who was a very small, thin girl who looked like she might be a Chinese too. She poured Barney a glass of red wine out of a bottle on the back bar, then picked a dollar out of the pile in front of him.

“Oh, choose one, God damn it, Lawrence,” Doris said suddenly and glared at me. “I'm tired of fucking around with you. I wish I'd left you at home.”

“Cold,” I said.

“Cold?” Doris looked stunned. “Is that what you said? Cold?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Did you hear that, Benny?” Doris said to Barney.

Barney looked up at me from his glass of wine and said, “Don't let her confuse you. I been there before.”

“Cold isn't one,” Doris said in an aggravated way. “Try to be smart.”

“Brave, then,” I said. “I mean, bravery.”

“All right, then.” Doris picked up her glass without drinking. Only ice was left in it. She sat for a few seconds without saying anything, as if she was thinking about something else. “What have you been so brave about?” she said, and turned the glass up to her nose.

Barney leaned over and whispered something in her ear, which Doris ignored.

“Nothing,” I said.

“It's an abstraction to you, then,” she said. “Is that it?”

“Mutts fuck mutts,” Barney said, and he said it seriously and to me. He suddenly grabbed my arm tight and high above the muscle. “When I get back, Lawrence, I'll show you what I mean.” He pulled himself off the stool, using my arm, and started toward the dark end of the room, where the rest-room hallway was and where the man was still talking on the pay phone. He didn't walk steadily at all, and when he got to the entrance of the hallway he held the corner of the wall and turned and looked at us. “Don't confuse love with pain, you two,” he said, and he stood for a moment, staring in our direction. I noticed his silver belt buckle was pushed off to the side in a way I'd seen some men do. Then he just disappeared down the little hall.

“Don't confuse me with your wife,” Doris said loudly, then motioned for another drink. “All boats seek a place to sink is what I believe.” And I stood closer to the bar, wanting to think of a way to get her to leave and wondering what Barney was going to show me when he came back. “I told him Esther was my given name,” Doris said in a whisper. “It's my least favorite name. But it's biblical, and Indians are all so religious, he likes it. He's pathetic, but he's a hoot.”

Doris was staring at a door behind the bar. There was a little circular glass window in the door, like a kitchen door in a restaurant. A man's large white face was in the window, looking all around inside the bar from the back room. The man had on a big hat you could see part of the brim of. “Look at that,” Doris said. She was staring right at the window, and the man's face was staring right at her. “What party is he looking for, do you suppose?”

The face was there another moment, then went away. But slowly the door opened and the man we'd just seen, with another one right behind him in the dark, looked out into the
bar. He had on a sheriff's uniform. He looked one way and then the other. He was holding a big silver pistol with a long barrel out in front of him, and was wearing a heavy coat with a badge, and heavy rubber boots with his pants tucked in the tops. The man behind him was a sheriff too, though he was younger and didn't look much older than I was. He had a short-barrel shotgun he was holding with two hands and high in front of him, with the barrel pointed up.

Neither one of the men said anything. They just stepped slowly into the room, looking around as if they expected to be surprised by something. The little bartender saw them and went completely still, staring at them. And so did Doris and I. I heard one of the two or three Indians in the other part of the room say, “This machine loves me.” Then I heard the front door of the bar push open and felt cold air flood in. There were three more deputies outside, all wearing hats and heavy coats, all carrying short-barrel shotguns. None of the men looked at me or at Doris. They looked at all the Indians, then around the room at each other, and suddenly they seemed nervous, as if they didn't know what was about to happen.

One of the men—I didn't know which—said, “I don't see him, Neal, do you?”

The man with the pistol said, “Look in the bathroom.”

And then Doris, for no reason at all, said, “Barney's in the bathroom.” She pointed at where Barney had gone a few moments before.

And immediately, as if that had been their signal, two of the deputies at the front door moved across the room on their tiptoes to the head of the little dark hallway where the pay phone and the rest-room door were. One deputy grabbed the man who had been talking on the phone but had stopped talking and was just standing, holding the receiver at his side, and pushed him out of the way. Both deputies got on either side of
the hallway entrance and pointed their shotguns down toward where I guessed the rest-room door was. And then the two other deputies started whispering to us and motioning with their shotguns. “Get down on the floor, get down on the floor
no
w
!” they said.

And we all did, all of us. I got on my belly and put my cheek on the wet floorboards and held my breath. Doris got down beside me. I could hear her breathing through her nose. She made a grunting noise, and she grabbed my hand. Her glasses had come off and were lying on the floor, but she didn't say anything. Her eyes were shut, and I pulled myself close to her and put my arm over her, though I didn't see how I could protect her if something bad happened.

Then someone, and it must've been the man with the pistol, shouted in the loudest voice I'd ever heard, “Barney. God damn it. Come out of the bathroom. It's Neal Reiskamp. It's the sheriff. I've got people out here with guns. So just come on out. You can't get away from me.”

The deputy who was closest to me moved quickly, almost jumped, over to where he could get behind the two in the doorway, and he pointed his shotgun into the hallway too.

“Give me some light,” the man who was the sheriff shouted. “I can't see anything down there.”

Another deputy ran out the front door. It had been standing open, with cold and snow blowing in. I heard his boots on the snow, then the sound of a car door opening. I didn't want to look up, but I could hear feet shifting and scuffling on the floor. The wood was hard against my cheek, and I tightened my arm around Doris until she made another little grunting noise, but didn't open her eyes. The rotating beer sign over the jukebox flashed little stars across the floor.

There were no sounds from Barney in the bathroom. And I wondered if he was even in there, or if he'd gone out a window
or out another door, or even—and this felt like a dream I was dreaming—if he might've gone up through a trapdoor in the ceiling and into the attic and was on the floor above us all, in some deserted room in the dark, pacing around, trying to decide what to do, how to escape, how to come out of this in good shape. I even thought about his wife, about her being robbed of her money and her rings. Then I heard a noise like more feet scuffling, and the sound of something or somebody beating on something, a wall maybe. The deputy who'd gone outside ran back in with a long black flashlight.

“Shine the son of a bitch down there,” the sheriff said. “No. Up. Up more, God damn it.” The pounding kept going on somewhere. Bang, bang. First it sounded like metal, and then I heard glass break. Then more banging. “Barney!” the sheriff yelled very loud. “Barney!” The banging kept on. The little bartender, who must've been on the floor behind the bar, began to make a high-pitched sound—
eeee,
eeee,
like that. I thought the banging had made her afraid, because it was making me afraid. I could feel my jaw closed tight, and both my fists were clenched. There was more of it—bang, bang, bang—and then I looked up and saw that the two deputies were still pointing their shotguns down the hallway at what I still couldn't see. Their legs were spread way apart, and the man with the flashlight was squatting behind them, shining his light between one man's legs.

Doris said, “I'm all wet, Lawrence.” She opened her eyes and stared at me, and wrinkled her nose up in a strange way. Then, from the hallway where the deputies were looking and pointing their shotguns, there was a very loud crashing, breaking sound, as if a door had been broken in or out. There was more noise I couldn't identify, and I couldn't even say now what it was, though for some reason I thought Barney was kicking something, even though it was like a noise made by
metal. But whatever it was, the deputy holding the flashlight suddenly jumped back out of the way, his light going crazy across the ceiling, the long black barrel hitting the floor. And then two of the men who were holding shotguns shot almost at the same instant, right down into the little hallway, into the dark. And the noise of those two guns going off inside the barroom was an awful noise. My ears went deaf and there was pressure on my brain, and my eyeballs felt like air was pushing on them. The shots made a yellow flash and dust was all in the air and falling out of the ceiling, and there was the thick, sour smell of burned gunpowder. When the guns went off I felt Doris jump, and she squeezed my hand until her wedding ring cut down into my knuckle, and I couldn't get it free.

“Okay,” I heard Barney say to the policemen in a loud, odd voice. “I'm all shot up now. You shot me up. You shot me. I don't feel good now.”

Two other deputies, ones who hadn't shot, ran into the little hallway, right in front of Doris and me, though a third one knelt beside the man who'd held the flashlight. “I'm all right,” that man said. “I'm not shot.” His white hat was on the floor. I heard the bartender say, “Oh, my heavens,” though I couldn't see her.

Then Barney—it must've been him—said, “How are you?” almost in a casual voice, then he yelled, “Ohhhhhh,” and then he said, “Stop that! Stop that!” And then he was quiet.

The two men who had shot Barney stayed where they were, pointing their guns into the hallway. They had each ejected a shell, both of which were on the floor.

The sheriff, who was standing behind everybody, said even louder, as if he was even more afraid now, “Careful. Be careful. He's not dead. He's just hit. He's just hit.” One more deputy, who had been across the room, suddenly moved into the hallway in front of the men holding guns. “Barney, you son of a
bitch,” I heard him say, “stay down there now.” But Barney didn't make a noise. I heard footsteps behind me, and when I looked, the Indians and the man who'd been talking on the phone were going out the front door. I saw headlights outside, and from a distance I heard a siren, then the noise of a two-way radio and a woman's voice saying, “It probably is. But I can't be sure. You better check that out. Ten-four.”

I looked at Doris, and her eyes were wide open, her cheek flat against the wet wood. Her mouth was drawn tight across, as if she thought something else might happen, but she had begun to loosen her grip on my hand. Her ring came off my knuckle, and she breathed very deeply and she said, “They killed that man. They shot him all to pieces.” I didn't answer, because my jaw was still clenched and my ears hollow, but I thought that what she said was probably true. I was close to what had happened, yet I wasn't a real part of it. Everything had happened to Barney and the policemen who shot him, and I was better off, or so I felt, to stay as far away from it as I could and not even discuss it.

IN A FEW MINUTES
one of the sheriff's deputies came and helped us to stand up and go sit in the booth against the wall. There were a lot of police in the room all of a sudden. The front door stayed open, and two Montana highway patrolmen and more sheriff's deputies and two Indian policemen all came in and out. I could hear the voices of other people outside. More cars drove up with two-way radios going, and an ambulance arrived. Two men in orange jumpsuits came inside and went down the little hall carrying equipment in black boxes. I heard someone say,
“No problema aquí.”
And then the sheriff said, “Go ahead, I'll just sign all that now.” Barney never said anything else that I heard. After a couple of minutes,
the men from the ambulance left. One of them was smiling about something, but I didn't think it had to do with what had happened. It had to have been something else.

“I'm freezing,” Doris said across the little table. “Aren't you freezing?” She had found her glasses and put them back on, and she was shivering. Almost immediately after she'd said it the same deputy came in and brought her a blanket and one for me too, though I wasn't so cold, or didn't know I was. My nose was running, that was all, and the front of me was wet from the floor.

For some reason, two deputies took the bartender away with them. I could hear them put her in a car, and heard it drive away. And then the ceiling lights in the bar were turned on, and a man came in with a camera and took pictures in the hallway, using a flash. He came out afterwards and took pictures of the room itself, one of which Doris and I were in, wrapped in our blankets.

In about ten minutes, while we sat waiting, two more ambulance men came in the door with a folding stretcher on wheels. They pushed it into the hall, and I guess they picked Barney up and put him on, because when they pushed it out through the bar he was on it, covered up by a sheet with blood soaking through. One of the men was holding Barney's white Burlington Northern hard hat, and I could actually see part of Barney's ponytail out under the edge of the sheet. I had to turn to see all that. But Doris didn't look. She sat with her blanket around her and stared down at the cup of coffee the deputy had brought. When the cart had gone by she said, “Was that him?”