The Meeting - 869 words

The Meeting

It was an old corner saloon dating back a century, the siding a faded purple, the trim dark red. I entered through the door on the corner. I liked that it was angled forty five degrees to the street. I walked past the half dozen tables to the bar, stood and waited while a guy in his late twenties extracted himself from a laptop and raised his eyebrows at me.

“Bud, please,” I said, and gave him four bucks and took my bottle away to sit in a table by the window and wait. I expected my appointment would show up soon.

The floor was ancient brick-red tile and the floors were the same red as the door and window trim and didn’t quite match the floor. The ceiling was black. The bar was black and had a dented brass rail held up on one end by a cinder block. Bottles stood in rows behind it, and glasses hung above it. The bartender wore a yellow t-shirt and black jeans and pink Vans and sat down again at his computer. I thought maybe he looked Italian. He too was waiting.

Also at the bar another man sat, his back to the room. A big fat white man with a full gray beard and a red t-shirt and old workpants and boots, a beer bottle at his side. He was reading the funnies. I thought that was funny. No one reads the funnies anymore, no one reads an actual paper, except people like him who have gray beards and nowhere else to be on a Tuesday afternoon. He also was waiting but was being very nonchalant about it.

Around where the bar turned a corner a younger white guy nursed a highball and argued into his cell phone. He was smiling mostly, maybe he wasn’t arguing, or maybe he was talking to someone that he liked arguing with. He had a green dress shirt and slacks and a porkpie hat with some tweedy pattern and had grown out his sideburns. He looked pretty sure of himself for being in a bar on a weekday. Clearly he had an appointment.

Two girls sat at a table with tall iced drinks. By girls I mean well-fed black women barely over twenty one. They wore blouses, one sort of orange, the other dark blue, and jeans on the tight side. They were full and round and the darker one had very pretty eyes that looked around while she was talking and sometimes stopped to look at a place three inches to the side of my head. She was watching me watch her and didn’t want me to know it. I just watched. I liked her eyes. The other one was bored and stared at the far wall. They were expecting someone, no question.

A man came in, about forty walking with a cane. He too was black and the cane was brushed aluminum of the sort issued by a hospital. He leaned on the bar, all shoulders and elbows poking out of his dark work shirt. He knew the bartender and they played smack for awhile in low tones. I couldn’t hear. One of the girls laughed. I guessed she had better hearing than me. But for all that he wasn’t someone anyone was waiting for. He just came in for a drink and company.

I sat in quiet for awhile, waiting. The door was open and I listened to cars pass, a bus, someone talking as he walked along the sidewalk. Within the shell made by the background noise all was quiet. For a moment no one spoke, and silence walked on elephant feet through the doorway.

And I heard the gunfire. It was very close and the bartender looked in shock at the ceiling and fell back against his row of bottles, a crimson splash deforming his neck. Everyone turned to look and the fat man’s head exploded in blood and bone, pushing his body down against the bar and as he fell to the floor the guy with the cane shouted, “Oh, sh—!” but he never made it to the door, he was cut down with a shot to the chest. The girls screamed and cried, their plump bodies trying to dive under the tables and run to the door at the same time, and they jerked, out of control, unable to get away as one, two red little fountains erupted from their bodies and sent them reeling, falling, scattering chairs across the hard tile floor. The guy in green was off the phone now, it lay on the floor, he crouched with his back to the wall, mouth open in silent panic, mouth open in horror, mouth open in death as a bullet tunneled through his throat and spine to lodge in the lathing behind him. Red splashed the wall, the floor, dripped in arcs across the bottles. Silence on its elephant feet pushed all sound out of the room and in the silence I could hear a voice saying, “I guess they met whoever they were waiting for.”

I got out of there quickly, the silence walking by my side, and we agreed the meeting went well.