The Ski Jumpers, page 13
But as soon as I entered the barroom, I recoiled. The music was quieter than it had seemed coming through the walls. Or perhaps it was muted by the crowd. There were dozens of customers. Perhaps fifty people, many of them men as old as Sheb, elbows-up and chins-down on the bar. Phil Johnson was still there with a table set between a pull-tab booth and a vending machine across the room. He held a package of wrapped meat like a carnival barker, his audience of two younger men and one of the dancers apparently enthralled by his eccentricity.
The four-sided bar had two keeps. The first sucked on a toothpick as he limped from one beer cooler to the next. The other was an older woman with a microphone hung around her neck like an Olympic medal. A couple of televisions broadcast a west coast Timberwolves game. Along one side of the bar, two brass poles rose from the dancers’ stage. Up on that stage, a woman scrolled through something on her phone in one hand and held a drink with the other, sucking it down through a bouquet of straws. Another woman sauntered down the stairs at the near end of the stage, stuffing dollar bills into a sequined purse and asking the bartender to make her a vodka and soda. The music stopped suddenly at the same moment the bartender put the microphone to her throat and said, “Anton already ordered you one, hon,” and she held up a drink sitting on the end of the bar. Those words, spoken through her throat and amplified by the microphone, sounded like an automated voice on the telephone.
“Where is he?” the dancer asked, pulling the straps of a flimsy dress back over her slight shoulders.
Again, the bartender put the microphone to her throat and said, “Playing pool.” She nodded with the microphone across the room. I glanced where she pointed and saw a whole new part of the bar through an archway and down a few steps.
It smelled of cleaning solvent and pizza cooking in a toaster oven and perfume, which I soon realized was worn by one of the women from Sheb’s barge office, who tapped me on the elbow. “That’s Barb. She had her larynx removed a couple years ago. Cancer.”
“Barb,” I said stupidly.
“She—” Some country music melody came on, and with it the voices in the bar, which had quieted to whispers in the intermission between songs, rose again. The woman standing next to me leaned closer. “She’s worked here for more than twenty years.”
I nodded, and looked at my informant with a sideways glance.
“You forgot my name,” she said matter of factly. “It’s Kristi. Well, actually, it’s Missy but you have to call me Kristi here.” She loosened the fur collar around her neck. “Chloe’s not Chloe but Britt. Britney. Same rule though.”
Up on the stage, the dancer set down her drink and her phone and started to sashay.
Kristi said, “That’s Rose, but really Allison. She plays the worst music.”
“I’m getting quite an education.”
Now she unbuttoned her jacket altogether. “You’re not like your brother, then?”
“Like him how?”
She looked at me seriously for a long moment. “Never mind.”
“We’re more alike than either of us knows,” I said.
“He told us you were coming. Sorry about your dad, by the way. He was a real sweet man.”
“My dad? You knew him?”
“He’d come in sometimes during the afternoon and have a pizza with Anton. Just lunch though, nothing pervy. He wouldn’t even look at us.”
Now I turned to face her. “Really?”
“Really what? Yes, he came in sometimes. No, he was not a perv.”
“I’d be surprised to hear otherwise.”
“He was an exception. Look around this place.”
I did as told. The bar was full of men my age or older, most of their attention flitting between the drink in front of them and the dancer on the stage.
“A bunch of fucking creeps,” she said. “Believe me.”
“It’s not hard to imagine.”
“You should write a book about this place. Your brother could tell you stories.”
“I’m sure he could. If I got him drunk enough.”
“Anton doesn’t get drunk,” she said.
“Anything else I should know about him?”
She turned and looked toward the pool room. “Your brother’s a decent guy. He’s fun. He’s my boss.”
“Gotcha.”
“And I can tell you guys are, like, rivals or something.”
“Because of what he said about my coming here?”
“Because I can tell when men don’t understand each other.”
I must have looked surprised.
“You should go play pool with him. I’ll order some drinks. What do you want?”
“Sounds like he’d rather not play pool with me.”
“Don’t be stupid.” She stepped to the bar in two graceful strides. “Go. I’ll bring drinks.”
* * *
*
He was sitting on a barstool in the far corner of the room, his face tucked into his shoulder, his hands up at his nose, taking another blow. The other woman from Sheb’s barge office had her hand on his knee. There were three pool tables in the room, all spoken for, and another twenty patrons, including a streak of six or eight paunchy men in black leather vests emblazoned with the white tiger-claw patches of their motorcycle gang presiding over a pinball machine outside the men’s room. The faint antiseptic stink of the main barroom was more pronounced in here, even with the red door of the main entrance swinging open every few minutes for the smokers to step in or out.
Anton rubbed his nose and watched his opposition aim his cue at the seven ball. Chloe leaned in and whispered something and Anton’s gaze and smile rose at the same time, up over the guy taking aim and straight at me instead. That smile was so disarming. Anton had always been able to summon in me a big-brotherly instinct, one that offered help or sympathy or protection without knowing why. In that instant, from across the pool room, Anton shrugged his shoulders as if to say, What do I need? Like he was asking for all three.
We met on my side of the table, where he looked at me with yet another expression, one that suggested he’d be patient, maybe even that he understood he’d struck a blow he regretted. Before I said anything, Kristi appeared at my elbow, the waitress trailing her with a tray of drinks.
“Did you order all this?” he asked me.
“I did,” Kristi said. “I’ll pay.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Anton said, pulling from his pocket his roll of cash. He paid with a hundred-dollar bill and told her to keep the change.
He handed Chloe and Kristi a shot, then took one for me and one for himself and raised his glass. “To Pops,” he said, “and to my brother, who I love.”
“I love him, too!” Chloe slurred.
“For real, Chloe,” Anton said, then clinked my glass. To me he said, “Cheers.”
We drank our whiskey and set the glasses down.
“It’s my shot,” he said, cocking his head and examining the pool table. He bent over, aimed for the twelve ball, and missed. The guy playing against him (who I now understood was with the bikers) made three shots in a row, including the eight ball. Anton pulled the wad of cash out again and peeled off another hundred-dollar bill and paid his lost wager. “Easy come, easy go,” he said to me.
Kristi and Chloe huddled by the pinball machine, and Anton and I crossed back to the high top, where he picked up his bottle of beer and took a long pull.
“Are you and Chloe together?” I asked.
“Not really. I mean, we hang out, but she’s not exactly the kind of girl you’d bring home to Ma.”
“Does Angel know her?”
“Fuck no.”
“Does Chloe work here?”
“She used to.”
“You seeing anyone else?”
“Running this place means I have, like, fifty girlfriends.”
“Are you complaining?”
“It also means I have fifty kids. Most of them drive me out of my mind.”
Now Chloe walked out the red door, Kristi on her heels, lighting cigarettes before they hit the cold outside.
“You look at her any harder and you’re gonna have to confess to Ingrid,” Anton said.
“I mean, it’s like being in a strange country for me.”
“It’s your home country, brother. You can’t be a tourist here.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“This is where you grew up. Your people run this place. Sheb runs this whole end of town. I run this bar. That’s all I mean.”
I glanced toward the door again. “She said Pops used to come in and have lunch with you here.”
“Sure.”
“I don’t know why that surprises me.”
“Probably because you’re a sanctimonious prick.”
I looked around the pool room again. The guy who had just beat Anton was chalking his cue and waiting for the balls to be racked again. Behind him, through the arch into the main room, I thought I could sense the mood rising. People moved about, the general din quavering as the music was getting louder and the lights grew dimmer, even as they flashed more.
“He liked to come in and watch the Twins. Day games,” Anton said. “We’d have a pizza and a couple beers. The dancers would play songs he liked. I don’t know that he ever even peeked at a woman on stage.
“A lot of the guys who come in here are like that. Lonely. Middle-aged or even older. They just want a finger of whiskey and to sit in a dark bar. Most of the girls, they leave those guys alone. Their radar for who’s game and who’s not is supernatural. Pops, well, not only was he my old man, but he was the least game of anyone who ever stepped foot in here.” He paused, got a faraway look in his eyes, finished his beer, and continued. “This might be hard for you to believe, but he had some pride in me.”
I sat up to protest, but Anton put his hand up.
“You don’t have to get defensive about it. I’m just remembering him, all right?” He held the empty beer to the light. “He and Sheb have been running together their whole lives. He’s seen just about everything Sheb’s seen, and I think he kind of liked to be in the muck. For sure he lived vicariously through him. And through me, for that matter. It was hard to do that at the house, or in Sheb’s sleazy fucking office. But here?” he gestured at his domain. “Here he got a good dose of it. Like I said, he had some pride in me and this place.”
“I was going to say I know that’s true.”
Anton looked again at his empty beer bottle, set it on the table and took up mine instead. Without asking for permission, he took a drink. “I can’t believe he’s dead.”
The word was like a hammer blow, and we looked at each other, startled.
“Fuck,” he said. “When was the last time you talked to him?”
“We actually talked a lot. He’d call me at night, after Bett went to bed. Sometimes the calls would go on for hours.”
Anton smiled.
“Is Bett going to be all right?”
“Since when do you give a shit about Bett?”
“Come on, man. Who’s being judgmental now?”
“It’s a real question.”
It was my turn to take a pull off the beer. “I know how he took care of her, that’s why I ask. Who’s gonna do that now?”
“Ma will be all right. She’s as tough as oak bark.”
“She can shovel her own walk?”
“I’ll shovel her walk.”
“Tomorrow you will, but what about the hundred other snowy days?”
“Those, too, Jon.”
In a lull between songs, I looked into the main room. There was a shout, and another, and the bouncer sitting on the threshold between the two rooms stood and hurried in the direction of the pull-tab counter. Anton was quick to follow, leaving me alone at the table in the corner with the biker gang still shooting pool. I had no instinct to see what was happening, and the truth is I might have hailed an Uber and gone to get my car at Bett’s if Chloe and Kristi hadn’t come back just then. Chloe went straight for the women’s room, and Kristi sat at our table.
“It’s never gonna stop snowing,” she said as a shiver rippled through her shoulders. She loosened her fur collar. “What’s going on in there?”
“I don’t even care to know,” I said. “I was just about to leave.”
“Don’t,” she said. “I want to talk to you.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
She appeared bashful, and picked up one of the empty shot glasses. “You want another drink?”
“I almost never drink this much,” I said.
“Me neither. And I’m not a coke head like Chloe, either. And I smoke only when I’m here.”
Anton ducked back into the pool room and tapped one of the guys in the biker gang on the shoulder. The two of them left again as quick as Anton had gotten his attention.
“Is there trouble?” I asked.
“Who knows?”
I leaned across the table and spoke softly. “What’s with the biker guys in the middle of winter?”
“They’re not actually bikers,” she said, “but some churchy group. The tiger on the back of their vests and jackets represents the wild beast that used to be inside them.”
“You’re joking?”
“Look closely. You can see the crown of thorns on the tiger’s head.”
One of the gang ambled around the table and bent over to take a shot, giving me a clear view of the patch on his shoulder. There were the same spread tiger claws but also the crown of thorns she’d mentioned, along with the word INRI woven into the design. After he took his shot, he walked back around the table for a follow-up.
“He’s a very strange man,” she whispered, so close I could smell the cigarette smoke on her hair. “His name is Lincoln Schmidt. Linc, everyone calls him. He used to be a pro bicycle racer, but he broke his hip and got addicted to something. Thirty years later, he found Jesus, and here he is playing nine-ball at Boff’s, drinking soda water and lime.”
“You know an awful lot about him,” I said.
“I’m a good listener,” she said. “And I’ve heard his story many times.”
I watched them take a couple more shots, trading misses and cussing each other out, and turned back to Kristi. “So, you work here? Or . . .”
“Yep.”
“And all that bullshit over at Sheb’s office?”
“Chloe asked Sheb if she could be one of the girls. I think she wanted to make your brother jealous.”
“That’s fucked up.”
“She’s sweet, but she’s got her problems.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“How’d you end up at Sheb’s office?”
She looked away.
“I’m an asshole. Sorry.”
“It’s a fair question. I wonder myself.”
“It’s none of my business.”
She looked back at me, her expression exuding poise. “You’re right about that. But it’s no big deal.” She caught the waitress’s attention and flagged her over. “Hey, Kristen. What’s going on over there?”
“Some asshole getting grabby with Laquisha. He was thrown out the back door.”
“Was it that prick with the sunglasses?”
“Funny how they’re always the same motherfuckers. Anyway, you want a drink, baby?”
“Can I have a Maker’s?”
“Rocks? Water back?”
“Yep.” She tapped my hand. “What do you want?”
“I’ll have the same.”
We watched the waitress head back to the bar. When she disappeared around the corner, Kristi said, “I need the money.”
“I get it.”
“For the record, I’m not some whore. I don’t go for that. No way.”
“You said Chloe has her problems. What about you?” I said.
“I have a long list of them.”
“I’m sorry. I’m just making conversation. It’s been a long damn time since I talked to a woman in a bar.”
“Now I’m a woman in a bar?”
“See what I mean? I’m just a babbling idiot. You don’t have to babysit me.”
“My mom, she’s the main one. I spend most of my money taking care of her. She lives with me, too, which isn’t great. Plus, I’m trying to save for school. I have only three classes left.”
“What do you study? Where?”
“It’s super geeky. Promise you won’t laugh?”
“Why would I laugh?”
“I’m an accounting major. At the U.”
“How’s that geeky?”
“Credits and debits, profit and loss, ledgers and calculators, insolvency, bankruptcy.” She looked at me deadpan. “It’s not exactly strippers and cocaine.”
I must have blushed, because she was quick to add, “I mean, I actually wear tortoise shell glasses. I spend my free time at the library. I read your book, famous author guy.”
“I won’t hold that against you.”
“That I read your book?”
“That you called me famous author guy.”
“From Anton’s lips to my ears.” She glanced at me, then down at the empty shot glasses and beer bottles. “Cheesy. Sorry.” She moved all the empties to one side of the table. “What’s up with that, though? I mean the deflecting.”
“My brother and I don’t understand each other very well. He’s got an idea about what I do that’s far from reality. I guess it embarrasses me. And I guess I wish he respected me more.”
“Do you respect him?”
“I hardly even know him.”
This was an admission years in the making. But in that corner of his bar, with the religious bikers playing billiards and the naked women in the next room, and the next round of drinks on the way, I couldn’t stop talking. “But I definitely respect him. And of course I love him, even if he hates me.”
“I thought we covered this. Your brother doesn’t hate you.”
I wished the waitress would come back with our drinks, or that Anton would reemerge from whatever fracas he was dusting up, anything so we could change the subject. But nothing and no one came to rescue me, and we sat in the silence I couldn’t think how to break until Kristi said, “I know how fucked up families can be. My mom, despite the fact she couldn’t exist without the help I give her, resents me every day. Like, she relishes it.”
