A YEAR OR TWO after all of this, after I’d gotten a little better, I was tending my dad’s bar, the one he opened up after Curtis died in the accident and he lost his job from drinking too much. He bought the bar, and ran a little liquor store in a corner of the building, and I ran the bar, evenings. I took classes at the junior college during the day.
One night when almost no one was in the bar, a weeknight, a man came in by himself and sat on a stool and asked for a beer. I’d never seen him before. He was maybe forty, forty-five. Hard to tell, as I was still only nineteen, myself, legal age in Mississippi in those days, but far from having any view over the nearer horizon.
He was a pleasant man, with a small, pleasant, unremarkable face. He was dressed in what looked like business attire minus the jacket and tie he’d left either in the car or at the house. His collar was pressed but knocked awry. His medium-length, but definitely barbered hair was just the slightest bit mussed up. Mine wasn’t the first bar he’d been to that evening.
When he’d ordered his second beer, he said this was his one night in the year to go out and get drunk.
“I don’t drink, otherwise,” he said. “Just one night a year, though, I go out and I get plastered. It’s a safety valve.”
“Well, that sounds okay,” I said. “Can’t fault you for that.”
“No, you cannot, that’s true,” the man said.
He reached across the bar to shake my hand.
“Monroe Clooney,” he said. “My friends call me Mo.”
“Call me Will, Mo,” I said.
“I will, Will,” he said, and laughed. “Sorry.”
“No, no, Mo,” I said, and we both laughed.
Then Mo Clooney told me his story. He was a civil engineer, made a good living, but he and his wife couldn’t have children, they’d tried, and so about ten years earlier they’d started taking in foster children from the local orphanage. There were mostly boys in the orphanage, and so they decided to take only boys, just to keep things simple as possible. But here they were ten years down the road, and now they had ten boys running about their house, which was fairly large, but still.
“They’re great boys, mostly,” Mo said. “But even so, you got to blow off a little steam every now and then. Hence,” he said, raising his beer, and then draining it. I got him another, on the house.
“Thank you,” he said, as if I’d paid him a compliment. He spilled a little of his beer on the counter and mopped it with his shirtsleeve.
“My boys need a project,” he said then. “Always have to keep them busy. So I’ve decided to buy some kind of old car that they can take apart. Doesn’t really matter if they can put it back together again.”
“They get the ‘exploded view,’” I said. I loved that term. So did Mo Clooney, because he was an engineer, I guess. Most people don’t know it. It’s the simulated photo of something, like an engine, as if it’s just been blown into pieces that happen to be all its component parts, and they’re suspended just inches away from one another, as if in the act of flying apart, so that you can see all the parts separately and where they fit into the whole. Mo Clooney could hardly stop laughing. He probably didn’t get to hear much engineer humor. I knew the term only because I tended to thumb through dictionaries when I was bored sometimes, a habit I’d picked up lately. When Mo Clooney finally could stop laughing, he asked me about the old VW bus I’d parked in the corner of the bar’s dirt and gravel parking lot.
“Doesn’t run anymore,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “What’ll you take for it?”
I shrugged. “Fifty bucks.”
“Deal,” Mo Clooney said.
He pulled out his wallet, peeled off fifty dollars and handed the money to me, and shook my hand.
“No need for a bill of sale,” he said. “I trust you.” He laughed. “I trust everybody. It was nice to meet you. I’ll have someone tow the vehicle to my house by tomorrow afternoon.”
And then he left, giving me a little wave over his shoulder, and walking only a little bit unsteadily.
Next afternoon when I got to the bar, the bus was gone.
I’d had a thought, when he was walking out the night before, that he was a pretty odd guy, and so I’d gone outside to the parking lot, to see if he was really there.
Or to see if I was, I suppose.
Mo Clooney was there, fumbling with the keys to his car, and then getting into it, cranking it up, and driving it slowly away down the darkened, lamp-lined street.
I’d thought for a moment that he was one of them. But his sense of humor had been too normal, his laughter too real. And the look in his eyes had been so vulnerably human. It seemed filled with a kind of muted loss.
No, I said to myself then, he’s one of us.
CREDITS
Some of these stories appeared, sometimes in different form, in the following publications: “The Misses Moses” and a selection from “Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives,” Narrative; “Fallen Nellie” and “Alamo Plaza,” Ecotone; “Are You Mister Lonelee?” The Yalobusha Review and A State of Laughter, ed. Donald R. Noble; “Terrible Argument,” Short Fiction (UK); “Water Dog God,” The Oxford American and Best American Mystery Stories 2000; “Visitation,” The New Yorker and The Pen/O. Henry Prize Stories 2010; parts of “Ordinary Monsters” (“Her Tribe,” “Intermission,” and “Going Down”), Bombay Gin; “Carl’s Outside,” The Greensboro Review; “Noon,” The Idaho Review; “Vacuum,” Granta.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to the literature and writing faculties and others at The University of West Florida (James, Mary); The University of Alabama, Birmingham (Sena); Spalding University; Ole Miss and members of the Grisham writer-in-residence committee (thanks, Barry) and the Grisham family; The University of California, Irvine (thanks, Elizabeth); and The University of Wyoming. Thanks to the writers I’ve been privileged to know and work with in these places, for their good work and friendship. And to my family, for love and tolerance.
I’m grateful to the National Endowment of Arts for a fellowship in 2004. To the Taylor family for generous use of the Holmes house in 2003–5. To the Lannan Foundation for a residency in 2006. To the JW Foundation for a brief but crucial time in Tucson. Thank you to Meagan Ciesla for retyping some of these stories and others. To good friends in Seagrove Beach, Fairhope, Meridian, Oxford, Pensacola, Birmingham, Montgomery, Tuscaloosa, Boulder, Santa Fe, Phoenix, New York, Laramie, and elsewhere. For reading and responding, thank you to Jon, David, Beth, Rob, Kim, Joy, Cressida, Quentin, and especially Neela, a staunch and generous champion. To my agent, Peter Steinberg, undaunted. To everyone at W. W. Norton, particularly to Bill Rusin, Denise Scarfi, and Rebecca Carlisle for generous and goodhearted diligence and care. And especially to my editor, Alane Salierno Mason, still and always the best. Thank you most to Nell, for love and loyalty beyond what I could imagine.