When she came out ten minutes later, her husband was hunched over a fresh beer I’d just pulled him. He didn’t see her, but she saw him. She stood there at the entrance to the bathrooms, watching him, her purse clutched to her chest, pushing her pearl necklace into a jumble around her pink, flowered sweater. She’d been crying. The fluorescent over the pay phone sparkled off her red, shiny nose. I looked at her then, and I knew what she was going to do, maybe even before she did.
She slung her little scarlet purse over her shoulder and began walking. She held her head straight and high, didn’t even turn to look as she walked past her husband. Brad, I found out his name was. As she rounded the corner of the bar, one hand lifted a silky strand of her honey-brown hair and pushed it behind her ear, and she still didn’t look.
I felt something fluttering in my stomach as she neared the divide. She seemed to feel it, too, and her step slowed for a millisecond; her foot, you could see it hover there above the scarred floorboards, and then it came down on the other side. She was across the divide.
The Yuppies paid no attention to her. They were busy with their cell phones and catalogs, but you could feel life, breath, and thought halt on the left side of the room, just for a moment, the way Tina’s foot had halted in midair before crossing the divide. One woman stood up, her hand placed possessively on the shoulder of her boyfriend; then another woman, at another table. They were ready for her. Tina didn’t notice them. She went up to the bar, to an empty stool between Tinker and Raz, turned her skinny little ass sideways, and slid onto the seat. I was already there, waiting for her.
The bar was suddenly a network of interconnected cells, interconnected atoms, and they all led back to me. Every light was unbearably bright, for I could see the bright red nails that flicked nervously at a scratch on a table, the piece of paper crumpled in a dusty corner, an old bloodstain on the chrome of the jukebox. The conversations were a meaningless hum. I knew the thoughts behind them, the lies, the desires, the boredom, the pain. And I knew, without turning, that Brad was staring across the horseshoe bar at his wife.
“I’d like a Bud Light, please.” She had a tiny voice when she wasn’t angry. It was sweet, like the bells on Christmas wreaths.
Tinker chuckled in that way he has of making you feel like a freight train’s coming. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said to her, “but Jack here don’t serve Bud Light on this side of the bar. ’f he did, this whole place would just up and float away.” He flitted his beefy arm in the air over her head, and she ducked.
Tinker’s a big old boy from Kentucky. He has the build of a caveman, and there’s always at least some evidence of his last meal stuck in his strawberry-blond beard, but he’s a “good feller.” That’s about as high as you can get in Tinker’s estimation, is a good feller. He never starts fights, always enters them unwillingly, and knows how to finish them quickly. I never saw him raise his hand to a woman, and he’s never run out on his bill. That’s about as high as you can get in my estimation.
Tina blinked at me, as if unsure whether to play along with the joke or not. “What do you serve?”
Tinker answered for me, saying she could have either a PBR or a Schlitz. “But if you want a boilermaker, Jack’ll let you have a Miller Draft with it.”
She looked at Tinker’s bright blue eyes, almost hidden by his chubby cheeks. She licked her lips and then turned to me. My hand clenched automatically.
“I’ll have a boilermaker.”
“What kind of whiskey?” My voice felt like it came from somebody else.
“Wild Turkey.”
This brought a hoot from Raz, and he slapped the bar and asked for the same.
I turned to pour the shots and caught sight of Brad’s face through the skyline of liquor bottles. He was staring at his wife across the room, his chin down, eyes up. The light glinted off his short, neat blond hair. He sat still as a headstone.
I set the shot glasses in front of Tina and Raz and pulled their beers. Raz, a true gentleman, waited for Tina. I watched the foam trickle over the side of Tina’s mug, feeling the heat from Brad’s steel-colored eyes boring through the skin on my back.
Raz curled his hand around his shot glass and looked at Tina. “On a count of three. Ready? One, two...”
Two elbows went up, two heads went back, two empty glasses were slammed down on the bar. Tina grimaced, her eyes squinched shut, and I wondered if she was going to be able to hold on to it, but at last her eyes opened. Raz laughed and Tinker slapped her on the back.
“Chase that puppy,” Raz shouted, and lifted his beer. Tina followed, slowly, but when she set her mug down, it was half empty.
“Where’d a little thing like you learn to drink like that, darlin’?” Raz put his arm around Tina, and I could smell the acrid scent of two-day-old perspiration from where I was standing. Tina blinked, but she smiled up at him, then blinked again as if seeing him for the first time. He was a sight to behold, Raz. Long, stringy black hair, a goatee going towards salt-and-pepper, but the thing that pulled him out of lineups again and again was his eyes. In the light of that bar, you couldn’t tell where the pupil ended and the iris began. It was like looking into a black hole. Someone asked him about his eyes once, and he said his family was Armenian, as if that explained it. People who spend time around Raz know to look over his left shoulder when speaking to him. You never look into that abyss twice.
“In college,” Tina said, like she had majored in drinking.
Raz put his head down close to hers and she didn’t pull away. “I bet you was a sorority girl, wasn’t you?”
He was smiling, and she was looking him straight in the eyes, a rabbit in the thrall of the cobra. “Tri-Delt.”
“Is that your name? Delt?” He smiled, but he looked angry, afraid of appearing stupid, but knowing he couldn’t help it.
“No.” She shook her head in confusion and closed her eyes, and I thought the spell would be broken then, that she wouldn’t look back, but when she opened them again, she did. She stared straight into his eyes. “Delta Delta Delta. That was my sorority.”
The wooden stool leg scraped across the floorboards as Tinker turned towards her. When he cleared his throat, too, I knew what he was trying to do. “I always wondered,” he said, “what do sorority girls do? I mean, what’s the point of being in a sorority?”
She glanced over her shoulder when she answered, but she didn’t turn her body away from Raz. “It’s a social club. You make friends. I guess it’s sort of like being a biker.”
This brought a shout of laughter from Raz, and though I didn’t turn around, I swear I could feel all the muscles in Brad’s body tense. I had Denise working that side of the bar. She wouldn’t know what to do, she hadn’t been tending bar long enough. I wanted to go over there myself and try and handle him, but I didn’t dare leave Tina alone. I was as snared as she was.
“Are you calling us a sorority?”
Raz pulled a pack of Camels out of his inside vest pocket and shook one out before holding the pack out to her. She took one and then so did he. He lit up, then slid the Bic over to her. She had to hold on to it with both hands, her thumb struggling with the serrated metal rollers before finally getting the flame to catch. The tiny yellow light illumined her face in a sickly glow, and then it was gone.
She coughed, her body curving with the effort to take in the smoke, but she recovered quickly, blinking away the moisture from her eyes and rubbing the back of her thumb under her nose. “No, I’m calling you a fraternity.” She managed a smile. “Boys are in fraternities, girls are in sororities.”
And then Raz leaned back in towards her, until his forehead was touching hers. “I ain’t no boy, lady.” His arm moved, and I knew his hand had slid to her knee. “Are you still a little girl, or are you a woman?”