I was heartened by the fact that the five at the table didn’t seem to notice Jeter at the bar. They were so self-absorbed that they hadn’t even looked up. I knew it would be a matter of seconds, though, before they did. Jeter was hard to miss with that damned big coat.
Getting his attention wasn’t easy. I wanted him to look at me so I could signal to him to get the hell out of there. He’d have to see me there, right?
“I’m looking for a shitbird named Garrett Moreland,” Jeter asked the bartender loud enough for me to hear. I was shocked by his brazenness. “Is he in here?”
The bartender appeared not to have heard. I glanced into the backbar mirror to assure myself that Garrett hadn’t, either.
“Jeter!” I hissed. “Let’s go.”
The biker nearest to me looked up from his drink and scowled at me, but Jeter didn’t acknowledge I was there.
“Garrett Moreland, I said,” Jeter growled. “Is he in this shit hole?”
The bartender made a point of ignoring him. Instead, he waddled down the length of the bar, asking each biker if he needed anything and going by me as if I didn’t exist. As he passed, I marveled at the quantity and misogyny of his tattoos; skulls with spikes driven through them, women impaled on the hood ornaments of late-seventies Chryslers and daggerlike penises, the American flag dripping blood into the open mouth of a caricature of former VP Dick Cheney.
“Jeter, goddammit!” I yelled, trying to shout above the music. “We need to leave!”
The biker to my right wanted another beer. The fat bartender ambled back to where he’d started with the biker’s empty glass to fill it from the tap. He never even glanced my way. While he filled the glass from the tap right in front of Jeter, I saw the Montanan do a frightening thing: He smiled.
“Either you tell me if Garrett-fucking-Moreland is in the building, you fat greaser,” Jeter drawled, “or a particular kind of hell will break out all around you.”
There was a beat of silence when the song ended. The bartender filled the glass. When it was full, he nodded almost imperceptibly toward the table in the back.
“Much obliged,” Jeter said, turning slowly around while keeping one hand on the bar. I could see him squinting toward the table under the black light.
“Jeter…” I said.
Because I was concentrating on Jeter, I almost missed the movements of the bartender, who was fishing around under the counter. And with the deceptively quick movements of a fat man who for years has concentrated solely on the speed of his arms, the bartender stepped back with a black baseball bat and raised it above his head and smashed Jeter’s hand with it. I could hear the bones break with the same muffled snapping sounds of dry branches underfoot.
I was frozen where I sat.
Jeter didn’t cry out, didn’t even pull his hand away. Instead, he turned back toward the bartender with an I-can’t-believe-you-did-that look.
Surprised that the blow didn’t bring this crazy Anglo in the silly coat to his knees, the bartender cocked back and swung again, smashing Jeter’s misshapen hand on the bar, presumably breaking every bone that hadn’t been broken by the first hit. I’ll never forget the sound of contact, like hitting a Ziploc bag filled with pretzels.
I don’t know why the bartender did it. I’ll never know or understand. All I can guess is that he was reacting to the insult and that he’d done the same thing before in similar situations in order to drive people out of the club. But like my life those past two and a half weeks, what happened next was beyond analysis.
All of us have heard the phrase “He got his head blown off.” I’m here to tell you that doesn’t actually happen. I know because when Jeter reached into his duster with his right hand and came out with the sawed-off double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun that was once referred to as a coach gun because it was the weapon of choice for stagecoach drivers, and pressed the muzzle into the bartender’s forehead with both hammers cocked and fired both barrels, well, the bartender’s head was not actually blown off. The top right quarter of it disappeared, and what was left of the mirror behind the bar was spattered with blood, brains, and chunks of bone, skin, and hair. The bartender dropped to the floor as if his puppet strings had been clipped, taking a shelf of beer glasses with him.
The sound was tremendous, and my ears were ringing. The two bikers at the bar dismounted and scrambled and passed me, running toward the door. I watched them from above, detached, as if my own soul and perspective were removed from my body.
Jeter was enraged. He stared at his broken hand for a moment, saying “Why in the hell did he do that?” before recovering and breaking the shotgun open with his undamaged right hand. The two huge, spent, and smoking shells hurtled back over his shoulders on either side of his head. He transferred the weapon under his left arm and dug into his duster pocket for two fresh shells. He reloaded and he snapped the shotgun closed with an upward jerk, turning toward the back table while he cocked both barrels. His broken left hand hung uselessly by his side.
“WHICH ONE OF YOU SHITBIRDS IS GARRETT MORELAND?”
I realized that the high-pitched noise in my ears was one of the girls shrieking.
The gangster on the right end of the table farthest from Garrett pushed back so hard in his chair that he sent it flying behind him. He stood up next to the table. The dark boy in the middle, who had been getting serviced, stared openmouthed while he inexplicably felt the sudden need to button himself back up. The blond girl next to him screamed while holding her hands to the sides of her face. Garrett still had both of his hands on the table wrapped around his mug, his bearing remarkably calm, his eyes taking in the man with the shotgun, who was approaching him, as if trying to place him, trying to figure out why he’d called out his name.
“You the shitbird Garrett?” Jeter asked him.
Jeter didn’t notice that the man who had stood up was bent slightly forward now, his arm behind his back digging for something in his pants.
Jeter pointed the shotgun with one hand, said again, “You Garrett Moreland?”
And the gangster pulled his weapon, a semiautomatic, and fired four quick rounds-pop-pop-pop-pop-with the weapon held sidewise out in front of him. Jeter’s coat danced, and he stumbled back a step, then swung the shotgun over and it exploded again and kicked higher than Jeter’s head. A great bloom of red spattered across the chest of the gangster, who fell back over the chair he’d previously sent skittering across the floor.
Patiently, Jeter slid the shotgun back into its sling inside his duster and came out with a stainless-steel.45 semiauto. He shot the dark boy in the middle point-blank in the neck before the gangster could rack the slide on the pistol he’d been fumbling for. The gangster’s gun skittered across the table and fell to the dirty carpet.
“Run away, girls,” Jeter said. “I’ve got business here with young Mr. Moreland.”
The blonde kept screaming as she ran, her hands still pressed to the sides of her head. There was a moment when our eyes locked as she ran toward the door, and I wondered if she’d be able to identify me later.
Jeter stepped aside for the female with the spiked hair, not expecting her to stop, turn, pause, and shove a pistol into his armpit and pull the trigger three times with muffled bangs. He cried out with a yelping sound, the hand with the pistol dropped to his side, and he staggered several steps to his left before collapsing on the dance floor in a heap.