Whiskey Dick was making a point that Mereta wanted to argue, but Whiskey Dick was unwavering despite a few half-hearted attempts by Mereta to refute him, wondering if maybe he didn’t have a point after all. Not that she cared one way or the other, she just worked there, she didn’t own the place.
“I used to win something every two or three times I’d buy pull tabs, $50, $75, $100, now I can’t win to save my life. I could buy a $100 worth of pull tabs and maybe have one $2 winner, maybe a $5 winner. It didn’t used to be that way.”
Mereta shrugged. “Maybe it’s just your bad luck.”
He watched Whiskey Dick and she could be on to something there. Whiskey Dick looked like someone plagued with inherent bad luck from the outset. And if a life has balancing shares of predetermined luck both good and bad, Whiskey Dick could be justified in protesting the rigged game preventing him from realizing his reconciling allotment of good.
“Dodge buys the pull tabs from the company that prints ‘em and pays more for the rigged batch, but because they’re so few winners he comes out ahead. And it ain’t just me.”
Whiskey Dick glanced around at the other people in Ruth’s Purgatory, searching for a quorum or at least one person to back him up. Ben Ficklin, Old Jimmy, deathly old with a glass of brown soda and a straw, missing one of his eye teeth, the restaurants guy who didn’t say much but laughed and grinned along, and a couple, him drinking shots and having difficulty speaking, her fondling their car keys.
“Look.”
He pointed to the full jar of pull tabs behind Mereta and below the liquor bottles. “Nobody buys pull tabs anymore. There’s all the proof you need.”
Ruth’s Purgatory was one of the last few places he went without the fabulous Rebecca. She wasn’t aware he came to Ruth’s. He’d kept that off the list of voluntary divulgences, more so for what it might say about him that he still came here. He texted her that he was tired to fend her off, the things she posited in response implying she wondered what he could possibly be tired from. How hard could it be peddling le restaurateur — freshly-scented restrooms, mug chillers, trendy flatware patterns, or the item she hated, the wall-mounted condom dispensers and cherry-flavored, glow-in-the-dark, ribbed and spiked and ultra-sensitive refills. He pretended to be unmindful of her insinuations. She could think what she wanted. He would conceal this one last sanctuary from her, such as it was.
Someone had torn out the guts of the roof, scattering bits of foam insulation like aging chunks of cheese around the circumference of the place, creating the impression of a last chance social alternative, flayed bits of insulation like mildewy confetti. In he went, quickly as if not to be seen entering, from the bright day and its big Texas sky, to the inner dimness of this windowless vault of decrepitude hermetically sealed from daylight.
And there he was in the corner as always, the legendary and majestic Babe Ruth, a large black-and-white (and surprisingly well-preserved) close-up of the Babe circa 1933, haughty and arrogant in his Yankee pinstripes, scowling at him as he entered as if he were some revolting subspecies of human. Like a reporter with a camera, intruding on the Babe’s sacrosanct pre-game ritual or tape-measure hangover, an unplanned dugout assault with one of those comically large cameras and hand-held bursting flashes from way back when.
The insulation cheese and the Babe seemed in cahoots, relegating him to a kind of manic malaise, where laughing at the not-drunk-enough-to-be-funny antics was expected or they would begin to look askance at him, as if he might think he was better than everyone else. It was possible to scrub away the mania with enough alcohol, and the Babe and the insulation cheese seemed to know this, co-producing the ambience to prod him along. People were glad to have him moor alongside, another presence where there was a depressing paucity much of the time. Were anyone to leave, it might relegate to skeleton crew the scant remaining contingent, as if that one extra person constituted a happening, or a gathering at least. Or that one extra person departing could be on their way to something better and might never return.
Mereta the bartender was well too young for this ensemble, striking, with long, straight brunette hair and big green eyes with acute nocturnal vision well-adjusted to the Cimmerian shade. He had fifty dollars magically disappear off the bar once when she was bartending, and he’d heard one of the regulars normally too intoxicated to speak had as well, accusing Mereta, even calling her the no-turning-back C-word.
Celeste and her daughter arrived, immediately becoming the center of attention. He couldn’t remember Celeste’s name right away before overhearing it again, one of the morsels about her and her daughter he’d ingested in various states of inebriation, obligingly half-listening with half-interest, following along by inhaling tidbits floating by his span of attention like secondhand smoke. She was divorced. She’d been the bar manager at Ruth’s for twenty years. Her Kia van had been recalled a dozen times. For being here they should all be recalled, for checking and rechecking the various components of their psyches that were defective, or if not defective in need of a thorough diagnostic. Celeste the bar manager came on her off hours, when he’d have thought she’d be putting miles between herself and this place. The Babe seemed to find this especially pathetic, that she was here, now, and with her young daughter.
Whiskey Dick left Mereta for Celeste’s daughter and he’d already sidled up to her, Celeste laughing it off, cigarette-hoarse like the laugh of a Madame too old to appease the clientele but still relevant to the business. Whiskey Dick with his tatts, conqueror of women accustomed to disappointing men, Celeste’s daughter in a kind of limbo, having dropped out of UT after two semesters and not sure what she wanted to do with her life from this point forward, something like an unplanned pregnancy the first in a string of misfortunate inevitabilities.
An elderly man wandered in with bouquets wrapped in cellophane cones, and when he was gone, he’d be the focal point of communal sympathy. If Ben Ficklin hadn’t bought a bouquet from him Celeste would have wanted to know why no one bought flowers from the poor old guy, until someone else blurted out that he had pulled up in a brand new CRV and everyone laughed and no one cared. Ben Ficklin turned grandly to Celeste, and when he was about to present the flowers whirled around and gave them instead to Whiskey Dick, kissing him on the cheek, and the place exploded into a deafening aural palsy, a sound coming out of Mereta as if she’d been presented with an unexpected, toe-curling orgasm.
Despite being consciously aware of the Babe’s glaring disapproval he chimed in, “So, Whiskey Dick. Where’d that come from?”
And the tavern, culled to a titter, erupted anew, and someone shouted over the laughter, “yeah, Whiskey Dick, explain that one why don’t cha?”
The laughter beginning to subside then swelling again when someone shouted, “It ain’t because he likes whiskey, and his real name ain’t Dick if that helps ya any.”
He turned to the Babe hating it all, every minute of it, every utterance, every glass or bottle drained, every cigarette smoked to the filter. This saloon was exile for the great slugger, with no foreseeable possibility of escape. Who knew exactly why, but he could come up with what might have been the charges against the Babe based on generations of hearsay — for never generously accepting the trappings of his fame, or graciously bowing to the invasiveness that came with it, his inability to check his famous appetites, the haughty arrogance at being better than anyone else at hitting a baseball, not appreciating that this God-given ability was nothing more than some blessing for which he’d been arbitrarily selected. For greatness misplaced, for flunking some kind of monumental test, for being unable to shoulder what turned out to be a considerable burden, the Babe banished here to live out an eternity scowling at the aftershock of his life, forced witness to these repetitive sins, hanging by a hook at this sorry-ass saloon in the middle of Nowhere, TX.