Jed says it already slurring the ends of his words and pausing to gather them back into his mouth. He takes another deep swallow and stares off at the wall of half-empty bottles behind the bar.
“I’ll tell it straight,” Jed says “just the meaty facts.”
“Get on with it,” I say back, staring down my glass and wondering about the dress I saw the other day. I think about how good I might look in it. Then I think about the heels I’d wear with them, and my chest aches, and blood flushes from my face. I take another drink and blink back the shame bubbling somewhere in that hollow place beneath my sternum.
“Well, you see,” Jed slurs his words, shifting in the barstool to find that sweet spot where he will remain inert for the rest of the night, “It goes like this. They found him right?”
“Where?” I say back. “Where they find him?”
“Just down the street,” he says. “ head all split open with his brains and shit exposed and ripe for the crows.”
“Jesus Christ, just there in the street?” I want to cry when he says it, but I don’t.
The jingle of the entry bell pierces the haze of conversation and the low buzz of the patrons, some alone, some huddled together, but still very much alone. It’s Barry, looking sweaty and nervous like he always does.
“Hey, is that Barry?” Jed perks his head and his eyes focus a little more following the sound of the door.
“Goddamn, that’s Barry. Barry!” Jed yells it and waves Barry over. Barry jumps at the sound of his name, he’s in a suit. He’s in a fucking suit, what a guy that Barry is. Barry walks over to us and bumps a patron he doesn’t know, Pat. Pat doesn’t notice cause he’s four drinks deep into the evening and it’ll be hours before they ask him to leave Bojangles.
Barry waddles over, in his suit. It’s inky, and navy, and his tie is some wild concentric pattern. He’s sweating through his shirt before he reaches us. “Hey fellas,” Barry says, “ what’s the news?”
“Jed here is gonna tell us the straight story,” I say, “fixing to just give us the facts, so there isn’t no mistaking.”
Barry nods at Jed and Jed puffs his chest out, “Setting the record straight,” Jed says.
“I’m all ears,” Barry says and then orders a beer and a shot of bourbon.
“You know how they decide what’s bourbon and what isn’t,” Jed asks and doesn’t wait for an answer from me or Barry, “It needs to be made and barreled in Bourbon Kentucky, ain’t that some shit?”
“Just get on with the story,” I say after taking another drink, ordering another shot, and thinking about that dress some more.
Jed straightens, but his eyes won’t stop moving. As if they are on some seesaw inside his head. “It goes like this,” he says. “They found him in the street, head split open, nose busted, and his ankle like this. Jed makes a motion with his hands, setting them at a right angle.
Barry winces and sucks in a sharp breath, “Who?” he asks, “who did they find again?”
“Slow down,” Jed says. He smiles with his eyes squinting at Barry like he’s about to do a magic trick. Jed’s mustache is moist at its tips, and you can smell the alcohol as it wafts from his face to anyone within earshot.
“So they find him in the street,” Jed says, “just out there with not a soul in sight.”
“Who found him,” I say. I look down at my watch and think about–
“One of Dale’s girls,” Jed says. “Just before they opened the diner.”
“I love that place,” Barry says, “ and Dale’s a real mensch if I’ve ever met one.”
“Mensch?” Jed says, “the fuck is mensch? That more of that jewshit you’re into?”
“I’m not into “jew shit”, Jed,” Barry says, he’s not angry when he says it. He’s smiling, “I’m fucking Jewish, you antisemite troglodyte.”
Jed guffaws and feigns ignorance “Jew? You’re a Jew? Since when?”
“Since I stopped blowing out your pig father’s asshole, you fucking wet-brain,” Barry says.
Jed giggles then those giggles turn to open, crying laughter. “Man alive,” he says, “you all have mouths like that?”
I get anxious waiting for Jed to pick the story up again. “Which one of Dales’s girls found him?”
“Found who?” Barry says.
“I’ll get to that,” Jed answers and orders another shot. He waits instead of continuing. The bartender shoots Jed a single shot and Jed takes it straight, “ I wanna say it was Gina, maybe? Is she the older girl?”
“By a few years, yeah,” Barry says. “They’re good people.”
The bar is named Bojangles. There is a sign outside with a man in a top hat and a long nose and a shoe with a hole with a toe sticking out of it. A few blocks away, no more than a quarter mile, Jed says that’s where he fell. On that crack that cuts across Rawlins Street. He fell, and his head split, and he spilt himself all out in the street. Where his ankle snapped the way Jed did with his hands. Jed won’t say who it is or isn’t. Or maybe was or wasn’t. That dress. That dress, a club collar, and a French placket. Crisp poplin the color of a robin’s egg. My face wobbles in the glass, and just for a second, it’s different. Not so different, but different. Barry looks nervous and tired.
“You ok?” Barry says looking at me.
“Yeah, yeah, a little tired,” I say and my stomach turns over and I want to cry. I want to hold and be held, “Who fell, Jed?”
“You’ll never guess,” Jed says.
I don’t say anything.
Barry doesn’t say anything and I wonder if it’s for the same reason.
“You’re not even going to try?” Jed says.
Barry shrugs and takes a sip from the beer he ordered when he first got in. I look at my wobbly face, then back at Jed, then back at Pat sitting behind Jed, he’s crying. Not with noise, but in that pitiful way solitary men cry where they try and keep the bottom of their jaws from trembling and they can’t keep the tears in.
What time is it?
Later than I think.
“You’re not listening goddamnit,” Jed snaps his fingers at my nose. I jump and spill some of my face out of the glass on accident. Jed’s face is hard and somber like the face of an old stone ruin left buried among wild vines.
“I’m listening,” I say, and take a drink, and think about Pat and his crying, and Barry and his Jewishness.
“Like hell,” says Jed, “It was Wally. You believe that? Wally just cracked open and bleeding out in the street for one of Dale’s girl to find.”
The last part of that makes me sad. Those girls are young. Younger than us at least. The world must seem so open and ripe with possibility–then they find poor Wally, just lying there, seeing his insides leaking out of him, seeing that bone poking through his skin. They shouldn’t have to see that. Not when there is so much more to see. Wally shouldn’t have gone like that, not before–
“What happened,” I ask, still thinking about those girls having to see Wally like that, and wishing it was me.
“I don’t know Wally all that well,” Barry says, “He the one that works over at the old pharmacy?”
“No, that’s Mikey Wallace you’re thinking,” Jed says “Wally is the one that runs the old theater.”
The fact hits Barry in his chest and me and Jed both see it. He’s beside himself, face turned white and eyes all big and wet with surprise.
“No, that Wally,” Barry cries, “that’s horrible, I just took the kids to go watch that production of Oliver Twist they did. I loved it, just loved it.”
Jed shrugs with a matter-of-fact confidence, “thems the facts,” he says. Jed pauses and his face gets still and serious. He’s wobbling slightly in his chair, his body becoming more difficult to keep upright.
I think about Wally, it’s not fair that it’s Wally. That little drill in my head keeps pricking a nerve somewhere down deep and I can’t leave it alone. Jed says the name, but I still feel numb to it. Like it isn’t real, like there’s more for Jed to say. What’s the point in that? Poor Wally takes a tumble and now his brain is open to the world and someone has to sew his foot back on. And I. And I. And I–want that dress.
“How is everything, you know with the kids and–” Jed purposefully trails off asking Barry, “you doing alright?”
Barry nods and smiles weakly, “We’re getting on enough, you know how it is,” he says then takes a longer, bigger drink from his glass. He sighs to himself and does his best to look at every inch of the bar except at me and Jed, “ You know how I feel, I deserve this. I deserve it being this hard, and that’s just that,” Barry says.
I can’t stop thinking about Wally, and his theater, and his giant velvet drapes of burgundy, and his head open and his self spilling out into the street. Then his ankle and his bone snapping. I wonder if there was sound, and wonder if he felt his flesh rip and bones splinter before he heard it or if he’d already gone vacant and the fracture was merely a silent insult to silent injury. I wonder who he thought about lying there. If he called a name. Did he call my name?
“What happened?” I say. My voice is hoarse, and Jed and Barry hear the edge. I see it in the way they lean back from me, as if they’re afraid of me, or whatever they see coming out of me when I ask the question.
“Well, he fell,” Jed says, “what do you mean what happened? He fell and he died, right there out in the street, and nobody saw until poor Gina got there to find him.”
“What do you mean he just fell? How’s that a fact? He just fucking falls for no reason?” I say.
“Not no reason,” Jed says, “I’m sure he probably just tripped on that crack. The one in the street.”
“That’s it?” I say.
“What you mean that’s it,” Jed says, “that’s a whole lot. Wally owned a theater, everyone knew and loved him and one night he goes for a stroll. Maybe Wally had a little too much to drink. Maybe he wasn’t paying attention. Wally falls, and he falls hard. Hard enough to crack his skull right open. And his ankle just rips right through and so he’s there out in the street. Maybe he didn’t die right away, but it was sort of gradual,” Jed says it like he was the one who fell, “like maybe he could feel it pouring out of him like water from a pitcher, just getting lighter and lighter and he’s just empty. But that don’t matter, cause the story we know–the facts–is he fell, and when Gina found him in the morning, he was cold and stiff and dead, and that poor girl had to see it. Had to reckon with it and there was nobody there to help either of them. He was alone and–and it ain’t right that he was, that he had to be.”
Jed is breathing hard and his face is all screwed up and red. The bar is even quieter than before. The cigarette smoke has thinned and the calm of those still there is punctuated by a distant cough or someone clearing their throat, or Pat trying to hide his sobs.
“That’s it, you say,” Jed mocks my voice and takes another drink.
“I still can’t believe it was that Wally,” Barry says, but Barry is by himself somewhere. It’s on his face, he says he can’t believe it happened, but it’s his children you can see on his face. They’re always there.
“Straight fucking story,” I say, “nothing straight about it.”
Jed shrugs and wobbles in his stool keeping an impossible balance. I sulk, and sulk and then the dress the color of a robin’s egg floats back and blooms, and I get queasy and paranoid that Jed and Barry know what I’m thinking. They don’t, they both sit with their elbows on the bar staring into their glasses. Jed smiles and mumbles and then demands another, Barry continues to sip at his first drink; his face vacillating between sullen and fraught with panic.
“I gotta go,” I say.
“Be well,” says Barry.
“Till next time,” says Jed.
I pass under the sign of Bojangles. A man in a top hat with a long nose, and a shoe with a hole and a big toe sticking out of it looks down at me, and I look up at him. He doesn’t have anything more to tell so I go on my way.
“I’m going to get that dress,” I say to no one at all. I make my way stumbling for a quarter mile, dragging my head to look up at the street signs marking cross streets under failing lamplight. The sky isn’t there when I try to find it, and it startles me. I find Rawlins Street and glue my eyes to the ground looking for the crack. That culprit responsible for doing poor Wally in for no good reason at all. I find it, and get down on my knees, searching. I try to find something of Wally. Some stain, some splotch that the street cleaner didn’t see or Dale didn’t bleach. I wedge my face into the cracked cement, letting it cut into my cheeks. I try to find him there, breathing deep and hoping I catch the taste of his blood on the back of my throat when I do. There is nothing. No sign to tell me that for a night, my Wally leaked out into the cement and returned back to the dust he was always so particular about never wanting in his house. I say his name. I try to call his name and it dribbles out.
“Do you hear me,” I say, “I’m going to get that dress.”
I stumble over the crack in the road where Wally probably fell and opened himself up and let it pour out. I listen and look up at the sky, and there’s still nothing, no stars, no moon, no space.