Lost Echoes

28

For a little town the steak place was pretty swank. They had a valet that took the car, guy that walked you to the door, and a gal he handed you off to inside. She walked you to your table, menus under her arm, left those with you, told you your waitress would come soon.

Actually, it wasn’t a table. It was a booth, and it was one of the few spots in the place that wasn’t so well lit you felt like you ought to do a dance number. Fact was, it was a little shadowy over in that corner because there was a kind of canopy over a series of booths there.

Rest of the place was bright and loud, with music playing, some guy at a piano in a suit, and Harry thought it was all kind of silly in a town like this, people dressed up like they were going to church.

“They didn’t ask for reservations,” Harry said.

“Already had one,” Tad said.

“They didn’t know how many,” Joey said.

“I made a reservation for a booth.”

“You some kind of big shot?” Joey asked.

“No. I just have money.”

The waitress came. She was cute and so happy and sweet, and her name was Sandy, and there wasn’t anything she wanted to do more than serve them, and she told them so, and gave them smiles. Harry had the taste of saccharin on the back of his tongue when she left.

He sat there and hoped there were no sounds outside of the loud music, guy at the piano. Nothing hidden in anything he might bump. It was a new joint, so maybe it was safe.

Joey was not loopy, but the wine had made him happy, and something of a loudmouth. Or a louder mouth. He was talking about the waitress and how he’d like to give her an exploratory plumb, or some such thing, so Harry decided to go to the bathroom.

Tad and Joey watched Harry thread his way through a new batch of patrons, and Joey said, “You a queen, Tad?”

Tad turned to him, said, “Now say that again.”

“I said are you a queen? You got a thing going for Harry?”

“How do you like your steak?”

“I asked you a question. I didn’t mean anything by it, asking you if you was queer.”

Tad gently placed his menu on the table, shifted his position, and laid an arm across the back of the booth.

“All right. Let’s you and me get down to it,” Tad said.

“Suits me.”

“Thing is, other night, that stuff happened with those thugs. I don’t remember it. Harry told me about it. But none of it was an accident. Just take that note.”

“Trying to scare me, Tad?”

“Just make that note, like I told you.”

“Tad—”

“Shut up, Joey. What I got is a major drinking problem. I don’t happen to be gay. If I were, though, I want you to know that I would be the best goddamn dick sucker ever fumbled with a zipper. I tell you this to let you know when I decide to be good at something I am. I tell you this to let you know that I am very good at whipping people’s asses. I tell you this because I don’t think you’re any kind of friend to Harry. I think you’re a fucking little parasite that would suck the blood out of the withered balls of a dead hyena.”

“You don’t have to get nasty.”

“You opened the door, shit-dick. You wanted to know about me, and now that I’m in touch with my true feelings, let me stay in touch. I think you are one rotten piece of stringy, sun-whitened dog shit lying windswept on an ant-infested hill. And you want to make everything and everyone around you turn dead and white too. Can’t stand the fact Harry’s got something going and has a chance and could quit drinking. ’Cause where would that leave you? Folks that didn’t grow up with you, they wouldn’t give you fifteen minutes in an outdoor shithouse unless it was on fire and you tied to the toilet.

“You are the biggest goddamn loser since losers were invented, and you’re like a fucking disease. You spread your loser, withered-white-dog-turd sensibilities wherever you go, just hoping you’ll drag everyone else down into the sewer with you, you piss-and-turd-gulping piece of glorified dog shit that almost walks like a man. Now, I’ve got that off my chest. I got one more thing to say, a question really. Would you like your steak to go, you fucking odoriferous weasel ass?”

Joey started to open his mouth.

“Oh. One last thing. You speak loudly, cuss me, act nasty in any way, you will wake up with a fucking tube in your nose and one in your dick. You’ll think you’re a spaceman, so many tubes will be running out of your body. I will beat you and slam you and toss you and kick you and stomp you and just about anything I can think of, up to hitting you with some of these chairs, and possibly some of the patrons. So don’t. Don’t say anything. Not a goddamn word, even if it’s in Greek.”

Joey closed his menu, slid out of the booth, and walked briskly toward the door.

The waitress, Sandy, appeared.

“Hi,” Tad said. “Uh, there will just be two of us after all. Our friend remembered he left the stove on.”

In the bathroom Harry washed his hands carefully and looked around and felt nervous, but there were no sounds that had sounds beneath them, light and shadow, images and pain.

No. He was cool.

So far.

He dried his hands under the blower, took a deep breath, went back out into the restaurant.

When Harry came back to the booth, Tad was reading the menu. Harry said, “Where’s Joey?”

“He left.”

“On foot?”

“Sure looked that way.”

“Where to?”

“I’m not certain. Liquor store would be my guess.”

Harry picked up his menu, said, “He coming back?”

“I don’t think so…. I would say no.”

“You two get into it?”

“Heavens, no. We just talked.”

Later, back at home, in the dark, Harry took off his clothes and sat naked on the couch. He sat there for a long time. Slowly he got up and went to the trash can and took out the wine bottle and held it near the window so the outside light could shine through it. There wasn’t even a drop left. He set it on the bookshelf and looked at it for a while, then he put it in the trash can again.

He sat on the couch and looked at the trash can.

He sat that way for about five minutes, then got up and got the bottle out of the trash and held it against his nose and smelled it. It smelled like strawberries and a back rub. He ran his tongue just inside the bottle neck. He began to work his tongue savagely along the outside of the bottle. There was just the faintest taste of wine.

He noted he had an erection.

Holy shit. I’m so fucking horny for liquor, I’ve got a hard-on.

That old dog won’t hunt.

Harry broke the bottle in the bathroom sink and picked out the glass and put it in the bathroom trash. He cut himself in the process. He sucked his finger and looked at his face in the mirror. The light was off, so he could not see himself well. He could see enough to notice a man with his hand in his mouth, sucking. All of this over a goddamn wine bottle.

He washed his hands and his face and put on a fresh pair of shorts and got his pillow and blankets out of the closet and lay on the couch and covered up.

He thought about how the wine had looked in the jelly jar, and how Joey had acted as he drank it. How he had smacked his lips and how the wine had beaded on his lips, how he had licked at it when it splashed onto the sides of his mouth.

Harry got up and found the jelly jar Joey had drunk out of. There was just the faintest bit of wine in the bottom.

This is silly, Harry told himself. I want a drink, I can have a drink. Hell, one drink, that isn’t anything. Maybe I could go to the store, get a beer. Just one.

In Rio Bravo, the drunk in the movie had quit drinking the hard stuff, just had a beer now and then. That worked for him. He could drink a beer. It was the hard liquor he couldn’t have. A beer. That would be cool. Just one. A cold one.

Shit, Harry thought. Dean Martin was an actor. He didn’t have to get over being a drunk. He was playing drunk. In my case, Harry thought, I am not playing.

He washed out the jelly jar, in case he should start trying to drink the dregs, and went to bed. After a long while of thinking about drink and thinking about the sounds that made him drink, the faces he had seen, the pain he had felt, he drifted off to sleep.