Turner’s Saloon. Yet, I know darn well that when the urge hits me, I would have to walk a long way to get that glass of beer.
Chapter 2
Saloons all have one thing in common. They stink. Beer, cigarette smoke, and the dim lights don’t help to cover up any of it.
I grabbed the first stool on the right after I came in the door, near three other customers already sitting three stools away from my stool. The barkeep was a woman, maybe a little on the heavy side and wearing a stained apron that had once been white.
“What’ll you have?” she said in a flat voice.
“Schlitz,” I said, only just a wee little put out by the unfriendly greeting, and maybe I was making excuses for her. Like uh, bad day, too many beer cases to haul in, or maybe her daughter-in-law? What the hell. Most bartenders greet you with a nice friendly voice, and it was right in the middle of my amateurish breakdown of her outlook for the day when the guy on the next stool spoke to me.
“Hey, Bud. You’re sitting on my stool.”
“Huh?”
“My stool dummy. You’re sitting in my seat.”
Aw shoot, I thought. I’d been in this little Cambridge town for less than a half hour and already I’m being rousted. Well, yeah. So what? He maybe thought he was picking on a sissy. He was wrong. But that’s okay. I knew him better than he knew himself. He was a murderee. One of thousands just like him. A guy that goes around starting trouble until some poor fool finally kills him. He likes to pick on mild mannered looking guys, that he figures are easy to shove around. Like me. In time, he’d probably pick on the wrong guy, and end sending him to the hospital where he’d die. Oh, maybe he wasn’t blooded yet, but in time he would get his bones, and from my first inspection of him, he’d most likely get caught the same as most of them do.
The thing about this guy is that he probably didn’t know yet the extent of his true potential. This is the guy, that causes people to buy firearms, that they take home, and lock in a box before they put it in the top drawer of their dresser, and won’t realize how foolish they were until a guy breaks into their living room.
Trouble with this guy was the very last thing I wanted to see on my list of things to do for the day.
The bartender set my bottle of beer on the bar and reached for my money.
“Could I have a glass, please?” I said, and I no sooner got it out of my mouth, when she shoved it in front of me. I picked it up, turned it on a thirty-degree angle, and poured it nearly full, and then before I could drink it, I heard the guy snicker. Slowly, I tilted the glass and took a drink, then just as slowly, I used my forefinger to point to the next stool between us.
“This yours also?” keeping my voice submissive.
“Bet your sweet ass punk, but I have been known to rent my stools out to strangers.”
“How much?” I enquired.
“Ten bucks an hour,” and I could see the sneer on his face at the same time I noticed that his buddies were whispering things to him. Egging him on, I guess, and did I really want to do this.
There were three of them, for Christ’s sake. I just wanted a beer, and I sure as hell wasn’t intending to get a bunch of lumps on my head. The smart move to settle this mess was to grab a quick swallow of my beer and haul ass out the door.
He had an almost anxious look on his ugly face. Like a guy with a real good poker hand about to drag in the pot. The bastard wanted me! Our eyes met, and he didn’t flinch even a little, and that’s when I noticed the little scars around his brows. He was a tush hog...a barroom brawler. But then somehow I got the notion that I might be dealing with a team.
“Ten bucks, huh?” I said, “but sadly, I feel that if I would contribute to your little stool renting enterprise, that I would puke in my beer, so I got to say no.”
“Jive ass mother licker, I’m gonna’ fuc—”
He didn’t get it all out, because he was swinging his beer bottle at my head, but what cut off his cursing was the blood spurting from his nose, when I jammed the heel of my palm into it, before I grabbed his head and slammed my knee into his chin.
When I let him go, so I could attend to his buddies, he sank like a wet rag at my feet. Then I had to jump over him so I could kick the first of his buddies in the chest with my feet. He staggered backward to land in one of the booths just as the other guy was throwing a punch at my jaw. It didn’t land.
One of the very first things my old jiu-jitsu teacher had taught me was how to break the arm of a guy throwing a punch. When I made my move, I could hear the crack, but I never did learn how to determine the difference between the breaking of an arm and the dislocating of a shoulder. Both sound the same.
The bartender was screaming, and the guy with the busted arm was doing the same. I took another swallow of my beer while I tried to understand what the bartender was yelling about.
“You dumb ass fool,” she yelled.
“These guys are all connected. You’re in deep shit. Get your ass out of here, and then clear the fuck out of town, and I mean right now. Go!” and she made a shooing motion with both her hands.
Connected? I stared down at them. Hmm... they sure as hell didn’t look like mob guys. More like working men, even ditch diggers. The guy that had tried to rent me the bar stool was a big guy, and dressed all in blue jeans and shirt, and his eyes were fluttering open as I studied his ugly face. All three men were in their forties, and the guy I was looking at had his hair cut in white sidewalls.
I tilted my glass and finished it and went out the door. Indecision. Man, my head was full of it. But one thing for sure. She would call the cops, and they’d be small town cops full of piss and vinegar. No way to get away from them, nowhere to run. This was their town, and they’d know every nook and cranny and get me quick. Damn it. I sat down on the curb.
I would wait.
It must have taken maybe three minutes before I heard the siren. It’s almost always the same in every town. The wailing of it starts out very low and builds to a deafening scream, and if you’re standing close enough to it, you’ll want to cover your ears with both hands.
The lights were flashing on the gumball machine when they careened around the curve, after leaving the bridge in like two seconds, they slid to stop right in front of me so I had to lean back to keep the door of the car from hitting me. Both the bulls dashed inside, and both were carrying their shit sticks.
They would break up a fight. The bartender hadn’t told it all.
It didn’t take long. One of them still carrying his head beater came out the door and walked over to me.
“You the guy mixed up in that fight?”
“Yeah.”
“Stand up and use your hands to lean against the car.”
I did it and felt his hands quickly running over my body, and as soon as he was done he told me to stand up straight and put both hands behind my back so I complied, and just that quick I was a prisoner in the little town of Cambridge, Ohio.
The
