I move my head, slightly, like this,” Jack shifts imperceptibly, “I’m taking two pictures, my mind compares them, measures the difference, and I get my sense of depth.”
“Okay.”
“At first it was hard, though.”
“I know some soldiers, lost eyes in Iraq. They say they have trouble shaking hands. Parking the car. Chopsticks.”
“Chopsticks are tough for everybody,” Jack allows.
There are few customers tonight in the Roundup Room. Jack prefers the anonymity of his corner stool at the bar to the checkerboard-cloth-covered wagon-wheel tables for six and slide-in booths in the over-lit dining area. When was the last time, he wonders, there were six people having dinner together in here? Two couples, marines from the nearby combat training facility and their dates, are the only diners. The jarheads are having the all-you-can-eat popcorn shrimp, and their ketchup-splattered plates suggest it has become a how-much-will-they-cook situation. Three heat-jacked, love-shot, middle-aged gals sit in a booth with a pitcher of margaritas, sharing their perky loneliness. Another marine, older, in street clothes but with the unmistakable high-and-tight haircut, gunnery-sergeant set to his mouth, and intricate, indecipherable tattoos on both biceps, sits hunched at the opposite end of the bar from Jack, nursing a lite beer and occasionally glancing up, hopeful, at the door.
“I’ll tell you what, though,” Jack continues, unable, for some reason, to shut up, “it makes you greedy, about what you do see. It forces you to see more clearly. You don’t waste your time on the visual garbage. A man with one eye wants to focus on the things that are worth seeing.”
The bartender rolls out some more limes. “So I guess you spend your free time surfing porn sites on the web.”
“He’s a comedian,” Jack says, smiling. Shut up, Jack tells himself. Shut up, go outside, have your smoke.
Salisbury steak with Brussels sprouts and cactus shavings is an attempt, Jack guesses, at nouvelle Western cuisine. He eats hungrily, without thinking about it. It’s his first meal since an Egg McMuffin and Diet Coke breakfast, on the grey, fog-bound road back from Santa Barbara at dawn.
For a moment he wonders if he dreamed it.
“Been out here before?” The bartender is bored. Just grinding through another shift.
“I’ve got this friend, married a swimsuit model. She’s filthy rich and they’ve got a house in the north hills. Usually I stay up there.”
“Not this time?”
“No.”
“Swimsuit model. That’s sweet.” Jack pushes his plate back, politely trying to put a punctuation on the conversation, but, apropos of nothing, now the bartender waxes on: “Before he got married, my cousin Cody was, like, this major poozle hound. He had a theory that, before you get serious about a girl, you want to meet her mother. Seriously. Because, according to Cody, the mom is what she’s going to look like when, you know, the fruit goes past ripe.”
“Past ripe.”
The bartender smiles. “Hey. Two pictures.”
“What?”
“Two pictures, one eye. Like you were saying. It’s the multiple pictures that give you the depth of perception.”
“It’s bullshit, though,” Jack says. “Don’t you think?”
The bartender shrugs, suddenly on the defensive for his cousin. “So, your friend, did he ever meet the swimsuit girl’s mother?”
Jack thinks. “He did, yeah.”
“And?”
There’s a commotion in the kitchen. Raised voices, pans clattering. Everyone in the restaurant pretends not to notice. The bartender takes Jack’s empty plate away and replaces it with a cup of coffee and brandy snifter filled with two fingers of Sambuca. Jack swirls the glass, trying to rinse a stray bean back down with its buddies.
Abruptly, the kitchen doorway bangs open, a lanky cook appears pushing ahead of him a sullen girl with a Hello Kitty backpack. He scolds her in Spanish, she says nothing, her Day-Glo sunscreen smeared across her cheeks, her unscreened arms sunburned painfully red. The girl just stares at her feet until the cook gets tired of yelling and goes back into the kitchen with a sense of finality.
“Hey.”
The girl looks up and locks eyes with Jack.
“I’m Jack. What up?”
The front door opens and closes on Jack’s blind side; Jack glances toward it out of habit, and discovers he can’t stop looking at the young woman who enters, his breath literally caught for an instant in his chest before he remembers to breathe again, she’s that pretty.
“Rachel,” the Hello Kitty girl tells him, but Jack’s not listening anymore.
Hitching up her short green dress, the woman lifts herself onto a bar stool halfway between Jack and the marine sergeant. Her legs cross gracefully to let one green high-heeled pump dangle. Then she takes it off, puts it up on the bar, and rubs her foot.
“These shoes are murdering me,” she says. The bartender pours her a Wild Turkey straight up. “No wonder they call them Fuck Me pumps.”
The bartender laughs. The young woman in the green dress manages to look around the entire room without making eye contact with Jack.
“I heard about a guy who makes a thing you can put in the heel to make them more comfortable,” the bartender is saying.
“That’s pretty vague. A guy? A thing?”
“Didn’t occur to me to take notes.”
“Ha ha.”
“I thought you were going dancing in Victorville tonight.”
“I thought this all-you-can-eat shrimp deal was supposed to draw customers.”
“Talk to the boss, m’lady.”
“Yeah. As if.”
They both laugh.
Jack pretends to study the oil-swirls in his coffee, so she won’t think he’s staring. But he is, staring. The dim light that falls on her from old recessed spots softens her face to a pleasant blur of pinkish white framed by dark hair that folds to her shoulder. Smudges of mauve eye shadow, serious, impenetrable eyes. A slur of lavender lipstick betrays the sad smile.
One of the old gals, slender, white-haired, stands up with the empty margarita pitcher and brings it to the bar for a refill. Jack tap-taps his cigarette again.
“Excuse me. The girl who just came in—”
Both the bartender and white-haired woman glance at Jack, wondering if he’s talking to them. Jack waits. The older woman smiles, self-conscious. Jack smiles back. The bartender refills the pitcher, delivers it, and looks at Jack. “Yes sir?”
“I’d like to buy her a drink.”
