Every Dead Thing

“We don’t do coffee,” he said.

I glanced along the bar. Two stools down an elderly man in a lumber jacket and a battered Cat cap sipped at a mug of what smelled like strong black coffee.

“He bring his own?” I inquired, gesturing with a nod down the bar.

“Yep,” said the bartender, still looking at the TV.

“A Coke’ll do. Right behind your knees, second shelf down. Don’t hurt yourself leaning over.”

For a long time it seemed he wasn’t going to move, then he shifted slowly, leaned down without taking his eyes from the screen, and found the opener on the edge of the counter by instinct. Then he placed the bottle in front of me and set an iceless glass beside it. In the mirror behind the bar, I saw the amused smiles of some of the other patrons and heard a woman’s laugh, low and boozy with a promise of sex in it. In the mirror over the bar, I traced the laugh to a coarse-featured woman in the corner, her hair huge and dark. Beside her, a stout man whispered sour somethings in her ear like the cooings of a sick dove.

I poured the drink and took a long swig. It was warm and sticky and I felt it cleave to my palate, my tongue, and my teeth. The bartender spent a while idly polishing glasses with a bar towel that looked like it had last been cleaned for Reagan’s inauguration. When he got bored with redistributing the dirt on the glasses he wandered back toward me and put the bar towel down in front of me.

“Passin’ through?” he asked, although there was no curiosity in his voice. It sounded more like advice than a question.

“Nope,” I said.

He took it in and then waited for me to say more. I didn’t. He gave in first.

“Whatcha doin’ here, then?” He looked over my shoulder at the pool players behind and I noticed that the sound of balls colliding had suddenly ceased. He smiled a big shit-eating grin. “Maybe I can”-he stopped and the grin got wider, his tone changing to one of mock formality-“be of some a-ssistance.”

“You know anyone named Demeter?”

The shit-eating grin froze and there was a pause.

“No.”

“Then I don’t believe you can be of any a-ssistance.”

I stood up to leave, placing two dollar bills on the counter.

“For the welcome,” I said. “Put it toward a new sign.”

I turned to find a small, rat-featured guy in a worn blue denim jacket standing in front of me. His nose was dotted with blackheads and his teeth were prominent and yellow-stained like walrus tusks. His black baseball cap was marked with the words Boyz N the Hood, but this wasn’t any logo John Singleton would have liked. Instead of homies, the words were surrounded by the hooded heads of Klan figures.

Beneath his denim jacket, I could see the word Pulaski under a seal of some sort. Pulaski was the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan and the site of an annual rally for Aryan crackers everywhere, although I bet the face of old Thom Robb, grand high ass-wipe of the Klan, must have just lit up at the sight of Rat Features and his pinched, subintelligent face arriving to take in the Pulaski air. After all, Robb was trying to make the Klan appeal to the educated elite, the lawyers and the schoolteachers. Most lawyers would have been reluctant to have Rat Features as a client, still less a brother in arms.

But there was probably still a place for Rat Features in the new Klan. Every organization needs its foot soldiers, and this one had cannon fodder written all over him. When the time came for the Boyz to storm the steps of the Capitol and reclaim the Jewnited States for their own, Rat Features would be in the front line, where he could be certain to lay down his life for the cause.

Behind him, the bearded pool player loomed, his eyes small, piggy, and dumb looking. His arms were enormous but without definition, and his gut bulged beneath a camouflage T-shirt. The T-shirt bore the legend Kill ’em all-Let God sort ’em out, but the big guy was no marine. He looked as close to retarded as you can get without someone coming by twice a day to feed you and clean up your mess.

“How you doin’?” said the Rat. The bar was quiet now and the group of men at the pool table were no longer lounging but stood rigid in anticipation of what was to come. One of them smiled and poked his neighbor with an elbow. Obviously, the Rat and his buddy were the local double act.

“Great till now.”

He nodded as if I’d just said something deeply profound with which he had a natural empathy.

“You know,” I said, “I once took a leak in Thom Robb’s garden.”

Which was true.

“It’d be better if you just got back on the road and kept driving, I reckon,” said the Rat, after a pause to figure out who Thom Robb was. “So why don’t you just do that?”

“Thanks for the advice.” I moved to go past him but his pal put a hand like a shovel against my chest and pushed me back against the bar by flexing his wrist slightly.

“It wasn’t advice,” said the Rat. He gestured back at the big guy with his thumb.