this story is dedicated to the memory of James “Jimmer” Sheehan who may have found this amusing, but probably would have explained in great detail how to do it better
I hit my knuckles on the top of the sturdy wood as I stepped onto the overgrown lawn. It was still straight and level. The man built a good fence.
There was a rusty paint can lying there in the dirt by the house’s foundation and I kicked it towards the “for sale” sign across the lawn. It may as well have been one of the cans we’d used when we painted the place.
I walked across the street to the bar, The Elbow Room. As I walked across, I followed with my eyes the light coming down onto the street through the bay windows of the upstairs apartment. I wondered who lived up there these days and if they’d figured out a better furniture arrangement for that awkward main room.
There was a big paper sign hanging cheaply over the entrance of the bar, bold and yellow and completely without taste. The messy sharpie scrawled across it read: “KEG CLEARANCE! $3 pints—$3 wells—$9 growler fills—KITCHEN CLOSED”
I walked into the bar and stopped a few seconds to look around. The density of the strange and old items decorating the many shelved walls had escaped my memory.
“You see these old gas lights I got in here,” Jim had told me once, “that big brass steering wheel, that ship’s clock there? There was a boat went down somewhere outside a bay we were anchored up in, oh, somewhere out in the Aleutians, might have just been Dutch. I can’t remember. Anyway, this old trawler was about half submerged just outside in another little bay and the half that wasn’t under had all this cool shit on it my skipper thought we might salvage. So I spent a whole week over there on the wreck grinding off everything I thought I could use or keep. I was engineer, see. Coast guard showed up eventually and told us we had to put it all back and almost arrested us anyway but those lights and that clock and that wheel I managed to get by ‘em.
…..That glass ball up top there behind the bar, I won that in a bet at this big flea market in central Mass I worked at when I was a teenager. That’s how I learned about Alaska in the first place......This big plank up on the wall, that’s bubinga wood. Ba-bing-ga. I found that in a shipping container I bought in one of those auctions. Straight from Africa”.......Built the bar myself. Maple. Took fifteen of us to carry the thing in here.”
I think every one of the countless old Jack London books and world war two ration cans and weird photos on the walls had probably come out of stories too. But I didn’t know a tenth of them. With a big group of regulars we might be able to come close. Still, I wondered how many of those stories would be lost or forgotten now. In more ways than one, those variously peculiar and generally old objects contained the man’s whole life.
Soon it would all be junk.
I went over to our table in the corner by the fireplace and sat down. “Hey Betty. Hey Sam,” I said.
Betty didn’t say anything, just stood up and hugged me.
She was a big soft woman, nearly as wide as she was short, and it was a good hug. With her messy black hair, black calf-length spandex pants, and Pantera t-shirt she kind of looked like a big, rosy-cheeked, em0 blueberry.
Sam didn’t say anything either when we both sat down. Instead, he nodded my way and slid me the beer he had waiting for me. We all have our own ways of expressing affection.
“I was gonna ask, if you guys are both drinking, who’s tending bar?”
“Jimmer’s wife,” Matt said without looking up. “She didn’t want to have to pay anybody for only a couple shifts.”
“Yeah, I guess so. She’s practically giving it away though. Probably be busy.”
It was a little jarring, he looked so much older and sadder and thinner than he’d used to look. His long nose hooked ominously over dark sullen eyes, his torn flannel hanging limply over a gaunt frame and holes in the toes of his boots. The man looked tired. And old. Like there was something dragging him down faster than the rest of us. “Yeah….” he said. “I’d imagine she just wants to close up as soon as possible and get on with things.”
Betty was picking at something stuck to the table with her fingers “Can we talk about something else?” she said. She was giving me this kind of starry-eyed look. “We haven’t seen you in, what’s it been, two years? Or has it been longer?”
“Four years,” I said.
“God, that was fast. It doesn’t seem like so long ago since you were back there slinging pies and playing all that crazy music,” she said. “You must be thirty now.”
“Thirty-one.” I said. She shook her head and kept her eyes on me.
We were all quiet for a long while trying to think of what to say next. What else was there to talk about? We could look back or we could look forward, there was precious little between.
I said, “do you guys remember any of the nicknames Jimmer would call you? I was thinking about it the other day. I got ‘sunshine,’’pumpkin,’’curleyqueue,’’bugaboo,’’snookums,’’billyboy,’ and I couldn’t think of anything else.”
They shifted around and looked at their drinks.
Eventually Sam said,“I don’t think he ever called us names like that.”
“Oh,” I said. He didn’t?” When they didn’t say anything, I got up and went for the bar. “Three Basil’s please, Leslie,” I said. She gave me a strange look pulling down the bottle from the shelf and I remembered that the two of us had never met before. I smiled back at her awkwardly.
“Start a tab?” she said.
“Yeah, thanks,” I said.
I took the whiskeys back over to the table in the corner and set them down with an air of ceremony. “Here we are.””
“What the hell’s that for?” Sam said.
“For filling me in. I want to know everything. You know, not just the stuff in the local news reports. We’ll have a whisky and then you guys can please tell me what happened. I feel like I have to know everything,” I said.
Betty leaned in and looked at me with a big grin. Even though it was writ large across her face there was only sadness in her eyes. She said, “do you remember the time the pizza oven broke and Sam and Jimmer were grilling people burgers on the back porch and they were having such a ‘good time’ that they set the whole thing on fire? And when the fire department showed up they were still grilling but in a new spot right next to the burned up porch like they might as well just give it another go?” She tilted her head back and shrieked like a joyous hyena. Betty had a famous laugh.
Sam smiled. “He thought if we had some burgers for them too they might let it slide.”
“You mean setting the bar on fire?”
“Betty.” I said.
The plastic smile faded from Betty’s face and revealed the concern it had disguised. “I dunno man, Leslie’s right over there,” she said. “I don’t think she even knows what happened, really. I hope she never does. Can’t we just tell eachother old stories and get drunk?”
“You’re saying something’s not up? Come on, Betty. You make it so obvious,” I said. “Oh, don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what,” she said.
“All coy like that,” I said. “Come on,” I said. “You want to tell me everything. You want to spill your guts. You’re making those comments because you want me to drag it out of you and have it be a good drama. But I really don’t want to play your game. Can you just give me the story? Please. What happened that day? Don’t I have some right to know?”
“What comments?” she said.
“You know, the melodramatic ones like ‘I hope she never finds out….’ dun…dun…dun…” I pretended to play an organ.
“I didn’t say that. And if I did I wouldn’t say it like that.” She leaned forward on the table so she could turn away from me to look at Sam. “I think I want to have something to eat,” she said. “I’m hungry all the sudden. Maybe we could all just go get something to eat?” she said.
“What’s the deal here?” I said. I was irritated and I sort of slammed my beer on the table.
It must have been pretty loud because Betty kind of bounced up in her chair and looked around nervously to see if I hadn’t caused a scene. “Will you be quiet? Jesus. Ok, ok. Take it easy. We’ll tell you. We can tell him right, Sam?”
“Shit, Betty, I don’t know that this is the best time.” He was looking down and holding very still as though he were trying not to be noticed by anybody.
I motioned to Leslie at the bar for another round.
“It’ll be a better time after another whisky or two,” I said. “Come on you guys, you gotta relax. You look like you’re about to hold the place up.”
We all drank and Betty and I both coughed.
Then Bohemian Rhapsody came on quietly over the radio.“Oh fuck,” Betty said. She reached for her phone to turn the stereo up and got out of her seat, grinning at us and gyrating her hips. Sam and I both cringed significantly.
I looked at him in sadness. “I forgot that Betty likes Queen.”
He didn’t look away from her, but he nodded his agreement.
We continued to watch in mesmerized horror as Betty shamelessly pantomimed a dramatic performance for us complete with an air-guitar solo and a clumsy knee slide. Matt pulled low his Chicago Cubs cap.
“Can’t we just have an honest chat?” I said. But my pleas were met by her waggling Freddie Mercury finger. She loved how we hated it.
When the song finally came to an end, Betty leaned in close to me, panting beerily after having lip-sung her lungs out, and whispered, “ok…he…” she paused to take a deep breath…“wasn’t…” another deep breath…“drunk.”
“What?”
She held up her hands in apology and rolled her eyes, still breathing very hard. She was beaming. “You….said…I should….need to…relax.” It took her a while to catch her breath. By the time she had recovered she started to look sad again and repeated, “he wasn’t drunk.”
“Who wasn’t drunk?” I said.
“I thought you were supposed to be smart, college boy.” She looked around and lowered her voice. “Jim, you dummy.”
I squinted at her in confusion.
Unblinking, with eyes full of earnestness like an insistent child, she repeated, slower this time, “he wasn’t drunk.” She gave an exaggerated nod as if to certify the statement.
“Yeah, I got that but what do you mean ‘he wasn’t drunk’?”
“When he crashed his Harley. He wasn’t drunk.”
“Yes, I know what you’re referring to but what does that have to do with anything? So what if he wasn’t drunk?” I was starting to get a bit agitated. Who could possibly have cared if Jim was drunk or not? Besides the police, I mean. We were talking about a guy who drank beers all afternoon every day. I looked to Sam in the hopes that he might explain what she was trying to say a bit more sensibly, but it seemed like he was intentionally averting his eyes from mine.
Betty closed her two hands into fists and rubbed them together as she exhaustedly lowered her forehead into them and almost whispered, “I think they wanted it to look like he was drunk is what I’m trying to say. But he wasn’t. I know he wasn’t.”
Sam gritted his teeth and watched something going on behind our backs.
I said, “who wanted it to look like he was drunk? The cops? Betty, what are you talking about?”
“I don’t know. No, not the cops. I don’t think so. I don’t know. I know I sound crazy. God, I feel crazy. I’ve never felt like this in my life. But you have to listen to me. It’s true, I know it’s true. See, there’s this. Right here. Look at this. Just look. See. Sam found this on the bar when he came in to open up Sunday. That was the day…”
“I know,” I said.
“Anyway it was just sitting there waiting for us to find it. Look at it, there. Read it. You’ll see,” she said.
She was holding out a slip of paper, a ripped piece of a small pocket-sized notepad page. It read: “They’re coming. Not what you think. Key in shop. Know when you see.”
Well, it was definitely a note from Jim. That was the first thing. And I had no doubt about it. His was a very distinctive and boyishly neat scrawl—all caps and no style, like an architect. But what did it mean? I had received so many messages like that which had turned out to be so cryptic only out of a concerted effort by Jim to use as few words as possible. Betty would have, in her ten or so years of bartending at this place, become more accustomed to these riddles than I ever had. Those skeletons of a thought. This wasn’t exactly like catching Kaczynski. Minimal linguistic forensics were required to determine that messages like “2. Meat. Or else.” only meant something like I had to have a check ready for the pepperoni guy by two or we wouldn’t get a delivery the next day. I was sure it had to have been something like that.
Why wouldn’t Betty think so too? She was staring at me from across the table while she waited to see a reaction come across my face. When I met her gaze she lit up. “Come on! How fucking ominous is that?” she said. “There’s no way it’s a coincidence. On the day he died? It has to have something to do with it.” She jutted her head forward aggressively at the look I met her with. As though anything were obvious right then. “Right?” she shrugged her shoulders and raised her hands ever so slightly like she didn’t even have to say duh. Then she turned to Sam. “Right?”
Sam looked directly at her for a long time like he was trying to decide what to say and then he said, “I don’t know, Betty. What makes it so hard to think that he was just drunk?”
“This!” She said, “this makes it hard to believe!” She held the note in the air and flapped it around. “You know what else makes it hard to believe? Jimmer rode motorcycles his entire life. All over the whole country. Remember he talked about following Ken Kesey’s bus from California to Oregon and then down through Nevada? God, he made it sound so beautiful.” She took a big drink from her beer and rubbed her eyes with both hands. “He had weeks and weeks on the road. He told me he ran into Neil Young in the South Utah desert and rode right next to him and his wife for half a day. He rode with Andrew—see, he’s right over there smoking outside—every Sunday all down through the gorge and up into Washington. You’ve seen how many bikes he has in his garage, maybe twenty?” She went on. “He rode with his kids all the time. I mean, I of all people even let the guy take my own children out and show them how to ride dirt bikes. That's how much I trusted him. And he was probably drinking the whole time he did that too.”
Sam and I both waited to see if she would continue. You know, to see what was her point.
“It just doesn’t make any sense that a few beers could have caused him to crash like that on that little street not even ten minutes away from his house here. I don’t know what but something happened. It had to have. I know you think so too, Sam.”
Sam didn’t look up or say anything at all but his silence became one of acquiescence.
“See!” she said, “Just think about it. They want us to think he was drunk. I don’t know who, but they do. Did I just rhyme?” She burped and adjusted herself in her seat. She was getting very excited, almost exultant. “We just need to figure out why. And we have this clue. You know, ‘they’re coming for me.’ He left it so we’d find it and then we’d find them. He said ‘the key is in the shop.’ So we have to look there. There’s something in there that’ll tell us who was after him. Something is going on. And he wanted us to know. He wanted us to find out” She rested her hands flat on the table and took a deep breath. Case rested. She waited to see if it had caused its intended impact.
I’m not sure that it did, though we went along with it anyway. I looked hard at Sam, long enough that he eventually had no choice but to meet my glare with his own eyes. This seemed to break the ice some between the two of us, and his look softened after a second. I couldn’t remember a single thing I’d ever really liked about the guy. “How long have you two been here?” I said.
He knew exactly what I was asking. He said “we only had the one round before you showed up” and shrugged.
I didn’t know what to say. “Well, jesus guys, I dunno” I said. It was completely crazy. I had heard about grief doing this to people but I had never seen it before myself and I didn’t know how to deal with it. That’s what I’m trying to say: I didn’t know what to do. I thought it best to try to appease her. We both must have thought so. “I guess we better have another round and go see if we can break in and poke around in the shop,” I said.
“We don’t have to break in.” Betty said. “Sam’s got a key. Manager, remember?” She grinned and jigged her thumb at him.
So the three of us had a couple more whiskys and then we went for the shop. No cars drove by on the street beside the bridge as we entered the swinging door of the gate. It led behind the bar and before the entrance of the shop, a two story gabled building with corrugated aluminum siding and red and green painted trim around the windows and the doors.
Sam unlocked the big wood door with an iron skeleton key and pushed it open. We followed him in and he turned on the lights. It was just like I remembered it. It smelled like sawdust and shellac and stale beer. And just as I had always remembered, there was still no discernible system for the arrangement of things. For me, it was complete madness. There were pieces of lumber to one side and pieces of half-built chairs to another, a tablesaw in the middle of it all so covered with random tools and pieces of scrap wood that it was hardly identifiable as a tablesaw at all. The workbenches, too, were buried beyond recognition. There was an antique cash register, two old U.S. army issue motorcycles with sidecars buried in cables, a little blue MG with the hood open and the engine suspended by the chains of a come-along above it, wooden doors for old wooden boats, a maidenhead for a sailboat, porch columns, massive ten-foot-long old-school logging hand saws, vintage neon lights and bar signs, tools of all sorts and shapes, and grease, and beer bottles, and various cans of paint and chemicals and weed everywhere.
I looked up at Betty and Sam helplessly. “Where do we start?” I regretted intensely going along with this ridiculous treasure hunt.
Sam looked pissed off. “Hell, I don’t know,” he said. This is all just fucked up.” He kicked a piece of scrap wood and put his hands on his hips and looked down and took a deep breath. Then he looked back up at us, “I’m sorry. I’m just a little upset is all,” he said.
Betty didn’t give him a second thought. She was in a state of adrenal-type fervor, such was her excitement at the prospect of finding another ‘clue.’ “You know what the problem is?” she said. “The problem is that we’re looking at this stuff and thinking its a huge mess. But it’s not. Is it? To Jimmer this was organised, you know. I guess it was.” She looked at me appealingly, “wasn’t it? So maybe we just try to think like Jim? I don’t know.”
“Yeah, yeah. That’s not such a bad idea,” I said. I winked at her, “I guess you are a little smarter than you look.” She gave me a bitter, saccharine smile and flipped me off. Then turned away from me to see where Sam had gone.
“Sam, what time you been opening the bar on Sundays?” she said.
He took a while to respond. When he did, he said it quietly. “I guess I usually get in around ten or eleven depending on the day.” He was looking away from us and remained like that. He’d been standing off to the side of us just holding still and not saying anything. Thinking, it looked like.
“Get it? Do you get it?” Betty clapped her hands together. “We just think ‘what would Jimmer be doing around nine or ten on a Sunday’ and we look around there.” She turned straight to me. “I am smarter than I look, you fuckin’ dickhead,” she said.
Sam stiffened. I watched him bring his hand to his mouth and rub his upper lip in pensive frustration and stare away from us into the corner of the ceiling.
“What would Jim be doing at ten in the morning?” I said. I couldn’t think of anything.
The smile drained away from Betty’s face as she repeated the question softly to herself. She pursed her eyebrows and chewed on her cheek. She looked up at Sam and me. “What did Jimmer do in the mornings?” she said.
A loud, exasperated breath escaped from Sam’s mouth. He still didn’t look at us but I saw him blink very slowly and shake his head. It seemed like he might burst at any second.
I didn’t say anything, only took in the chaos of the place. The little objects spotlit by dusty beams from the streetlights just outside the windows. Betty began to root around at the clutter on top of the tablesaw with a renewed sense of urgency and Sam started looking through the tool benches over away from us in search of another beer.
I let the futility of it all sink in. Let it wrap me up inside, right around the center of my belly. And for a second it felt like I could just do nothing at all for the whole rest of my life, like it would be better if I did nothing. You know, like what was the point? But more than that. Really a lot more than that. “What are we doing in here anyway?” I said. And suddenly I felt like I might start crying.
“What?” Betty said. She stopped whatever she was doing to look me down. “We’re looking for whatever that note was about.” She was angry but she was trying to act like she was only confused. “What are you talking about? We’re here to get this sorted out. To figure out what happened?” she said.
“Nothing happened, Betty!” Now Sam was almost shouting and he turned back to face us. I don’t think I’d ever seen him so angry before. It didn’t exactly seem right coming from that thin, quiet figure—that’s what I remember thinking. “Nobody killed Jimmer,” he said. “He crashed his bike and he died and that’s it. There’s no conspiracy. There’s….there’s….there’s no plot or scheme or whatever you think there is. For christ’s sake, he just crashed. It was an accident. He crashed. That’s all. That’s it. Crashed and died. End of story. And it was probably his….” he trailed off. “He was probably….”
He stopped short. It was as if he realized very slowly that we were really still there in that workshop with him and he was really talking out loud at us. Betty had this horrified and angry look on her face. I could hardly look at either one of them. I didn’t know what to do.
Before any of us had figured out what to say there were three loud, hard knocks on the street-side door across the shop from where we stood. Knock, knock, knock. Quick and even.
We remained motionless there in our mutual bewilderment. I don’t know what reverberated more powerfully in those drawn out seconds: the three ringing echoes, or the undulating quietness of the buzzing lights and our heartbeats and sharp breaths. It was as though it were alive and taking shape before us. It felt like there couldn’t be anything in the whole world louder than that silence.
Nobody moved and we all three of us looked at each other to see if somebody might. But we didn’t. We stood there stunned and dumb like herd animals. All we could do was hold still. Then Betty started to cry, louder and louder until I was praying for that silence to come back. Louder and louder. And still we just stood. And she cried. Louder. Louder. Until there was nothing else.