I looked at it like it was a herpe—like it can’t be but it is.
This limp paper sign hanging cheaply over the bar door. The messy sharpie scrawled across.
KEG CLEARANCE! $3 pints—$3 wells—$9 growler fills—KITCHEN CLOSED
Green lights flickered from outside the Riverside Corral, the strip club/boat consignment lot just across the street. Where speakers by the entrance doors played Dream Lover. And the music drifted softly up to me through the green glowing fog on the empty street. Made me feel like I was in the beginning of a slasher movie.
Bolt your doors. Lock your windows. There’s something in the fog.
I walked in through the door under the sign that might as well have been a tombstone. The bar was decorated with a lifelong collection of old weird things from Alaska. With signs from bars that had closed decades ago—The Fo’c’sle Bar, The Elbow Room, Sourdough Bar, Skinny Dick’s Halfway Inn. With ships in bottles. And old black and whites of motorcycle gangs. Ten-foot-long crosscut saws. WWII ration cans. A red lit clock with no hands on it. Nets hanging. A big brass bell.
It was like a museum for Jimmer’s wackadoo life as a hardworking eccentric.
“You see these old ship lights I got in here,” Jimmer told me one time, “that wheel and clock there? There was a boat went down somewhere outside a bay we were anchored up in, oh, somewhere out in the Aleutians. Might even 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 like a whole week over there on the wreck taking parts and grinding off everything I thought I could use or keep. I was engineer, see. After a week though, here comes the Coast guard to tell us we gotta to put it all back. Almost arrested us. But those lights and that clock and that ship’s wheel I managed to get by ‘em.
He’d told me stories about lots and lots of the things he kept in the bar. When I’d helped him fix up the old house down the street. We’d call it a day early and go get drunk in the bar before it was open and Jimmer would give tours.
I remembered them as I walked through the little wood room.
“…..That glass ball up top there behind the bar, I won that in a bet at this big flea market, biggest in the country, I worked at when I was a teenager in central Mass from this little Aleut guy. He traded me that ball for an old skilsaw I rebuilt. That’s how I learned about Alaska in the first place. Got up there and come to find out a glass ball isn’t worth shit. We’d go beachcombing for ‘em and now I got a like fifty.”
He’d take me over to a wall with signs and pictures and antique fishing rods.
“See that sign, Artic Bar, yeah, That was a good place. In Ketchikan. One time we were tied up there and they were having these huge flood tides. We were out on the dock doing boat work in the morning like a regular day. I was working on some hydraulics or something like that. Then I heard one of the guys say, “hey look, there goes the Artic Bar,” and I looked up and the whole bar was floating on its foundation down the channel. The stilts had come loose in the flood. We got a few skiffs together and managed to haul the thing back over. The owner was a crusty old Norwegian guy. Gave me this sign as thanks…..
“…..That little note. Look at what that says. See that name? Jack London. I think that’s a real Jack London note I found hidden in this little box at the top of the Ballyhoo in Dutch Harbor. It’s the biggest mountain near the town. They say he was the one who named it……
“.....That’s a motorcycle chain from Neil Young’s bike right there. I met him on the road one time and his chain busted and I helped him fix it.”
It was all just junk without the stories that were now lost.
I saw Betty and Sam at our table in the corner by the fireplace and went over. “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 rosy-cheeked, emo blueberry.
“You have a beard,” she said.
“I have a beard,” I said.
Sam said hi to me. He slid me the beer he had waiting.
“If you guys are both drinking, who’s tending bar?”
“Jimmer’s wife,” Sam 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. It’ll probably be busy.”
He looked like a skinny old wrinkly necked turkey vulture. He had this big hooked nose and dark sullen eyes. He looked tired. And old. He lifted up his Cubs hat and wiped a sad hand from his nose all the way across his bald head to his neck.
“Yeah” he said. “I think she just wants to close up as soon as possible and get on with everything.”
Betty was picking at something stuck to the table with her fingers “can we talk about something else?” she said.
She looked at me with her eyes faraway. “We haven’t seen you in, what’s it been, two years? Or has it been longer?”
“Four years,” I said.
“God, that was so fast. It could have been six months since you were back there making pies and playing all that crazy music, if you had to ask me about it.” 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?
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?”
They shook their heads.
I shrugged. Hit the table with my knuckles. Got up and went to the bar. “Three Basil’s please, Leslie,” I said. She gave me a weird look and she pulled down the bottle from the shelf and I remembered that the two of us had never met. I smiled back at her awkwardly. She had dark craterish circles under her eyes. Shoulders slumped inward. A plastic smile.
“Start a tab?” she said.
“Yeah, thanks,” I said. But I meant, “I’m sorry.” I wanted to tell her that I was feeling compassionate. That I shared in her sadness. To try to enunciate feelings that sound cheap as words.
Instead I smiled back at her. Let her see the sadness in my eyes. Took the whiskeys back over to the table in the corner and set them down with an air of ceremony. “Here we are.””
“What’s that for?” Sam said.
“For Jimmer, man.”
We all cheersed, “to Jimmer.” Quietly. Hollow voiced. And took the shots.
I leaned in and scratched my forehead. Trying to make myself say it. “So what really happened?” I said. I took a big nervous gulp of beer.
Betty ignored me. She said, “do you remember the time the pizza oven broke and Sam and Jimmer were grilling burgers on the back porch and they were having so much fun that they didn’t notice they set the whole thing on fire? And when the fire department showed up they were still out there grilling right on the burned up porch. Still drinking.” She tilted her head back and shrieked a joyous hyena cackle. Her famous laugh. It was so loud that when I lived upstairs we could hear it echo down the hallway like a clown in a funhouse.
Sam said, “he thought if we had some burgers and beers for them they might let it slide.”
“You mean setting the bar on fire with it full of people?”
“Betty.” I said.
The smile slipped like sand off of her face. “I dunno man, Leslie’s right over there,” she said. “I don’t think even she knows what really happened. Can’t we just tell eachother old stories and get drunk?”
She looked at Sam. Kept rubbing at some invisible smear on the table. “I think I want to get something to eat,” she said. “I’m hungry all the sudden. Maybe we could all just go get something to eat?” she said.
“Betty why are you being so fucking weird?” I said. I was irritated and I sort of slammed my beer on the table.
It must have been pretty loud because Betty bounced up in her chair. “Just chill dude,” she said. “We’ll tell you, ok. We can tell him right, Sam?”
“Shit, Betty, I don’t know that this is the best time.” He was looking down and held real still with his beer against his chest like if he didn’t move nobody would see him.
I motioned to Leslie for another round. Said. “You look like you’re about to hold the place up, Sam.”
He tried to look less unrelaxed.
We drank. Betty and I both coughed.
Bohemian Rhapsody came on over the radio.
“Oh fuck,” Betty said. She reached for her phone to turn the volume up and got out of her seat. She grinned at us and gyrated her hips.
With deep sadness in my voice I said at Sam, “I forgot that Betty likes Queen.”
He didn’t look away from her. Nodded his solemn agreement.
We watched in horror while Betty pantomimed a singing performance and air-guitar solo right in front of us. Matt pulled his hat bill low.
“Can’t we just have an honest talk?” I pleaded.
But my supplications 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, panted her whiskey breath on my face. The hot beery steam bounced off my teeth. She whispered, “ok he….” took a deep breath…“wasn’t…” another deep breath…“drunk.”
“What?”
She held her hands up. Rolled her eyes. Still panting. Beaming. Proud.
It took her a while to catch her breath. She looked at me like an indignant child. 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. “Jimmer, you dummy.”
I squinted at her in confusion.
She repeated, slower this time. Staccato. Like an indignant child. “He. Wasn’t. Drunk.” And 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.”
“So what if he wasn’t drunk?” I was starting to get a bit agitated. Who could possibly have cared if Jim had been drunk or not? Besides the police, I mean. He was always drunk.
I looked at Sam in the hopes that he might explain what she was trying to say, but it was like he was intentionally looking away from me.
Betty closed her two hands into fists and rubbed them together and 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 tell you. 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. I feel fucking 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 what day it was,” Sam 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.
They’re coming. Not what you think. Key in shop. Know when you see.
It was definitely a note from Jimmer. The very distinctive and boyishly neat scrawl. All caps and no style, like an architect. The cryptic concerted effort to use as few words as possible. Skeleton thoughts.
But what did it mean?
In her ten or so years of bartending at this place, Betty would have to have been more used to these riddles than I ever got to be. It wasn’t exactly like catching Kaczynski. Minimal linguistic forensics were necessary to figure out 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.
It had to have been something like that.
She was staring at me from across the table while she waited to see a reaction come across my face. “Come on! How fucking ominous is that?” she said. “There’s no way it’s a coincidence. On the day he died?” She jutted her head forward aggressively at the look I met her with. “It has to have something to do with it. Right?”
She shrugged her shoulders and raised her hands ever so slightly before she let them fall lifelessly back on the table. Then she turned to Sam. “Right?”
“Jimmer did drink a lot,” I said.
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 how he talked about following Ken Kesey’s bus from California to Oregon and then down through Nevada? He made it sound so beautiful.” She took a big drink from her beer and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “He had weeks and 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 two days. He rode with Andrew. He’s right over there smoking outside. Rode with him 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 stopped, picked her beer up like she was about to drink but then put it back down.
She went on. “He rode with his kids all the time. I mean, I of all people even let him 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. 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 remained completely motionless.
“See!” she said, “Just think about it. They want us to think he was drunk. I don’t know who, but they do.” She burped and adjusted herself in her seat. She was getting this almost exultant tone in her voice. “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.
“How long have you two been here?” I said.
Sam shrugged, “we only had one round before you showed up.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Well, jesus guys, I dunno,” I said. 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. “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 another shot and then we went out back to the shop. No cars drove by on the street beside the bridge. And the fog drifting off the river still shone a bright emerald green and carried the muffled tones of fifties pop music. Eery under the leafless trees on an otherwise clear night. Sam keyed the lock and we went through the swinging gate door. Into the grass alley behind the bar. And over to 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 smelled like sawdust and shellac and stale beer. And just as I remembered, there was still no discernible system for the organization of anything in there. For me, it was complete madness. There were stacks of random 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. Workbenches buried beyond recognition in cans and rags and laid down tools. And a million unique items. 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 chains above it. Old wooden doors for old wooden boats. A maidenhead for a sailboat. Porch columns. Vintage neon lights and bar signs. Tools of all sorts and shapes. And grease. And beer bottles. And sawdust and cans of paint and chemicals everywhere.
I looked up at Betty and Sam helplessly. “Where do we start?” I regretted going along on this ridiculous treasure hunt.
Sam looked pissed off. “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.” he said.
Betty didn’t give him a second thought. She was in a state of adrenal-type fervor.
“You know what the problem is?” she said. “The problem is that we’re looking at this stuff and thinking it’s a huge mess. But it’s not. Is it? To Jimmer this was organized, you know. I guess it was at least. He always knew where everything was” She looked at me appealingly, “didn’t he? 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 fuck you 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 stayed 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 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.
Betty 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 wouldn’t look at us but I saw him blink very slowly and shake his head.
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 for a full 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. Like what was the point? “What are we doing in here anyway?” I said.
“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!” Sam shouted. He turned to face us finally. I don’t think I’d ever heard him raise his voice before. “Nobody killed Jimmer,” he said. “He crashed his bike and died and that’s it. There’s no conspiracy. Somebody just took a left and they didn’t see Jimmer coming and he couldn’t stop in time. There isn’t any plot or scheme or whatever the fuck 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 talking. It was like he remembered that we were really still there in that shop with him and he was really talking out loud at us. Betty had this horrified and angry look on her face. 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’d come in.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
Quick and even.
We stood there motionless. Looking fearfully back and forth from each other to the door. I don’t know what reverberated more powerfully in those long seconds, the three ringing echoes, or the hush of the buzzing lights and our heavy heartbeats and sharp breaths. It was alive and taking shape before us. This silence that sucked noise like cold sucked heat. Becoming substantial.
Nobody moved. We stood there stunned and dumb like herd animals. All we could do was hold still.
Then Betty started to cry. Softly at first. And slowly louder and louder. Louder and louder until I was praying for that enormous silence to come back. Louder and louder. And we just stood there. And she cried. Louder still. Until my ears were about to burst. Until I was crying too. Until there was nothing else but the crying.