by Kent L. Johnson
Disgusting. It was always disgusting. The urinal appeared to be a large watering trough yanked from one of the farms out here in the rural sticks and fashioned into a huge communal pissing vessel. It had some water that acted like it was rinsing down the effluent, but the sides were encrusted with congealed urine and hard water stains, the color of slime covered quartz. The rinse water just thinned down the toxic liquid enough so flies could breed in it. Probably hasn't had a washing since it was plopped down in here some twenty years ago. Swatting for flies that puttered around my head at least kept my mind off the ammonia like smell that dilated the blood vessels inside my nose despite the fact that I'd been holding my breath since I entered.
I pushed on the door to get out and entered into a cloud of smoke that hung like bayou moss over the pool tables, this, despite the fact that smoking in a public place had been outlawed for some fifteen years in this state. It was a job though, and luckily I didn't have to come around here very often; maybe once every couple of months. The owner of the bar owned the machines outright and collected the cash from them daily. He just called when they needed to be serviced. He had the coin operated pool tables for years and very little ever went wrong with them. I had installed video poker and twenty-one machines for the drunks to play even though they did not pay out: that would be gambling. But the drunks played all the same, dousing quarters into the brightly lit machines until the machines finally beat them.
I was here to install a new jukebox, a digital version with over twenty thousand songs, that Joseph, the owner had bootlegged onto a hard drive. What do I care? He pays me well, two C-Notes to drive the thirty miles out to the intersection of 'Who the Fuck Knows Avenue,' and 'Who Gives a Shit Road.' The cinder block building is about six-hundred square feet with no windows. It's painted white, but dirt and dust stains from the rain drained roof, leave river bottom imprints down the sides. The bar runs twenty-two feet of the thirty foot length of the building. The floor is cement. Ashes and old cigarette butts lie hidden on the lee sides of pool table feet where a casual sweeping failed to find them. This is a place that opens at six AM so the locals that have no other place to go, while hired hands tend their farms, can drink and start the day off they same way they like to end it: inebriated.
I unplugged the jukebox from the wall and gathered up the electric chord before slipping a dolly under the old beast. The antique contraption that played those vinyl forty-fives looked like an Edsel with a rounded chrome grill that encircled bubbled glass and wrapped around eras of time. It was encrusted with a patina of cigarette tar and dust. It looked as sleek as the day it was installed and as dirty as a junkyard dog. Collectible for sure, and my very well educated guess, the most expensive thing in the bar, perhaps the county? At auction, cleaned up, this would fetch a pretty penny.
Two boys in their early twenties sat at the bar. I had heard them order bar pizza and a couple of beers. Then the interesting conversation started. I'm not one to eavesdrop, but some conversations deliver themselves to you, and you can't help but listen.
“I didn't know she was gonna be like that,” the one on the right said. He was thin with a long face and light blond hair shaved up around his ears. A straw cowboy hat, bent in multiple directions with a few well worn and dirty spots sat cockeyed across his tiny scalp.
“Well, Mom's still pretty pissed. I mean, it didn't even last a month,” his brother, I presume, chimed in. He had the same long face, but his hair, although blond, looked like it was cut with a hedge trimmer. There was no even cuts across his entire head. The hair looked dry and dirty, like straw at the bottom of a stable.
“I told you, if I'd a known she were a bitch when we got together, I'd never married her.”
“Mom give you the money for the ring, she'd really either like the ring back or the money.”
“I swear, I didn't know she was a bitch.”
“What you gonna do?”
“I really want to move back home. I don't like livin' in Jimmy's RV, but I'm afraid Mom won't let me. I swear, I didn't know she was a bitch.”
“Mom won't let you back, lest you get her the ring or money. She like knock you on da head.”
“I get paid next Tuesday, but that's only a few hundred and I got to live. I'm lucky Jimmy lets me stay in his RV. It's kind of small and I don't cook so good, but it's all right. Think Mom will let me pay her a hundred a month until it's paid off?”
“I don't...”
“Mom doesn't know that Arlene was a bitch. I'll tell her, explain to her how as soon as the wedding was over, Arlene didn't want nothing to do with me and she was evil. I mean, she didn't want to sleep with me, cook for me, or even clean. She just yell at me, tell me she made a mistake and she wanted out.”
I tilted the old jukebox back on the dolly and rolled it outside into the hole ridden parking lot and placed it next to my truck. I pulled the lever and the hydraulic lift moved to the ground. The old jukebox went into the truck. I strapped it in place then I pulled the new one out. I hated the way craters in the parking lot bounced the new machine up and down like a boat in a typhoon as I wheeled it to the bar.
I finally hit the level floor inside, and wheel the new machine in. The smell of smoke and old beer fill my nose and for a moment, I'm not sure if I'm nauseated or melancholy for old times. I shake it off and keep moving the new jukebox along. I push the machine against the wall and I listen.
“I swear, I didn't know she was a bitch.”
I plug the machine in and go to the bar and stand next to the brother that wasn't married. “Bobbi,” I yell to the barmaid. “Down here.” I motion with my hands. Bobbi, the day shift barmaid waddled down behind the bar to me, cigarette dangling from her mouth.
“Hey, Jess.” Bobbi smiled at me. She looked like that slightly 'off' aunt everyone has in their family. Her jowls bounced in unison with the skin under her arms. The bright red lipstick almost matched her hair color, roots the color of volcanic ash. Her dentures were perfect, save a smear of lipstick.
“I need a couple bucks in quarters to try out the new equipment and how 'bought a pint for this hard workin' stiff of Joe's?”
“You got it.”
She moved to the cash register to get me some quarters. Both the boys at the bar turn and looked at me.
“I couldn't help overhearing your conversation earlier. Sorry about your marriage going south.” I looked at the man in the cowboy hat.
His brother comes back at me quick. “He should have known better. I mean, he's only ninete....twenty-one.”
His brother spilled the beans and we all know that I have the upper hand in the rest of the conversation, since twenty-one is the legal age for drinking. I don't care to use this knowledge, but it's there just in case.
“I'll tell you what I think...” I stare at 'marriage gone wrong. I know I should just mind my own business, but I don't know what possesses me at times, stupidity, I guess, but I kept talking.
“I think that you need to take some of that money from your next paycheck and go find yourself a girl that isn't her. Spend some money on her in public.”
Both the boys grin at me when I say this.
“Teach that bitch a lesson.”
The boys mouths dropped and they stared at me coldly.
“Don't appreciate you talkin' about her that way,” the future ex-husband says to me.
“What are you talking about? You've been saying she's a bitch ever since you got here,” I said.
His brother turned to me and he looks pissed. “He can say that, cause she did that to him, but you got no right calling her a bitch,” hedge trimmer hair tells me.
“I don't get it,” I say. I looked up and saw Joseph, the owner, walk into the bar and we make eye contact.
“She's our cousin, our kin. We don't like any, but maybe us, talking about our kin like that.”
Bobbi arrives just on time and she's got a beer for me and two dollars worth of quarters for the machine.
“Thanks Bobbi. How about getting my two friends here beers? On me.”
“We'll accept that as a kind of apology,” hedge trimmer hair said. “Just no more remarks out of you unless you know who you're talking about.”
“Okay,” I told him. “Let me play some music on the new jukebox for you.” Joseph arrived at my side as I slipped a quarter in the machine.
“Hello, Jess. I'm anxious to hear this new juke,” Joe said.
The first song I played from the new music machine is Dueling Banjo's. The sound is excellent. Ex-husband and hedge trimmer hair are grinning and tapping their feet to the music. Their faces covered in smiles. The irony lost, over their heads, or maybe it's me being too clever for my own good. A halfwit should have got it and knocked the shit out of me, but at the bar on the corner of nowhere...?
“Ready to go Joseph? Ready to put that old box in the barn with the rest of the stuff that is obsolete?”
“Yeah. I'm ready,” Joe said.
“Let me play one more song for the boys here at the bar, and then they can pick the rest.”
I found 'I Am My Own Grandpa,' among the thousands of songs on the box and queued it to start next.
“Guys.” I nod my head to get their attention. “Pick out the next ten or so songs. This thing seems to be working just fine.”
Joe and I walk out of the place and I'm grinning.
“Think you're pretty smart? Huh, Jess?
“What are you talking about, Joe?”
“Making fun of my clients. They deserve to have a drink, dance, play pool and listen to music and have a good time just like anyone else. They may not be the cream of the crop, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have some fun.”
“You missed the first part of my conversation with those boys,” I told him. “Did you know he married his cousin?”
“Not unheard of in these parts. Doesn't make it right, but not unheard of,” Joe said.
I'm silent as we walk to the truck. I figure, maybe I just collect my two-hundred bucks. I can't tell if Joe is ticked or not.
“Here's the deal Jess. Out here in the sticks, there are some folks living that could only live out here. Know what I mean?”
“No. Explain a little bit further,” I said.
“It's like this. A lot of these people aren't the brightest folks on the planet. They work in menial jobs like milking cows, shoveling shit, plowing fields and they expect to do it for life. Jobs that not many people would consider a career.”
I saw him out of the corner of my eye glance in my direction.
“If they were to move to the city where you're at, nobody's going to hire them. Of if they did, they wouldn't pay them enough to have a place to live. Out here, well, they fit in. Folks throw trailers on their property and let the help live where they work. They get paid low wages, but it's enough. What I'm trying to say is, they need a place also. A place they fit into.”
“I can understand that,” I replied to him. “Shouldn't someone teach them about genetics though? I mean...”
“We got that covered,” Joe interrupted. “You don't think that girl turned into a bitch overnight for nothing do you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“There's a group of us, ranch owners, business owners, you know? We get together and talk on a regular basis. Let's just say that she was persuaded to make sure the marriage didn't even start to go anywhere. We know the genetic history around here. Actually, she was his sister.”
“No shit?” My gut felt hollowed and my stomach muscles tightened, a frightened feeling.
“No shit,” Joe continued. “Her dad, his dad, same ranch owner.”
We reached my truck. Joe pulled two one-hundred dollar bills from his pocket and handed them to me.
“If you want, you can keep the old jukebox,” Joe said. “Might take a lot of cleaning, but it could be worth something.”
“Thanks Joe.” I placed the money in my wallet and opened the door to my truck. “So how long have you guys, the ranch owners and stuff, been pulling the strings on everything. Even relationships?”
“Just like everywhere; since it started,” Joe said.
“Just like everywhere?”
“Sure. You may live in a city, but there are people there that keep an eye on everything that goes on. They make decisions that affect your life every day. Unless you are one of them, you don't even know.”
I climbed into my truck, nodded at Joe and started the engine. I thought about his statement and a flush moved down my skin from head to toe. The hair on the back of my neck stood erect.
“You're probably right,” I told him.
He grinned. “Probably?”
End
