Free You Were Wrong by Matthew Sharpe Page A

Chopin nocturne, the light soft click of billiard ball on billiard ball, the crack of the pool cue on the man’s shoulder, the one, two loud thumps of its butt on his head, and the sack-of-potatoes sound, which took at least six seconds each time he heard it, of the man crumpling to the floor, and so Karl did not immediately understand that the cause or purpose of the woman’s graceful swaying was soft, slow music from the jukebox. Her back was to him. She held a cigarette to what he assumed were her lips; her shoulders came up and her ribs slightly up and out, the cigarette down to her side. A cloud of smoke came quickly down and to her right, as could only have happened had she blown the smoke out through her nose. He had not yet seen her face but no one with an elegantly narrow torso, flared hips, long neck, and easeful movements of the kind Karl now witnessed—and who had exhaled smoke so commandingly through her nostrils—would not also have had a beautiful face. She wore a white cowboy hat and her dark hair was in a short ponytail. Her black untucked dress shirt, seemingly sewn to match her body’s size and form, was arrayed with tastefully small rhinestones that spelled out in cursive, from one shoulder blade to the other, MISS POPULAR HYBRID . From a narrow hallway at the back of the room emerged a tall, wide, big-handed man in old flannel who ought to have been named Rusty or Clem, except for the fact that he didn’t have a mustache. Facing the woman and Karl but not, Karl thought, seeing the latter, he raised his right hand to the height of the woman’s head as if preparing to slap her or perform semaphore. His left he placed around the woman’s waist. He swayed with her. They jukebox slow-danced. Clem whispered something to her and she laughed, which gave Karl a momentary view of the top of the white cowboy hat.
    The beating he had taken, the night of “partying,” the lifetime of love and loss in the scant hours with Sylvia Vetch, and the murder’s exertion had depleted Karl. He sat on a stool midway down and leaned on the bar for support as men do who’ve spent years of afternoons in bars. He saw Clem notice him and inform his lady of this with a nod of his head. He thought this establishment might now provide him with the unavoidable opportunity of another fight, he thought he might have two fights a day from now on and be dead at thirty, one less Volvo on the road. The beautiful woman disengaged herself from Clem and walked behind the bar. Clem went back into his narrow hall. She was, he knew now, the bartender, and Clem had merely let her know she had a client. Karl wondered how many of his misapprehensions of the world the world had the patience and resources to correct.
    She approached him, her face an indistinct and mottled off-white moon floating on the black shirt that was not fully separate from the darkness of the bar.
    “Karl,” she said.
    “Huh?”
    “Look at me.”
    “What?”
    “Look at me.”
    “Sylvia!”
    “Karl, I’m—”
    “Pour me a double.”
    “A double what?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “A double has to be a double of something.”
    “Really? I thought a double was a kind of drink, like a grasshopper.”
    “It’s not.”
    “What do people usually get doubles of?”
    “Whiskey.”
    “That.”
    “Why?”
    “Tough couple days.”
    She poured him it and winked and walked away. The wink was the worst. He downed the double to numb the wink and was drunk. She was no longer in the room. The jukebox was on its second or third slow song since he’d arrived.
    She was gone a long time. Clem was gone. Karl was alone in the bar except for the sad woman who sang the song. Evidently all songs this machine played were of the same slowness and of a similar emotional tenor, a romanticized and belted-out sulk. This one, he thought, was called “Cry.” She came back. She came along the bar at medium pace, eyes averted, not in shame, as he’d hoped, but in annoyance. As with