Free Island by Alistair MacLeod

at eight when he had paused, books in hand at the doorway, and it had gone on and on, the night’s hours fleeing with the swiftness and unreality of a dream. The type of dream that holds you in a delicate tensile web, even while a certain part of you knows that you will not remember in the morning, and you do not quite know if the feeling is one of ecstasy or pain, or if the awakening is victory or defeat, or if you are forever saved or yet forever doomed.
    And now a voice said, “Boy, you goen to wait all night? I ain’t got time.” And he moved with a jolt, out of the dream but in it, and said, “Side pocket,” indicating the direction with his head, and taking the cue he leaned over and across the table, raising his right leg and feeling his belt buckle press into his stomach, and the brown-black wood strong against his testicles and then the sensation of the smoothly polished wood running slickly through his fingers as he shot and then watched the gently nudged eight-ball roll softly and silently across the field of green until it vanished quietly before his eyes, and he could hear it then, clanging and rolling noisily now somewhere beneath andwithin the table on its clattering way to join its predecessors in an underworld of dark. And then he saw the green dollar bill flutter down to the table before his eyes and even as he reached for it, someone else was pushing one of the quarters into the slot and redeeming the balls from their cavern and preparing to arrange them within the rack. And it was now after midnight and he knew he had stayed too long.
    He had not been home since before eight that morning when he had walked out into the early October sunshine with his books beneath his arm. He could see the books now lying just inside the door on the end of the narrow bench that ran along the wall. They were covered defensively by his jacket and from beneath the sleeve he could see the algebra, and the red-covered geometry into which he had pencilled his marks, 90’s mostly, and the English text whose poems he had almost totally committed to memory. They looked incongruous in this setting and he vaguely wished that somehow he could cover them more adequately; to protect them and perhaps to protect himself from the questions that they asked and the questions that the men might ask about them. He flicked his eyes nervously down the canyon-like room. It was long and narrow and he could hardly discern the far end with its hazy EXIT sign because of the tobacco smoke that seemed to hang in wavering layers in the stale and sour air. A long uneven bar ran almost the total length of the room, beginning near the pool table and stretching like a trackless narrow-gauge railway toward a distant bandstand where two guitarist-singers and a drummer perspired beneath the ever-changing coloured lights and blasted the heavy air with the twanging heartbreak sound of Nashville. On the bar itselfthree bloated no-longer-young go-go girls moved with heavy unimaginative movements, their net-stockinged feet not always avoiding the sad little puddles of spilled beer. Beneath them and along the bar the men they were supposed to entertain looked up at them dutifully and wearily, although one with hair of snow moved his heavy, calloused hand rhythmically up and down the neck of his beer bottle with a slow and thoughtful masturbating motion.
    Over everything and all of them the odour hung and covered and pressed like the roof of a gigantic invisible tent from which there could be no escape. It smelled of work clothes, soaked and dried in sweat and seldom washed, and of spilled beer and of the sour rags used to mop it up, and of the damp and decaying wood that lay beneath the floor, and of the reek that issued forth from the constantly swinging doors of the men’s washroom: the exhausted urine and the powerful disinfectant and the shreds of tobacco and soggy cigarette papers which appeared in the trough beneath the crudely lettered signs: This