Free Bernard Boyce Bennington & The American Dream by Peter Crowther Page B

found and the questions still remaining don’t have quite the same degree of urgency any more.
    There will be a half-dozen people here for the little drama that will unfold tonight, and that’s counting Jack who’s always here, tending bar and playing music and passing the time of day—or night—with folks who want a few words with their liquor. Four of the half-dozen are regulars and two of them new folks. One of the new faces is still to arrive.
    Over in one of the booths along the back wall, a tall man sits with his coat collar pulled up around his neck. He’s the one new face that’s already here in Jack Fedogan’s bar—one of those faces that blow in off the streets, sometimes just the once and sometimes on a few more occasions—and so Jack and the other regulars have paid maybe a little more attention to watching him than they might do otherwise.
    They’ve noticed, for example, that the coat the man’s wearing is a thick coat, navy blue, in a heavy surge weave, with dark pants showing creases you could cut paper with, and heavy black shoes, laced up and double tied. Beneath the coat collar he sports a thick woolen scarf, still knotted, and on his head he wears a wide-brimmed hat, navy blue again—covering tufts of hair sticking out from beneath like sagebrush clumps—the hat’s brim snapped down rakishly over his eyes, even here inside the Working Day where Jack Fedogan keeps the atmosphere warm and cozy. And they’ve noticed the black hold-all bag on the floor next to his feet, a scuffed bag, one that has seen a lot of wear and tear, years of being carried or thrown in the bag of a car, in the trunk maybe, bouncing side to side as the car goes from here to there, or maybe many plane rides and numerous adventures on carts to and from airplanes and many trips along moving baggage claim lines, going round and round until its owner spotted it and retrieved it from the monotony. The bag looks full on this outing, though the eyes watching it can’t exactly figure out what it contains.
    To the three regulars at the table in the center of the floor, their regular table, the man appears to be lost in thought, nursing a bottle of beer which he keeps on moving around from side to side, slouched back in his chair, apparently watching the condensation patterns it makes on the table. The watching doesn’t seem to contain much in the way of interest. The man looks sickly, the regulars have agreed in hushed conspiratorial tones, coming down with a head cold or maybe the flu…or maybe he’s got a more exotic ailment in these days of ailments so exotic that even their names are acronym codes of letters and symbols, because the implications of the words they hide are just too terrible to contemplate…wasting diseases that take away a man’s dignity as well as his strength and his looks and his mind.
    They figure he’s here to forget something or to find it, looking for answers the way so many are. But most of all, he looks lonely.
    In the small trio of regulars locked in a round of their customary joke-telling, Jim Leafman knows all about loneliness and about trying to find answers outside of The Working Day. Jim, who collects garbage for a living and carries the smell of carbolic soap with him wherever he goes, remembers sitting in his ‘74 Olds outside an apartment building on 23rd waiting for his wife to set off for home just a block away, watching her run-walk along the sidewalk, her hair newly tidied and her hose pulled up straight and the feel of another man’s hands still fresh in her body’s memory. He remembers watching her and trying to sense her shame, watching her until she isn’t there any more.
    And he remembers coming back another night or maybe later that same one, the inside of the Olds an olfactory trinity of JD’s, betrayal and a red-tinged fury that licks at the insides of his eyes and makes them dry, makes his eye sockets hurt—though maybe that was just the JD’s—sitting there watching