Free The Bighead by Edward Lee Page B

Yes! They have dartboards
and pool tables.”
    “ Oooo, sounds like bad news
to me.”
    “ If we go there, they’ll,
you know, they’ll leer at us. They’ll try to pick us up! Really,
Jerrica, we shouldn’t go in.”
    Jerrica wasn’t listening. “All right!”
she celebrated.
    Ahead, the high postsign blazed in
blue neon: CROSSROADS. A long, squat tavern with tawdry blinking
lights. “It’s still here,” Jerrica rejoiced. The red Miata prowled
for a parking space. Music rumbled in the air, rising and falling
as the front door opened and closed. Hoots and hollers abounded
from within. The gravel lot looked about half full, with pickup
trucks and dented hotrods, plus a few poorly-kempt
motorcycles.
    Jerrica parked the car. Charity
struggled not to complain.
    “ Come on,” Jerrica
insisted. “We’re going in.”
     
    ««—»»
     
    Dust eddied up from the wood floor’s
seams as they marched through an entrance spotted with more garish,
blinking lights. Charity followed reluctantly along, but Jerrica
felt electrified. Yes, this was a real “slice of life” bar: a dump.
Jerrica, of course, was no stranger to bars, but this place? Its
frowziness seemed so genuine—its cheap tables and tacky padded
booths, its dartboards and pinball machines—and this delighted her.
She wanted reality for her article. Well, here it was. A working
man’s bar in the depths of Appalachia.
    She needed her article to be more than
just frilly trimmings; she wanted to relate the society beneath the
environment, and what better place could that be found than here?
From here, The Crossroads, Jerrica could make the most superlative
observations as to the beating heart of this rural
neverland.
    “ Oh, God,” Charity
whispered in a fret, grabbing Jerrica’s bare arm. “They’re…looking
at us!”
    “ Calm down,” Jerrica
consoled. But it was true. The second they’d entered, every eye in
the place turned to them. Big men in overalls, workboots. Beer mugs
paused midsip, talk paused midsentence. Old men, bent and racked by
age, young men, broad-shouldered and virile—they were all different
yet all crafted from the same arduous mold. The jukebox twanged on
in some insipid hybrid of hard rock and C&W. Charity urged them
toward the back booths, but Jerrica insisted on pulling up two
seats at the bar.
    A lean barkeep in suspenders and
shortsleeved shirt traipsed toward them.
    “ Really, Jerrica!” Charity
whispered fiercely as ever. “We shouldn’t be—”
    “ What’s kin I get ya,
ladies?” the keep interrupted with a high, tweaky voice.
    “ Two Heinekens, please,”
Jerrica requested.
    The keeps eyes shot up.
“Heineken? Hein eken!” he exclaimed, pronouncing the word as hahn-a-kern. “This here’s
a American bar,
ladies. We don’t carries none’a that foreigner beer.”
    “ Oh, well in that case,
two…Buds?”
    The keep grinned through cracked
teeth. “Comin’ right up.”
    Charity remained sitting nervously on
her stool, her hands worrying in her lap. “I feel
ridiculous.”
    Jerrica lit a Salem. “Why?”
    “ I mean, look at how I’m
dressed compared to everyone else. Everyone else is wearing
jeans.”
    “ Honestly, Charity. You
worry about the silliest things. What difference does it make what
you wear to a bar?”
    “ I just feel
uncomfortable.” Charity lowered her voice. “And what about all
these leering men?”
    Jerrica looked around.
“What leering men? You’re being paranoid. Nobody’s looking at us.
Nobody’s leering. Sure, right when we walked in, everyone gave us a glance
because they’ve never seen us before. Now they’re back minding
their own business. Look.”
    Charity sheepishly peered down the
bar, then behind her. All the other patrons had returned to their
conversations. Two men played pool, oblivious to them. “Thank God,”
she whispered to herself.
    Christ, Jerrica thought. No
wonder she has problems keeping a man. No wonder they never call
her back. Did Charity act this