Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 123, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 751 & 752, March/April 2004

Slow-Motion Tornado by Kimberly Colley

Kimberly Colley practiced law for ten years in southeastern Kentucky, and before that, worked as a reporter. She has taken what she hopes is a permanent retirement from the law to focus on her writing. She has never lived in a plains state such as that she writes of here. She “made it all up,” and says, “for me, that is one of the chief delights of fiction, and why I’ll never write about a lawyer.”

It’s a big bar, but not big enough.

I’ve been working here at Rider’s since the early ’seventies, probably the longest run of any bartender in Nebraska. Rider’s Roadhouse squats on the edge of the prairie, about five miles past the factories that form a loose wagon circle around Dulles, the closest thing to a metropolis in this section of the state. It’s a sprawling wooden building, with just enough roof to keep the rain off and hold up the neon sign that calls to bikers from both directions. If it’s ever been repainted since I’ve been here, I don’t remember it. The clapboards are just as gray as my beard, and a whole lot scraggier.

Rider’s started out as a blind pig in the ’twenties, back before all the factories moved in and made life so much better for us. When Prohibition ended, the bar managed to squeak by a few more years before the owner went bankrupt, after which the building stood empty for a long while. This is just what I’m told.

The current owner bought the place in ’seventy-two, made just enough repairs to bring it up to code, and opened it as a biker’s bar. By that time, we were on the route that a lot of ’em took when they made their annual trek to the Black Hills. Word of mouth being what it is among bikers, the business built up pretty quick. We’ve had our share of bar fights through the years, but nothing we couldn’t handle. With the exception of the toilets, the office, and the storage room, it’s all open inside, like a dark and dirty Wal-Mart. The boss buys the cheapest tables he can find, particle-board crap that won’t do too much damage if someone’s head gets smashed against it, which happens just about as often as you’d expect. Or at least, it used to.

Dulles isn’t too far from Omaha, you see, and while it’s still mostly rural, we’ve seen the subdivisions edging towards us across the prairie like a slow-motion tornado. Out on Route 80, our old, dirty pickups are sharing more space with the shiny SUVs, and soon those pickups will be hauled off to Ed’s junkyard, and only the SUVs will be left. A newer and better species roaming the plains.

People get funny ideas. After thirty years working behind a bar, you’d think I’d be used to it by now, but something always manages to come along and surprise me. The funny idea I’m talking about was, some Yuppie comes to the bar one night with a whole bunch of his friends. Yeah, this bar.

It was around eight o’clock. I guess this guy had just finished his supper at home, or maybe he’d been working late and wanted a beer. It was late November, just before Thanksgiving, dark outside, although the moon’s reflection off the inch of snow on the hard ground cast enough light you could see out to Ahlvers’ farm two miles across the open field.

He pulls open the door and walks in like he owns the place, that cock-of-the-walk stride that guys put on when they want to show everyone they’re not really afraid. He’s tall, with shiny — I mean, it glowed — brown hair, with his bright white collar sticking out over his navy-blue crewneck. His buddies sort of crowd in behind him, and together they shuffle over to the bar.

They had two drinks, and they left. No one got hurt, which pretty much amazed me. The bikers stared at ’em hard, made a few jokes about what the Yuppie wives were doing while their husbands were out drinking, and how the bikers would like to help them do it, but that was about all. The Yuppies, when they decided to leave, left quickly. The leader had lost his swagger; no Dutch courage for him. But they didn’t trip over themselves, and they didn’t make eye contact, and everyone got home safely that night. And then that weekend, more came back.

That was a year ago. In February’s Omaha Magazine, Rider’s was voted “Hippest Bar,” and soon, on the weekend, more than half the parking lot came to be taken up by SUVs, Mercs, BMWs, and, of all things, Volvo station wagons. Inside, the bar was still open, one big, ugly room, but one half was taken up by men and women in business suits, their top buttons undone. They left the other half of the room to our bikers. They segregated themselves, like blacks and whites on a Sunday morning, the Yuppies on the right, bikers on the left. The barstools on this invisible divide were always empty, a no-man’s land.

I suppose it was inevitable, given the time of year.

Here in Nebraska, we don’t trust the spring. We see the sun in a bright blue sky, and our lips thin and our eyebrows pinch together. We see green buds on the spindly gray branches, and we shake our heads at the cruel joke nature is playing on us. Every warm day is a slap in the face, because we know another cold snap is on its way. And then one day, the cold snap doesn’t show, and Nebraska exhales. When it does, people uncoil. All the sap that’s been percolating inside them all winter long bubbles up and goes any damn where it pleases.

So I can’t say I was too surprised when Tina Olsen — I learned her name later — had a fight with her husband on the right side of Rider’s that Friday night.

They fought like nice, upper-middle-class people. Lots of low tones, hers going down to a shrill whisper when she got really mad, her husband’s voice getting deeper and gruffer. Her knife-crease jawline whipped around as she spoke, emphasizing her words, and he interrupted her. I was refilling Eldon’s beer down at the other end of the bar, but watching those two out of the corner of my eye. Her face was red. Her husband was jabbing his finger at her, his shoulders hunched towards her, his neck stiff, and then his finger made contact with her chest. She rocked back, and one hand flew to the tender spot on her breast where he’d poked her. She wanted to hit him, you could see it in her eyes, but you could also see the fear. She grabbed her purse and went to the ladies’.

When she came out ten minutes later, her husband was hunched over a fresh beer I’d just pulled him. He didn’t see her, but she saw him. She stood there at the entrance to the bathrooms, watching him, her purse clutched to her chest, pushing her pearl necklace into a jumble around her pink, flowered sweater. She’d been crying. The fluorescent over the pay phone sparkled off her red, shiny nose. I looked at her then, and I knew what she was going to do, maybe even before she did.

She slung her little scarlet purse over her shoulder and began walking. She held her head straight and high, didn’t even turn to look as she walked past her husband. Brad, I found out his name was. As she rounded the corner of the bar, one hand lifted a silky strand of her honey-brown hair and pushed it behind her ear, and she still didn’t look.

I felt something fluttering in my stomach as she neared the divide. She seemed to feel it, too, and her step slowed for a millisecond; her foot, you could see it hover there above the scarred floorboards, and then it came down on the other side. She was across the divide.

The Yuppies paid no attention to her. They were busy with their cell phones and catalogs, but you could feel life, breath, and thought halt on the left side of the room, just for a moment, the way Tina’s foot had halted in midair before crossing the divide. One woman stood up, her hand placed possessively on the shoulder of her boyfriend; then another woman, at another table. They were ready for her. Tina didn’t notice them. She went up to the bar, to an empty stool between Tinker and Raz, turned her skinny little ass sideways, and slid onto the seat. I was already there, waiting for her.

The bar was suddenly a network of interconnected cells, interconnected atoms, and they all led back to me. Every light was unbearably bright, for I could see the bright red nails that flicked nervously at a scratch on a table, the piece of paper crumpled in a dusty corner, an old bloodstain on the chrome of the jukebox. The conversations were a meaningless hum. I knew the thoughts behind them, the lies, the desires, the boredom, the pain. And I knew, without turning, that Brad was staring across the horseshoe bar at his wife.

“I’d like a Bud Light, please.” She had a tiny voice when she wasn’t angry. It was sweet, like the bells on Christmas wreaths.

Tinker chuckled in that way he has of making you feel like a freight train’s coming. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said to her, “but Jack here don’t serve Bud Light on this side of the bar. ’f he did, this whole place would just up and float away.” He flitted his beefy arm in the air over her head, and she ducked.

Tinker’s a big old boy from Kentucky. He has the build of a caveman, and there’s always at least some evidence of his last meal stuck in his strawberry-blond beard, but he’s a “good feller.” That’s about as high as you can get in Tinker’s estimation, is a good feller. He never starts fights, always enters them unwillingly, and knows how to finish them quickly. I never saw him raise his hand to a woman, and he’s never run out on his bill. That’s about as high as you can get in my estimation.

Tina blinked at me, as if unsure whether to play along with the joke or not. “What do you serve?”

Tinker answered for me, saying she could have either a PBR or a Schlitz. “But if you want a boilermaker, Jack’ll let you have a Miller Draft with it.”

She looked at Tinker’s bright blue eyes, almost hidden by his chubby cheeks. She licked her lips and then turned to me. My hand clenched automatically.

“I’ll have a boilermaker.”

“What kind of whiskey?” My voice felt like it came from somebody else.

“Wild Turkey.”

This brought a hoot from Raz, and he slapped the bar and asked for the same.

I turned to pour the shots and caught sight of Brad’s face through the skyline of liquor bottles. He was staring at his wife across the room, his chin down, eyes up. The light glinted off his short, neat blond hair. He sat still as a headstone.

I set the shot glasses in front of Tina and Raz and pulled their beers. Raz, a true gentleman, waited for Tina. I watched the foam trickle over the side of Tina’s mug, feeling the heat from Brad’s steel-colored eyes boring through the skin on my back.

Raz curled his hand around his shot glass and looked at Tina. “On a count of three. Ready? One, two...”

Two elbows went up, two heads went back, two empty glasses were slammed down on the bar. Tina grimaced, her eyes squinched shut, and I wondered if she was going to be able to hold on to it, but at last her eyes opened. Raz laughed and Tinker slapped her on the back.

“Chase that puppy,” Raz shouted, and lifted his beer. Tina followed, slowly, but when she set her mug down, it was half empty.

“Where’d a little thing like you learn to drink like that, darlin’?” Raz put his arm around Tina, and I could smell the acrid scent of two-day-old perspiration from where I was standing. Tina blinked, but she smiled up at him, then blinked again as if seeing him for the first time. He was a sight to behold, Raz. Long, stringy black hair, a goatee going towards salt-and-pepper, but the thing that pulled him out of lineups again and again was his eyes. In the light of that bar, you couldn’t tell where the pupil ended and the iris began. It was like looking into a black hole. Someone asked him about his eyes once, and he said his family was Armenian, as if that explained it. People who spend time around Raz know to look over his left shoulder when speaking to him. You never look into that abyss twice.

“In college,” Tina said, like she had majored in drinking.

Raz put his head down close to hers and she didn’t pull away. “I bet you was a sorority girl, wasn’t you?”

He was smiling, and she was looking him straight in the eyes, a rabbit in the thrall of the cobra. “Tri-Delt.”

“Is that your name? Delt?” He smiled, but he looked angry, afraid of appearing stupid, but knowing he couldn’t help it.

“No.” She shook her head in confusion and closed her eyes, and I thought the spell would be broken then, that she wouldn’t look back, but when she opened them again, she did. She stared straight into his eyes. “Delta Delta Delta. That was my sorority.”

The wooden stool leg scraped across the floorboards as Tinker turned towards her. When he cleared his throat, too, I knew what he was trying to do. “I always wondered,” he said, “what do sorority girls do? I mean, what’s the point of being in a sorority?”

She glanced over her shoulder when she answered, but she didn’t turn her body away from Raz. “It’s a social club. You make friends. I guess it’s sort of like being a biker.”

This brought a shout of laughter from Raz, and though I didn’t turn around, I swear I could feel all the muscles in Brad’s body tense. I had Denise working that side of the bar. She wouldn’t know what to do, she hadn’t been tending bar long enough. I wanted to go over there myself and try and handle him, but I didn’t dare leave Tina alone. I was as snared as she was.

“Are you calling us a sorority?”

Raz pulled a pack of Camels out of his inside vest pocket and shook one out before holding the pack out to her. She took one and then so did he. He lit up, then slid the Bic over to her. She had to hold on to it with both hands, her thumb struggling with the serrated metal rollers before finally getting the flame to catch. The tiny yellow light illumined her face in a sickly glow, and then it was gone.

She coughed, her body curving with the effort to take in the smoke, but she recovered quickly, blinking away the moisture from her eyes and rubbing the back of her thumb under her nose. “No, I’m calling you a fraternity.” She managed a smile. “Boys are in fraternities, girls are in sororities.”

And then Raz leaned back in towards her, until his forehead was touching hers. “I ain’t no boy, lady.” His arm moved, and I knew his hand had slid to her knee. “Are you still a little girl, or are you a woman?”

She arched her back. Sweet Jesus, she arched her back. I did a quick inventory — the shotgun was strapped under the bar down by the cash register, six feet away, the S&W .45 underneath the bar towels down near my feet.

“I think I’m a woman. But what do you think?”

Raz’s voice was a growl. “I think you’re a little girl. I don’t think that boy of yours over there ever once made you squeal. You ever squealed for him?”

Tinker’s stool scraped again, sharper this time, as he got up and walked around to Raz, cupping his hand around Raz’s tattooed bicep. “Come on, man, let’s go.”

Raz shook him off, his gaze never leaving Tina. “You got someplace to go, go. I got business here.”

“You got no business here, man,” Tinker said, and that got Raz’s attention. He turned away from Tina slowly, the tendons in his neck taut, but his shoulders loosened, their muscles oiling up in instinctive preparation.

“I got every business here. We got business here. This is our bar.”

“That’s right, Raz. We belong here. She doesn’t.”

“What do I have to do to get initiated into this fraternity?”

Both men looked back at Tina, sitting there with one arm on the bar, puffing on that Camel like she was Lana Turner in a wiseguy dive. All the color drained from Tinker’s face, and his fists clenched and opened, clenched and opened. Raz ran his hand up her thigh until it was cupping her ass.

“All you gotta do is go for a ride. My bike is right outside. Wanna ride?”

All four of us were frozen in a tableau that would’ve been funny if it wasn’t so terrifying, and then it shattered. Tinker pulled at Raz’s left shoulder. Raz’s right arm cocked back, and then his fist snapped into Tinker’s face, slamming into his left cheek instead of his nose as Tinker turned away and down. Tinker came back up leading with his right, catching Raz on the jaw. I heard the crunch of teeth grinding together, breaking, and I crouched, reaching under the towels for the .45, and when I came up, there were three men there, three men in a clumsy group hug. And then Raz fell away.

He hit the floor on his left side, and that’s why I didn’t see it. I heard it, though, that thick, dull squish of sharp metal in soft flesh that I’ve heard a few times in my life. I knew what I’d see before I saw it. A dark pool was forming beneath Raz’s ribs. He rolled onto his back, and I saw the shaft of a pocketknife sticking out from the T-shirt. He was still breathing, but it was a nasty, gurgling sound, and a second later, I saw a bubble of blood come popping out of his mouth.

Denise was already on the phone to 911. I could hear her low, frantic voice murmuring into the portable just behind me. I was just standing there, the automatic loose in my limp hand, stunned by the knowledge that I was watching my first killing in ten years. I tell myself that I was in shock, and that’s why I didn’t react.

But I saw it all. I saw Tinker take a step towards Brad, saw him pull the kid into a one-arm embrace, the boy’s back to his chest, saw his other arm reach up, the hand grab the jaw, saw it pull once, sharp, final. And I heard the crack.

It’s funny. I don’t remember the screaming, though Denise says there was a lot of it. Mostly from Tina, she says. But I didn’t hear that, just the snapping of Brad’s neck, cannon-loud and reverberating in the canyon of my skull.

The police closed us down for a while, and when we opened back up, the Yuppies didn’t return. A few bikers straggled in, but not enough to stay in the black. For a few months there, I thought we were going to have to shut our doors, but the owner was an old biker himself. He said they’d come back eventually, and they did, but business hasn’t been the same since Raz died. Tinker’s doing a life stretch in Leavenworth, and the owner’s getting old. He hasn’t got any kids, at least none that he knows of, so when he goes, I reckon this place’ll go too.

I hear Starbucks is looking for a location in these parts.