Peril

ABE

The old awning resisted him like a creature with a will of its own.

“Come on now,” he blurted out impatiently.

Abe gave the crank a furious jerk, and the awning creaked out a little, covering just enough of the sidewalk to allow pedestrians to take cover beneath it but not enough for the side flap to display the full name of the bar. Rain-soaked strangers would think they were scurrying into a tavern called “McPhe,” not one named for its first owner, Casey McPherson.

“Lucille’s not coming in tonight,” Abe said when Jorge arrived a few minutes later.

“In one of her moods,” Jake added.

Jorge shrugged. “Yah, okay, thas goo.” He hurried into the back.

“Thas goo,” Jake repeated with a laugh. “You could tell him you’d just eaten your own fingers and he’d say ‘Yah, okay, thas goo’.”

Jake was nearly seventy, with sloping shoulders and a shrunken face. He seemed to slither more than walk. Behind his thin lips, it was easy to imagine a forked tongue. “As for Lucille, she should see a doctor. They got pills for it now. I seen them advertised on TV. You pop a pill and it’s blue skies all the way.”

Abe had advised Lucille to take medication, but it had done no good. Lucille called her dark mood The Weight, and he knew how it worked in her, falling before midnight and growing heavier every minute so that she felt that she was being slowly squeezed to death, each second dropping upon her like a stone. By dawn she’d have lost all desire to open her eyes. And why not? All she’d see was a cramped, dingy room, chairs littered with old newspapers, piles of square white boxes from Tan’s Golden Dragon. Abe wondered how long it had been since she’d ordered anything but moo goo gai pan. That should have told her that it was getting worse, he thought, that The Weight would continue to fall upon her until it crushed everything-touch, taste, smell-left her with no sensation whatever except the impossible heaviness of the surrounding air.

And yet, for all that, she’d been a first-class singer when he’d met her years before. Like the best bar singers, she’d always known what the customers expected of her, how they wanted to have their spirits lifted. She’d been able to do that because she’d understood that in every man there was a knight, and in every woman a lady of the lake. The knights were fallen and the women were faded, but their vision of themselves lived on. If you kept that vision in mind, you could make each customer feel special. For years Lucille had accomplished that extraordinary feat, but at some point The Weight had crushed it, and she’d stopped singing except by rote, just mouthing the lyrics to no one in particular. He’d briefly thought of letting her go but lacked the heart to do it, and so simply had done nothing but helplessly watch The Weight grow heavier each year.

Jorge returned to the bar, mop in hand. “Okay I start now?”

“Yeah,” Abe said, then grabbed a stack of envelopes from beside the cash register, walked to a booth at the rear of the bar, and began to do the bills. Casey McPherson had taught him to pay everything on time. That way, if you ever had a problem, the suppliers would cut you a little slack. Twenty years had passed since then, but Abe had yet to ask anyone to wait for the money or take less than what was owed. That’s the one thing he could say, the bar had sustained him. It paid for his apartment on Grove Street and the occasional night at some cabaret joint uptown. Those were the nights he lived for, a table alone, a dark room, a singer with a trio-piano, sax, bass-an ensemble so pure in Abe’s mind that there were moments, brief and a little scary, when the voice and the instruments joined in an arrangement so balanced, so inexpressibly right, it brought tears to his eyes. There were even a couple of times when he had actually hit that elusive mark himself, the unexpected D-flat he’d added at the end of his arrangement of “She Was Too Good to Me,” for example. Perfect. He looked up from the bills and remembered the sound of it, the way Lucille’s voice had curled around the note, so sad and lost and goddamn hopeless. That was a moment, he told himself now, smiling quietly the way he always did when he thought of something really good.