Wolf Hour

11 Liza, October 2016

Liza Hummels held open the door of Bernie’s Bar as one student helped another to make it through.

‘Sure you can get him home all right?’ she asked.

‘We live just round the corner,’ the boy snuffled.

Once they’d left, she closed the door and locked it.

‘Why didn’t you let me throw him out?’ asked Eddie, the other bartender at Bernie’s. They took turns at covering the day shift, with the older, more alcoholic clientele; but evenings, when the students drank there, they were both on duty.

‘It was his birthday,’ said Liza.

‘Everyone has a birthday,’ said Eddie.

‘Yes, but this guy found out today that he failed the same exam for the third time.’

Eddie shook his head and buttoned up his jacket. ‘OK if you...?’

‘I’ll do the till,’ said Liza. They both knew she did the till. On the odd occasion Liza had to stay at home because her boy was sick the whole thing ended up such a mess it left her with twice as much work to sort it all out when she came back the next day. So the routine was that Eddie always asked before he left.

She switched the usual playlist with its permanent hit parade for the Delines’ ‘Calling In’. She always played it after she closed up. Once somebody asked if that was her singing, some guy who obviously thought she and Amy Boone sounded the same. Liza swayed about behind the counter as she did the takings. Bernie’s — which wasn’t Bernie’s, there was no Bernie, just three sisters who’d inherited the bar — wasn’t doing all that well, that was pretty obvious. While the other bars in the neighbourhood decorated and worked hard to attract the students, Bernie’s banked everything on minimalist maintenance, low outgoings and lower prices. But the combination of shabby location and shabby clientele had given the place a rock-bottom image, which deterred everyone except those with the least money. That didn’t make it a customer profile impossible to make money from, and Liza had her own ideas on how to make Bernie’s a bar that was both cheap and cool and could attract the alternative section of the student population. These would in turn attract the straight, monied crowd who liked to hang out with the cool artist types in the belief that this made them that bit cooler themselves. It was the same pattern as in uptown; first came the bohemians, attracted by low property prices, and the straights followed them. The sisters had listened when Liza voiced her thoughts, but when it came to funding the small investments such a change would have necessitated they backed off. It was frustrating, and every once in a while it occurred to Liza to make them an outrageously low offer and take over the bar herself. Put her ideas into action. Make some money for once. Buy Bernie’s cheap and sell it at a profit. Because once the straights started arriving it would need to be sold pretty quickly. When the straights moved into uptown and drove up standards and prices, they also drove the bohemian element out. The same thing would happen with Bernie’s, it was just a question of selling before the buyer understood that within another year or two Bernie’s would once again stop being the cool place to hang out.

Yes, yes, a fun way to pass the time, thinking thoughts like these when the days — like today — dragged by.

Liza called her sister’s number.

‘Hi, Jennifer. Soon finished here. Is he sleeping?’

‘Like an angel.’

‘Any dinner left?’

‘It’s in the refrigerator. But hurry up, they’ve changed the timetable again and my last bus goes just before midnight.’

‘Oops, then I better catch an earlier bus myself. See you.’

Liza hurriedly put the evening’s takings away in the safe and turned off all the lights, the clearing up could wait until tomorrow. She put her jacket on, turned on the alarm, knew it would hurt her hip but ran for the bus anyway. Got there just in time to see it pull away from the stop and disappear into the night.

‘Shit!’ she said loudly and pulled out her phone.

‘Second that,’ said a voice.

She looked up.

A man stood leaning against a Ford parked by the sidewalk. She recognised the coat before she recognised the rest of him.

‘Second what?’ she said.

‘It’s shit. I second that opinion.’

‘What is?’ she said without interest as she scrolled back to her sister’s name.

‘Most of it, I’m guessing.’

‘Like just missing a bus?’

‘No, right there we’re lucky.’

‘We are?’

‘I can drive you to wherever you want to go.’

She looked up from the phone. He had a bump on his forehead but seemed to have sobered up from earlier in the day.

‘Thanks but no thanks,’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m waiting for you.’

She felt something stir inside her, a memory, an old fear that had never quite died away. ‘Because?’

‘Because I want to apologise.’

‘Apologise for what?’

‘For being an asshole.’

‘You weren’t an asshole.’

‘No?’

‘You paid up and you didn’t start a fight with anyone. So in my book that’s not being an asshole.’

He smiled. ‘OK, maybe I wasn’t an asshole, but I still am an asshole. It’s more or less a constant. So I’m apologising for that, at least.’

To her surprise, Liza noticed that both his words and his smile of resignation made her feel calmer. Maybe he wasn’t what you would call handsome, but he wasn’t bad-looking either when he smiled. Charm. Yes, a certain charm. Maybe it had been there earlier too, but her radar for things like that was turned off when she was working behind the bar.

‘Anyway,’ he said as he straightened up from the car. ‘Can an asshole make amends today by offering to drive you somewhere, Liza?’

He must have noticed that she hesitated slightly, because the next moment he opened the passenger door for her with an exaggeratedly gallant gesture.

She laughed drily. ‘After the conversation we had what makes you think I’d dare take you up on your offer?’

‘Your gut feeling when it comes to people,’ said the man. Bob. She didn’t know why she remembered the name. Probably because it was short. She glanced up and down the street. Not a taxi in sight, and if she waited for the next bus her sister wouldn’t make it for hers. She felt the old fear. It was speaking to her, but in a low voice. And she had gathered from the phone call she overheard at the bar that he was a policeman.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘But no funny business.’

He showed her his open palms and backed away smiling round the car.

‘Well?’ he said, after she’d given him the address and they had passed the first set of traffic lights on the road south in a strange but not actually embarrassing silence.

‘Well what?’

‘What’s on your mind?’

‘I thought you were the one who had something on your mind.’

‘Shoe is on the other foot now. I’m your driver and your confidant.’

She smiled. ‘What if I don’t have any issues?’

‘Oh but you have some, my lady.’

‘Oh yeah? Such as what?’

‘You’re tough, but you were afraid when I said I’d been waiting for you. You work behind that bar and it hides your limp, but you can’t hide it when you run. You probably have trouble making a commitment because you’re afraid of being let down again.’

She sighed.

‘Am I wrong?’ said Bob.

‘I guess not, I’m just so tired of men who think a superficial psychoanalysis is the way to a woman’s heart. And the zip on her pants.’

They drove on in a silence that was now slightly more oppressive. Liza noticed the plaster on the knuckles of his hand on the steering wheel.

‘Do you always give your suitors such a hard time?’ he asked.

Liza sighed again. ‘Is that what this is? You’re paying court to me? And if so, then do you always stalk your victims?’

She saw that she had hurt him and regretted what she’d just said. Why could she never just leave it? The guy was driving her home, his woman had just dumped him, and he was looking for some comfort. How difficult could it be for her — especially for her — to understand that?

The radio was playing low. Emmylou Harris’s version of Springsteen’s ‘Tougher Than the Rest’. A playlist from his own phone maybe. OK, so he got bonus points for that.

‘All right then,’ she said. ‘My son’s father up and left me. I developed a rare illness, one that eats up the bones. It took parts of my hip and no one believed I would ever walk again. He just couldn’t handle looking after a newborn baby and a disabled wife and away he ran. Not hard to understand.’

‘But not to forgive and forget, maybe?’

Liza looked out the window. She hoped it would rain soon. She’d always liked the rain, didn’t know why. Maybe it was the country blood in her. Maybe it had something to do with purification. And maybe it was just because she liked the rain.

‘You’re right, a stalker tried to rape me when I was thirteen years old.’ She took a deep breath. ‘So three out of three. Congratulations.’

Silence. Just Emmylou.

‘D’you want to talk about—’

‘No,’ she interrupted.

‘—something more pleasant?’

They drove.

She started to laugh. He glanced over at her and then he began to laugh too.

‘Screwed-up people,’ she murmured, and he turned up the music, another woman, singing about could you please stop your whining and laugh instead. And Liza began her story. Not much of it, not the whole story, just stuff about her childhood and her parents. A typical white middle-class family facing the future and optimistic about the eighties, and then the shit hits the fan.

‘My father lost his job. We had to move to somewhere cheaper, a place where the neighbours didn’t go out to work but got as much in social security cheques as my father did for breaking his back in all those casual jobs he took. He told me he had to use all the money they’d been saving to send me to college, because I was bright, you know. Instead we lost everything, while the rich got richer. And no one seems to know just exactly how it happened.’

‘Then other people began making cars that weren’t just cheaper than ours, they were better than ours too.’

‘Could be. My father says that people like us were once the backbone of this country but now we’re the crap in the middle, not lucky enough to get rich but still too proud to live off welfare. He’s voting for Donald Trump, he says.’

‘And you?’

She shrugged. ‘I suppose I could vote for Trump, but he just makes me puke. I’m not too crazy about Hillary Clinton either, but maybe it is time for a woman to take over.’

Then they were there. He parked outside her house, and to Liza it seemed the journey hadn’t really been all that long.

The police officer leaned forward and looked up at the house. ‘Looks cosy.’

‘I dated this guy from Tennessee who said that back where he comes from it’s what they call a shotgun shack.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘A house so small you could stand in the doorway and empty both barrels through the window at the other end.’

‘That I would like to see.’

‘I’m not inviting you in if that’s what you think.’

‘No, I didn’t mean it like that.’

‘OK.’

‘So he had no staying power?’

‘Who? The Tennessee guy?’ She grinned. ‘I was the one that jumped ship there. He believed in UFOs, and that it was fake news about the world being round. Those two things together were just a little bit too bizarre for me.’

They laughed.

‘Some people are just screwed up,’ he said, again with that sad smile she suspected was something he deliberately used on women.

‘How’d you get the bump on your forehead?’ she asked.

He raised his hand as though to hide it, the same way her sister automatically did whenever Liza asked about her most recent bruise or black eye.

‘I let a guy hit me so I could beat him up,’ said Bob. He sneaked a glance at her, as though checking to see how she took this.

‘I see. And what happened to him?’

‘I think they took him to hospital. If my colleagues hadn’t stopped me, I believe I might even have killed him.’

‘Jesus. What had he done?’

‘He complained that I’d fucked his wife.’

Liza didn’t respond.

‘I have an anger management problem,’ said Bob. ‘And I have... other problems too.’

‘O... K...’ she said, drawing out the syllables.

‘Here is when I ask if you’d like to meet for a coffee one day,’ he said. ‘And you should answer no.’

‘Then I say no.’

He nodded. ‘Smart girl. Sleep tight.’

‘You too.’ She opened the car door. Was about to step out. Stopped. ‘Hey.’

‘Yeah?’

‘You shouldn’t try to just fuck her out of your head. Your ex, I mean.’

He licked his lips, as though tasting the thought. ‘You sure about that?’

‘Yes. You shouldn’t drag other people down with you when you’re sinking.’

She could see he was about to say something, try to be funny. But then it was as though he felt a sudden jolt and his face twisted in pain. That was definitely not something he used on women, and she felt an urge to reach out and stroke the bruise on his forehead. Instead she climbed out of the car. Then turned back to look inside.

‘Thanks for the ride, Bob.’

‘Well, thank you. See you soon.’

‘OK. But not...’

‘Not?’

‘I meant what I said about not meeting for a coffee. All right? I don’t want any campaign.’

He gave a big smile. ‘I hear you, Liza.’

She shut the door and headed up toward the house. Knew he was watching her. Then she heard the car drive off.