Jeremy Saperstein

What turns a town into a city? In the dreams of their founders, they all start out as cities. Sometimes they take different paths is all.

Atticus, a town that once come close to being a city was now moving back to being a town. It sat between the foot of a tall hill and the shores of a great lake that once had risen to the top of the hill, far north of here, where the spring comes late. The founders of the city dreamed of great ships full of exclusive merchandise coming in from the east and outfitting the homes of the bankers and city leaders and leaving full of raw iron ore. The state opened a branch of the university system at the north end of town, and students who couldn’t make the grade at the system’s central school in the capitol tried their fortunes at U-Atticus.

The town seemed the color of solder moved the wrong way under the iron, a flat metallic alloy. The people seemed as if they were made out of the same alloy. A weaker man might let himself believe that the cold winds dipping down from Canada carried with them the moist hint of a spring from some faraway place, but the brown grass and patches of snow lasted well into May - sometimes June -each year. Weaker men didn’t last too long in Atticus. Nothing did, without showing considerable wear.

The sidewalks had been designed and poured flat and true with great commerce in mind, but now cracked with each year’s freeze and jutted crazily skyward, letting grass and small trees through their oppressive hold over the ground below. Without their correcting flatness at their bases, the worn brick buildings looked ready to topple, the victims of a subtle earthquake. The bridges, once strong and painted bright city green, were now going to flat gray and rust. Every day seemed like Sunday, like all of the families were somewhere else, listening to a fiery young pastor tell a tale of damnation. The few people on the streets walked with purpose, lacking much to loiter over.

If Atticus were music, it would have been a creaky waltz played by a ragtag band of one-eyed cowboys using borrowed and found instruments. At some other time, the thirties and forties maybe, the music would have been hot swing jazz, clarinet-heavy and played by tea-smoking hipsters with heavy eyelids. But that was in the thirties and forties, when people still sent things by ships.

The docks were generally silent now, as was the mercantile district downtown, which sported as many empty shops as it did storefronts populated by hippie entrepreneurs who sold homemade candles and used goods. The hippies were students from the capitol, never able to leave Atticus. They presented a counterpoint to the youth of Atticus herself who grew up in town and left by twenty-one or never left at all.

Rod Frumach was on the cusp. He grew up in Atticus and went to the university for a while, until a crisis of conscience on his part (when he started wondering why he worked so hard for something so artificial as a letter on a piece of paper) and his parents (when they began to wonder why they were supporting a hairy backtalker who seemed to have no urge to do anything but complain about the ‘boodjwa’ way they lived) combined to strongly suggest that he leave school and strike out on his own. After the shock subsided, Rod looked at the end of his parents' support as a blessing. Now he could do what he wanted, without worrying about pleasing anyone but himself. He meant to move to the capitol and find some fabulous job doing something creative with hip people like himself, but now, two years later, he'd managed to get only a few blocks from the campus.

Rod meandered listlessly through a series of part-time retail jobs. Rent was cheap in Atticus and it didn’t take too much work to keep the rent paid on his apartment and peanut butter in his pantry and still have some money left over for beers at the Trail’s End.

Some patrons said they remembered when the Trail’s End was a hopping saloon, with live music on the weekends and sailors and whores and fights and romance. Most of those patrons, though, were the shaking old men who came in for beers in the early afternoon and left by the time the evening news came on the television. The Trail’s End now was a bar that had refused to let time enter after the mid-1960s, when it entered with a fast-talking Formica salesman who covered every available surface with the material of the future. It looked more like a cafeteria than a tavern, but the jukebox was filled with bitter new-wave singers and the broken hearts of truck drivers and cowboys stained with weeping pedal steel. The Grain Belt was cheap, if flat, and you could still get a homemade sandwich on nights Ruth felt like making them.

Ruth had been the sole owner of the Trail’s End since her retired soldier husband suffered a heart attack while bringing a keg of beer up from the basement. Ruth’s sandwiches, like her cooking, were over the top, dripping mayonnaise and butter and home-canned pickle slices. Some patrons suggested that Ruth’s cooking might have wandered to high-fat excess as a way of gracefully leaving what had become a loveless marriage. Others quickly shushed them, and pointed out how much Ralph, the deceased Mr. Ruth, loved batter-fried fish covered in tartar sauce with battered French fries on the side, and not just at the Friday fish fry either.

Ruth was widely loved by the patrons. She was the deliverer of the beer, and in a field where listening was a desirable and vanishing skill, Ruth always listened to your problems and sometimes offered solutions. What’s more, she always remembered your name and the last problem you talked with her about, so Rod’s greeting was generally something like "Howzitgoin’ Rod? Didja find yer dream job yet? I’m telling ya, ain’t gonna be no openings as a perfesser for ya if ya don’t go back to school!" accompanied by an hourglass-shaped tumbler of Grain Belt. Ruth’s friendliness was such that nobody made fun of the occasional patron who, after a Grain Belt too many, slipped and called her Mom. Everyone had been there.

Ramona was one of those patrons. Her rich and straight dyed-black hair was cut in bangs flatly across her forehead, and she was one of the motley crew - the only female - who gathered at the Trail’s End with Rod on most nights. None of the crew noticed that Ramona was a girl, or at least it seemed that way sometimes. She never dated any of them and brought a boy she was seeing into the Trail’s End only once. That night she ended up leaning across the bar to hug Ruth and cry on her shoulder after her boy downed five shots of schnapps and loudly made an indecent proposal to one of the peroxided and lipglossed girlfriends of one of the rednecks. The rednecks stood as a group and took Ramona’s boy outside to sober him up with their boots and Ramona was strong and silent until Ruth set a shot in front of her and said "Tough luck, sweetie. You can do better." Rod ended the night propping her up on her stool, letting her cry into his chest, playing sad songs for her on the jukebox and singing along with her to the saddest, before half-walking, half-carrying her back to his place.

The rest of them included DuWayne, Rod’s best friend, a hulking blonde who wore a biker’s leather jacket and was missing portion of a front tooth as a result of protecting Rod during the War of the Jukebox.

The War of the Jukebox took place one night before Rod and DuWayne became friends, when the crew drunkenly piled into someone’s car and driven to an all-night diner out by the interstate. The jukebox at the diner had an impressive range of hits from the 80s, and Rod blurrily fed it every quarter he had and then entered "Working In The Coal Mine" by Devo for each selection until his credits ran out. Nothing happened until they were leaving, when a group of burly guys wearing baseball caps and flannel shirts underneath denim jackets surrounded them. Rod, full of beer and newly energized from eggs, chose to take no shit from a bunch of backwards-ass gearheads and cowfuckers and slurred exactly that to the gathered mob. He didn’t see the punch that caught his jaw, only an explosion of lights in his skull. When he regained his senses and opened his eyes, it was only to see a desert boot heading towards his face. He closed his eyes and, when the expected impact didn’t arrive, opened them again to see something unexpected: the owner of the boot flat on his ass with DuWayne cocking his own leg to aim a kick at the fallen redneck’s ribs. The melee after that was unmemorable, mostly because things were happening so fast out of anger and so randomly from drunkenness that there was nothing to grab hold of and remember. After a lot of yelling and shoving and a few punches, one of which broke of a chunk of DuWayne’s front tooth, someone in the diner called the cops, who pulled up at different times in all eight of Atticus’ squad cars and separated the warring factions.

DuWayne and Rod - probably because they were the ones who were bleeding the most - ended up handcuffed together and in the back of a squad car. Rod was starting to feel his head throb where he had been punched and trying to catch his breath, which was coming heavy and verging on sobs when DuWayne managed to elbow him. "Hey, kid, what you in for?" he said.

Rod remembered the old Arlo Guthrie song and laughed. "Littering", he said. DuWayne jerked closer to Rod, saying "…and they all moved closer to me." "Murder", said Rod, finishing the line. DuWayne jerked back to his original position and said "…and they all moved away from me." When the officer returned to the car, he turned three shades of purple to find his prisoners giggling uncontrollably in the caged back seat.

DuWayne and Rod were best friends after that, discovering similar tastes in areas besides sworn enemies and beer and spending the most time together and sober of any of the Ruth’s crew.

There was also Stan, who lived with his mother and had never held a job that anyone knew about but could identify any TV show from the seventies and could recite the dialogue from most episodes of the old Star Trek by heart; and Mo, who showed up about half the time the crew was holding court and was the only one to have a real, full-time, suit-job.

Some portion of the crew sat at the back table at the Trail’s End nearly every night but Sunday, when the bar was closed. They appeared in force on Saturday nights, filtering in around nine o’clock and drinking single glasses of Grain Belt. After at least three of them arrived, they switched to pitchers plugfed change into the jukebox. By midnight, a round of shots was ordered and an uproarious, sometimes obscene toast proposed and they were all pretty well schnockered. Ruth called last call at about a quarter of two, and they leaned on the table with their elbows and looked at each other out of the corners of their eyes. Someone always had more beer at their place and volunteered it to keep the party going, or else they would cajole Ruth into pouring a last pitcher as the last of her other patrons were leaving. They hurriedly swigged it down, as Ruth yelled "Keep those glasses off the table, guys, I don’t need the cops coming in and seeing me serve you after closing time." No one had ever seen the cops come into the Trail’s End, even when Ramona’s boy had been beaten bloody outside, but they all accepted the threat as real and imminent anyway.

Sundays, they woke up, loaded up on painkillers and met at the City Café for huge cheap greasy breakfasts and lots of coffee. They were barely tolerated at the City, not welcomed like they were at the Trail’s End. Of course, they weren’t usually in cheery moods at the Café, while nothing could bring them down at the bar. Still, they went to the Café each Sunday morning, sometimes making the counter girl brew five or six pots of coffee during their stay. One particularly hungover morning they ate breakfast and lunch there. Only the fact that the diner closed at two kept them from eating dinner there as well. They called the day, each week, Medicine Sunday.

Except for Rod, people in the crew didn’t really see each other socially away from the Trail’s End. Rod was most likely to catch up with people outside the bar, and went out of his way to go to movies or diners for coffee in the afternoons with DuWayne or Ramona or Stan. Usually, though, they ended up at some bar after coffee as a ‘field trip’, a chance to see the rest of the town, they rationalized. After a round or two at the foreign bar, they invariably dropped by the Trail’s End for the rest of the evening.

Once, while they were walking back from seeing some second-run action movie, DuWayne stopped at a blue Camaro parked in the street. The Camaro was from the disco seventies and was painted a rusting metallic blue with matching mag wheels. The front plateholder had a Confederate Stars-and-Bars flag installed instead of a license plate. DuWayne pulled a wide-tipped permanent marker from his jacket and knelt at the flag and carefully wrote "DIXIE FAGGOT" in block letters over it. He finished and smiled at Rod. "The best thing is, they won’t notice it for days," he said.

"That’s just gonna get someone beat up, DuWayne," Rod said. "They’re gonna see that and look for the closest geek and kick the shit out of him for no reason. And you’re gonna be the cause."

"Bullshit, I’m gonna be the cause. Rednecks never need a fucking reason to beat anyone up, Rod. They’ll beat someone up when they see this, but they were wanting to anyway. And it would have been for some other reason if it wasn’t for this. Quit fucking kidding yourself."

"But why keep it up? Maybe if we didn’t do shit like this and keep making fun of them…" Rod’s voice trailed off as he realized the sort of hippie shit he was starting to preach. "Yeah, that’s actually pretty funny, they probably won’t notice it until they’re having a keg at the park and one of their asshole buddies calls them on it."

"Yeah, see?" DuWayne laughed.

Rod agreed and laughed, and they continued walking to the bar. But Rod was disturbed by DuWayne’s action for some weeks after. He wondered if he wasn’t somehow playing a part in a stupid cycle, if he could stop it somehow. Then his thoughts would leave DuWayne’s vandalism, and he would start to wonder if his own life wasn’t just stuck in the stupid cycle. He pictured a giant washing machine in heaven, and God putting people into it and setting the dial to Wisdom, then opening the lid during the Stupid Cycle, and pulling people out to see if they were finished, if the stupidity had been washed out of them. Rod wondered what other cycles God’s washer had. He hoped there was a Smart Spin.

After the night her boy cheated on her and got the shit kicked out of him, Rod and Ramona watched a lot of movies together, sometimes at the theater, but mostly on videotape at Rod’s apartment. They’d get a twelve-pack and sit drinking beer on Big Brown, Rod’s thrift-store couch that seemed like it had been covered in the skins of hunted-down teddy bears and smelled like the inside of Satan’s own ashtray. She loved the couch, and would sleep on it when the party ended up back at Rod’s place, sometimes clutching an afghan her mother knitted for Rod as a high school graduation present to her chin, even while the others laughed and drank around her. That night Ramona’s boy got the shit kicked out him outside the Trail’s End and she called Ruth ‘Mom’, she came home with Rod and he held her on the couch, her tears soaking his shirt until she mercifully passed out. The next morning they woke up and went over to the café for Medicine Sunday and never talked about the night before. No one knew what Ramona’s boy was really named.

Sometime after DuWayne’s attack on the Camaro, he started seeing a girl from the college. Maybe as the result of endless childhood teasing about her name, Eena was a classic bad girl, a great bad girl in fact. In junior high, she was the first to get breasts, the first to wear makeup, the first to embrace and discard every fashion trend. She ran away at thirteen, was returned a few months later and developed an uneasy truce full of tough love and respect that her parents read about somewhere which helped her finish high school without getting pregnant or murdered or worse. She drank coffee, smoked in front of her parents, drank a glass of wine with them at dinnertime, and stayed out all night and met her mother as she returned home in the morning. Back in Atticus, she still carried a love of any substance that fucked her up, be it cough syrup, pot, acid or liquor. DuWayne didn’t bring her to the bar very often. The few times Rod talked to her, he envisioned her becoming a born-again zealot and trying to convert everyone around her. She seemed like she would throw herself completely into whatever they were doing, and right now, Eena was getting fucked up. She was too much of a fighter to let the drugs kill her, so she would probably turn to Jesus as a way out, and when she did, she would turn hard. Rod thought he'd seen a lot in his twenty-two years on the planet, but really, he just read a lot of authors who described girls like Eena, so he assumed he knew her better than she knew herself.

With Eena, DuWayne started dropping acid. At first, only with her, and only as part of all-night lovemaking (or so DuWayne said — it was never clear that he and Eena ever kissed), but then he started taking it on his own. "It’s like a big field trip into my own head, Rod. I feel like I’m finding myself," he said one evening when they were the sole patrons at the Trail’s End. "I’m just enjoying it right now."

Rod paused to keep from telling DuWayne how full of hippie shit he was. He took a breath and began. "Yeah, but I think you might be overdoing it a little. Remember all of those guys we saw on MTV, the ones who played in all of the bands in San Francisco in the sixties, and now they’re living in halfway houses and mumbling to themselves?" Rod said. "I’m not saying it’s a bad path to go down, but it sure seems like some people go down it and then have trouble coming back."

DuWayne quit telling Rod about his tripping after that, and Eena stopped coming to the Trail’s End after Rod saw her talking earnestly to Mo one night and asked "Where’s Meena and Minah?" It seemed like DuWayne was probably continuing the inward journeys on his own. Some nights he came into the bar and sat at the corner of their table, saying little and watching each movement in the bar like a cat watching fish in an aquarium. One day while they were sitting in the Saturday afternoon sunshine and drinking a beer on Rod’s porch, Rod launched into a vicious putdown of a redneck whose mufflerless truck drove by on the street below. Rod sensed that he'd lost DuWayne, usually the first to make fun of the flannel shirt and smokeless tobacco of their fellow citizens, but now strangely silent. He looked over and saw DuWayne looking out over the rooftops of the houses across the street, a single tear rolling down his cheek. Rod stopped, unsure of what to do or say. Finally, he reached out and hit DuWayne gently on the shoulder. DuWayne started. "Wanna 'nother beer, man?" Rod asked, standing up.

That night at the bar, Rod found himself in a conversation with Mo about how miserable Mo was wearing a suit and tie every fucking day, man, and how great it was that Rod was free, man. To keep himself from telling Mo that he was full of shit, that he wasn’t more free than anyone who paid rent and bills and worked for anyone but themselves, he excused himself and walked to the jukebox. On his way there, he saw DuWayne and Ramona perfectly illuminated in the shaft of white light springing from the broken panel in the fixture that hung above the pool table. Their heads were together, almost touching, and they were talking and laughing. They looked like they had been dating already for a hundred years. Rod suspected this was about to be the first night of that hundred-year Reich. He felt warmth in his chest and his cheeks and quickly looked away before they saw him. He pulled a greasy, rumpled dollar bill from his pocket, played Al Green on the jukebox as a silent best wish and returned to Mo, now talking to Ruth who was already pouring him a shot. With the fuzzy warmth of the beer, Rod thought to himself about what a wonderful place he was living in and how beautiful everything was and how lucky he was to have come to this point in the maze of life. When he looked over to share this glow with Ramona and DuWayne, they were nowhere to be found. Rod returned to his beer.

The next morning Rod slowly walked to his bathroom, pulled down the jar of aspirin and poured three into his hand. He gently padded to his kitchen, filled a glass with water and sat heavily at the table. He looked for a long time at the aspirin in his hand, then, with sudden resolve, brought them to his mouth and chased them down with the water. He set the empty glass on the table and looked at it for a long while, then stretched across the table without leaving his chair and reached for the phone. He dialed Ramona’s apartment and got no answer. He let it ring twenty times, then twenty more, not listening to the empty ring, but pondering the path of least resistance to return the phone to its cradle. It all seemed like too much effort. He left the phone, still ringing Ramona’s number, on the table and slowly stood and walked back to his bed. A phrase ran through his head, I do believe I am dying. It was something he had heard or read before, he thought, and it repeated itself now in his head with a numbing rhythm. This would be the longest Medicine Sunday, he thought. And he hated Ramona and DuWayne for leaving him alone. He wondered if they were lying on DuWayne’s mattress, entwined in the sheets and entangled in each other. As he pictured their unlined faces slack and faint smiles at the corners of their lips, he fell asleep.

It was dark when he woke up again, and he felt so much better that the voice in his head that had been saying I believe I am dying with so much conviction a few hours earlier was now saying there may be reasons to live in a trembling voice. He walked to the kitchen and drank half a container of orange juice without pouring it into a glass first. Then he saw the phone, long since disconnected, and felt a wave of guilt and nausea tumble down his body from his forehead and had to sit.

On a Sunday night, there was no place to go where he might meet the crew. He couldn’t call Ramona or DuWayne and sure didn’t want any part of – or belong in – their new life anyway. Everything had changed, and he felt the world tilting on its axis beneath his feet. Or maybe that was leftover from the beer. He put a frozen pizza in the microwave and opened a cola. This would be a night to soak in the warm motherly glow of the television.

Halfway into some stupid sitcom in the seven-thirty time slot, a commercial came on. It was part of the program that the network sold to the local stations, and it was for a truck-driving school in the southwest part of the state. The commercial was washed out, like it had been copied two or three times from VCR to VCR before it arrived at Atticus’ sole TV station. In the commercial, some jasper stood holding a gas pump and emoted "This job pumping gas is all right for now, but what about the future?", then spent the rest of the thirty seconds learning to drive big rigs and getting ready for the sacred joy of the open road. "Thiyus here job is okayuh for nowah, but whut about the FYUTchir?" Rod imitated the commercial in his best hick drawl. As the next commercial came on, though, his mind began to form a picture of life as a truck driver, cresting a hill into a beautiful valley as the sun set behind him, Merle Haggard on the radio. He thought of a life where his only friends were sassy truck stop waitresses named Darlene and Lurette, who waited late at night for his headlights coming down the highway and secretly dreamed of marrying him. He would need a handle for the CB, maybe "Day-Cart". Yeah, he would hide his intellectuality behind the play on Descartes. One of his trucking brethren would notice and start up a conversation on the CB about it, maybe they would become fast friends and have long philosophical discussions as they crossed the plains of the Dakotas.

As quickly as he built up a romantic vision of his trucking future, it came tumbling down. He imagined meal after meal of greasy hamburgers and dry biscuits covered in battery-acid gravy. He considered how his ass burned now and tried to picture how it would feel after ten or twelve hours driven into a sticky vinyl seat. He thought about sleeping alone on the side of the road, staring at a black-and-white glossy of Ramona…

Rod shook his head violently. Where had Ramona come from? The sitcom was nearly finished now, and Rod shut the TV off with the remote control and looked at the black screen for a while. The walls of his apartment seemed grayer and closer than ever as the sun set behind the hill. He wished hard that the bar was open, wished harder, then realized that it still wasn’t going to be open, no matter how hard he wished. "I need to get the fuck out of this place", he said, then wondered if he'd said it out loud. He felt the silence of the apartment, probed it for a ringing echo of his own voice, then started repeating I do believe I’m dying again.

He stood, walked to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, stared without seeing at the contents, then closed the door. I need to get the fuck out of this place, he thought, careful not to say it out loud this time. It’s time to move, time to act instead of react. He walked to his desk and dug out a resume he'd written shortly after leaving college and starting making corrections and additions with a pencil.

The next day, Monday, Rod got to the Trail’s End early. He asked Ruth for a clear soda, but she already had a beer under the tap before she processed what he'd said. "Here, it’s on me, Hon," she said, setting it on a coaster in front of him and scurrying over to another customer. Rod eyed the beer. He hadn’t rushed here for a beer, in fact the thought made him a little queasy. He wanted to catch up with Ramona or DuWayne, to hear the scoop. He half-listened to Stan when he came in, looking to the door each time someone came in. Finally, at eleven, half-drunk, he left.

At his apartment, the red light on his answering machine was blinking. Someone had called. He pressed the button to hear the message and he felt his queasiness return when he heard Ramona’s voice. She'd called a little after he got to the Trail’s End and she wanted to get together, tonight. Before the recording of Ramona finished playing, Rod dialed Ramona’s number listened to it ring. He shook his head as he recalled the empty results of other calls he'd made, usually long distance, after returning from the bar. Gotta keep it together, he half-thought, half-muttered to himself, keep it together, Chief. We’ve had this much beer before and passed for sober.

"Ramona. You called."

"Oh, hi, Rod. Where were you?"

"The bar. What’s, uh, what’s up?"

"Oh, I was calling, because, you know…" Her voice ended with a question.

"You and DuWayne?"

"Yeah."

"And you’re singing the ‘I Got Lucky’ song?"

"Yeah."

Rod took a deep breath, careful not to exhale it across the mouthpiece. He tried to sound nonchalant. "So?"

"Rod, I don’t know. It’s just weird, is all. I just wanted to, I don’t know, check with you. Like you’re my father, for Christ’s sakes."

"Yeah, well, whatever. I mean, DuWayne is probably my best friend here, and everything. But I don’t know if I’d let my sister date him. He’s been doing way too much acid."

There was a pause. Ramona replied flatly, "Yeah."

There was a longer pause. Rod was acutely aware of his refrigerator dripping Freon or something in its tubes. Finally, he could take it no longer. "Well, I’m so happy for you kids. I hope you two have a swell life together. Really."

"Don’t be a smart-ass, Rod. Were we dating?"

Rod didn’t know what to say, so he remained silent.

"Were we dating?"

"For Christ’s sakes, Ramona, of course we weren’t dating."

"Then what the fuck do you care?"

Another pause. Then Ramona spoke again, with a smaller voice. "Why didn’t we ever date, Rod?"

Rod said it before he could stop himself. "Lack of ambition." There was silence from Ramona, then he heard her gently place the phone back in the cradle. Rod listened until the dial tone, than the insistent off-hook tone. Then he held the phone by the mouthpiece and smashed the earpiece into the Formica of his secondhand kitchen table. "Shit!" he yelled to his walls.

On Tuesday, Rod checked his answering machine every fifteen minutes from behind the counter at the video rental store where he worked, hoping there would be a message from Ramona. He was afraid to call her from the store, for fear everyone in the store would hear his apologies. His coat was on and he was walking out the door as his shift ended. He was at his apartment door when the phone started ringing.

Something got in his way as he raced through the dark living room, and he nearly Dick Van Dyked into the kitchen. He caught his balance and got to the phone on the seventh ring. "Hello?"

"Rod. What’s up?" It was DuWayne.

"What’s up with you?" Rod’s voice was sharper then he meant it to be.

"Man, Ramona told me you were all freaked out. What the fuck is the problem?"

Rod clenched his teeth and his fists. There was no problem. He knew that. "Problem? What problem? There’s no problem."

"Yeah." DuWayne did not sound convinced. "Anyway, me and my girlfriend are going out for a beer and she wanted to see if you would join us."

"Yeah, sure, that would be great, I haven’t seen Eena in a while."

DuWayne giggled. "Eena? No, I mean Ramona."

Rod didn’t remember getting out of the conversation with DuWayne. He was pretty sure he hadn’t said anything bad. He was pretty sure they were supposed to meet at the Trail’s End in an hour or so. He was pretty sure he was going to die, right now. He could feel his large intestine moving to strangle the life out of the small one and his head spun like it had on the longest Medicine Sunday, two days ago. He certainly wasn’t dating Ramona, yes. But did DuWayne have to be such a dick about this all?

At the bar, they sat on the same side of the table, waiting for him to join them. Rod repressed a shudder. He remembered one night, watching movies with Ramona, when a movie couple sat on the same side of a diner booth. "God, I hate that," she said, "it’s so disgusting to see people do that." But there was no doubt about it, there she was, sitting on the same side of the table as DuWayne. Rod sat down with them.

They talked, but Rod didn’t - couldn’t - listen. He managed to parry their conversational thrusts, and kept his head above water by grunting and making small talk. DuWayne watched Ramona’s face closely, with the wide eyes of a child who suddenly sees something magical. His smile, usually yellowed and dingy with coffee and nicotine, seemed the whitest of whites. His eyes twinkled where before there was only the dullness of someone who was spending too much time out of his own body.

Ramona never looked at DuWayne. She smoked and leaned forward to Rod, expectantly. She laughed too quickly and too loudly at Rod’s jokes and chuckled politely at DuWayne’s. When DuWayne got up to go to the bathroom, she developed a strong interest in lighting another cigarette, then in the moving nature-scene beer sign above the cash register. She didn’t speak or look at Rod. Finally, Rod spoke.

"Listen, that was a shitty thing to say on the phone the other night. I was hungover, not thinking straight. I’m sorry."

Ramona glanced over. "Oh, yeah, it’s okay. No matter. Whatever." She took up her glass with the same hand her cigarette was in, drained it and handed the empty glass to Rod. "Fill me up, there, Tex, ‘kay?"

Rod was filling the glass when DuWayne returned to the table. He looked at Ramona. "I wrote our names above the urinal, sweetie, and put a heart around them." He looked at Rod and laughed, too loudly. Ramona didn’t react. Rod drank the rest of his beer, poured the rest of the pitcher into his glass and announced that the next one was on him. He walked to the bar with a great feeling of relief to be away from the table. At least Ramona wasn’t laughing with Him - DuWayne's pronoun was capitalized in Rod's head. And it was good to see some personality returning after the desiccated DuWayne who did too much acid, or was it? It was like an episode of The Twilight Zone, Rod thought, we saved the patient, but, well, I’m afraid he’s not quite the same. Not the same? My God, he’s a monster!

"Who’s a monster, Hon?" Rod had spoken the last thought out loud and Ruth heard on the other side of the bar.

"I, uh, want a monster pitcher of beer, Ruth, not one of these tiny ones."

"Smart-ass. Mind I don’t give you a fucking thimble full of beer next time." She turned to fill the pitcher. Rod turned to look at DuWayne and Ramona, like a driver slowing to look at an accident, but like Saturday night, the table was empty. Rod swiveled his head around the bar, starting to clench his teeth – but then he saw DuWayne at the jukebox. He walked to the table and set the beer down, then joined DuWayne, who'd fed the machine a five-dollar bill and was now picking every love song he could find, smiling like an idiot. Rod watched for a moment then walked back to the table, filled his glass and drained off half of it before Ramona returned to the table. "Happy Together" was playing. Rod’s stomach tightened and his teeth were in danger of disintegrating from his clenching them tightly together. He forced a tight smile onto his face and looked up at Ramona, whose face showed little or no emotion at all as she sat down. "Hey."

"Hey. Peeing, huh?"

"Yup." Her face remained unchanged, oblivious to DuWayne’s sap coming from the jukebox and impervious to Rod’s smile.

Rod felt like a pimply high school kid trying to impress a cheerleader. The tension in his stomach turned to queasiness and he scrambled to think of something funny, something to break the ice. "Hey, I put together a new resume last night. I’m thinking of getting a job in the capitol."

"Huh."

Now Rod was relieved to see DuWayne leaving the jukebox and walking back to the table. He was digging in his jeans pocket as he walked, and when he arrived, he handed Rod a crumpled dollar bill. "Here, you do better at this than I do, go plug the jukebox some more. Let’s keep those assholes from playing any Frank Sinatra tonight."

Rod involuntarily held his hand out and took the offered dollar bill. He held it away from him for a moment, like something dead and gone rotten, felt his stomach and teeth clench up again, then got up and walked to the jukebox. There, he reached in his pocket, pulled out every quarter he had and played "Strangers In The Night" five times. Then he walked out of the bar, into the next bar down the street and started drinking shots of bourbon and imagining that Ramona would be upset and start looking for him frantically while DuWayne tried to keep her in the bar by grabbing at her hand. Rod moved to a table by the window so he could keep an eye on the street. But only rednecks passed by, driving their mufflerless trucks and jacked-up muscle cars and occasionally heaving beer cans out the window. At closing time, he staggered home, feeling a pain stab at his stomach as he walked by the door to the Trail’s End and thought of Ramona and DuWayne.

The red light on his answering machine wasn’t blinking when Rod got home. He lurched over and turned the ringer off, then got angry and picked up the phone and tried to yank it off the wall, but it slipped his grasp and the receiver fell to the table below. He kicked a chair at the table instead and went to bed.

His eyes opened up the next morning and he was wide-awake, like he’d never slept. His stomach felt tired from the clutch n’ quease routine the previous night. With a clear head, he got out of bed and started work on his resume. He looked at the clock at around ten, then called in sick to work. At noon, he took a small handful of aspirin, put his sunglasses on and walked to the drugstore for the three-day old Sunday papers from the capitol. At four, he took a stack of envelopes containing newly typed resumes and cover letters to the post office and watched a grumpy clerk affix first class postage to each of them. When he finished with that, he walked to the bar he had been the previous night and ordered a pitcher of beer and sat at the bar, drinking it and watching TV until he finished it and went home.

Thursday he made sure the phone at his house was working by calling and leaving a message from work. When he got home, the red light blinking excited him until he played his own, solitary, message back. Thursday night he made an extravagant pot of chili, using steak and dried kidney beans, making a time-consuming point of chopping all of the ingredients into eighth-inch chunks. While he cooked and ate, he played a Frank Sinatra record and drank the last five beers in his fridge.

Friday he worked into the afternoon, checked his answering machine without result, then got his car and drove south to the capitol. The interstate to the capitol was long and straight and Rod tuned the radio to a seventies-classic rock station and turned it up, letting the too-familiar songs act as a sort of a mantra for him as he drifted away. As the day turned to dusk, more traffic indicated that he was hitting the outskirts of the capitol city. He drove to the student ghetto of the university there, parked and walked around, looking at the residents starting to get fucked up after a grueling week of whatever it was they did. He looked at store windows, stared at the girls as subtly he could and walked for a while in the neighborhood. Finally, he came across a bar with a brick exterior and an inviting red neon sign that read "The Buffalo" behind its single glass-brick window. He went in and ordered a beer. It was darker than the Trail’s End, paneled and not as well lit. The tables and bar were real wood and stained a rich reddish-brown. There was no pool table. Rod walked to the jukebox, reached into his pocket, and came out with a crumpled dollar – the same dollar, he realized, that DuWayne had given him to play the jukebox at Ruth’s earlier in the week. Rod fed the dollar into the jukebox and carefully picked songs, pretending he was on the radio for some kindred soul driving late at night along a plains highway. He picked country-and-western and broken-hearted songs and tacky AM pop chestnuts from the seventies, thinking about the effects they would have on the spirit of his imagined travelling brother. He closed with "Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes" and smiled to himself, picturing his imagined soulmate driving into the sunrise and singing along in road-hoarse voice at the top of his lungs and laughing to himself at the absurdity of his own actions.

Rod drank glasses of beer until his selections finished playing on the jukebox, then drove back to Atticus. He drove past the Trail’s End on the way back to his house, pulled over for a moment, and then drove on.

The lights were still on when he returned. He them off and watched the lights of downtown outside instead. He watched them until dawn, not really thinking about anything, except to wonder at length why some of the other apartment lights were on, what stories were behind each of them. At dawn, he peeled himself from the chair and went to bed.

Saturday morning, the phone woke him up. He answered it and heard Ramona. "Hey."

"Hey," he replied.

There was a pause that Rod felt strangely unworried about. A few nights ago, silence in a conversation with Ramona had made his stomach tie itself up in knots. a few nights before that, there was never a silence because they would both be talking a mile a minute, trying to tell stories or explain exactly how they had felt about some event or person. Now there was a silence that Rod felt comfortable in. He made no move to say anything.

Ramona broke the pause. "How’s it going? You took off in a big hurry the other night."

And it took you until now to call, Rod thought. I guess you all weren’t too concerned. "Going great. Went down to the capitol last night, found a new bar. Had a couple of beers, played the jukebox. Friday night in the big city."