Billy picked up a dishcloth and polished some pilsner glasses that had previously been washed and dried.
“But then you’re a stone too,” the tourist said, “because if you’re squeezed, you give nothing back.”
Billy continued polishing the glasses.
The gray eyes, bright with amusement, brightened further. “You’re a man with a philosophy, which is unusual these days, when most people don’t know who they are or what they believe, or why.”
This, too, was a style of barroom jabber with which Billy was familiar, though he didn’t hear it often. Compared to Ned Pearsall’s rants, such boozy observations could seem erudite; but it was all just beer-based psychoanalysis.
He was disappointed. Briefly, the tourist had seemed different from the usual two-cheeked heaters who warmed the barstool vinyl.
Smiling, shaking his head, Billy said, “Philosophy. You give me too much credit.”
The tourist sipped his Heineken.
Although Billy had not intended to say more, he heard himself continue: “Stay low, stay quiet, keep it simple, don’t expect much, enjoy what you have.”
The stranger smiled. “Be self-sufficient, don’t get involved, let the world go to Hell if it wants.”
“Maybe,” Billy conceded.
“Admittedly, it’s not Plato,” said the tourist, “but it is a philosophy.”
“You have one of your own?” Billy asked.
“Right now, I believe that my life will be better and more meaningful if I can just avoid any further conversation with Ned.”
“That’s not a philosophy,” Billy told him. “That’s a fact.”
At ten minutes past four, Ivy Elgin came to work. She was a waitress as good as any and an object of desire without equal.
Billy liked her but didn’t long for her. His lack of lust made him unique among the men who worked or drank in the tavern.
Ivy had mahogany hair, limpid eyes the color of brandy, and the body for which Hugh Hefner had spent his life searching.
Although twenty-four, she seemed genuinely unaware that she was the essential male fantasy in the flesh. She was never seductive. At times she could be flirtatious, but only in a winsome way.
Her beauty and choirgirl wholesomeness were a combination so erotic that her smile alone could melt the average man’s earwax.
“Hi, Billy,” Ivy said, coming directly to the bar. “I saw a dead possum along Old Mill Road, about a quarter mile from Kornell Lane.”
“Naturally dead or road kill?” he asked.
“Fully road kill.”
“What do you think it means?”
“Nothing specific yet,” she said, handing her purse to him so he could store it behind the bar. “It’s the first dead thing I’ve seen in a week, so it depends on what other bodies show up, if any.”
Ivy believed that she was a haruspex. Haruspices, a class of priests in ancient Rome, divined the future from the entrails of animals killed in sacrifices.
They had been respected, even revered, by other Romans, but most likely they had not received a lot of party invitations.
Ivy wasn’t morbid. Haruspicy did not occupy the center of her life. She seldom talked to customers about it.
Neither did she have the stomach to stir through entrails. For a haruspex, she was squeamish.
Instead, she found meaning in the species of the cadaver, in the circumstances of its discovery, in its position related to the points of the compass, and in other arcane aspects of its condition.
Her predictions seldom if ever came true, but Ivy persisted.
“Whatever it turns out to mean,” she told Billy as she picked up her order pad and a pencil, “it’s a bad sign. A dead possum never indicates good fortune.”
“I’ve noticed that myself.”
“Especially not when its nose is pointing north and its tail is pointing east.”
Thirsty men trailed through the door soon after Ivy, as if she were a mirage of an oasis that they had been pursuing all day. Only a few sat at the bar; the others kept her bustling table to table.
Although the tavern’s middle-class clientele were not high rollers, Ivy’s income from tips exceeded what she might have earned had she attained a doctoral degree in economics.
An hour later, at five o’clock, Shirley Trueblood, the second evening waitress, came on duty. Fifty-six, stout, wearing jasmine perfume, Shirley had her own following. Certain men in barrooms always wanted mothering. Some women, too.
The day-shift short-order cook, Ben Vernon, went home. The evening cook, Ramon Padillo, came aboard. The tavern offered only bar food: cheeseburgers, fries, Buffalo wings, quesadillas, nachos…
Ramon had noticed that on the nights Ivy Elgin worked, the spicy dishes sold in greater numbers than when she wasn’t waitressing. Guys ordered more things in tomatillo sauce, went through a lot of little bottles of Tabasco, and asked for sliced jalapeños on their burgers.
“I think,” Ramon once told Billy, “they’re unconsciously packing heat into their gonads to be ready if she comes on to them.”
“No one in this joint has a chance at Ivy,” Billy assured him.
“You never know,” Ramon had said coyly.
“Don’t tell me you’re packing in the peppers, too.”
“So many I have killer heartburn some nights,” Ramon had said. “But I’m ready.”
With Ramon came the evening bartender, Steve Zillis, whose shift overlapped Billy’s by an hour. At twenty-four, he was ten years younger than Billy but twenty years less mature.
For Steve, the height of sophisticated humor was any limerick sufficiently obscene to cause grown men to blush.
He could tie knots in a cherry stem with just his tongue, load his right nostril with peanuts and fire them accurately into a target glass, and blow cigarette smoke out of his right ear.
As usual, Steve vaulted over the end gate in the bar instead of pushing through it. “How’re they hangin’, Kemosabe?”
“One hour to go,” Billy said, “and I get my life back.”
“This is life,” Steve protested. “The center of the action.”
The tragedy of Steve Zillis was that he meant what he said. To him, this common tavern was a glamorous cabaret.
After tying on an apron, he snatched three olives from a bowl, juggled them with dazzling speed, and then caught them one at a time in his mouth.
When two drunks at the bar clapped loudly, Steve basked in their applause as if he were the star tenor at the Metropolitan Opera and had earned the adulation of a refined and knowledgeable audience.
In spite of the affliction of Steve Zillis’s company, this final hour of Billy’s shift passed quickly. The tavern was busy enough to keep two bartenders occupied as the late-afternoon tipplers delayed going home and the evening drinkers arrived.
As much as he ever could, Billy liked the place during this transitional time. The customers were at peak coherency and happier than they would be later, when alcohol washed them toward melancholy.
Because the windows faced east and the sun lay west, softest daylight painted the panes. The ceiling fixtures layered a coppery glow over the burnt-red mahogany paneling