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Bartab
by Cesca Janece Waterfield Twenty dollars rented a bed and two thin rugs curling in slant sun above Granby Street's sluggish shuffle. After check in, Jo napped, barely stirring. She woke to a vicious skirl of tools and men one floor up; some kind of ambitious renovation. Rising, her neck ached. She pictured her shoulder blades as kissing twins pinned above her ribs. Down the late afternoon street she and Colin found a bar. Red vinyl and dark walls around a horseshoe bar drew up and disappeared into a cavernous ceiling. Somewhere an air conditioner loudly issued steady white noise. Above Jo's stool hung a nicotine-stained painting of horses straining gray wire toward fresh grass. Colin squinted to see what draft beer they had while the bartender argued with a girl. Jo watched a man tune a guitar. Inconspicuously bent over the frets, he plucked errant strings and listened, his head tipped toward the note, and then turned a peg delicately until the pitch lay tautly to the ear's pleasing. While Colin counted out their change, the bartender turned to resume his argument with the girl. Jo looked down at her lap and fidgeted. Suddenly the girl whipped around as if she'd been struck and dashed for the exit. She pushed the scarred, heavy door into the August sunlight and a fat wedge stripped the room briefly of its shadows. In the doorway the girl turned to face the other patrons, paused for a long second, and wailed like a newborn. At the bar, a row of faces turned with inconsistent levels of interest and steadiness to watch. It was a brief distraction. Her tantrum seemed to implode, a dud Roman candle or a punch line flubbed. Fury squandered her words and after the door groaned shut, the bar was left wondering what she had screamed. Did she say she wasn't coming back? Fuck whom? Colin grinned at Jo, whose amusement disguised her creeping relief that it wasn't she making such a ruckus, sent three blocks in the heat to hunt watered down drafts. "Guess somebody's got a problem," Colin said in that voice. They turned their backs from the door and the man beside Colin filled their glasses from his own pitcher and declared a toast to Thursday, his birthday. The air conditioner compressor kicked in and seemed to soften the glare outside the single rectangular front window; seemed to lend itself to the cellular lull of the chorus of no. Raising their glasses to each other they smiled widely and drank. Back
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