By Charles F. Quaas
When David Henly arrived for his shift at the pub, he felt as if the place were ready to explode. He felt it in the air. He felt it in the snow. He felt it well before he stood before the door. Before crossing at the corner of Nevada and Park Avenue, David watched three men who the minute before seemed the best of friends engage in a brutal series of blows. They fought like animals, punching, kicking, even biting one another till a man called to them from the steps of the pub.
“Y’all quit yur wrestlin and git in here. It’s time for the toast!”
Toast? David thought, clutching the handles of his bicycle tightly. The sight of blood, any blood, always left him queasy and the men who fought bled plenty in the snow. So much in fact David wondered how on earth they managed to get back on their feet. Without so much as a whimper they followed the one who called back into the pub, and it was some time before David realized he was standing alone in the snow.
Glancing at the blotches of red as he latched his bike to the gate David wondered if he were in the right place. Spits, the only pub on Spin Street, had strict rules about fighting and the like. The first time got you thrown out. The second you were banned for life. As an employee he should’ve stopped the fight when it started, and he did see it start, but then again David was never one to get himself into trouble.
Better to the look the other way David always told people who asked whether their friends had had too much to drink look the other way and you’ll have a good day.
Besides, he surmised, if anyone got into it at the pub Harry Henshey always took care of it. He’d straighten them out easy peasy. A burly man the other side of thirty Harry was as regular an employee as Spits ever had. Not counting David of course. Aside from the owner and his Hee’s, as people were apt to call Henly and Henshey, no one worked more than five days a week.
That’s just how things were at Spits. Although listed as one of the ‘TOP 25 PLACES IN COLROADO YOU WANT TO SEE IN 2014’ in an online magazine the pub saw few customers outside the regular crowd. No one knew exactly why the pub was so hard to find only that if you asked for directions to Spits, you’d probably end up on the wrong side of the street. It was the kind of place where you weren’t welcome if people didn’t know your name and David suspected the regulars worked hard to keep it that way.
And it was for that very reason David Henly thought he must be dreaming for when he came out of the pub’s storeroom, he found fifty men crowded about the bar. They were people who’d never be seen together in public. Bankers and lawyers and men with yellow teeth eager for another drink. Respectable men in their Sunday best mingled with obreros fresh off the street. They drank together. They laughed together. A few even danced together, their legs swaying to a most ungodly tune. Beer, wine, and whiskey sloshed across the floor and as he stood in a puddle of rum David calculated how long it’d take him to clean up the place.
The answer was too damn long. It was his job after all, being on closing shift, a shift he and his coworkers drew lots to take. It was the only way the manager thought fair and as he watched one man toss another across a table David cursed his rotten luck.
Gods help me he thought, grabbing a rag to try and do what he could about the mess. The manager was nowhere in sight and unfortunately for David the only other employee was a man he utterly despised. A man, David realized, who seemed quite pissed.
“About time you got here,” the man shouted, eyes flashing, struggling to make himself heard. David ignored his accusing tone and poured himself a drink, careful not to take from more exquisite bottles.
“Traffic was bad,” he said after taking a hefty swig. Pouring himself another glass, David and the other man watched an older fellow clamber atop a table. Those closest to him laughed as the man looked as if he might fall. He swayed this way and that, ponytail flapping back and forth, till at last he found his footing. With a wave of his glass the musicians in the corner ceased their tune.
“Friends,” the man bellowed, hoisting up his glass, “welcome!”
The crowd did the same, roaring its approval. At this time Harry Henshey appeared from somewhere, as he often did, and with his appearance the other employee slipped away like a spring freeze.
Good riddance David thought, glad in a way that it was just him and Harry. The other man only worked once a week and couldn’t be counted to keep a bag of grapes let alone manage the place. Harry on the other hand once caught a bullet between his teeth. Or so the story went. The man worked the oil fields round Odessa in his youth and often complimented David for being made of sterner stuff.
“Kids these days don’t know shit,” Harry’d often say as they closed up shop, “they don’t know shit and they ain’t worth shit. But you David,” Harry being the only other employee who called him David and not Big D, “you’re at last worth a shit.”
The man had a way with words, that much was for sure. He still went back to Texas from time to time, usually when he needed good money, and the place just wasn’t the same with him gone.
“Some crowd,” Harry growled as the man on the table said a joke which made the whole pub laugh.
“You know what this is about?” David asked as he counted the register. Most of it was small bills, tens and fives, and as he counted them out David realized there weren’t any ones.
“It’s a wake. I think.”
“You think?” David asked to which Harry could only shrug.
Whatever it was the old man gave his toast and the crowd a hearty shout. They drank as one and despite the rush which followed David thought it a charming scene. Soon the register held plenty of ones and for David time passed quickly. Eventually Harry disappeared into the crowd leaving David in the company of a pair of old geezers with crooked teeth.
“Clarence Wetherbey,” said the older of the two. He offered a hand to David who shook it if only to be polite. The other fellow did the same though when David took his hand, he felt surprising strength in it.
“So, what brings you to our little gathering,” Clarence asked, blue eyes lurking behind the rim of his glass. Unlike his companion with the striking purple suit and emerald cufflinks the man dressed plainly. Too plainly it seemed.
“I work here.”
“Do ya now,” Clarence gasped, “that’s a fine thing ain’t it. Always wanted to work in a pub I did. Ever since I was little.”
“You said you wanted to join the merchant marines,” the other man muttered, a comment which made Clarence grin as he set his glass upon the bar.
“I did, yes. Once upon a time I wanted to be a marine. Imagine that. Me. A marine!”
The old man laughed and clapped his hands together. He looked first to David, then his friend, then laughed again. He was a crooked man, that much David could tell, a man used to searching for the right side of the tracks. The other man shook his head and introduced himself to David as one Mathew Eversbey.
“If you couldn’t tell we aren’t from around here. A lovely place you got though,” Mr. Eversbey looked round the pub as he said this, “a lovely place.”
And yet Spits was so much more. She was an icon, a beacon for the lost souls of Spin Street. Souls David knew personally. Like the professors at Briggs University and what seemed like half the artists in Colorado Springs David Henly found something comforting in Spits. In its sagging walls. In its old color TV’s and broken pinball machines. The place was as much a home to David as it was any orphan on the street.
By now the music began again and those gathered before the bar broke up into smaller parties. Harry walked between the tables, stopping occasionally, and everywhere he went the men laughed. Now that the place was a bit more orderly David saw a few of the regulars in their usual places. A couple noticed him staring and raised their glasses in greeting. David would’ve done the same if he could, but he soon realized Mr. Eversbey hadn’t stopped talking.
“Yes. A lovely place. I’ve never seen one like it. Have we seen a place like this Clarence?”
“What?”
Mr. Eversbey gave David a knowing look, as if apologizing for his friend’s hard of hearing.
“I said have we been to a place like this.”
“No. No. We haven’t,” Clarence howled, his voice cracking like an old tree branch, “you don’t travel much in the marines.”
“Yeah, I guess,” David knew nothing about the marines aside from the commercials he saw on TV, “So… where’re y’all from?”
“Oh, lots of places,” claimed Mr. Eversbey, with the eagerness of a drunk man half his age, “England. Poland. Jerusalem. Montesellum. Arkansas. Kansas. Texas. South America. We’ve been all over.”
“About the only place we haven’t been is the moon,” Clarence muttered over another glass of whiskey.
“That be true,” Mr. Eversbey agreed, “be true indeed. Though for all the places we’ve been they ain’t half as many as Old Mr. Potts went to.”
At the mention of Mr. Potts both men raised a glass and despite having never known the man David felt the need to do the same.
“So, uh, Mr. Potts,” David began to say after they’d all had a drink, unsure it polite to inquire about a man he hardly knew, “he knew all of you?”
“Of course,” Mr. Eversbey said, offended it seemed, by the question, “why else would we have gathered here today if not for dear Mr. Potts?”
“A good man he was,” Clarence muttered over another glass of whiskey, “you won’t find a man like that today.”
“Here here,” called someone from a nearby table. David looked to see who’d chimed in and found four faces staring back at him. They were an odd lot, two blacks and a Mexican, with the fourth a face David simply couldn’t tell. Evidently, he was the one who’d spoken for the man raised his glass and said loudly, “to Mr. Potts!”
“To Mr. Potts!”
The toast was followed by a moment of silence during which David looked for a shrine to the man. A picture even. But there was none. Only a crowd of strangers and strange men. While Clarence and Mr. Eversbey engaged in a private conversation David took the chance to tidy up a bit. Unfortunately for every glass he wiped clean two more took its place. And for every two came another three.
This continued till David gave up entirely. By then Clarence wanted another drink. After filling his glass David poured another for himself and listened to the conversation taking place between Mr. Eversbey and another man.
“No no no!” Mr. Eversbey exclaimed, angry enough to shake his fists, “that is not what happened?”
“You weren’t there,” the other man said, a remark which only further enraged Mr. Eversbey.
“Mr. Potts told me himself what happened and would you go so far as to call Mr. Potts a liar!”
“No,” the man growled, “but like I said I was there!”
At this point it seemed the men might come to blows. But David knew better. Three years’ work in the pub taught him to judge these kinds of things and sure enough the men remained in their seats, albeit glaring at one another over Clarence’s drinks.
Clarence for his part seemed not to notice their animosity. Instead, after finishing the second of three drinks, asked David if he’d heard of a place called Waylen County.
“No,” David replied, “can’t say I have.”
The answer did not discourage Clarence. Not in the slightest. “I didn’t expect you to. That’s where Mr. Potts was born you see. They don’t call it that no more. Now they call it uh…” Clarence looked off in the distance, as if trying to remember, but as David suspected he could not. Instead, Clarence turned to Mr. Eversbey and asked, “what they call that place Old Potts came from?”
“Waylen County.”
“I know that. But what do they call it now?”
Now it was Mr. Eversbey’s turn to think. He sat on his stool for some time, thinking as thinking men do, till at last he grumbled, “the hell if I know. Hey Lawrence,” Mr. Eversbey shouted to a man seated some distance away, “where they call the place Old Mr. Potts from?”
A man seated by the pinball machines gave it some thought, “Cope County, I think.”
David mouthed the words, Cope County silently. Having never heard a more ridiculous name for a place in his life he said nothing as Clarence went on to explain.
“Yeah yeah. That’s the place. Potts from Cope County. The man was a legend that he was. A gunslinger if you can imagine the sort.”
“I don’t think I can,” David said, careful not to sound offensive. Gunslinging just wasn’t a profession to be had in 2014. If Mr. Wetherby realized what David had said he didn’t correct him. Rather, the man seemed incapable of hearing anything but what he himself was saying.
“Yes. Mr. Potts from Waylen County. He was a good man Mr. Potts. Had a wife and three kids.”
“Four kids,” said another man from down the bar.
“What’cha say,” Mr. Wetherby hollered to which the man replied, “he had four kids. Not three.”
“When the hell he have a fourth kid?”
“Hell if I know,” the man replied, “only know that he had a fourth. It was a mulatto or something.”
“What’s a mulatto?” Clarence asked.
“Means the kid is mixed,” said a man in a black suit. He said this matter-of-factly though after seeing the look on David’s face was quick to add, “don’t mean the kid is bad. Just means he’s mixed.”
“Yeah but Mr. Potts wasn’t mixed,” Clarence said, “ain’t no way a man that pale was mixed.”
“Pale?” David thought, not realizing he’d voiced such thoughts aloud.
“Yessir Old Potts was pale. Didn’t matter if he spent all day in the sun, he’d show up to church on Sunday paler than an old silver spoon.”
“He never went to church,” Clarence muttered, “none of us did.”
“What?”
“I said he never went to church,” Clarence said, forcefully, “sure he donated a lot, but he never went to church. He’d just send that boy William in his stead. You’d could hardly them the two apart you could.”
“I knew him to be a sworn Presbyterian,” Mr. Eversbey replied, “and all the Presbyterian’s I know go to church whenever and wherever they can.”
“Well Mr. Potts didn’t go,” Clarence said, “ain’t no business for a vampire to go.”
“I’m sorry,” David began, the words catching in his throat, “did you say…” but his words were lost in the flurry of yet another exchange.
“He wasn’t no Presbyterian.”
“He was a Baptist.”
“A Catholic!”
“I ain’t never known no Catholics.”
“Well, it’s what he was.”
“I thought he was a farmer?”
“The man been alive six hundred years and the best he did was run a farm?”
“I ain’t sayin that’s what he did all I’m saying is he owned a farm!”
It was Clarence who made that last remark. He and the others crowded about the bar, their cloaks and clothes swaying in a most unnatural cold. Some flashed their teeth; others magic only God knows.
As for David, the poor boy was overcome with fright. He ran out the back, down the street, and didn’t stop running till he was well past the other end of Spin Street.
As for the vampires, they didn’t even feel David go. They were too busy arguing amongst themselves as to what it was their good friend Mr. Potts did and why exactly they should remember him.
Charles Franklin Quaas is a graduate student currently attending the University of Central Arkansas MFA Creative Writing program. His work will be published forthwith in The American Book Review.