I had been helping to keep Tommy’s bar from floating away, while simultaneously easing the burden of whiskey that for too long had strained and warped the top shelf, when they walked in.
Leaning and sipping there, I had been doing my job, running random permutations on all the data thus far collected in a thousand parallel subroutines while the social and lexical myselves – the parts of me that like to think they’re the thinking part of a rational coherent creature – were distracted and inhibited by the run-down patrons and the vapors – and the vapors of the patrons – of Tommy’s Tavern, three-hours and thirty-seven minutes before last call, waiting for the solution to fall out, infinite possibility to collapse and crystallize, for the water to rise over the brown line.
They walked in like nihilists who owned the place, striding purposefully through the door, except that they were striding purposefully.
Striding purposefully into a – stipulated: unsavory and unpopular, and utterly lacking in most of the hallmarks of success, except for a run-of-the-mill bunch of loyal drunks – nightclub. During business hours. Which most of your true-blue nihilists will do anything to avoid, barring some momentous extenuating coincidence. Their purpose was not to undermine the idea of doors, or even thrash the dialectical reification of architectural narratives, but to give the clear impression of being likely to nip the totality of the autonomous nervous system, and related capacities for perception and cognition, right out at the brainstem.
One might say they did, by extension, cast some doubt on the concept of shelter. They were bulky and emptily menacing and mean and wore fashion to say so. Rich nihilists, maybe, valuing only serious haircuts.
They were further unlike nihilists in that, having entered (leaving the social construct of the door more or less intact) and glanced professionally around with menacing eyes for the shadows dozing in their cups, they fixed their twin, intent – if somewhat flat – gazes on a space about a yard behind my head, and headed directly across to flank me at the bar.
“Palmshoe,” the one who had less than three minutes to live growled like a sock full of gravel singing through a short, sharp arc.
I sipped. I leaned. I blinked.
I kept leaning and I sipped again.
A hand fell on my shoulder, jostling the arm that held the glass, and, at almost the same moment, with a report like a shock of thunder a crisp block away, Tommy smacked two glasses heavily on the bar before us, rasping “What’s it gonna be, fellas,” without asking. Then he leaned forward, spat on the bar in front of the one who had spoken, and rubbed at it with a rag he pulled from his hip pocket.
They definitely weren’t nihilists: that spooked them.
The hand was withdrawn by the quiet one while the short-timer near went for his own gun twice: first, at the sound of the glasses on the bar, and then again as Tommy reached for his rag.
Now, anxious and embarrassed, and uncertain whether or how to be offended by the spit, he vented some menace. To his credit, his throat sustained that terrible timbre, grumbling and cracking like a quarry collapsing, “Fuck off jack. We’re gonna have a few words. Private. With Mister Palmshoe, here. And you’re gonna fuck off over there or know the day.”
Tommy smiled. I leaned.
“Before you go, gentle Tom – and nevermind me and these boys’ll have us a nice chat – would you kindly be so good as to tip another generous measure of solace from your bottle into all this lonesome ice? That’s the man. There,” I sipped, and sipped again.
“You been sayin’ things, Palmshoe, askin’ questions,” – he had about forty seconds left – “Insinuating –”
I stopped leaning but held tight to the drink and swung to face him.
“Now you hold it right there!” I bellowed. “I, sir, am a member of the enlightened guild of fantastical scriveners, a pledged poet and philosopher, privileged, charged, obligated and, indeed, ordained to the sacred duties of saying, as you put it, things, and asking questions. We properly-invested sayers and askers may hint; we may predict; we may allude; we may draw similitude, make inference explicit, imply or foreshadow, from time to time, but we do not conscience insinuating!” I sipped, righteously. I sipped indignantly.
“Asking questions and saying things, saying questions and asking things, that’s the whole art and article, my man! Why, just now, in fact,” I sipped, “good Tom, the gentle proprietor of this public house, and I were pondering the immortal and, if I may briefly stress this point, fundamental, question of –” I turned and, consulting a document lying there on the bar, spun, sipping, back to see my interrogator standing with pistol drawn, "- what -"
I blithely finished, “is a seven-letter word for ‘hot condiment’?” as he shot me in the drink.
But the sound of his shot, a mild punctuation of the urgency, in his brief, wrongful estimation of his own agenda for our conversation, was lost in the roar of sixty buckshot pellets being forced out of both barrels of Tommy’s father’s shotgun and tearing, at hypersonic velocities, through that thug’s torso and formerly-related organs to skitter into the walls.
The silent one gagged, his jaw swallowing and swallowing while his eyes hung suspended on the mist where his partner had just been getting started, and not digesting it.
My drink hand was bleeding. I stooped to grab the dead hand’s pistol, clubbed the confused goon into unconsciousness, liberating another from his pocket, and, by the time I made it around the bar, found Tommy snapping the breach closed around two fresh shells. I reached for the top shelf, and poured two glasses over ice.
“What the hell’s this all about then, Vic?”
“Critics, Tom, my man.” I sipped and leaned, “Agents sent from the board of standards and practices come to serve me notice that my poetic license has been revoked with extreme prejudice.”
Holding the gun his father had installed behind the bar when he first opened forty years ago, Tommy sipped thoughtfully, “So?”
“So? So, ‘eureka’, Tom! I’ll have to take a break from trolling for odes and worshiping beauty for a time, Tom! With no poetic license I'll be writing nonfiction, for now, and I have recently perfected my title in some nonfiction suitable to write.”