Floating Staircase(98)

I started to turn my head.

“Don’t make it obvious,” he warned, then slipped farther down the bar.

Taking a long swallow of my beer, I casually rotated around on the barstool.

David Dentman sat alone at one corner of the barroom, perched buzzard-like over a pitcher of beer. He wore a red and black flannel shirt, the sleeves cuffed to the elbows. The skin of his face seemed to be dripping off his skull and into his beer, and there was a bristling sheen of beard at his jaw. Sensing my eyes on him, he glanced up and stared me down.

Discomfited, I turned away.

My mind returned to that evening in the cemetery—the way he’d looked standing over his nephew’s grave. Now, despite all that had been revealed, I found that my impression of the man remained unchanged. Something about him was innately wrong.

“Glasgow.” Dentman’s baritone voice punctured me like an icy quill. “Travis Glasgow. Glasgow the writer.”

I swiveled around on the stool. “David,” I said, nodding. We could have been old acquaintances. And in a way, I guess we were.

“Come here,” he said. “Sit down. Have a beer with me.”

“I’m waiting for someone, thanks.”

“Be a sport, Hemingway.” His gaze was shackled to mine. I couldn’t turn away. Haunted, he was a shape without substance: a hollowed husk.

Also, he was grinning at me.

It took a fair amount of willpower to get off my stool and cross over to his table. It was the perilous trek around the ridge of a great mountain. A few lumberjacks shooting pool paused to watch me while on the jukebox someone was attesting to the fact that his gal was red hot.

As if by design, a single chair stood empty across from him at the opposite end of the table. Without a word, I pulled the chair out and dumped myself into it.

“That’s the spirit,” he said humorlessly.

“I’m buying this round.”

Dentman eyeballed me like I was a Thanksgiving turkey. “Your face healed up okay.”

“No worse than it was before.” When I realized I was rubbing my cheek, I quickly dropped my hand. “Anyway, I’ll consider it a going away present.”

“Shots,” Dentman said. “Bourbon.”

I motioned Tooey over to the table. He’d been watching me since I sat down. “Bring us a bottle of your nastiest, angriest bourbon.”

In under a minute, Tooey returned with two shot glasses and a dark carafe shrouded in dust. He unscrewed the cap, then set the bottle and the glasses on the table. “I brought glasses. Unless you two want to drink this shit out of an ashtray?”

“Thanks,” I said. “We’re good.”

When he walked away, he did so with the uneasy gait of someone who feared he might get shot in the back.

Dentman squeezed the bottle. I expected it to shatter. He filled both shot glasses, spilling much, then picked up his glass, scrutinized it. “Here’s to world peace.”

Together we downed the shots. It tasted like piss spiked with lighter fluid. I felt my insides tremble.

“I’m sorry for what happened,” I said once the sinister aftertaste had faded.

“Ain’t for you to be sorry about.”

“You didn’t let me finish,” I said. “I’m sorry for what happened to your family. But I still don’t trust you.”

“That’s good,” Dentman said, “because there’s still a part of me that wants to smack your face around to the back of your head.”

“Well, shit,” I said. “We should have toasted to friendship.”

To my astonishment, Dentman laughed. It was a low, drilling, lawn mower sound, much like the engine of his pickup, but it was a laugh just the same. After the laughter died, he said, “I suppose I owe you a bit of gratitude.”

“How’s that?”

He made a clicking sound at the back of his throat. “My sister, she needs me. She needs me to look after her. She isn’t well.”

I wondered if he had any idea I’d been watching his testimony through the two-way mirror.

“Our mother died when we were very young,” Dentman said. “Car accident. I guess I don’t remember her much.” Very sober, he looked straight at me—through me, I would have bet. “My father was a bad man.” Slowly, he shook his massive head, as if trying to shake the memories loose. “What was your father like?”

My father had been warm and understanding, given to periodic bouts of capriciousness and whimsy when the spirit struck. Before Kyle died, he had been a good father—so I suddenly hated myself for my inability to summon any memory of him other than the day when he beat me black and blue with his belt.

“Just a regular guy,” I said.

“Our father,” he said, and it was as if he were about to recite a prayer, “was crazy before he ever went crazy. This crazy man would tie his children to trees out in the yard when they were little. If you broke a dish, you would have to kneel on the pieces. You leave the stovetop dirty, you felt just what those hot burners could do. Hold your hand. Hold it. Keep it there until you learn your lesson.” He thrust his chin at me. “You ever learn your lesson when you were a kid?”

“No. Not like that.”

“He made me do things that no grown person—especially no father—should ever make a child do. He did worse things to Veronica. Things he couldn’t do to me.”