You Remind Me of Me (16 page)

“Geez,” Troy said at last, trailing these thoughts. “How sick is he?”

“I don’t know. But he’s in the hospital,” Crystal said. “I might go visit him this weekend. Bring him some flowers or something. Do you want to come?” And then she stopped herself awkwardly. “Sorry,” she said.

He was silent. These small, humiliating moments were not the worst thing about his “house arrest,” but they were steady and goading, the most constant. He smiled at Crystal, but it felt more like a wince. “I have other plans this weekend,” he said, ironically, even as she gazed at him with her large, sympathetic eyes.

“Are you okay, Troy?” she said. “I mean, I know you don’t want to talk about it, but . . .” She sighed, made a flustered motion with her hand. “It must hurt you,” she said. “You limp.”

He felt himself twitch, involuntarily. “No, not really,” he said. “It’s not tight or anything.”

“That’s good,” she said. She looked down at his pant leg, to where the anklet monitor was discreetly covered. “I just meant, well. Spiritually. It must be painful. It’s a very cruel thing for them to do. To put that thing on you.”

“Not really,” Troy said, and he looked away from her, smiling tightly. The anklet felt warm and heavy. “It’s not a big deal,” he said. He shut the sliding door of the ice cooler, decisively. “I hardly notice it.”

——

By the time Vivian came upstairs with the new guy, Abraham Lincoln had left peaceably and the bar was empty. Troy was reading the local newspaper, moodily thinking of his own recent appearance on page two. When someone went to jail in St. Bonaventure, everyone was aware of it. “Arrests” were written up on the same page as the obituaries and birth announcements and weddings. The write-up on Troy had been right under a big, grinning picture of a girl he’d gone to high school with. Beneath the descriptions of the girl’s bridal gown and her proud parents, Troy had found himself summed up in a few sentences. “Area man. Possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute. Court date set.” Today, he saw, there was another birth, another death, a drunk-driving arrest.

Vivian came up behind him. She stood there, her chin lifted, watching over his shoulder as he read. He finished the obituary before he looked up.

“Is there something you want me to do?” Troy said.

She made a wave of her hand, as if surprised. “Oh, I wouldn’t want to take you away from your newspaper!” she said. She was a raspy-voiced woman in her late fifties, with a blond, steel-wool perm and a stout, shapely figure, which she accented with tight jeans and western blouses. Troy was used to her attitude of resigned suspicion and impatience, as if her main job was to keep him out of trouble, to ensure that he didn’t slack off too much or sneak drinks when she wasn’t looking. Mostly, he thought, this was just an act. He was a good employee, and she knew it. But it was a role she enjoyed playing, and to please her Troy began to take the liquor bottles off the shelf and dust them.

“I just hired a young guy to work in the kitchen,” she said. “He’s going to be starting tonight, so you’ll have to keep an eye on him. You can manage that, can’t you?”

“I hope it doesn’t get too busy,” Troy said.

Vivian cocked her head. “Well, if it does, it will be a good test for him. He has a lot of experience. He worked in Chicago for years.”

“Is that right?” Troy said. Vivian’s glasses hung from a beaded chain around her neck, and she lifted them to her face, hovering over the newspaper Troy had been reading, scanning it. “What’s he coming
here
for, from Chicago?”

“Fed up with city life, he says,” Vivian murmured. “There were some tragic circumstances, I gathered, but I didn’t want to pry.”

“Mm,” Troy said. He continued to run his wipe over the glass bodies of the liquor bottles, frowning. “So what about Junie?” he said.

“Junie had another heart attack,” Vivian said irritably, as if Troy were trying to make her feel ashamed. “What do you think I should do? I don’t know when, or if, he’ll be back. I can’t close down the bar to wait and see if he gets well. And I’m damned tired of listening to you bitch every time I ask you to cook for me.”

“Okay!” Troy said. “I was just asking.” He watched as Vivian lit a cigarette and breathed a stream of smoke down onto the obituary notice.

“Just asking,” she muttered. “I don’t need you and Crystal guilting me about poor old Junie, that’s for sure. I’ve got enough troubles as it is.” She gave him a hard stare, but then they both composed themselves into politeness as the young guy she’d hired came up the stairs.

“Hello, Jonah!” Vivian cried, and Troy watched grimly as she switched into warm-and-friendly mode: the disarming, gold-tipped teeth in her smile, the crinkly eyes, the endearments—“honey,” “sweetheart,” etcetera. She did this with everyone she hired. For the first week or so, she treated them like she was a kindergarten teacher and they were her prized students. And then they lost their charm. She became a disappointed mother, ironic and long-suffering, tolerating their lack of competence and clucking critically even when she was satisfied with them.

“Hi,” the guy said shyly. “I’m Jonah Doyle.” He glanced at Vivian, and stood there awkwardly, his long arms limp at his sides before she introduced them. The guy kept his head down, not even looking Troy in the eye, but then when Troy offered his hand, Jonah clasped it in both his palms, squeezing it surprisingly hard. “I’m really pleased to meet you,” Jonah said, with a nervous, earnest enthusiasm, as if Troy were someone he had heard of, someone famous.

“Yeah,” Troy said. He shifted a bit, uncertainly. A narrow strip of raised scar tissue ran from the edge of the kid’s eye, across his cheek. This might have seemed threatening on someone else. But with this guy it just seemed disconcerting. He had a freckled, boyish face, with round cheeks and carefully combed and parted blond-brown hair, and the scar was like an out-of-place appendage—a toe instead of a finger, a misaligned ear, an empty eye socket. It was hard to keep from staring.

“I’m really looking forward to working with you,” Jonah said, and Troy nodded slowly, trying to avoid the guy’s face. Jonah was dressed up like a churchgoer in a button-up shirt and khaki slacks, but then for some reason he had on heavy black work boots.

“Yeah,” Troy said. “I’m looking forward to working with you, too.” He glanced over to Vivian, who smiled benignly. If she noticed something strange in the air, her expression didn’t betray it.

——

At least, as it turned out, the guy was competent. When things picked up around 6:30, Troy was fairly amazed at how much more efficient Jonah was than Junie. Troy would thrust an order through the little window that separated the bar from the kitchen and the next time he passed by a plate would have appeared—cheese sticks or Buffalo wings or nachos, arranged neatly and even garnished. He glanced back in the kitchen and watched briefly as Jonah’s long, nimble fingers arranged deep-fried jalapeño poppers in a circle over a bed of greens—something Junie would have never bothered with. Junie would have tossed the poppers onto a bare plate once they had cooled off a bit. He certainly wouldn’t have fanned them out like petals, or added a little side cup of nacho cheese in the center, as Jonah did. “You’re getting fancy, eh?” Doug Lepucki said, grinning as Troy set the plate down on the bar, and Troy shrugged. “New cook,” he said, and a popeyed young guy leaning on the bar with a clutched twenty-dollar bill ogled Doug’s plate and said, “I’ll take one of those things, plus a pitcher.”

In his previous life, Troy would have been pleased. People tipped extra on food tabs, and he was under no obligation to share tips with the cook. It was surprisingly busy—the Stumble Inn had never been a particularly popular Friday-night gathering place, but by nine there may have been more than forty patrons packed into the small bar, and he was moving fast, pouring beers and pitchers and fixing drinks, a permanent sheen of sweat on his forehead. He had to empty the tip jar because it got too full.

But the truth was, he felt a little unnerved. It was a rowdy crowd, and the chimes of group laughter, the screams of delighted women, the bellows of asserting men, the general cacophony of drunken voices—the steady rising and falling of human chattering hooked into his spine.

The bar was too full of people for comfort, he thought. Too full of people who knew him, or who knew of him, or who had heard from an acquaintance about his situation. He didn’t go out from behind the bar to clear tables of plates or glasses, feeling self-conscious of the monitor beneath his pant leg. A boisterous group of young men in their early twenties, apparently friends of Ray’s, were the most troublesome. “Hey, bartender!” they called. “A round of bong hits for the boys over here, bartender!” and a flock of har-har-hars rose up from their table like crows.

——

What could he say? This was part of his punishment, this humiliation, and all he could do was frown stoically. He thought of Lisa Fix: “I wouldn’t say that this is the ideal job for someone in your situation,” she had said.

He was aware of Jonah, too. Jonah’s eyes on him. He’d turn to look over his shoulder and the prickly feeling on the back of his neck would intensify for a moment. Here was Jonah, his nose and mouth shadowed, peering out from the kitchen as Troy tilted the edge of a glass against the flow of beer. Troy filled the glass, letting the foam fall away and slide down the outside edge of the mug. He looked over his shoulder again, just in time to catch Jonah gazing intently at his back. Jonah smiled, shifted his eyes. “What?” Troy said, but Jonah didn’t hear him over the general noise of the bar and Troy was too busy to bother repeating himself.

But it continued to grate on him as the night wore on. Every time he turned to look, there was Jonah, intent in his surveillance, then pretending to glance away as if he hadn’t been staring. It made him aware of himself as an object of observation, in general. There were the patrons who knew, watching as he limped along with his hidden parole anklet, turning to their friends to remark, grinning with gossip, as he passed. There was the monitor signal he was emitting, even now. There was the black book, the “itinerary,” which Lisa Fix would comment on, prodding the mundane and intimate details of his life, as if it were all typical, as if she could predict the rest of his life with a shrug of her shoulders. All of this settled over him heavily, and when he looked over to see Jonah with his neck craned and his lips parted, scrutinizing Troy’s preparation of a round of Jagermeister shots as if it were a magic show, he turned with exasperation to face the guy.
What in the fuck are you staring at,
he started to say.

But it was weird. He wheeled abruptly, irritably, and then said nothing. Jonah was looking at him with a kind of focused, unblinking concentration that seemed almost like a trance. It took him aback.

“Hello?” Troy said, loudly but uncertainly, and Jonah startled slightly, blinking at last as if he’d been asleep with his eyes open. “Hey, man, are you awake or what?” Troy said.

“Oh!” Jonah said. It seemed to take him a moment to lift out of whatever staring rhapsody he’d been in, and Troy shifted a little, uncomfortably. He noticed that there were even more scars etched along the backs of Jonah’s hands, trailing along as if something had raked a claw across his skin.
What happened to him?
Troy wondered again, and for a moment a kind of shadow passed over him—something chilly, flapping like a sheet on a clothesline.

“Sorry,” Jonah said. “I kind of spaced out for a minute.”

“Yeah, well,” Troy said. He cleared his throat. “We’re kind of busy, if you hadn’t noticed. Would you mind getting out there and clearing off the tables? If it’s not too much trouble.”

“Oh!” Jonah said, and Troy watched as he put on a kind of professional smile, like a mask. “Of course! Sorry!”

What was it? Troy thought. He watched as Jonah loped out onto the floor and began to collect empty glasses. Something was wrong with the kid, something beyond the scars, but he wasn’t sure how to pinpoint it. A kind of actory stiffness? Troy had the paranoid idea that maybe Jonah was an undercover agent for the DEA or something, planted here to spy on him. Then he dismissed the thought—he had no connections, nothing worth spying upon, and in any case, whatever this Jonah was, he was no undercover agent. Troy observed as Jonah gathered the dirty beer glasses and arranged them neatly on the end of the bar, lining them up in a careful pyramid, like bowling pins.

“Thanks,” Troy said, and Jonah looked him in the eye briefly, then nodded, as if they both knew a secret.

——

Closing time was approaching and the unexpected crowd began to thin out. The feeling of being watched faded as well, and every time Troy glanced behind him Jonah was busy with something or other. Not staring anymore—and Troy found himself wondering if he’d just overreacted, if he’d just imagined that Jonah had been watching his every move. He’d been feeling so self-conscious lately. He thought he’d get used to the ankle monitor, that it would come to be something he hardly noticed, but instead it seemed like it was worse, day by day, to the point that he sometimes felt like it glowed, or gave off waves of heat or radiation. He looked through the order window and saw that Jonah was dutifully scrubbing the grill with a charcoal pad, his head down, his hand moving like a painter. Troy cleared his throat, but Jonah didn’t look up.

Troy leaned against the bar and rested his forehead against the ham of his palm. He heard the door to the bar open and slam shut several times as people left—headed out, headed home—and he didn’t even look up. He imagined Loomis, asleep in Judy’s house; Carla, somewhere in Las Vegas, tilting her head back as she drained a drink; Ray, opening a forty-ounce beer and tucking it between his legs as he drove home from some bachelorette party, his windows open, angry rap music tub-thumping from his speakers.
My life is ruined,
he thought, distinctly.

——

By the time two o’clock came around there were only two people in the bar: a man and a woman, French-kissing in a corner near the jukebox, their hands underneath each other’s clothing. “Last call!” Troy said loudly in their direction, and the couple lifted their heads like animals surprised from grazing. “Last call!” Troy said, more softly, and the two of them got up and walked out wordlessly.