Lostport

Chapter 11

Chapter 11

Ben tried Summers again. And again. Got voicemail each time.

He began to feel hungry. He had a fridge full of groceries but felt too restless to cook or clean so he drove to the nearest roadhouse, a place on Telephone Road called the Big Ditch. He pulled into the parking lot, his car the smallest by far, a dwarf among pickups, extended pickups, trucks jacked up on monster tires, vans, sedans and muscle cars.

Saturday night in Eastport.

Inside, there was a long bar along the left side and tables and chairs on the right. At the back were two pool tables and a small stage where an uninspired four-man rock combo was trudging through Brown Sugar. Big guys in the style, or absence thereof, of Bachman-Turner Overdrive. Everything about the place looked rough: the wooden chairs and tables, the thick planks of the floor. Every table had baskets of peanuts in the shell; the floor was covered with spent shells and skins.

The walls were adorned with framed sepia photographs of the Erie Canal while it was being built. Drawings of the bridges spanning the canal at its widest. A print called “The Towpath Barbers,” showing men in chairs getting haircuts as mules pulled barges along the north side of the canal. A print of Governor DeWitt Clinton pouring a bucket of Hudson River water into the terminus of the canal at Buffalo, entitled “Marriage of the Waters.” Photos of barges headed for the Great Lakes, crewed by towheaded stalwarts bound for adventure. All long dead now, even those who’d lived life to a stubborn end.

Ben steered clear of the pool tables. He had no interest in playing and it was his experience that if a fight were to break out, it would probably be around a table, drunks arguing over whose turn it was to play, whose quarters were whose, whose girl was whose, who did or didn’t scratch on the eight ball, and before you knew it, someone grabbed a cue and started swinging. He took a table away from the stage and sat in the chair against the wall, slightly angled toward the door so he could see anyone coming in. He could also see the bar and anyone sitting there, could see their faces in the mirror behind the bottles.

Most of the crowd was in groups of three or more, regulars, friends, people who had sopped up a lot of beer here, who knew the waitress and were calling out her name—Sheila—getting amiably drunk now that it was well after dark. A couple of guys sat at the bar, not together, an empty seat between them, watching a Sabres game. Another guy at the end of the bar was trying to engage them in a conversation about the New World Order that was taking over the country, the sleek black helicopters he’d seen out over Lake Ontario, the frogmen in black suits being lowered down to the water on ropes.

One of the hockey watchers said, “Give it a rest, Billy, would you? Everyone’s heard about your famous black copters and no one gives a shit.”

“You’ll give a shit when they show up at your door,” Billy said. “Take away your guns and question you to death. I’m only telling you what I saw with my own damn eyes and when they come for you, you’ll wish you’d believed me.”

“I’d let them take me right now if it meant I didn’t have to listen to you no more.”

“You’ll get yours,” Billy said, and walked away muttering about copters and divers and the snuffing out of the American way.

Sheila finally made it to Ben’s table. She was stout, fortyish, with dyed blonde hair and a high voice for a gal her size.

“Start you off with a drink?” she said.

“Any good local beers?”

“You must be from outta town,” she said. “You could brew the world’s best beer next door to here and most of these fellas would still order a Bud. But I do have an Ithaca Pale Ale that won a bunch a medals at a fair somewhere. They also make a nut brown and an apricot wheat beer but you don’t look that fruity to me.”