The Hitching Post Saloon, Apache Trail Highway, Apache Junction, Arizona
Good Friday, April 18, Afternoon
Under the warm sun, shining among billowy clouds, the man, of average height, felt the soul-sunken ire of inescapable affliction as he reached for that saloon door. The deep red paint of the wooden double doors offset the dented tin handles. These and the striped awning hung with unlit festive lights, held a suggestion of relief from the pain wracking his brain. He heard music inside and wondered, ‘Will it drown out the screaming in my head?’
‘Does it ever?’
The breeze, which the tall, thin sandy-haired man just leaving had remarked was pleasantly cool and unseasonable, caressed the thinning white hair covering the back of his neck.
The siren in his head, her song constant, her volume not, rose in pitch, driving him in.
Pulling the door open, the incomer was greeted by a friendly face, a tan woman with silver hair, heading back behind the bar from a dining table, “Welcome to the Hitching Post.”
Her smile was genuine.
The small bar was half full, a Mexican plumber, an Indian driver, and one large cowboy in white shirt and hat. He was a man in his 80s, tanned like the stained oak tables, hair to match his hat and raised a bottle to him. Nodding with respect, the entrant then paused. Looking around, and noting the long, open, “public” tables, he ambled there, as conscious of his bad knees and swollen gut as he was of his thinning white hair, half covered by his loose felt beret of black.
He noted, shifting it on his brow, ‘The band is almost shot—but it feels good. I like it this way.’
Feeling as if he had been sitting too long, but altogether unsure, he stood by a stool and waited patiently as he looked, amazed, up at the looming menagerie. Mule deer heads, elk heads, one with a great rack, and even a huge bull moose head, decorated the high wall above the bar. The walls, posts, beams and eves were fairly wall papered with one dollar bills, signed by visitors with pen and marker.
‘How can I identify these ungulates so easily—I feel it in my bones, despite your strident song, Lady within—that I had this beginning in a city.’
No answer chimed within, that bringing with it some relief.
He grinned, focusing on the taped dollar bills in their thousands, and whispered to himself, “The great American God is here defaced, reduced to graffiti post cards.”
Two tall, young beauties, wearing black shirts labeled with white letters THIRST RESPONDER worked smoothly, the tattooed one waiting tables, the tall, long-haired one taking drinks out back to an extensive patio. He awaited the barmaid, a doll more near to his age.
A myriad of toys and pup culture memorabilia hung from strings and wires. It could take all day to name the various trinkets. Above the patio door hung a large yellow stuffed bird, a cartoon tweetie bird, head the size of a basketball, in a pink cage. Above and to the left of the door behind him was a stuffed white image of Elvis in an iconic pose.
Her voice was sweet to intrude, “Nice day for a drive!”
He turned to see the bar maid smiling up at him, and agreed, “I suppose so.”
She grinned, looking him up and down in his ill-fitted powder blue jacket, button shirt, and slacks and white sneakers, offset by his beret, “Surely you didn’t ride a horse or bike, dressed like that,” as she nodded at numerous middle-aged bikers and babes filing in.
“Surely,” he agreed, “and as fat as I am, walking out here would be out of the question.”
“What will it be, sweetie?”
“Well whiskey, the strongest cheap stuff you have, and a commemorative shot glass, if you sell them.”
“A water back?”
“Oh, yes, Doll,” he said with some unease as he tried to recall where his wallet was.
She smiled at this and left him turning out his pockets while admiring her cute stride and ready smile coming easily over her shoulder to a face too kind to grow ugly, even under the reign of wicked Old Age.
Pleased to hear the lessening of her perpetual siren song between his addled ears, he mused, ‘I had one once, right? A good woman like that?’
A face came to mind, a slightly smiling, tanned face of a woman with short black hair, puckering her lips for a kiss. To her image, and to she who screamed forever from within his mind, he sought within, ‘Was she you?’
The scream lessened, became less shrill, like as to a facility power outage alarm. Taking this as a ‘No,’ he wondered, ‘I bet you had a pretty name too.’
“Here you go, sweetie. Are you alright?”
“Oh, yes, I…”
“Let me get that for you,” she soothed, “you seem preoccupied.”
He looked down to see two thick wads of folded bills, one $50s, and one $20s, lying on the floor, clipped together with money clips made of CSA belt buckles, one Naval, one Cavalry. And, in his hand, was a thicker wad of $100s held together with a CSA Infantry buckle.
“Wow,” she giggled, “don’t let any young woman see all of this.” He then saw in his left hand that he held a car key, an old Ford key, and a fold of $20s, in a rubber band with a social security card, laminated in plastic, printed blue with Jon. R. Imbolden and the numbers 197-20-1717.
Breathing a sigh of relief, sure now of his identity, Jon smiled softly into her face of sisterly concern.
She breathed kind of husky like and smiled, “Nice to meet you, Jon. One of those 20s will do, the glass and drink are $18 and the water is free!”
“Thank you, Doll,” and he peeled off two and tried not to look to longingly at her pretty face as she turned away with a pursed smile, “Thank you, Jon.”
Selecting pockets to house his disturbing paper fortune, with the SSI card and the banded bills in his shirt pocket, Jon methodically turned his attention to that whiskey. Drinking it down, he heard her leave, her song, by a few strong drops of grace, drowned.
He felt sadly for sanity within, and finding none, he mused, ‘I shall wake to you in the morning, My Girl, if God grants this stumble bum another day.’
He sipped his water and scanned the room, slipping into his trade, his professed avocation, his HUNT. For this he knew absolutely, with burning intensity, was his true being, ‘I Hunt, a Hunter I am.’
‘Six bikers, working men, with wives, who have jobs and a long weekend. Catholics are great company with Easter nigh.’
‘Two couples, professionals leaving half their trout, and the business owner, wife and baby horsing down their steak.’
‘Old cowboy at the bar, about done, getting his bar wife hug from the doll.’
‘The Injun and the Mexican, his friends.’
‘Two Aztecs ordering lunch.’
The door behind him creaked slightly as she brought another smile and a shot to the end of the public table where he now perched like a paunchy owl of prey. To his right filed in four figures who smelled just right, four leather-clad, golden-tanned, pearly-toothed homosexual creeps up from Hell’s deeps. They did not seem to notice him, but smell him they did, with their long, pointy, paint-on-tan noses, their too fine eye lashes batting at his stale scent. They turning to look at the baby in its mom’s arms, with something like thirsty hurt in their eyes.
‘Fags,’ mused the hunter in him, as they seated them selves 20 feet south of right.
‘Bring on the Night,’ he smiled within as Doll polished a shot glass behind the bar and gave him a likely wink.
To be continued in Celina.
