A Cavalcade of Lesser Horrors

Joe

108 Joe For a while, back in college, I tended bar in the small farm town near campus. There was a town bar, and there was a bar where the college crowd drank. I worked at the town bar, next door to the butcher and across the street from the Catholic church. It was the only church in town. Hard-core regulars anchored the bar stools from the time we opened in the morning until suppertime. These were thirdgeneration Stearns County Germans who’d grown up on farms and spoke English with a German accent. Hour after hour, day after day, they took turns buying rounds of tap beer for the house. It was a financial anomaly—a Grain Belt Ponzi scheme. If you bought a round, then everyone for whom you bought would buy you a beer in return, and somehow a few extra beers would come sliding your way as men came and went, buying their way in and out of the game. By noon, no one sitting at the bar knew who owed rounds to whom. We, the people behind the bar, were the only ones who tallied. We kept scraps of paper under the coin tray in the cash register and hash-marked down how many beers they’d bought. The customers were all on tabs. These guys didn’t work. They had bad backs or were laid off for the winter. It was something, always something. But they had huge farmers’ hands—permanently calloused stacks of knuckles that looked to be eight or nine inches tall when they engulfed a beer glass or the dice cup. Their index fingers looked thick as JOE 109 broomsticks as they twirled them in the air—another round for the house. Their wives worked—at the chicken processing plant mostly, performing the hard, dirty, unhappy jobs the rest of us never see or think about. They gutted. They plucked. They washed and packaged. On Friday nights, the women brought their paychecks to the bar, and the men had them endorse the checks. Then the men slid the checks across the bar to the man who owned the place, who settled their tabs and slid whatever was left of the check back across the bar to the men. To celebrate this emancipation from debt, the men would point upward and rotate their index fingers—a round for the house. We would set everyone up, including all the wives, and start new tabs for the magnanimous sons of bitches. The cycle, having completed itself, would begin all over again—just like the cycles and rituals working their way through the calendar in the big stone church across the street. The bar was a narrow, tall-ceilinged old space—a hole-in-thewall on a gritty, gray street in a gritty, gray small town in winter. You opened the door and walked in and saw nothing but hunched backs and hams on bar stools, like so many hills in a landscape, rolling away toward the backdoor in a carcinogenic mist of cigarette smoke. This was Winesburg, Ohio and Our Town without the callow yearning. These people had known one another their entire lives. They’d been born and raised right there. They’d married and intermarried across the street, and they’d tied a tight little genetic knot around themselves in the process. From my vaunted position on the service side of the bar, everyone was beginning to look just a little too much like they were related to everyone else. And everyone knew everyone else’s story. There was one old man, a favorite with the locals, Joe. He was well past eighty, a farmer who’d sold his place and moved his wife and himself into town. 110 JOE “I sold eighty acres,” Joe used to tell anyone who would listen . “I drank forty of that. I’m gonna drink the other forty, then you won’t see old Joe no more.” He came and went by the alley door. Most mornings, he would shuffle in around nine-thirty, and he would stand at the bar in his long, threadbare overcoat, drink until noon, and then go home for lunch. After lunch, he would take a nap, then come back to the bar and drink until supper. Some nights, he’d come back after dinner. He had blue eyes that seemed as merry as Santa Claus’s...