The Piano Tuner

Even Crazy Old Barmaids Need Love

Even Crazy Old Barmaids Need Love It takes about six months to make a decent bar. When Phil Masters bought The Grouper he threw out the newjukebox with its rock songs and put in the old one ofhis father's with its mixture of golden oldies and country. He put in more lights and took out some tables. He kept the stuffed fish above the bar—an immense fat grouper with an expression of open-mouthed wild-eyed surprise—but got rid of all the little black-and-white photos of the previous owner and his cronies holding up various fish between them. He brought along a reasonably honest bartender named Harry Kee and he kept the old barmaid, a tough-talking lady named Agnes Prokop who had been there for six years and knew what was what. Phil needed Agnes because The Grouper was a tough bar in downtown St. Petersburg. This is not very tough, because St. Pete is a gentle town where old folks sit behind the polished counters dissolving their Social Security checks and trying to figure out what hit them. But there are bikers and hookers, as in any self-respecting city and these had been breaking furniture for about two years in The Grouper, which is why Phil could buy it so cheaply. This wasn't his first tough bar and he knew what to do. The bikers came in in ones and twos, and at the first sound they made Phil and Harry had them by the elbows and 71 The Piano Tuner were carrying them out. Between them, Phil and Harry weighed almost five hundred pounds and Harry in particular had a smile that would make a dog faint. "You come back here, friend, and 111 be on you like white on rice/' he'd say, smiling, bumping the biker against the doorjamb with his belly. Harry's belly was a boulder not to be brushed aside lightly. Harry was about forty years old and a casebook example of grizzled. He never looked shaved and never grew a beard, but was somehow able to keep a steady four-day stubble : he looked like he had just emerged from some dark alley and was daring you to ask what he had been doing there. No one asked. Agnes pointed out the hookers for them, at least the aggressive ones, and they too were firmly though gently escorted out. Some of the quieter ones she didn't identify. Hookers need a beer now and then like anybody else. This interest in cleaning up The Grouper was not moral but financial : a decent family bar was easier and more profitable than a white-knuckle dive. It took half a year and a lot of energy to do it. The turning point came after about two months and was, oddly enough, one of their easiest times. The bikers came back in a group; outside The Grouper their bikes revved and coughed as they gathered—a sound that should have attracted all of the town's policemen, but instead seemed to disperse them—and after a while they banged the door open and came in. Phil didn't even wait for them to get near the bar. He fired his shotgun in front of them with a blast that made several people think they were dead. For a few minutes afterwards the remaining fish pictures swung on their hooks, glass fragments dripping like icicles in the silence. As the bikers hustled back to their bikes, Harry admired the holes in the wall. "Nice pattern," he said. They were going to panel the wall anyway. So fishermen came there, some reporters from the Times, college kids from the local branch of USF.Agnes made good 72 Even Crazy Old Barmaids Need Love sandwiches. A new theater opened nearby and brought them a lot of business: the theatergoers would come in before the play, and the actors would come in after it, starving for corned beef on rye and a cold pitcher of beer. One of the regulars was a middle-aged actor named Daryl Dana, a melancholy man with a deep voice and a face like a deserted battlefield, mined with smallpox scars and three long gashes above his eyebrows. When drinking he would talk of how he had been driving with his fiancee, the only girl he had ever known who could look at him...