At the Pub

At the pub they say, "his new missus has him whipped." Or "how is she, you know, with the dishes?" Or "they're either hot and can't cook or they can cook but they're crazy."

The women are sometimes there, sitting on their phones, messaging their moms or their friends far away. Or they're chatting to each other about kids. Or they're just at home, unwilling to make small talk. They'll be watching TV. Doing dishes.

Sometimes one of the women at home will call, looking for her husband. She'll call his phone, the phones of his friends. The men put their phones on the tables to watch them light up and buzz. If she's a well-known sort of woman, she'll call the pub itself. By then the one who is hiding begins to look pale.

Not often, but occasionally, one of the women will go to a different pub to the one her partner is at. She'll laugh with her girlfriends if she has any, or whoever she's scraped up from around the area to join her. She'll order the syrupy pub versions of the colorful town cocktails she used to drink. But everyone in the area knows each other and it doesn't end well. "Sorry mate," the boys say. "She was too pretty to be trusted."

The men talk about dogs. Dead ones, usually. One shepherd tells how his best bitch held mobs of sheep for minutes at a time, with only a stare. How she knew what "shake it" meant, could kill a ram like that, but would let the farmer's own chubby daughter pull her tail, poke fingers in her eyes. But if he'd said "shake it" while his daughter was clambering through the bitch's fur, well.

They talk about tractors, dirt bikes, fertilizer, and grass seed and who is ordering too much and who isn't ordering enough. The girls who are there sit in silence, with nothing to offer. They wonder what would happen if they interrupted. If they said, Hey, guess what, I had to fix a mistake at the cafe and send back some coffee today. But it would be too awful to be ignored, ridden over and buried under their disinterest.

The men talk about bosses. Who is disorganized. How they, lowest on the chain, suffer for it. How they would have organized it instead. They talk about who loves money. Who loves to stop for breaks. Who keeps them working long after the sun has set, with head-torches. They talk about managers who are kind to their dogs. Those who don't feed their dogs enough. Those who ruin a dog with beating so that when they call to it after the day is done, it lopes away from them against the fence line, tongue out, eyes rolling until they shoot it and it becomes another hero dog story.

They talk about other people in the pub. The townies—that is, anyone wearing dress shoes, anyone with skinny arms, anyone with glasses, anyone wearing a colorful woolen hat. The skiers. Anyone talking to foreign girls—who they call the honeys but never talk to. The tourists and the farmers cross over in the same places, but they don't sit at the same tables. The farmers hunch their red shoulders and mutter about the soft townie boys who can go over and talk with the honeys with long legs. They flex their big hands.

Sometimes the foreign girls aren't wearing bras. The boys stare. They point for their friends. The foreign girls go to the bathroom and come out with jackets on, heads down and cheeks flaming.

They talk about jobs that need to be done. Jobs that will never get done. Fights they've had. They tell the same stories word for word because the others will pick up on inconsistencies. No one wants to be known as a young fella. Everyone knows young fellas tell yarns. They stick to the truth. The time one of them got locked out of the...