Red: The Blue Moon

RED: THE BLUE MOON / Albert Goldbarth The Blue Moon's just a brew-chugged-down-the-gullet place, an hour or two after work; it doesn't pretend the world is crystal'ed, fern'ed, art deco'ed, fitted with brass. And so the drinkers leaning their day's weight on the plain dark wood here bring some real sign of the world in with them: one has her waitress' nametag still clipped near her nipple, one has a carpenter's level holstered at his hip, one simply has the rings of grease on his body that keep him busy bigamously married to the open bodies on carbueretor row. This early the talk is that specific: tools; the Frankenstein-like stitchline on a baseball's hide; the boss (a curse); what a bitch did once in a back seat's buck and roll; a paycheck; a daughter; the ruby-&-emerald weight of a brace of ducks. But later, for those who stay, the faces soften boozily general, and talk becomes, by amber ale-color stages, philosophy. We want to understand the heart, the accordion squeeze-and-release of what it means to get through a week, why even good people hurt each other, where the dead go, who the mirror bounces back when anyone shaves. The carpenter, Red, weaves out for home. We wave through air as murky as underwater, and he waves back. It's empty outside, and the blank black air is permissive, even conspiring. At the corner of Rudge and Danby, not for any reason really, he sets his level on the curb. Or maybe there is a reason: this is what he does, and what he is, and how he needs now to define himself for himself, before he gets lost in conceptual aether. The pellet of air lines up. He thinks of it, in its oblong; of the length of curb it's determining; of the extended line across the neighborhood's surface the curb is a unit of; and then of how that line exists on what's really a curve, a ball, in space, the volume we call weather, and then beyond that an ongoing even the travel of light can't fully describe, a void, the pattern that holds the void, and his own breath held in his mouth 48 · The Missouri Review until it's round and firm and more sober, and level, yes level, and he can walk a straight path home. Albert Goldbarth The Missouri Review · 49 ...