Months later: winter spills in from everywhere, like an overturned cup of liquid nitrogen. Simon struggled through it like everyone, head down and neck scarved to protect from the bitter, northeasterly wind. and yet still the inevitable draw to the maelstrom of the bars, even going it alone most nights. the bars he tended to frequent were smaller in comparison than most, at best dives with a maternal bartender & a disillusioned looking waitress plying the tables for whatever tip she could. he’d been floating lately, deviating from routines, trying to avoid the beaten path. the stampede, he felt, was coming. mid-january, the time when everyone loses their head to the snicker-snack of the winter wind and goes a little bonkers. some more than others.
in the squeal & shudder of a foreign intersection, snow-spittle clinging to his face, Simon sees the familiarity of a warm neon spilling its fluorescence on a snowbank. the name on the bar becomes apparent after a trudge through an unpaved section of sidewalk. Ghostly’s. It looks like an abandoned trailer, the windows possessing both horizontal blinds and what looks like curtains. The neon beacon is the comforting word: OPEN. Simon pulls back his hood and enters, shoving with his shoulder after the initial (and familiar) grudge of frame vs. door.
the juke is on, and it’s johnny cash. which song, he doesn’t know, but he knows the voice - who wouldn’t? - and the bar is empty. there’s an old man in a mackintosh and a driver’s cap sitting in a booth alone, drinking coffee. his hands shake, communicating the tremor to his whole body. from time to time, his bifocals slide down his nose and he shoves them up. Simon notices that there are band-aids on every other finger. some are peeling off. the sound of the coffee cup rattling against the saucer is a weird, skeletal accompaniment to johnny’s rough and pained quaver. the woman behind the bar is stout, wearing a white t-shirt and jeans. her hair is permed, copper-coloured, like a tangle of wires attached anachronistically to a fleshy, obsolete machine. her eyes are artfully hidden behind stubby forests of mascara and the curve of eyeglasses. Simon pulls up a stool and smiles. “Hi.”
her mouth moves at the same time as an eyebrow - immaculately plucked - arches upward. “Out in this weather?”
He shrugs off his scarf and laughs a little. “This is nothing.”
“From Maine, are you?” She is polishing a pint glass.
“Not originally, no.”
“Further north?”
“You got it.”
She smiles, but it’s a weird smile - something not quite right about it. She is cannier than she lets on, Simon feels. “What’re you having?” She pronounces it “yew”.
“Jameson on the rocks, please.”
Before he even says it, she’s turning round, fluid motions. Not rushed, like some bars he’s frequented. She sets the glass down on the bar and languidly scoops a small collection of cubes into it. Next, the bottle, which doesn’t have a spout on it, and the whisky flows as if commanded, perfectly into the glass. He puts a twenty on the bar and thanks her, waving off an offer of change. She shrugs, and moves off, a look in her eyes that says she wants to check it for counterfeit, the way some people eye a coin and bite it to make sure it isn’t chocolate.
he’s feeling generous. he likes this place. there’s no television, just the juke, and after each play, the records inside halt & judder to their automated destinations. each song begins with a scratching, deathly sound. time slips by him almost without his notice. the old man gets up and goes, tugging his overcoat around him. his steps are aided by a scratched brown cane. two longshoremen enter, sit in a booth. they are quiet, fatigue discoloring each of their motions. a yawn passes between them, serving as conversation. Simon watches it snow, heavier and heavier. “Seems like we might be stuck in here,” he remarks casually to the bartender.
She shrugs and replies without looking at him. “Can think of worse places to be stuck in.” Her arm in motion, describing the gleaming bottles of liquor on the shelves behind her.
“Good point,” Simon concedes, rolling the glass between his hands. A beat passes, lugubrious and dusty. A fly, somehow stowaway from the summer, buzzes fatly in a corner. “So why’s this place called Ghostly’s?”
She laughs. “Because we’re a haunted bar. You didn’t know that?” The way she says it, he isn’t sure she’s joking or not.
“Sure I did,” he bluffs. “Just didn’t think it would be so obviously named is all.”
“So you know her.”
“Knew her,” Simon corrects. His glass is empty. She fills it without being asked. When he fumbles out another bill from his wallet, she waves it away with carnation-tipped nails.
“What’s your name?”
He pauses, then looks her in the eyes, trying to dig their color out from behind the makeup. He thinks he can catch a sliver of opaline blue in there, a startling color. “Samuel.”
She heaves a chuckle, something dredged up from way down inside the caves of herself. It sounds dusty, and causes her to cough, a rattle which descends into her, shivers in her papery lungs. “You can call me Delores.”
“Are you the sole owner and proprietor here?” He takes a sip of the Jameson, settling into the lie like a comfortable chair.
Delores looks to a corner before glancing back at him, cagily. “You know I’m not.”
He coughs into a fist. “Excuse me. Are you the sole corporeal owner & proprietor here?”
Delores nods appreciatively. Simon abruptly experiences that old sense of vertigo, when the lie threatens to take over, when the con-man suddenly doubts the veracity of his own belief - and taps his fingers in a staccato pattern on the bar. His eyes flit to an ashtray nearby. The crushed remainders of Virginia Slims. Mistys. Two of three of the long housewife-killers. “Are you married, Delores?”
“Just to m’job,” she proclaims, and shifts her bulk away from him suddenly, moving with a speed that Simon didn’t think possible, and disappears behind a curtain into a room he hadn’t noticed.
