Black Wind

Two seats were open at the bar and Aaron took one next to a geezer with greasy hair hanging over a deeply creased face. A cigarette with half an ash intact dangled from the guy’s lower lip. His left arm was wrapped protectively around the half-filled glass of amber liquid. His ring and pinkie fingers and half his palm were missing, leaving a claw sporting long, dirty fingernails. He never looked up. Aaron began to question the uplifting nature of absorbing the local culture. Instead of leaving, he thought, what the hell, I’m here, I’m thirsty, and I’m going to have a drink. He ordered a Bud Light. As he tipped the longneck high, the bar door opened and a lean, long-haired man with a face of quilt-like scars and a Bowie knife strapped to his right leg stepped inside. As he surveyed the room, a cue ball slammed into the partition like a gunshot. Aaron flinched but none of the other patrons seemed to notice the noise. The scarred man turned so he could see into the poolroom. “Goddamnit!” the bartender yelled. “I told you guys to take it easy in there.” She slapped a bar rag on the counter as the ivory ball rolled out of the room, across the floor and came to rest against the scarred man’s knee-high moccasin. A tall redneck, dirty hair sticking sideways like frizzy wings out of his Caterpillar cap, overalls covered with drilling mud and streaks of grease, moved into the doorway. He looked down at the cue ball and then up at the scarred man, as if he were expecting him to bend over and pick up the ball. The redneck’s bloodshot eyes took in the newcomer. A malevolent smile crossed his face. From where he stood, he could not see the Bowie knife strapped to the man’s right leg. What he could see⎯the faded, torn jeans, the ragged fatigue jacket draped over the man’s barb-wire-taut 6-1 frame⎯gave him no reason to fear. A weak chin and protruding Adam’s apple bobbed as the redneck worked a plug of chewing tobacco around in his mouth, getting ready to speak. He puffed up his chest. “Say, Injun, why don’t you make yourself useful and hand me that there cue ball. I’d get it myself but, unlike you welfare warriors, I’ve been working for a livin’ and my back’s a little stiff.” The scarred man turned to face him, bringing the Texas toothpick into full view. It was as long as a man’s forearm and resting in an elaborately beaded sheath trimmed by leather fringe, each strung with a turquoise bead. It was secured at mid-thigh by two thick leather thongs⎯one around his waist and another just above the knee⎯a business-like arrangement that suggested you didn’t want to see the business that would bring it out. Voices in the bar quieted to a few whispers. Two other roughnecks, long brown beer bottles in hand, moved in behind their friend, who leaned against the door frame and, buoyed by their presence, said, “Lordy, lordy, boys, I think we done stumbled on Frankenstein’s Injun here!” The redneck’s eyes swept the rest of the bar patrons, who were Anglos and Hispanics, as if he expected some appreciation of his taunt. Instead, he saw what might pass for a few flickers of grim amusement. “Fella, just go back to your pool game,” the bartender said, her voice tense with annoyance. “I don’t want any trouble in here.” She dropped her hand out of sight behind the bar. The scarred man looked down at the cue ball as if he had picked up a dog turd in the gutter. A whisper of a smile tugged at his lips. When he looked back up, his eyes had turned feral and cold, and locked onto the redneck’s⎯the predator’s challenge. A deathly stillness enveloped the room. The redneck looked around the bar and swallowed, still fueled by a bully’s courage but less sure now. He said, “Say, chief, are you hard of hearing or just stupid?” The scarred man’s eyes never blinked, never wavered, the pupils so large you could not determine his eye color. The redneck was, in that moment, reminded of the huge, coiled diamondback he had stumbled on in the mudshack that time out on the drill pad: the one that looked like it was measuring him for a coffin. He had blasted it with double-aught 12-gauge, hacked it to pieces with a shovel, stomped it flat, and it still took four hours to quit twitching. As the seconds of silence stretched out, the redneck could see that rattler’s eyes in this broke-down Injun. His sphincter muscles were quivering, and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he tried to swallow the lump growing like a tumor in his throat. Finally, without looking down, the scarred man’s moccasin nudged the cue ball across the floor away from where the redneck stood. All eyes except the scarred man’s followed the cue ball’s slow progress as it ticked like the second hand on an old-fashioned time bomb across the uneven wood floor. Just before it banged into the wall, the other drinkers turned their eyes back to the bottles and glasses before them, ducked their heads into a defensive hunch, as if sensing something they didn’t want to witness. The redneck’s buddies felt the change in the room and began edging back into the poolroom. When the redneck looked back at the scarred man, his alcohol-induced bravado betrayed him. “Fuck it, man. J-jest f-f-fuck this shit! This is nuts!” He loped like a bum-legged jackrabbit for the back exit. A collective sigh of relief was audible in the room. Aaron, who had been watching the scarred man’s eyes, motioned to the seat next to his. “Buy you a drink?”