Rage Against the Dying

Thirty-five





The whole Quinn family was well known for their drinking. Mom and Dad would have parties and my brother and sister and I, mere tikes all, would roam through the house the next morning finishing off the warm highballs left by guests. I pretty much went off the hard stuff for Carlo’s sake, but without Carlo sobriety was just a waste of good liquor.

I sat at the bar of Emery’s Cantina, on my second vodka over ice in a short tumbler so I didn’t have to worry about knocking over a martini glass. The first sip created that captivating tingle at the base of my skull, then radiated warmth down my spine. By the second drink I was just high enough to remember the waitress told me the owner was Hungarian, and I said, “Egészségedre,” as I raised my glass to Emery.

He laughed, said, “It sounds a little like you are saying ‘up your ass,’” his Eastern European accent making the little come out like, lily. He tried to help me pronounce the toast correctly so it sounded more like to your health. While I was having a language lesson I scoped him out better than I did the first time I was in here. Not so much an overweight baby as I had at first observed, but definitely the sort of man people call Big Guy, he carried his weight so that even his belly had an odd sexual appeal.

Contact with a living human being felt good, so I asked, “When did you come over?”

“About twenty years ago,” he said. For a moment he went inside himself as if watching memories of his own, then told me he emigrated with his family just after the fall of the Iron Curtain. I understand there is, oddly, an unusually large Hungarian population in Tucson so it was easy to find a sponsor. He asked me about my professional life.

I said, “Copyright infringement.”

He looked skeptical. “But Cheri has told me you are famous.”

I lost the inclination for further conversation. Careful to avoid looking into the mirror that runs behind the whole length of the bar, I turned my focus to the bottles of Tarantula Tequila (no fooling) and something called Cabo Wabo. A stained cardboard sign with the witticism SHOTS HAPPEN, a double pun in a cop bar.

I looked at the jar of pickled pigs’ feet on the bar a few feet away. It reminded me of what you’d see in a medical examiner’s office after a mass fatality. The pink flesh and white gristle of the feet mashed against the glass as if they were looking back and, if they got out, would slime across the bar at me. There was … the way I had imagined with the water sparkling on the mountain, or with the cactus prints back in the hotel room, I started to imagine seeing something else, more violent, more hideously grotesque than before. I couldn’t take my eyes off the jar and felt a bit of the vodka rise in my throat.

If it wouldn’t have sounded crazy I would have asked Emery to throw a bar towel over the jar. I was sick of seeing these things and disgusted by my own thoughts. You are one f*cked up woman, Brigid Quinn. When all this is over I’m going to go back into therapy, I think. Then I thought, what for?

I finally wrenched my eyes away from the jar, searching for something that showed life was worth it. A vase with a single red rose next to the cash register made me wonder what Emery and Cheri were celebrating.

Emery must have sensed my mood and started doing that thing that expert bartenders do, pretending to ignore me but wiping glasses just close enough so that in case I wasn’t just talking to myself he’d hear my whisper and head over. He was that bartender that every detective needs, someone I’d be able to talk to now that I was alone again. He went briefly into a room off the bar, probably his office, and when he came back he smelled like cherry-bourbon pipe tobacco.

There weren’t many people there on a weekday night so I felt okay asking Cheri to turn off the jukebox that was playing a combination of 90s pop and guitar country. She did.

Since when did I develop this pathological hatred of music?

Since I could name one a*shole or another who’s partial to every kind there is, from Bach to hip-hop. Since when music is playing it’s harder to hear someone coming up behind you. Since Paul played the cello and every time I hear a stringed instrument it makes me feel like the performer is jabbing the bow down my throat. Certainly I hated music long before listening to Kate Smith belt, “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain” on a hot summer night, the night I lost Jessica.

I asked Cheri to tell me about herself. “Did you come here from someplace else like the rest of us?”

“No,” she said. “My people have been ranchers here for nearly two hundred years. We were never slaves.”

She sounded proud, like she wanted people to know that about her, to see something more than the fact that she was black. I’d heard about that, that small percent of the Arizona population, African American, who found their way here through some means other than slave ships. “Are you and Emery together?” I ask.

She smiled and nodded.

“How did you meet?”

“I needed a job to help pay for school. He knew my family.”

“How are your studies going?”

“Good.” That’s all she said, and then flickered sad. Everybody lies.

I changed the topic again by ordering a burrito with guacamole to absorb some of the liquor, which was getting to me after not eating anything since that bagel in the morning.

My brief exchange with Cheri about her relationship with Emery made thinking about Carlo unavoidable. Because that seemed somewhat preferable to thinking about mass pig fatalities, I gave in to the memories.