The barman downed the remainder of his rye shortly after Brian Powell finished his. He took the fifth of Old Overholt in hand, plucked the cork and refilled his glass right to its brim. In moving to pour one for Brian, he turned his body, such that he now faced the disquieted younger man full on for the first time. A shadow from one of the blades of the whirling ceiling fan cast the barkeep’s face in a darker light for a split-second that, from Brian’s perspective, lasted a bit longer, and the effect on his mind was like the gauzy knowledge of a half-remembered dream. His jaw slackened, his breath hitching in his chest as his heart skipped a beat, his eyes thereafter widening in recognition.
“Servais,” Brian whispered.
The barman—Servais—grinned in his crooked, puckish little way. “There ya are, Kid,” he said approvingly, then raised his glass.
Brian raised his and they each went to drink, but where the ex-ballplayer downed his in a quick gulp, Powell’s glass stopped just short of his lightly twitching bottom lip. He looked at Servais’ bearded rough-hewn face, watched him savor the burn of the rye and fire up a smoke, noted how the four jagged scars of varying length that had appeared on his shadow darkened face—two of which had cut swathes through his beard and one of which had deformed the leftmost portion of his mouth into a sort of sneer—had now vanished in an instant. Brian drank down his rye.
“Do you think,” Powell paused to burp into his fist, “History repeats itself?”
Servais took a pull from his cigarette, chewed over the question for a moment, then answered: “First as tragedy, then as farce. Didn’t someone say that?”
Brian took a cigarette from the pack the barrel-chested tough guy had set on the bar before him. Lighting it and taking a puff, he replied, “Marx, I think.”
Servais frowned slightly. “Never much cared for him. Or his brothers. Too much quippy crap. ‘I don’t wanna be a member of any club that’d have me,’” he spat on the floor to his left. “More of a Three Stooges guy, I guess.” Taking another drag, he squinted through thick blue smoke and asked, “What’s on yer mind, Kid?”
Brian ashed his cigarette, glanced up at Servais, flicked nervously at the filter a few times with his thumb, the words sitting uncomfortably somewhere in the back of his throat. “This is gonna sound… far-fetched…”
Pillowface Jones has had a hard life. Her birth parents abandoned her when she was an infant, and she was raised in a series of orphanages and foster homes, where a pattern that a weaker, less capable, less self-possessed woman would’ve allowed to define her emerged: alternately ridiculed and fetishized for a rare condition that resulted in her being born with a pillow for a head and face, Pillowface has frequently experienced the worst that humanity has to offer for most of her life thus far. In fact, it was her adoptive father who Pillowface identifies as “the first person who saw the person behind the pillow.”
The Man with the Beard Made of Bees knows a little something about being different. After all, he’s a man with a swarm of live bees for an impenetrable, irremovable beard. And so, when he laid eyes on a young Pillowface for the first time, it wasn’t a “freak” or a “disability” he saw: it was the beauty of humanity in all its rich, unpredictable glory. And so he and his then-wife, socialite and philanthropist Sara Tidwell, set about adopting Pillowface and inviting her into their home as a member of their large, wonderfully diverse family.
The Man with the Beard Made of Bees countsPillowface as one of his 12 daughters, 10of them adopted, and like nine of her sisters, Pillowface makes her living as an exotic dancer and sex worker in the employ of her beloved father.
“Yeah,” Pillowface told me over dinner at her favorite restaurant, The Tugboat Cafe, noted for its unique, chunky twist on ranch dressing, “Dad’s a lot more than just a dad to me. He’s also my boss.”
Pillowface and her siblings (one of her adoptive brothers also earns his living as a sex worker operating out of The Man with the Beard Made of Bees’ famous nightclub, B-Stings) regard their father very highly, speaking well not only of his parenting skills but of his business acumen, telling them to always make the most of their relationships. “You never know who might be in the market for a sex worker,” he often told and still tells them, and so they’realways on the prowl for sales.
But not everyone is supportive of Pillowface, her father, and their family business. Since The Man with the Beard Made of Bees first broke into the business, and for as long as both he and Pillowface can recall, people have charged them with the usual litany of offenses: “destroying the family as an institution,” “commodifying every aspect of life,” “immorality,” “pandering” and “prostitution” (the latter two originating with the Anytown Police Department, who have raided B-Stings and harassed its sex workers on many occasions over the years). “There has been an assault on the small businessperson—” and The Man with the Beard Made of Bees is quick to point out that his children are just that: independent men and women operating their own businesses, contracting their services to him on a strictly voluntary basis— “for as long as there have been entrepreneurs. And what they so callously and cynically call ‘exploitation,’ we call a family business entered into with love and of free volition across the board.”
Some have said this is mere “legalese” designed by a “soulless pimp prostituting his own children,” but nearly all of those critics have one thing in common, as far as I can tell: they’re apologists if not outright advocates for The Man with the Gold Car.
Emily Twiggs stopped typing and rubbed her eyes, which had begun to hurt. She leaned back, putting distance between herself and her laptop, then interlaced her long, thin fingers and cracked her knuckles concurrent to performing a big cat-stretch.
Taking a sip of her soy milk latte, Emily prepared to commence with her scathing takedown of The Man with the Gold Car, and those she considered to be carrying water for him, when there came a light knock at the door of her newly christened “writing room.”
“Yes?” the lithe-figured young journalist responded.
The knocking persisted, strangely yet more lightly and hesitantly.
“Yes,” Emily said, a little louder, pushing up the fashionable reading glasses whose frame matched the blue lapis of the teardrop-shaped earrings she wore. Not wanting to seem impatient, which she very much felt in light of the continued bit of knocking, she added, more gently, “It’s open.”
The door cracked ever so slightly and, after another second or two during which nothing was said, opened further, with still more rapping upon its wooden surface, now pushing at the limits of what could be called “knocking,” so faint was the resonance produced by the tiny, gently curled fist tapping against it.
“Okay to come in?” Pillowface’s strange little voice inquired, even as she did, in fact, come in.
“Oh. Yes, of course,” Emily said with a somewhat forced smile. “Hi, Pillowface. Is everything okay?”
Pillowface stood with one foot in the room and one in the hallway, one half of her pillow face visible, the other behind the edge of the door, her sinewy, knobby-elbowed left arm hugging its surface.
“Hey,” Pillowface said, giving a little wave with her hand before returning it quickly to the door. Her drawn-on mouth twitched a little during the ensuing pause before she then added, “Yeah. Everything is good.”
Emily nodded, waiting for something more. When it didn’t come, she cleared her throat and asked, “Was… there something you needed?”
Pillowface’s fingers, with their oddly pronounced knuckles and joints, tapped on the door a few times as she made anuncertain little noise. “Ehn… no. No, I don’t need anything.”
“Oh,” Emily said. “Well… what is it?”
“Some guy is on yer phone,” Pillowface offered after a bit more hemming and hawing. “Sounds funny, like he might be from someplace else.” After another pause, she hypothesized: “Italy or somethin’, maybe.”
Emily furrowed her brow. “Italy? Well... what does he want?”
“I dunno,” the strange young woman shrugged. “Said he was yer boyfriend.”
Emily’s face lightened. “Oh! Otter?”
“Uh-huh. I think so. Maybe.”
Emily removed her glasses and stood and moved to the door. She hadn’t heard the house phone ring, but in light of some recent events was eager to speak to Otter, who she had returned to calling her boyfriend in the past few days.
After thanking Pillowface, Emily went to the bar-style counter that divided the kitchenette from the living room and picked up the phone. “Otter?” she said.
“Heya babies, how’s it happening? “Otter,” aka Georgy, said in his thick accent, presumed to be not Italian but Russian, though this had never been officially confirmed.
Emily said things were going well, sharing some details that would’ve made little sense and held even less interest to her pop music-obsessed beau regarding her big Pillowface/Man with the Gold Car exposé, but soon became distracted by watching Pillowface struggle with the settings on the television: she’d gotten the tint and contrast levels all out of whack again, and the captions were now on as well. Pillowface glanced nervously over her shoulder at Emily here and there, but upon meeting her host’s gaze, she smiled and turned immediately back toward the puke-green tinted mess of blurry faces on the screen as if to convey that all was well.
“Um, hang on a sec, okay Otter?” Emily said, and then pressed the receiver into her palm. “Do you want me to fix the TV, Pillowface? I told you I don’t mind. It’s easy to get the settings messed—”
Pillowface turned around quickly. “No. It’s okay… I like it this way,” she said unconvincingly, just before a blast of dialogue that now sounded like a piece of silverware being ground in a garbage disposal emanated quite loudly from the TV. Pillowface punctuated these hellish blasts of noise with a reassuring smile.
Otter was yammering on—yakking full-speed—when Emily put the phone back to her ear. He’d gone to look at a farm property or something, somewhere out west of Capital City, and was eager to tell her all about it. She wasn’t sure if his mad plan was for her to move there and live with him, or if he even planned to live there or what; truth be told, her mood had soured and not just because of the nightmare Pillowface had made of the television or the new throbbing pain behind her eyes, but because Otter had just brushed her big breaking news aside to talk about his dumb farm. She flicked at her thumb with the nails of her index and middle fingers, Otter’s rambling blending and blurring together with the racket from the TV to form a harsh white noise that were making her want to scream.
“I gotta go,” Emily said tersely and loudly, then hung up the phone.
Servais was uncharacteristically unnerved by the events of the late morning, afternoon and early evening. Powell had come into the bar looking like a wreck and sounding like a fucking madman, on top of it having been weeks since he’d last seen the kid, when he’d not exactly been in the pink of health either mentally or physically, and had fled the grizzled former backstop’s basement den suddenly, tearing off his shirt and running screaming the house while Servais was getting serviced, so to speak, by Mookie. Now the old big-leaguer, who’d always been known for his level-headed ability to call a good game, had gone against both his gut and his brains by skipping town with Brian, and to top it off, the kid had thrown a real fit when Servais had secured his neighbor’s red Malibu convertible to make the drive to god knows where a little more enjoyable.
“You sure you’re alright to drive, Kid?” Servais shouted as the warm breeze of the dwindling evening whipped around them and he cracked open a cold can of Budweiser.
Powell glanced over at him, trying to conceal his obvious unease. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Ready for a beer?” Servais asked, leaning forward preemptively to open the cooler at his feet.
“No! Not… not now,” Powell answered, at first sharply, then dulling the edge and speaking more softly by his third word of reply.
Servais looked at him for a moment before letting the cooler’s lid fall shut. He thought about what the younger man had told him: that he’d watched the catcher-turned-barman die, torn to ribbons by a one-eyed beast, his cheek hanging off, his eye mangled, pink arterial blood frothing on his lips, and it seemed to Servais that his face now hurt, his jaw shot through with a freezing burn like an injection of dry ice that traveled down into his jugular, where it began to sting like battery acid.
After a wince and a series of sharp, short breaths, Servais gulped down his entire beer, crushed the empty can in his leathery fist and shut his eyes. The words came to him without the slightest, faintest whisper of a thought, and he spoke them automatically, as if repeating received wisdom:
“I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back,
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”