The Terror of Living

The Terror of Living

The kid had taken a bus north from Seattle
and stood outside studying the bar for a long time, weighing the options. A gust of wind brought the smell of sun- warmed tar from a patch of cracked pavement, the day changing warm to cold, airplanes passing overhead in the afternoon, the sound of jet engines firing and planes taking off from the nearby field. The bar wasn’t much to look at, just a two- story clapboard with a rock-and pebble parking strip. He toed a piece of gravel, thinking it over, then went in.

He took a drink off his beer, looked around the bar, and put the glass back down. With his elbows pushed out on either side, he was leaning hard up against the bar. It was the type of place he used to come to when he was underage — a short bar, dim light, with customers of questionable means — using his older brother’s ID and hoping to get laid. He’d been out of the world for two years on a vehicular manslaughter charge. He’d been lucky about it, too; young as he was, the judge had gone easy on him. On his thin
frame he wore a red shirt, so worn the material had turned the color of a dried peach. Locked up, he hadn’t worn the old shirt in years. The smell of him, in his new old clothes, was something of dust, something of mildew and dark, locked- away places, so deep it seemed to come from his skin itself.

He looked the beer over, better than the piss-pot stuff they brewed in Monroe, half-fruit, half-saliva, like some sort of Amazon moonshine. He took another swallow. It was his first legal drink and he sat staring at it, watching how the air condensed against the side of the glass and collected around the base in a watery circle.

Don’t fuck this up, he said to himself, looking around at the other customers. Don’t do a stupid thing like that.

When Eddie came up to the bar and sat down, the kid was taking in that dreamy glow of being somewhere he’d never been before. The two were separated by a seat between them, the kid looking down into his beer, staring hard at the way the bubbles bounced against the surface, then sloughed off to one side and collected.

Eddie ordered a beer from the bartender and waited for the man to pour it. The kid raised an eye to study Eddie, watching him as he waited for the beer to be delivered. After the bartender had gone, Eddie turned to look out on the bar and take it all in. There were two pool tables in the back, one occupied, an assortment of low tables near the wall with two or three chairs at each. Eddie turned back and spoke to the beer in front of him. “I guess you’re my man.”

Excerpted from the book The Terror of Living by Urban Waite. Copyright © 2011 by Urban Waite. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company, New York, NY. All rights reserved.