Content warning: references to violence
I met him at a gas station. He was pumping air into the tires on his Pontiac Sunfire and I was vacuuming the inside of my old Ford van. I wasn’t quite sure how to get the conversation kickstarted, so as the vacuum let out the last dregs of what it had to say, I tried to think up something to say myself.
‘Tires need some air, eh?’ I yelled as the vacuum’s roar tapered off.
He looked up at me and winced. ‘What?’, he asked.
‘Tires a little low?’.
He just nodded and went back to his business.
My dance with loneliness had started six months prior to that. Prior to that, I’d hardly ever felt the emptiness it’s served with, but since losing my wife to bone cancer, I could feel its breath as close to me as my own. Losing someone like that is a lot like walking through an open field for years, thinking you’re headed towards a perfect fairy-tale glade where you and your wife will spend the rest of your days, or if not that, at the very least you’re on a nice walk together, then all of a sudden that path ends with a cliff and you’ve just watched your wife tumble off its edge. Suddenly you’re all alone, left to retrace your steps or find new ones; whoevers choosing that is, I’m just not sure.
After that, I spent a lot of time with my best bud Hal. I’d go over to his place and we’d run our mouths like we always had, crushing beers in his garage until we both sank into our own dreams. We never talked about anything too real, but I liked it that way. I found it easiest for myself if we could just let whatever sat on our tongues roll off, instead of trying to wrestle with whatever your innards have to say. For a while there, I felt like having Hal around would be enough to keep my marbles from spilling, but Hal didn’t even say goodbye to me before he ran off to Thailand to live with a mistress he’d met online. Needless to say; I found myself log jammed in loneliness.
I hadn’t tried to make a new pal in quite some time cause I didn’t have to, so I felt a little rusty. I wasn’t looking for anything serious, just a bud to shoot pool with and talk about sports. Somebody to help shake the strange from my head, and soak it in some easy, simple thought. I’m not sure what it was that drew me to that fella, but I figured it wasn’t anything more complicated than time, place and the area my head existed between the two.
Some other guy was standing near the gas pumps, just fifty feet away, playing Giant Steps on his sax. I could tell that the man pumping air in his tires didn’t like the sound. He was chewing on the inside of his lip and squinting in the direction of the sound even though it was a cloudy, sunless day. I really enjoyed the sound of the sax, but I wanted this guy to like me, so I didn’t tell him that.
Seeing that both our cars being in need of a little servicing was clearly not solid enough grounds for conversation, I figured a mutual hatred for jazz might do the trick. What was one little white lie gonna lead to anyway?
When the vacuum stopped its screaming and the tire inflator ceased its screeching, I hollered out to him.
‘Boy, that music sure is some crap, eh?’
He shook his head, bit his lip and let out a little chuckle. ‘That ain’t no music’, he said. ‘I make better noise in the John’.
I imagined him in the gas station washroom, strumming a guitar, banging on a kick drum and playing the harmonica like a one-man act, but then I caught the joke and a laugh that felt like a cough breaking out of its grave came out of me.
‘I like you’, I said. ‘You wanna grab a beer at that bar over there?’. I pointed towards an old rundown black-painted, rectangular building with a burnt-out sign that read ‘Jimmy’s Scum Bucket’ in a curvy, french sort of font. Beneath the sign, painted white on the wall was what I supposed to be their slogan; ‘THE ONLY BAR FOR THE NEXT 50 CLICKS’.
‘I guess I could go for a beer’, he said.
The floor was so sticky that it nearly pried one of my shoes off. Inside, it was just the two of us and a bartender who looked like a mix between a trucker and a wizard. My new friend bought us a pitcher of Old Style Pilsner to share and told me I could get the next one.
As we sat down at a small table, he placed the pitcher down, and reached out a lanky, dirt stained hand for shaking. ‘Names Garment’, he said.
‘George’ I answered. ‘Boy, Garment sure is an interesting name. Where’d that come from?’
‘Well, my mom always said that after keeping her eyes closed for the four hours it took to birth me, the first thing she saw beyond the piercing white light as she held me was a piece of blue jean overalls. Damn woman thought I was no more than a piece of child sized workwear for the first twenty seconds she held me. So she figured that was Christ telling her the child was to be named after clothing’.
We played pool and he put coins into the jukebox every few minutes, playing his favourite rock n’ roll songs; anything from Hendrix to Guns N’ Roses. I used the cue as a pretend guitar and he thought that was funny. Slowly I could feel that sense of loneliness wander off a bit, and I started to sense the light-hearted version of myself I’d always known peering around the corners of a word here, a pool shot there.
When I mentioned that my wife had died of cancer, my friend started telling me about how he had managed to beat a case of testicular cancer himself.
‘Yeah, ain’t no disease gonna take ol’ Garment down. Only the weak die from that bullshit’, he said as he glugged back a half pint of beer.
I felt the natural flow of words clog up and a silence slung itself over our conversation. Garment’s tall, slender frame wavered like a dream and I felt a powerful energy pressing the walls of my lungs. I tried to speak but the words stopped themselves well before exiting. I wiped my hand on my pants nervously as the thoughts and feelings I’d grown too used to began to lap over my attention once again. A pain pressed on my chest, and I felt it hard to breathe. The two pitchers of beer we’d finished had me feeling as if my blood had thickened, and I thought for a moment, it might stop flowing.
‘You wanna go smoke something out back?’ he asked, breaking the spell that held me. ‘I got some good stuff’.
Thankful that the silence didn’t drown me, I obliged.
We walked out the back door. The sun was setting behind a bed of thick grey clouds and the land below it was flat and yellow. A dumpster sat stinking nearby and garbage lay at our feet. He pulled out a little clear glass pipe and sprinkled a powder in it. Having never been a fan of the powders, my head darted around nervously, searching for some sort of excuse in the flatlands as to why I couldn’t take part.
He lit the stuff and blew a thin, stiff cloud of smoke into my face and passed me the pipe. I took it, my head still darting around and my hands shaking. Nerves were pulling a trick that choked me with teenage insecurities. I thought about pretending to smoke it and blowing my cloudless breath away from us, but he watched me like a parent surveying their child’s first steps.
I set the powder on fire and inhaled a smoke that tasted like bleach. I could hear the highway searing nearby and as I held the smoke inside me the sounds wobbled, roared and sunk. The drugs settled into my skull like a bird in an unfinished nest.
I handed the pipe back to him, feeling time glug by, somehow slow, somehow frantic. My new friend was fiddling with something in his pocket. Whatever it was in there, it looked like he was strangling it. I could feel the unnamed drugs he’d given me tugging on my arms like dumbbells glued to my hands and my brain felt stupid.
Above the roar of the highway, the saxophonist started up again. He was twisting the sax into a rhythm so cool that I almost blew my cover by tapping my foot.
‘There goes that brass hack again’, my friend said. ‘Somebody oughtta knock his fucking teeth in’. He stopped fiddling with whatever it was in his pocket and a look in his eyes froze over like a pane of glass stained brown. This is the part of the story I hate admitting to have seen.
Wrapped around his fingers were a set of bruised brass knuckles. I trailed behind him, wondering if I needed a friend this bad, but still allowing the chains of some confusing energy to pull me forward. The highway froze and the music seized and suddenly all that could be heard was the sound of senseless punching and the clang of a saxophone falling to the pavement.
Then I was in the Sunfire, cluelessly leaving my van behind outside of Jimmy’s Scum Bucket. My friend was wiping the blood off his knuckles with a dirty rag and feverishly licking his lips. He reached for the stereo dial and jacked up the volume. Rock music blared loudly and he sang along like a howling dog. I watched the lines in the road pass by, humming Giant Steps under my breath, feeling like I had a lot more to take to get wherever it was that I was going.
Neil Jefferies was raised in a place called Red Deer. In his somewhat brief stint with adulthood, he has lived in Calgary, Vancouver and now he lives in Montréal. He has had his work published in REVOLVER Literary Magazine and Literally Stories and he was longlisted in the 2023 Quagmire Short Fiction Contest.
