The bar was nearly full. I ordered up a beer and sat down at the corner table. I looked around at the familiar knot of faces and I turned back to my glass as a bead of moisture raced down its side and I traced it with a finger. I was feeling a little hungry for something to do.
In the crowd I missed one presence in particular. I looked to the spot where he’d always stood and I smirked as I remembered back two years. I thought about it on occasions, as I did now, that maybe it’s not so strange that lonely towns on the other side of nowhere produce people of curious intellect. We’d met when I was in my first semester political science and in my second semester drinking ( I started early over the summer.) We were fellow inmates at a great Eastern University, but we shared more. My ambition was to be a writer and his ambition was to be an aging parasite on his father’s money.
His name was Onnie Morrow and he came from a place called, Frozen Sneaker, Nebraska although lately he lived among the fumes of Secaucus, New Jersey where his father was president of some agro-chemical concern. From the deer grounds to the dumping grounds – it was an eastern migration which I thought was strange in itself. No one ever moves to New Jersey.
Onnie was a real intellectual or so I thought. He was always quoting the philosophers. He knew all the famous ones, people like Marx, Plato, Socrates, and Hugh hefner. I never really knew what he was studying; it was an elusive subject, mostly he read a lot and he sat in bars studying girl’s fannies in the mirror.
I thought once to ask him where he’d gotten his name. He said that it was a name peculiar to Nebraska. I told him that wasn’t all that was peculiar to Nebraska. In the month that followed, we became great companions. Inseparable. Then, he disappeared. I called his dormitory. Nobody there was quite sure whether they’d seen him. Onnie it was always around – somewhere. Like potholes, you were always tripping over him in unlikely places.
It turned out that the college had been sponsoring a study of the effects of various pharmaceuticals on humankind. Onnie had always had a great sense of duty to his fellow man and was always the first to volunteer when there was a need. In short he beat a path to the lab.
He’d sign in for the morning session and lustily gobble down a handful of pills. He’d return in the afternoon for more. He always assumed various aliases when he signed in, names like Fred Nietzche and Fred Schopenhauer. The names were unimportant.
The medical types in the white lab coats never seem to catch on. However, every perfect crime has its flaw. On his eighth trip to the lab he signed the page – Jonas Salk. He was recognized immediately. I found him later that night in his dorm room, lying on his back at the foot of his bed, over his ears were clamped Martian like headphones, attached to a stereo which had long ago stopped. His dead eyes were open and stared fixedly at a point on the ceiling. I looked up to perceive where a tiny house fly clung to the ceiling. As I approached, the corpse on the floor mumbled something about needing people to grow potatoes and black holes suffocating the universe. I picked at a stringy piece of meat between my teeth and wondered just how long to fly had been dead. I roused him and we headed out for the night. Later in the evening, he said he had to meet someone, apologized and was gone.
I began to perceive a new presence in my life. Onnie was meeting a girl – Nikki. In the weeks that followed, I saw more and more of a shift in loyalties. There can be great camaraderie between young men, but it can never replace the ancient urges which blind men to women.
Nikki was a nice girl and pretty in a dark sort of way. She would play the jukebox for hours, half dancing, half swaying, to some quiet rhythm. However, she had the aura of maternity about her. I thought she was the type of girl who is forever mothering the men in her life, badgering them and turning them back into helpless, dependent children.
She had begun to succeed with Onnie. I’d seen that. He had stopped taking pills and had begun attending all his classes. Worse yet, he’d stopped drinking. She would stand by the jukebox and feed it quarters. Smiling. Motherly. Onnie would sit in the corner, hands clasped, quietly sipping at a ginger ale.
“Good God in the sky,” I thought. “The ultimate defeat.” Then Onnie stopped going to bars all together. “Auf Wiedersehen, mein Freund. I bid you adieu. Requiem and goodbye.” Or so I thought But life can be elevating, for little more than a month had elapsed, when I was sitting on my timeworn perch, casually drinking a beer as the regular crowd shuffled in, with Onnie in its wake. He was in a particularly evil mood. His eyes were fractured cathedral glass.
I thought – old Lucifer’s out for a bit of the night life among the low life. Conspicuous by her absence was her majesty, Nikki I looked to see if she had followed Onnie, but the door slammed and neary a curl was seen. Onnie headed immediately to the men’s room on some vital mission. Some clown came out and reported there was a guy in there pissing on his foot. I thought happy days were here again. Onnie it came out, still shaking his damn foot and sat down next to me.
I ordered him a beer
I could see the cage had been sprung. He was on the scram and he meant to make the most of it. no worries just serious belch and chug beer drinking. It wasn’t long before the front door opened and her eminence stood there with frying pan eyes. The warden had discovered the empty cage and had brought the nets.
Nikki made her elaborate entrance, as tempest always do. And, what followed was a kind of choreographed battle of body language. Onnie tried to ignore her presence. Nikki floated through the crowd and stopped at this or that table. Casual conversations. Finally, she made her way to the jukebox and began to feed it quarters. She played her song. She played his song. She played their song.
I watched as the atomic pile behind on his eyes flared into a critical mass. What happened next I’m not sure. I never saw where it came from, I only saw it in his hand. It was a small caliber pistol. Somebody screamed. “He’s got a gun,” and I felt the earth come up to me. The upside down world turned pale and under my arms I nearly smothered Nikki. Then, I saw the glass pane of the jukebox dissolve into shards. Giant hands the size of fielder’s gloves grabbed Onnie by his long hair and he screeched banshee-like. In an instant he was cornered.
Onnie slept that night in another type of cage.
I drove Nikki home. She sat silent for a long time. She looked at me half crying and said, “He loves me, that’s why. He wouldn’t hurt me would he?
“No,” I’d said. “I don’t suppose he would.”