The Geographer's Library

The Geographer’ s Library
In front of the package store, I turned to gawk out my window at two
couples, probably, God help me, a little younger than me, drinking beer in the
beds of adjoining pickup trucks, one with fire detailing and the other with
ocean. One of the guys stood up as I slowed down and tossed a beer can
toward my car. I thought it was an empty until it hit the driver’s-side door
hard enough for me to swerve a bit, and as I slowed down to check the damage
in my mirror, the guy who threw the can grabbed a tire iron from the bed
of his truck and started striding toward my car. There was a dent in my
door, but no comparable weapon in my car, so I just kept driving, my whiteknuckled
hands shaking and gripping my steering wheel. I heard them laughing
loudly, even through my closed windows, and in the rearview I saw him
slap his friend five.
A few streets down from the package store, around a sharp bend in the
road, was a squat two-story maroon house with Christmas lights wrapped
around the drainpipes and twinkling in the broad daylight. There was a parking
lot where the front yard should have been, and at the entrance to the yard,
a small wooden signpost was driven into the grass: the lone wolf.
I pulled into the parking lot, between a navy blue Crown Vic and a rusty
Datsun. Except for the neon Schlitz sign in the window and the parking lot in
place of a yard, it looked like every other house along this street. Behind it,
just visible around the side, was a backyard with a large grill next to some
Dumpsters and a sad-looking, broken swing set behind them: Norman Rockwell
seen from the bottom of a bottle, a view that could kick you sweetly in
the chest like a poem.
I entered the bar through what should have been the house’s front door,
and for a moment I really did think I had walked into someone’s residence:
the bar and all the walls were covered in that flimsy, fake-wood paneling common
to basements and rec rooms; no two chairs or tables matched, and they
all looked like Salvation Army castoffs. A black-and-white television set quietly
played soap operas in the corner. A thick-necked bartender with jetblack
hair and a Pancho Villa mustache glanced up at me from behind the bar
when I came in. Three other guys, all sort of grim and sleepy-looking,
glanced up at me, too. They were sitting singly; when they looked up, it
didn’t seem as though any conversations had stopped. The bar felt rough and
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