The Geographer's Library

Jon Fasman
The skinny guy’s voice had been beerily increasing during our discussion,
so by now the bartender was standing in front of us, hand extended to
me, his gold-fronted grin more menacing than a scowl would have been. I
shook his hand. “Eddie. My place here. You want maybe to mention in your
newspaper, I tell you some advice: don’t. This quiet place. My place,” he
said, squeezing my hand harder, his grin becoming wider. “We don’t like
trouble. People who ask too many questions, where I come from, we have
name for them: corpses.” I tried to pull my hand away, and he grabbed my
wrist with the other hand, still grinning, leaning even closer so I could smell
his garlic breath, sweat, and dishwater hands. “We drink toast to Jaan. Sorry
he died, but always people die. We drink toast, then you leave. You don’t
come back.”
The skinny guy had shrunk down in his seat. Eddie gave me my hand
back. It looked like raw chicken skin. I rubbed it, and the color drained back
in slowly. Still grinning, he turned around and put the bottle back on the
shelf. The skinny guy threw an arm around my shoulders and said confidentially,
“The Albanian, sometimes he’s a little hotheaded. C’mon, lemme walk
you to your car.”
To me “a little hotheaded” means you pound a bookcase when you stub
your toe or scream at the TV when some indistinguishable Jets quarterback
tosses a dying quail in the fourth quarter. It means you snap at someone when
you shouldn’t. Trying to rip my hand off while comparing me to a corpse
seemed far worse than “a little hotheaded.” Still, I wasn’t about to argue with
the one person in the bar who seemed to care whether I got out with all my
bones intact.
“Listen, Jaan was just a drinker, you know,” said the skinny guy as we
walked across the parking lot. “This is just a drinker’s bar, not really a social
place. All of us come here because we like to drink and get left alone. So
nobody really talked about where he’s from, or what his kids were doing, or
what his daddy beat him with, or any of that crap, because nobody here
cared. We sit down, hurt ourselves, and leave. Eddie keeps the place quiet
and cheap, and he don’t want anything else.”
“So you and Jaan never really talked?”
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