Near the intersection of Interstate 66 and Highway 15, where the roads start to begin their gradual slope into the nearby Blue Ridge mountains, and the evenings pale across a wide spread plain that gets broken into angles with the nearby hilltops, there is a bar inside a restaurant. Known for its wide porch suitable for the litany of smokers, the local Haymarket residents mingle with teams of soccer players and softball enthusiasts from the nearby fields. They make noise and buy pizza in the large restaurant rooms...but the bar stays quiet and distant from the visitors. Instead, the bar is where a few come to drink and watch hockey games on small screens. You can order the full menu, but mostly people come to drink.
The police chief of the small town sits at the near end of the bar, closest to the kitchen. He's likely in his late 50s, maybe later. But he has a gun so he usually is left alone, chatting with Joe the owner and chef.
Sometime in summer, maybe late, maybe early...he couldn't remember. He was alone, didn't want to be out in the unusually chill evening of a Virginia summer night and figured that the noisy comfort of this bar would serve him well...ice to the back of the neck so to speak. A beer in a cold glass...maybe some wings. Quiet solitude in a place with white noise of strangers.
The bar ran horizontal to the street, a long single stretch of wood with comfortable chairs that swiveled...wide wood top that had a slight inlay where the salt and pepper shakers could reside beside bottles of ketchup and red pepper flakes. There was a virtual juke-box, that tended to play 90's favorites...(he remembered a flare memory in his mind that she preferred that genre of music...) and he shook it aside as he sat down.
He told his name to the girl behind the bar, an older attractive lady who flirted with everybody, including the boss...including the police chief. He had finished his first beer in an amazingly fast fashion...so when she came by again he just pointed at the empty.
Another hon? she asked.
He nodded.
She put the bottle in front of him, and in his peripheral vision he saw a shape he remembered. A male face, a friend from golf. Joe.
Joe didn't recognize him as he sat down to his right, but when he announced himself Joe reacted like a high school reunion...hand shakes, pats on the back. He remembered thinking it was such coincidence.
Joe took up the only seat to his right...to his left were a few open ones...Joe's wife was expected at some point and they could move around and figure things out. He, looking back, was glad he didn't move then.
The second beer went just slightly slower, and Joe was now buying. The place was filling up, the music slightly louder...the sun now low and turning long orange lights into the windows...people had to speak up, heads moved towards each other to hear. The single bartender was joined by another, and they moved in a dance between the ice machine and the bottles at the back of the bar.
Soon Joe's wife arrived, and awkwardly she took the seat to his left, his separation a point of initial concern but they waved him off as his drink and all its sweat was on the bar in front of him. She had a clean spot and he sat between them, alternating back and forth in his dialogue. He ordered some food and could feel the evening mellowing.
He didn't know exactly what caused him to glance...perhaps it was just a recognition. Perhaps it was muscle tissue, or some carnivorous craving that remembers a taste that instinctively allures and draws attention. Whatever the fuck it is called he remembered looking slightly right, over the shoulder of the police chief.
She was coming in, she had arrived. She was not alone.
The impact was fairly immediate...he suddenly looked forward, the taste of any food immediately lost, the taste like a tablespoon of salt in his mouth. He heard Joe talking and his wife asking him to talk louder so he was caught in this crossfire of words...he sensed more than felt her presence moving towards him...he couldn't look, like the arrival of something that would cause him to react violently...not physically, but emotionally. Like he would be stripped raw and bare in that center section of the bar, exposed.
She passed by him, and he could feel his flush...the heat arise inside of him, likely visible. She took the chair next to Joe's wife...she was one chair away.
He returned to a normalcy that is like talking quietly to one person on one side and screaming to the person on the other...he wasn't nervous. He wasn't even upset. Rather, he was confused...his reaction unveiling new ground, new stances. He wasn't even sure she saw him, but he turned more towards Joe's wife so he could regard her.
Regard her. It had been quite a long time since that had happened.
Maybe it had been a year or two...a decade when the sun is snatched from your sky. Not in a fit of pique or in some amazingly tantalizing train-wreck of a disaster, they had just simply stopped. Stopped being.
Stopped being them.
Sure there had been some fast interactions...a wave here, a smile there. But like a glance it was just that...a hit and run. The way you brush a baseball against somebody to protect the plate when you're pitching. It's not deliberate...it's not hurtful. It's just like a warning to keep away.
So he had kept away, a world shrinking from a great vast expanse to a small silo...a world that was a bit more gray than ever before. Colors...yeah, they stayed mostly the same, but like older. A patina was painted across. And now, like some reveal she was incredibly close. Full regalia of make up and outfit...she sipped her beer and smiled, never meeting his furtive and rare looks her way. Joe's wife was a dumb obstacle, an impediment. If he could burn her to the ground he would...just to get a better view.
He remembered centering his view on the salt and pepper shaker in front of him. This isn't happening, he thought. There isn't a way in the world that this is going on.
This.
This is cruel.
Cruelty.
He had forgotten how she had applied make up to her eyes...had chosen certain colors to combine when she was going out. Staring at the salt shaker, pure white and boring, he suddenly remembered he had forgotten how achingly beautiful she was, how transformed she was and in the suddenly loud and much smaller bar in Haymarket he felt ugly and alone. He felt also ran. Joe yammering in his ear and asking if he wanted more beers and he signaled no...he had no appetite for anything human at this point...his one thing worth desiring just inches from him with zero chance of happening. It was a prison, this part of the bar...it's wood warm and glowing, the bit of headlights coming through and the music suddenly in the background.
He knew how the ghosts felt...they were there, looking, watching...but the the alive ones couldn't see them...couldn't detect them. He could scream and lunge...she would remain in repose. She smiled at somebody else, talking in hushed tones he couldn't hear. He knew how prisoners felt, the outside air just far enough away...a sky, a star, a butterfly fluttering by and reminding...
He switched to water...it was a safer bet.
At one point, at some point she got up to leave. For a minute he contemplated a coincidental need to get up as well, a sudden confrontation. He knew that would be horrific for her, a saddening. He needed to leave her alone, let her go and not disrupt the one thing they had agreed upon.
He couldn't help but turn slightly in her departure...she had a slight smile.
He wondered what it harbored.
He regarded the salt shaker, the boring white and the colorless tint and he felt an ache like something was just suddenly removed...and the whole lot of the shaker was tumbled over and poured into the raw wound...a stinging, piercing singe of pain that he knew he would feel.
Now, many years later, he can still remember her walking away.
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