Strange Fire

I was sipping a dollar draft on the deck of the Bull Moose Bar in Cambridge, New Hampshire (unincorporated), watching the bar’s new owner shellac his throat with gin, waiting for my paddling gang. The rains arrived before my friends, so I scuttled inside, into the dry refuge of the pine bar where the Good People sat blowing beer foam and strong talk through their beards.

They were bitching about the man outside, who had fiddled with the place. He’d renewed the felt on the pool table, re-stocked the jukebox with shite like Christina Aguilera, and he’d even hung a card over the bar, a storebought cardboard square that forewarned patrons not to order more than two shots. Foppery, all of it, and bound to cost him some business. I figured the place was doomed and I took to pounding beers as fast as they’d let me.

A half-dozen later I was on good enough terms with Kevin, the tall rangy dude on my right, to ask him what was the deal.

It was an open-ended question, sort of a conversational Rorschach blot. He was wearing an “I’m the NRA” cap and I wanted to see if I could goad him into blowing a hole in the jukebox a la Mark Chesnutt.

Kevin turned around and peered at the thing as it cranked up a Metallica song, and he spat a dry pah! on Lars Ulrich’s sonic shadow. “You bleeve ‘at shit? Gat damn heavy metal.” He turned back and pounded the bar with a fist. “John!” he exploded.

John, his buddy at the other end of the bar, glanced up owl-eyed from a pair of empty shot glasses. “Hwat?”

“Put some gat damn country music in that thang b’fore I harm somebody!”

John lurched off his stool and crashed into a waitress. Frisbees of hamburger and onion and bread went cartwheeling all over everywhere. She screeched and hammered on his bald spot with the empty tray and there was laughter from every quarter. I ordered them each a shot and Kevin and I bought five bucks worth of Merle Haggard and Mel Tillis and Hank, Sr. from the jukebox.

There was gunfire later, after my friends got there, up the hill at the Bull Moose’s campsite. And somebody set off a barrage of bottle rockets, and a few of what we used to call “quarter-sticks.” Plus the thunder and rain, and the snoring and farting. But all that was harmless fun, because we were going down the Rapid River the next morning.

I forget who it was that found the slug in her helmet, and Sean and I had a biggety wolf spider skritching at our tent all night. The rain pissed down until the wee hours.

We got up and fried muffins in butter and ate cantaloupe as the sun came out.

And the whole time I was thinking of my new daughter, five weeks old. Someday all this’ll be hers.