Coffin Varnish

He drank it in the back room with the lights off. He did not like the way it tasted. It tasted like the place he had got it from, and the man who had sold it to him, and everything that had happened that summer.

The bartender came through with a lamp and put the lamp on the shelf above the bottles and the room came halfway out of the dark.

“Another,” he said.

The bartender poured. The pour was slow. The bartender was a careful man and the bottle was not a careful bottle.

“This will kill you.”

“Yes.”

“Tonight?”

“No.”

“When, then.”

“When it’s ready.”

The bartender did not laugh. The bartender had stopped laughing in May, when the boy had died, and it was August now, and the laugh had not come back and might not.

He drank the second one. The pepper came up in his throat the way it always did and then the grapefruit cut underneath and then the long bad sweetness, and he thought again about the man who had sold him the bottle and the way the man had looked at him over the cork, like a man looks at a horse he is about to sell to someone who will work it to death.

Outside, in the alley, two men were arguing about a woman who had already gone home with someone else. He could hear the argument but not the words. He thought that was about right. He thought most of what he had heard in his life had been about right that way — the shape of it clear and the meaning of it lost down some alley he had never walked.

“She came in today,” the bartender said.

He did not look up.

“She asked after you.”

“What did you tell her.”

“That you were not coming back.”

“Good.”

“She did not believe me.”

“That’s her business.”

The bartender wiped the bar. There was nothing on the bar to wipe. It was a thing the bartender did when he did not want to look at a man, and he was grateful for it, the way a man is grateful for a small mercy that costs the giver nothing.

“She left a number.”

“Throw it out.”

“I did.”

“Good.”

He finished the second drink. The lamp made the bottles look like a row of small bad churches on the shelf. He thought about the summer. About the boat, and the cousin who had been on the boat, and the water that had been very flat that morning and very not-flat by the afternoon, and the thing he had done and the thing he had not done, and which of the two had been worse.

“Another.”

“No.”

“No?”

“Not tonight.”

He looked at the bartender for a long moment. The bartender did not look away. The bartender had a son still, and a wife, and a small thin reason to keep men from killing themselves on his liquor on a Tuesday in August.

“All right.”

He put the money on the bar. He put more than was needed. He stood up and the room stood up with him and held for a second and then settled.

“Tomorrow,” the bartender said.

“Maybe.”

He went out through the alley. The two men were gone. The woman they had argued about was gone. Everything that needed to be gone was gone, and he walked home under a sky the colour of cheap liquor in a cheap glass, and he did not die that night, and he was sorry about it and not sorry, and that was about right too.