It looks just like own of those diners you see along the highways in the States. A neon and plaster train pulls into a tired-looking station. The engine of the train is big and the cars are smaller and smaller. That extreme perspective thing signs have sometimes. The engine has a smile like the little engine that could, and red neon smoke puffs blink out of its smokestack. Bigger than everything, leaning over the train and the station, a thirty foot tall woman winks at me over her shoulder while offering a tray full of drinks to the train. I guess she’s offering it to the train, there’s nothing else there, no thirty foot customers, or even twenty foot customers. She would be thirty feet tall if she was standing up, but she’s leaning over with her butt in the air and her short skirt is hiked up to show ruffled panties, each ruffle outlined in green neon. Neon makes her eye wink. Neon makes the trains wheels go around.
A dozen cars and trucks as old and beat up as the Mercedes are parked in the dirt lot in front of this place. Underneath the sign, the front of the building is just plain brown painted wood, looking old and beat up. Bright lights and loud music coming from the doors and windows. Doors and windows open to the cooling night air. Two big bug zappers guard the door with bright blue lights and bulging bags of bug mush. The bugs commit mindless suicide at a rate of about five or six a second. There are piles of liver by the door, looks like liver. No, they’re dogs.
I climb out of my car joints all stiff, feeling the last two bumpy Panamanian road days in those places you forget you’ve got until they ache. Push the car door shut. Don’t want to slam it, but I know it won’t latch right unless I do. At least the light inside the car goes out, good enough. Walk toward the open doorway of the place, into the quadrahedron of light it throws across the dirt. Quadrahedron, great word, huh? Why do these things come to me when I’m exhausted?
Inside the ceiling is a forest of hanging junk and smoke. Beer and cigarette signs in Spanish are all over each other on the walls and more men than surely could have arrived in the cars and trucks I saw outside are packed in there. Men. All men. Some jukebox or radio or record player or tape player blares "Take This Job and Shove it!" All men. Nobody notices me when I come in, I don’t think. Well, first I think they do because this big roar of voices goes up around the pool table in the corner, but they aren’t looking at me. There’s arms and hands and cue sticks waving around all over and two men grab one arm each of a third guy and they start dragging him toward me. Toward the door. I move out of the way. The guy in the middle, he’s got a look on his face like he’s kind of worried, but his mouth is shut tight and his eyes look straight ahead. The other two, they are smiling and yelling something I can’t make out and the rest of the customers are all raising their fists and glasses and bottles and yelling stuff, too. The three of them go by me and the two doing the dragging push the middle guy out through the door where he trips over one liver dog and lands on another. The second liver dog jumps up yelping and runs off into the night. The two dragging and pushing guys put their arms around each other and watch the dog run away. They are laughing, now, holding each other up.
A stool at the dark bar opens up. I take the stool, since the guy has taken his beer bottle with him. The burly man behind the bar is busy with customers at the other end, so I turn around to take in the rest of the place.
Aside from the pool table, there are two card games going on, a shuffleboard table surrounded by a little cone of silence. Five men watch another line up a shot like spectators at a golf tournament. There’s one ancient pinball machine, but nobody is playing it. The pinball game serves as a precarious resting spot for several dozen bottles and glasses and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts and ashes.
There is one waitress, a woman of about 50 wearing a uniform that shows ruffled panties hanging below an abbreviated maid's outfit. The outfit is like the one on the thirty foot tall woman outside, but somehow it doesn’t look the same. Her body is long in the way of Mayan Indians, her legs are short and cone shaped. Her face is flat and she does not smile, her eyes are obsidian cliche eyes. The men ignore her except to order drinks.
"Can I help you?” a voice says behind me.
I turn and the bartender is right there in front of me, leaning over the bar. Up close he looks even bigger. His hair is frizzy brown cut round in a short afro hair. His face is a round carved out of a bowling ball hard black and shiny face. His eyes are black with white parenthesis eyes, and his nose is a wide, squashed across his face nose. His mouth is a full of stained teeth and surrounded by a goatee mouth. He is looking at me under heavy eyebrows. One of them goes up a little. Guess I’m taking too long.
"Uh, uh, sure," I say, "a beer? and a menu?"
He has big thick hands on the ends of big thick arms. He’s just a big thick guy all around. My eyes follow one of his hands as he points to a sign above the back bar, almost hidden by the hanging junk.
The sign had been professionally painted in green and gold and red, once. Now, the prices are painted over what looks like a couple times each. Each time less neat than the last time. Six items. Chili. Chili Dogs. Cheeseburger Deluxe. Mexican Plate. Macaroni Salad. Potato Salad.
The bartender reaches into an old Coca Cola cooler full of ice. I’m trying to decide between the Cheeseburger Deluxe and the Mexican Plate, but it is a hard choice to make. Look around to see what anyone else is eating. No one else is eating. The bartender puts my beer on the bar in front of me. Small chips of ice stick to the side of the bottle, water runs down in little streams onto the bar. My mouth is very dry.
"What's good tonight?" I say. Trying to be cheery and optimistic through my road daze.
"Well," the bartender says, "The chili is usually a crowd pleaser."
I look at him again. He is a very big guy. Hair sprouting out all places. A scar across his forehead, making a lighter trail across his ebony skin. His head sits directly on his shoulders.
"Chili, then," I say, "thanks."
He moves away behind the bar and pulls a lid off a big pot sitting on a gas stove back there. Steam comes up out of the pot and for a second he looks like a mountain in the mist. Just like those Smoky Mountains in western North Carolina. You wake up early for no good reason and there’s sun in your window, just a little sun. So you get up and throw some pants and shoes on and a flannel shirt over your tee shirt and you put some coffee in the coffee maker and while it’s steaming and gurgling you open up the door to the log cabin and step outside and you’re on an island. I mean last night you went to bed and you were on top of a mountain and now this morning you’re on an island only it’s not water all around you it’s fog. They say fog is just very low clouds, and I guess that’s what it is. You’re standing there looking out over the tops of the clouds that fill in all the valleys below you and just here and there is a mountain tall enough to stick out of the top. So you walk around to the other side of the cabin where you know that really big mountain is. And there it is sitting out there in the fog and clouds and you can see the black trees in the fog. You wait a few minutes and then the clouds start breaking up as the sun gets higher, and you can see more and more of the mountain and the clouds look whispier and gather into clumps before they disappear altogether. That’s what the bartender looks like with the steam from the chili pot all around his head.
I’m reserving judgment on that analogy.
The bartender puts the lid back on the pot. There’s a bowl with steam rising from it in his hand. The bowl goes on a plate and on the way back he grabs up some tortillas from a stack nearby and puts them on the plate. He picks up a spoon and a handful of paper napkins. I put some bills on the bar next to my beer. Seems that places I stop at, most of them, people feel more comfortable if I pay up front. I’m obviously not some rich tourist, and I’m not a local. Maybe they think I’m just some guy who might eat a meal and try to skip. Doesn’t matter, I don’t have a problem with it.
The bartender pulls enough money to cover the beer and chili out of the pile and smiles when I tell him to keep the change.
Behind me the noise and commotion in the bar rises and falls in waves and I just pretend it is the ocean back there. I eat the chili, which is excellent, and the tortillas, which are a little stale. Dipped in the chili they are fine.
When I am done I push the bowl away and turn to watch the rest of the patrons, who seem determined to be entertaining, but my mind is cloudy, and it is like watching TV, nothing really sinking in.
* * *
The night is cooling off, finally. People are leaving; the bar looks less and less crowded every minute, though I swear I never see anyone actually leaving.
The bartender comes over with his rag and wipes in front of me. I lift my bottle for him.
"You Frank?" I say.
"That's me." Frank says. He nods and wipes the counter.
"From the states?" I say. Take a sip of beer. Have to tip the bottle way up to get the last of it.
"Raleigh, South Carolina." Frank says. He points with his finger like pretending to shoot at my bottle and lifts his eyebrows. I shake my head, put the bottle down.
"Been here long?" I say.
"Since '75" Frank says.
I nod, look around the room.
"Know anyplace decent and cheap to stay?" I say. When I look back the beer bottle is gone.
"How cheap?" Frank says. He shakes his towel out. Starts folding it neatly.
"Twenty a night?" I say.
He’s staring at me, but not really at me, more like he’s staring through me. I resist the urge to look behind me.
"La Feliz Iguana,” Frank says. “Down the road about 2 klicks."
I nod.
“Sounds good,” I say, “Thanks.
I turn away, looking for a distraction.
"How come nobody plays your pinball?" I say. Slide off the stool and go over to it. It is a Williams OXO, from the late '60's. One of my old favorites.
"Broke." Frank says.
"Want it fixed?" I say.
No answer. I look over there. Frank is standing at the end of the bar, polishing a glass, looking down. His face in the dim light is like a silhouette, no features, just outline. Then the parentheses of his eyes flash up.
"You can do that?" he says.
"Probably." I say.
"Huh." he says. Parentheses go away.
"Tomorrow?" I say.
"Okay," he says, "Sure." Nods that silhouette head up and down, wiping the glass.
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