Before Lily could even open her mouth to answer, one of the guys at the bar quite calmly got up, lifted the guy next to him bodily two feet off the ground, and threw him on top of anearby table, which broke in half like a dry graham cracker. Immediately, it was team bar against team table, with everyone from scholarly little nerds to bluff neighborhood types to ex–football players gone to fat, along with a few suited wannabe hoodlums, flooding across the room to join the fray.
Until now, the fights I’d seen involved no more than a little bluster, some pushing and shoving, lots of sweating and slurring and swearing. They were nothing like this. Stripped to her undies, Dovey jumped off the stage and vanished. Kelly charged into the melee like Goliath, but promptly ended up on his butt on the floor. I put out my hand to Nell, who jumped up on her barstool. A guy grabbed her by the shoulder, and I picked up my ice water pitcher and threw it in his face. Nell scuttled over the bar and hid behind me. I pulled both of us down onto the floor, which was just what Lily had told me to do in the event. When she said that, during my interview, I thought she was just being dramatic. I glanced up, and there was Sam. What was Sam doing here? Of all times? I was so caught up in the action that I couldn’t even compose myself to decide if I should run to him or ignore him.
He was, however, ignoring me. He was mesmerized. Nobody’s idea of a street-fighting man, he was clearly as fascinated as I was by the willingness of testosterone-fueled men, ordinary men who had jobs and paid taxes, to go batshit crazy over something that had nothing to do with anyone except the original battlers—if even with them. He would later tell me that he had never been in a physical fight, even on an athletic field, but that he almost admired the complete abandon of the combatants.
They huffed and grappled and bellowed, their faces mottled with effort and booze, throwing wild roundhouse punches, only the tiniest percentage of which landed, and those with no visible harm.
It was fun for them. It was fun for me in all honesty. Nell’s eyes glittered. She was getting the full dark-side extravaganza.
It quickly got serious. One guy got hit and went down hard.He struggled to his knees, a cut on his head and one on his lip that bled histrionically. That guy’s friend began to pound the one who threw the punch and soon his nose was a pulp, and he was unconscious on the floor. Two other guys waded into the fray.
“Cut it out!” Lily yelled. “Stop!” In response, still another guy broke a beer bottle and advanced, holding it like a knife, taking swipes at the guts of anyone who came near him.
Then, suddenly, all the overhead lights switched on. It was like pulling a sheet off a corpse. The wreckage of broken glass, blood, smashed food, spilled drinks, stained and dropping wallpaper was exposed. The brawlers stood up straight, or pulled themselves up off the floor, and scuttled away like beetles. Some of them bumped into police who were coming through the door, probably as insurance against the chance that some few customers might want to pursue a drunken beef. One of the uniformed police called out, “Lovely Lily Landry! How are you doing, partner?”
“It’s the finest! Better now you’re here, Rambo!” she called back. This was evidently a private joke.
It was when Jack came in that I noticed he was handsome in the way that Sam was: compact, dark-haired, not a large man but graceful, immaculate, capable, quietly classy. I didn’t know if it was Sam’s brief on him that prompted the next thing I noticed, which was that he was also something Sam was not—dangerous. He said to the battlers, who were still wandering around as if they’d just been roughly roused from a nap, “Get out of my club.”
A police officer knelt next to the more aggressive of the bleeders, applying pressure with a bar towel. “He needs an ambulance,” he said. As if they’d heard their cue, paramedics burst through the door.
Jack asked Lily if she or anyone else were hurt, putting a comforting hand on her wrist when she shook her head. He then turned to me. “If it isn’t Irene, a good bartender, a bad fake, a nosy writer,” he said affably. “Who is this?”
“This is my sister, Eleanor,” I told him. I plucked up my nerve. “I would love to speak with you about my friend Felicity Wild, who as you know...”
“Yes. A terrible circumstance. A lovely and intelligent woman. And yes, of course, I’ll talk to you. I’m an open book.”
I doubted that. Further, I was stunned by his agreeable response. We made a date for coffee the following day, as Sam, clearly astonished, said nothing. As if they’d been waiting outside the door for our conversation to end, a burly crew of cleaners with shovels and buckets and wheely bins rolled in. I overheard Jack say that the club would be open for business at the usual time.
I told Lily that I would return the next day, in the early afternoon, to fill out my last time sheet and turn in my black vest with the monogrammed pocket of the busty woman in silhouette. I told Lily how that vest, which I wore over my black shirt from Target, had drawn some stares at the coffee shop—and that I’d made the mistake of grumpily assuming that people were openly gaping at my bosom. She laughed a little then and turned back to brushing broken glass off the bar.
I then approached Sam and asked, “What are you doing? I mean, I’m glad you’re here but...”
“I wanted to tell you something, and when you didn’t answer, I got scared,” he said.
“What did you want to tell me?”
He gestured at the ruin of the room and said, “Well, for some odd reason, Reenie, it just doesn’t spring to mind at the moment. And you’re obviously okay.”
He murmured that he’d be in touch and turned to leave. I wanted to chase him down, but didn’t have time because Nell was in full marvel mode.
“Wow,” Nell said, as we headed for the door. “Just wow. Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, sister! I was flipping scared off my ass. You just don’t imagine a joint like this in a nerdy little city like Madison,huh? And you were just so cool, Reenie, so ‘hey, no problem!’” For some reason, I was reminded of times when we were little, awakened at night by one of those Wisconsin thunderstorms where lightning flashes strobed and cymbalic crashes split the air every two minutes, nights when Nell came running to my room, tucking her cold feet under my knees and her cold hands under my back.
Since everyone had fled the brawl, my sister’s was the only car left in the lot.
All four tires were flat, not just flat, but on closer inspection, slashed. I wanted to charge back inside and face Jack. But I realized that wouldn’t be prudent... that this was a message to me. I said as much.
Nell was outraged. She babied her five-year-old Honda Accord, a graduation gift from our parents. She yelled now, “A message to the tune of hundreds of dollars! Those tires are only a year old!”
“I don’t think it will cost that much,” I said, as, just then, a tow truck pulled into the lot. The driver asked for Eleanor or Irene Bigelow. We nodded in unison. He then asked if it was okay to replace the damaged tires now. As he set about doing that, Nell signed the proffered receipt.
“You ordered new tires?” Nell asked me. “What, did you know this was going to happen?”
“Of course I didn’t order new tires! And of course I didn’t know this was going to happen. I think it was Jack who ordered new tires,” I said. “From the look of them, brand-new tires.” I also commented “What the fuck?” or words to that effect.
Nell said, “You were already quitting. What was the warning? Was it about Felicity? And next time, is he going to cut your throat, or my throat, instead of some car tires?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t know the answer.
