The Hat

 

By Kyle Heger

 

Rain was coming down hard enough to drown a crab when the tour bus pulled up in front of the Sea Daisy Inn. Not the kind of weather for sight seeing, or for tooling around hair-pin curves in a monster that size. Mud slides have been known to cave half the highway into the Pacific when it pours down like that. But, the way I figured it, mortality was the last thing on the minds of the passengers aboard that bus. After all, death doesn’t mix so well with an itinerary long on sticking your noses into bouquets of dried flowers, getting your hands on herbal bath salts and slopping up as many of the local arts and craps as your credit lines will tolerate.

 

The first thing you have to understand if you want to get any notion of this town is this: The place is cut in half.

 

One half is all bed-and-breakfast signs, fresh paint and false fronts. It’s their part of town, the part the tour-bus crowd passes through in an afternoon or a weekend.

 

The other half is ours. It’s where the rest of us eat, and drink and sleep our lives away, those of us who’ve never left, those of us who’ve returned defeated. This is where we live — the out-of-work fishermen, the out-of-work loggers, even the occasional out-of-work school teacher — nursing grudges, gloating over the town’s heritage of prosperity and independence that was never really ours to begin with. As if any of those rich bastards that sailed in here on those dog-hole schooners at the turn of the century would have taken the time to do anything but raise their hind legs and piss on people like us. As if, working in the timber fields, we could have got anything but misery from the misery whips, or been anything but screwed by the donkey screws.

 

To tell you the truth, these two parts of town aren’t really halves anymore. Ours is more like one quarter ... and shrinking. It’s being eaten alive.

 

I guess that’s the way it should be. Their side has the money. Their side has the future.

 

“It’s a perfect example of evolution,”  I might have explained to my class of high-school science students a decade earlier, through the fog of a three-martini lunch, providing the bible thumpers hadn’t taken everybody out of my class (not because of the drinking, but because of the teaching). “If you can’t adapt, you die.”

 

Even if it is the way it should be, that doesn’t mean we have to like it. We sit back on our rusty bar stools with our snoots full of cheap liquor, railing against the outsiders. As they stroll by outside the window of the Holdfast Bar and Grill, we take aim with our fingers, cock and fire. But our fingers fire blanks these days.

 

One thing that’s really got us beat is our knowledge that, even in here, where we’re on our own turf, we’re losing more ground each year, like the bluffs around these parts that continue to pay an annual allotment of rock and soil to the sea. Because, even in here, there are two kinds of people. The ones who’ll eventually end up over on the other side as bus boys or delivery men or janitors, latched on like limpets, driven by greed or just simple hunger. And the ones who’ll wind up disappearing up north out of reach, forced on by prices that are too high and work that’s too scarce.

 

So, maybe we can’t be blamed for being less than hospitable when we saw the stranger making his way across the muddy street from the Sea Daisy toward our little hole in the wall. Maybe.

 

It isn’t often someone makes that particular trip, from the kind of place where they give you mints on your pillow and fresh silverware with every course to the kind of place where you’d consider yourself lucky to find a roll of toilet paper in the rest room.

 

But there was more to it than that. There was something about the stranger himself that raised our hackles the moment we saw him.

 

At first I couldn’t put my finger on it. My view through the rain-streaked window wasn’t so great, but his build, his walk, his clothes, all  seemed pretty ordinary to me, nondescript even — the kind that would fit in here, across the street or anywhere.

 

What was it then that made our gazes all lock on him, our heads swivel to keep him in view as he approached as if we just couldn’t believe what we saw?

 

“Get a load of that damn hat!” the voice of one of my fellow patrons barked in answer to my unspoken question as the stranger hove into clearer view.

 

The hat really was something, I could see now. A lot of hats have crossed the threshold of the Holdfast. There was a motley assortment there that very day: baseball caps advertising one thing or another, stocking caps, old straw numbers with broken brims. But I had never seen one like this before. “Outlandish” might be the right word.

 

It was impossible to say exactly what kind it had started out as. From one angle it looked a bit like — what do you call them? — one of those fedoras that Humphrey Bogart used to wear in gangster movies. Then again, you could take it for a cowboy hat ... or a Panama ... or anything. It could have come from another century. Another country. Hell, another planet.

 

You couldn’t tell what color or shape it was, or what material it was cut from. In fact, the only thing you could say for sure was that it was the biggest damn hat you’d ever seen. The brim hung far over the stranger’s face, hiding his features. The crown stuck way up, so high that, as he climbed onto the wooden walkway outside the bar, it almost scraped the drizzling overhang.

 

“By God, you could take a bath in that thing!” said the same voice, which belonged to old Slappy Bridgeport, who was stationed at his usual post next to the spittoon, his back against the wall, two chair legs off the floor, keeping his balance there morning, noon and night.

 

The hat should have been comical but we weren’t laughing.

 

Our eyes stayed trained on the stranger as he knocked a clump of mud from one boot, pushed open the door and entered The Holdfast to the accompaniment of rusty bells.

 

Perched there ringside on the old bar stool, the one autographed long ago by my butt, I probably had the best seat in the house for getting a good look at the stranger. But I wasn’t expecting to make much of a profit scalping a ticket to that particular seat. It wasn’t just the hat itself that made the gooseflesh come creeping up my arm like some kind of dry rot, it was something else — my feeling that you could stick just about any age or career or character to this guy and make it fit. Any or none at all. He put me in mind of one of those rocks or pieces of wood the sea has been chewing on so long all the sharp edges and colors have been worn clean away. Even his expression, if you can call it that, had that feel to it. He didn’t look any happier or sadder or madder than a kelp bladder does, and his cold blue eyes seemed to be looking out at a whole lot of nothing as he stood there.

 

Conversation stopped. Some of us watched him from the corners of our eyes.

Others threw looks full in his face, like dirty rags. But we all sat ... listening. And I’ll be damned if every man among us couldn’t hear the drops of rain falling from the brim of the stranger’s hat to the dusty floor. Maybe I’ll be damned anyway.

 

At the time, I don’t think any of us knew what we were waiting for. But now, the answer seems obvious: We were waiting for him to take off that hat.

 

Now, it’s not as if we’re a particularly polite bunch down at the Holdfast. You’ll see a hat on the rack in these parts about as often as you’d find a glass of Chardonnay on the bar. Hell, if the good old boys don’t take them off in church, they’re sure not going to take them off here.

 

But somehow we expected him to remove his.

 

For one thing, I don’t think it even occurred to us that the hat could be anything more than a necessity a body would endure no longer than the time it took him to come in out of the rain.

 

For another thing, the stranger would have had to have been blind and deaf and worse not to know how peculiar it looked.          

 

It drew attention the way a lightening rod draws electricity.

 

We wouldn’t have expected him to keep it on any more than we would have expected one of those leather boys from San Francisco to plop himself down on a bar stool and give us the finger right in our faces, or a Scotsmen to come marching in, hike up his kilt and do the Can-Can.

 

And when he ambled over to the bar, pulled back a stool, sat down and pointed to a bottle of beer, all without so much as making a move to take that thing off his head, you would have thought from the expressions on the faces in there that he’d just made a declaration of war.

 

Behind his bar, Skipper hesitated, his fat fist and a gray towel stuck in a mug.

 

Something hung in the balance right then. Anger was all around us, ready at any minute to curdle into hate. You could taste it. And fear. Not the stranger’s fear. No, he remained completely expressionless, as if all our gazes weren’t fixed right on the bulls-eye we’d painted on his back. This fear came from someplace else, from deep within the pores of the wood paneling, from deep within ourselves — a fear of the past, a fear of the future, a fear of the unknown.

 

But without a particular person to work through, it looked like the anger and fear would just remain hanging there in the air like a bad smell.

 

The mug seemed heavy in Skipper’s hand as he set it down in front of the stranger. The bottle seemed heavy as he lifted it from a cooler, opened it and poured it into the mug. Hell, even the towel seemed heavy as he walked back over by me and began to sweep it across the bar, rearranging the dirt.

 

The stranger took a swig. In the back of the bar, one of the regulars drew a deep breath. Conversation started slowly up again, like an overloaded logging truck fighting the Townsend Grade in third gear.

 

For a moment, I could almost believe the flow of life at the Holdfast would return to normal. The stranger would finish off his drink in peace, leave and be forgotten.

 

But then the anger found its voice.

 

“Nice hat,” it said in a high-pitched, nasal buzz, the kind a circular saw makes when it’s cutting against the grain or when it hits some object that wasn’t meant to be buried there in the wood.

 

You’ve heard the tone before. Sarcastic enough to peel paint off a dry-docked boat. You’ve heard it on school grounds, in gas stations, on street corners: “Nice house ... Nice car ... Nice face ... Nice wife.” Wherever the pack has assembled. Wherever court is in session. The voice of the jackal. The jester. The creep.

 

In this case, the voice belonged to something we called “The Squeak,” a small boney specimen with yellow teeth and graying whiskers who sat in a corner with a bottle of whiskey between his legs, wiping something from his nose.

 

The Squeak was one of those creatures that always seem to be around, that can live anywhere — the Mohave, the Antarctic, The South China Sea — that you cannot exterminate and that will never go extinct.

 

You have vague memories of them, memories almost from before you were born, like a dinosaur’s memory of some hairy thing that came crawling around while it was still in its shell, making a meal of its brothers and sisters.

 

You remember avoiding them in school, bunking with them in the army, bumping into them during your shift at the factory ... but you can’t quite tell where they spend their nights or how they make ends meet. They are parasites that feed on the weak and suck up to the strong, objects of abuse that endure the disdain heaped on them just so they can be allowed the dubious privilege of hanging about the edges of the mob and living off its scraps.

 

There are some people who’d say Squeaks are the lowest form of life. But, in my book, it’s a toss-up between them and the ones who give the old thumbs-up to acts of violence and self destruction, who sit back smugly and nudge each other, encouraging the Squeaks with laughter, daring them, praising them, then shaking their heads after the smoke has cleared and asking, “When will they learn?”

 

Or maybe the lowest are the ones who just sit in silence, without taking sides, without lifting a finger to stop what they see coming, without so much as spinning their bar stools in protest. The ones like me.

 

The stranger hadn’t stirred, except to slowly set his drink back down.

 

The bar had gone silent again. Noise had drained from it faster than dirty water from a buckshot rain barrel. All except for snickers coming from the back of the room, magnified in the hollow wells of beer mugs, whispers, and the sound of Slappy’s two chair legs settling back to the floor. And if you knew Slappy, you’d know that wasn’t a step he took lightly.

 

The Squeak rose and lurched unsteadily toward the bar, hanging onto the half-empty bottle as if it were full of ballast. “It’s oil. You know, to keep my voice from rusting up on me any more,” was his standing joke. Or maybe “falling-down joke” would be more like it.

 

“Hey, you!” he rasped at the stranger’s back.

 

There was no response.

 

The Squeak scratched his thinning hair and grimaced.

 

“Hey, you!” he repeated. When he still got no answer, he turned around to his audience and frowned. He looked like the little monkey they used to have at the roadside zoo up the coast, one they kept locked up so long in a dirty cage it turned crazy, always wrinkling up its face, baring its teeth for no particular reason, its features constantly in motion, throwing lumps of shit out at the spectators.

 

“Habla Mexicanish? Sprachen ze sauerkraut? Is you deaf? Am you dumb? I’m not just talking to myself, Boy. Do you know who I am talking to?”

 

The Squeak bent down to peer into the faces of the people he called friends, subjecting them to the litmus test of his breath, shuffling from one to the other and saying, “Is it you? No, I’m not talking to you, Slappy ... You? No, not you ... or you ... or you.” After each person, he’d take a pull from the bottle, wipe his mouth and cackle to half-spoken words of encouragement.

 

He went all around the room until he stood again directly behind the stranger.

 

“No, sir!” he shouted. “I’m not speaking to them. I’m speaking to you. And I’m saying, ‘Nice hat!’” And this time, he accentuated each word by poking his grimy finger in the small of the stranger’s back.

 

“Observe, class, the oldest trick in the book,” I directed my nonexistent students who thronged the bar. As it turned out, they paid as much attention as the real things ever had. “The flight-or-fight syndrome, an animal’s response to danger. And yes, Mary Jane, man is an animal, no matter what the preacher says. Why, the Reverend himself is an animal as sure as that bulge in his pocket that greets you when you come in to church wearing one of those short skirts is something other than a hymnal.

 

“Now watch. Take notes. In the face of a threat, this fellow, this stranger, has basically two options. Flight or fight. Now, old Squeak here might not seem like much of a threat. And, by himself, he isn’t. But he’s got the whole pack behind him. And when they smell fresh blood, there’s no telling what they’ll do. When it’s 30-to-one odds, I’ve got my money on flight every time.”

 

Usually you can see which option a fellow’s fixing to take, just by looking at him. You can tell by the set of his shoulders, the look in his eyes, even by the air around him — whether it’s rancid with fear or electric with anger. But the stranger didn’t give any indication he had heard any of what had been said or that he had felt the finger poking at him. I had the idea his senses just weren’t working right, like some central nervous connection had been cut. Or like he was dead but somehow still moving around.  It wouldn’t have surprised me much to see him drag a carving knife through his arm without so much as flinching. He just lifted up his glass and took another drink.

 

I could tell The Squeak wasn’t taking any chances. He was hopping around in place so fast I thought he’d wet himself, getting ready for anything, either to high-tail it back to the far end of the bar in case the stranger decided to make a stand, or to go racing after him if the stranger decided to go to ground, pointing out which way the prey had gone like a beat-up hunting dog so the more enterprising men in the group could get their licks in.

 

The Squeak was so worked up, he reared back, squeezing out that voice of his again for everything he was worth. It sounded like what comes out of a busted harmonica.

 

“I ... said ... ‘Nice ... hat!’” he rattled, his voice deteriorating into a fit of coughs that left him doubled up and gasping for breath. He almost didn’t make it there for a minute, his coughs getting all mixed up with laughs and belches and great whooping gasps for air. I’ll say this for the little fart, though, he never let go of that bottle, even though there was only about a swallow left by then.

 

By the time he had straightened up and dried his eyes on an unbuttoned shirt sleeve, ready to turn his attentions on his victim again, the stranger had spun slowly around on his bar stool and was looking him straight in the eye with that numb look still spread out all over his face.

 

“You take it,” the stranger said. And, yes, his voice was as worn down and flat and indistinct as the rest of him was, at least from the hat down. Not a trace of anger or fear or mockery or anything.

 

I’m no mind reader, thank God. But I’m sure these were the last words anybody in the bar expected to come out of that mouth. I know I practically lost the liquor I’d just downed, which is something I wouldn’t even do at gunpoint. I guess I would have lost if I’d bet on either flight or fight. Somehow or other, the stranger seemed to have found a way to avoid both alternatives. But I sure as hell didn’t know at the time where it all was leading.

 

“What?” howled The Squeak. “What did you say? ‘Take it?’ Take what? You can’t be talking about that!” He pointed a shaking finger at the hat, then spun back around to face his audience. “Have you ever heard the like?” he asked.

 

The crowd laughed.

 

But you could tell something had changed in its laughter.

 

It was still ugly. It still sounded hungry. But now it didn’t sound exactly particular about its diet.

 

“Why the hell would I want a moth-eaten, bird-shitten, mold-buggered, shapeless son of a bitch like that on my head for?” The Squeak asked. Coming from him, it was almost poetry. As if he’d just scored some kind of victory, he did his version of an Indian war dance, stomping his feet, raising his hand back and forth in front of his mouth and whooping. I’m sure his performance wouldn’t have won any awards from our local Native American activists. I guess he was still trying to get a rise out of the stranger.

 

But that was more than just a bit like trying to get a rise out of a totem pole.

 

The stranger waited until The Squeak, antics finished, stood sagging over the bar, sweat slicking back his hair, panting, his red eyes glazed over from spending so much of his vocabulary and burning so many of his calories at one time, but still hanging onto that bottle, as if his life depended on it, which in some ways it probably did.

 

The stranger repeated in that one-note voice of his the same three words: “You take it.”

 

Then he got up. It took him a long time to do it. He was bigger than I’d noticed at first. Or maybe he’d grown. Of course that’s impossible ... but you never can tell.

 

The Squeak backed up, blinking, his eyes growing wide in the stranger’s shadow.

 

“And what if I don’t want a take it?” said the Squeak, standing on tiptoes. “If you plan to try to make me take it, you’d better look again. I’ve got a lot of friends in this room.”

 

“Where might those be, Squeak? You’d better introduce us to em,” came a response from the back of the room.

 

“What’s the matter, Squeak?” another voice asked. “With a mouth that big, I didn’t think it was possible to bite off more than you could chew.”

 

“I know I’ve probably taxed more than my meager share of your patience, class, but please bear with me and turn your attention now to the behavior of the pack,” I instructed my imaginary pupils. “First, be so kind as to unscrew the lid from that mason jar and slide it down so teacher can have a snort of formaldehyde. The bartender seems a mite preoccupied right about now, and I could sure stand to wet my whistle. Never mind the fetus in there, Jimmy Joe. It’s just a little old pig that never got born. Why, just think of it as an onion. Or an olive. If it don’t bother me, then I won’t bother it. And believe me, kiddies, it’s past bothering.

 

“Now, one thing you have to understand about the pack is that  it doesn’t just go after what you might consider its proper prey: the harmless members of other species, for instance. No, sometimes, when one of its own starts to fall behind, comes up lame or can’t pull its own weight anymore, the pack’s not above turning on it. Blood is blood. Meat is meat. And the scent of weakness can get the pack hot on the trail of some nice home cooking.”

 

The Squeak seemed to feel the tables turning in that dark and crowded room. Suddenly, it was his turn to decide: flight or fight? You could almost see those gummed-up wheels spinning in his head as he tried to figure out on which side of that question his self interest lay.

 

On the one hand, if The Squeak up and ran, he’d have half the Holdfast at his heels, laughing and joking, and ready for the kind of fun that can easily end up with a few broken ribs. It wouldn’t be the first time he had got on the wrong side of the crowd. At the best, he’d never be able to show his face in the bar again, leastways not without a few good bruises on it as the price of admission.

 

On the other hand, his prospects of coming up on top in a fight with the stranger weren’t exactly rosy. The stranger looked like he was as tough as shoe leather and had about six inches and maybe 40 pounds on his opponent.

 

Maybe, at last, The Squeak figured out, in some dim, primitive part of his brain, the part that was maybe just one step or two in front of the crazy roadside-zoo monkey, that if the stranger could opt out of the whole flight-or-fight choice, he could too.

 

I believe he was hoping for a stand off, as he pulled himself up to his full height, — all five foot five of it, if I’m any judge — took a step toward the stranger, looked him square in the eye and said,  “I may be small, but that don’t mean I’m easy to take.”

 

It was probably the bravest thing The Squeak ever did. It should have been his moment in the sun. But it turned out to be just another opportunity for a cheap shot.

 

“It’s a sure bet nobody ever accused you of being easy to take before,” one of the local wits contributed.

 

“Yeah, don’t worry, Squeak,” commented another. “You’ve got one of them there natural defenses. Stink bugs don’t get ate cause they taste so bad!”

 

Everybody laughed. Everybody except The Squeak, the stranger, and me. An uneasy feeling had come  over me that didn’t really incline me to laugh. If I’d had any sense at all, I probably would have paid my bill and left then and there. Screw it, I shouldn’t even have bothered with the bill. But something kept me there ... some kind of fascination. Morbid, I guess you’d call it. Like the curiosity that glues passersby to their windows as they snail by a really spectacular road kill.

 

The two of them just stood there, eye to eye, so to speak. Or eye to chest. Then you could see The Squeak start to tremble all over, going weak in the knees, and it wasn’t just a well-trained observer of the human species like me that could tell he was going to come apart at the seams any second.

 

You might look at what The Squeak did then as just being a case of taking the path of least resistance, giving into the demand ... or request ... of the stranger’s three words. Or you could look at it as an inspiration, because it still wasn’t exactly flight or fight. Maybe it was his way of trying to hang onto the last shreds of his dignity, or what might have passed for them at midnight during a full lunar eclipse and a complete power blackout.

 

No matter how you look at it, the fact is that The Squeak slowly and deliberately reached out and put his hands on that hat.

 

I can still see it in detail, too much detail. I can see the beads of sweat pop out all over The Squeak’s face as his hands rise slowly through the thick air. I can see the Adam’s apple bob up and down on his hairy little throat. I can see his fingers tremble as they touch the brim of the hat, jerk back as if they have received an electric shock, then grasp the brim again. I can see the little fellow share a sick grin with the rest of us as he stands there with his hands stuck to the hat, hesitating, trying to look like he is enjoying the joke as much as the next guy.

 

But by this point, no one else was laughing. They weren’t laughing and they weren’t eating or drinking or chewing tobacco or shooting the shit or whistling Dixie. They were all just plain watching.

 

All this time, the stranger stood silently, his back toward me. He didn’t move a muscle, just stood there with no more movement than something carved from burl wood, his hands hanging by his sides.

 

Then, all of a sudden, the hat was off his head. It was in mid-air. It was settling on The Squeak’s oily hair.

 

I don’t know what we had been waiting for. Fireworks? Explosions? The stranger to draw a gun or a knife?

 

But we sure were waiting for something ... some unfinished business we felt throbbing in the sour little room.

 

Feet shuffled. Throats got cleared. Watches ticked.

 

Finally, The Squeak broke the silence with a whoop and lit into action. I’d thought the dance he’d done earlier had been wild but it was nothing compared to this display. His feet kicked against that old wood floor so fast they must have violated about a hundred fire codes. Whatever it was The Squeak himself had been expecting when the stranger took that hat off, it must have been awful bad, because now that nothing bad had happened, he acted like a man who gets a letter from the governor right as they’re strapping him into the electric saddle. A good letter ... not one of those that says, “Wish I was there to see you fry.”

 

Wearing that thing on his head and doing that dance, he looked like something out of a lunatic’s nightmare.

 

Shouts went up. Cat calls. Jeers. I could have sworn there were even a few gulls’ cries thrown in for good measure. You know how those birds call out, ugly and shrill, when they think they’ve been deprived of something they deserve: fish guts or a three-day old crust of bread.

 

“Well, I’ll be ...” The Squeak shouted over the racket, not knowing, I’m sure, whether all the uproar was because the regulars of the Holdfast were proud of him or sorry they hadn’t seen him laid low. “It fits!”

 

He turned a fevered look upon the stranger and said, all wired up and twitching, “Now you ain’t gonna turn Injun giver on me now are you, Stretch?” his fingers stroking the worn brim. “Because I’ve got a good mind to keep this old thing ... so ....”

 

But the stranger wasn’t listening. He wasn’t standing. The instant that hat was snatched off his head, he began swaying from side to side, like the hat had been the only thing that had been keeping him up.

 

Now he was rocking over the way one of them great big old lightening-struck coast redwoods that have been standing up over the centuries, all charred and hollowed out, will sometimes as it goes crashing to the ground at the first kiss of a saw blade.  Before anyone even got the chance to holler, “Timber!” he was crashing into tables and chairs, breaking bottles and glasses and landing full-length in the rubble.

You didn’t have to be an M.D. to know he was dead. I’ve never seen anyone deader, his blue eyes staring harder than ever at nothing. The funny thing was that the part of his head that been hidden under the hat looked just as ordinary as the rest of him did. There weren’t any crazy tattoos or disfiguring scars or inexplicable burn marks. It was just the head of a man with slightly thinning straw-colored hair.  

 

The Squeak froze. His antics stopped instantly. His lips hanging open like that put me in mind of a big-mouth bass when it’s been landed and flops about in a world it’s never seen before, slowly suffocating. His eyes stared at the fallen man. His hands moved up to the brim of the hat and began to tug. I guess he wanted to throw it to the stranger. Like he was going to take it all back, make it all right. Like he was guilty of something and wanted to get rid of the evidence.

 

But the hat wouldn’t budge. He tried again, putting everything he had into it. Which wasn’t much. But it sure would have been enough to remove any normal hat. Still it stayed there.

 

“There’s something wrong with this damn hat,” he said,  grinning sickly. “It’s got glue on it or something. Will somebody give me a hand?”

 

He went from one man to another, inclining his head, practically begging them to lay hands on it. But each refused, some with a sad shake of their heads, some with a dirty laugh. He went around the whole bar, as meek and mild as a little mouse now, no smart mouthing, kind of shuffling his feet.

 

“Look, it’s a joke of some kind. A bad one,” he said at last, speaking to everyone with his face all screwed up like he was going to break into tears. “It’s just a damn hat, that’s all. It ain’t gonna hurt none of you just to help me! All I needs is a pair a scissors or a knife, something to get this off with. Anything!”

 

When no one responded, the Squeak closed his mouth with a snapping sound, then opened it again. To ask for help another time. Or curse. Or scream. I don’t know. Nothing came out. He turned to us again. Made a complete 360. But there was no help to be found in the Holdfast. Not then. Not ever.

 

The last we saw of him, he was flying out the door like a you-know-what from you-know-where, still tugging at that hat and bawling for help.

The party line in the three-county area is that he lit out of here to avoid the authorities because he was afraid he would be implicated in the death of the stranger. Those of us who were in the Holdfast at the time know better. We know the law was the least of his worries.

 

The only thing he left behind was his bottle. It lay on the floor spinning like a compass needle looking for true north. The sad thing was that there were a few drops still in it. Being his friend and all, I didn’t want them to go to waste. I drank them up, and I wished him good fortune into the bargain. I like to help out how I can.

 

***

 

The deputy they sent out was a young guy, from Gualala-way, I think. I remember he used to work the boats sometimes in the summer while he was in high school. I guess he also went to high school while he was in high school, but I don’t remember him from my class. Of course, I don’t remember much of those days. No, my memory’s pretty much shot now. Except for what happened that day in the Holdfast.

 

You could tell the deputy had to kind of force himself to squat down next to the stranger’s body. Given his druthers, he probably would have kicked it over with the tip of his shiny black boot. But there were witnesses.

 

He stayed down there for a couple of minutes, just looking, not touching anything, like he was searching for clues and didn’t want to disturb the evidence. But I wasn’t falling for that. I knew he was just plain scared, new on the job and all. He hadn’t yet built up his calluses peeling speed demons off the bluffs and dragging in the catch of the day  — the floaters that get caught on Finger Point up yonder, the ones knocked overboard by a wave that should have been smaller or tangled in a line that shouldn’t have been there.

 

I guess he figured there might be some sign of trauma on the body: blood, wounds, disfigurement.

 

But when he finally screwed up the courage to flip the body over and the stranger’s face was turned toward us, we could all see there was still nothing out of the ordinary there at all.

 

Unless you count the small smile that had bloomed like some bloody rose in one corner of his mouth. Even that might not have been enough to make you look twice — just the result of a reflex. But what we couldn’t ignore was that that godforsaken smile was still growing. It was getting wider and wider right before our eyes as if the stranger had succeeded in pulling off the joke of the century and was only able to enjoy it now that he was dead. Until I finally jumped off my bar stool and went heading through the doors before it had time to burst into a full-fledged laugh.

 

***

 

We never saw The Squeak again, those of who live down at the Holdfast.

Yes, I still have a berth there. It takes more than a little life, death, and damnation to scrape a barnacle like me off the hull of a bitch like that. You can have my shot glass once you pry my cold dead fingers from it, I always say. Besides, where would I be today if it weren’t for my friends? Other than sober, employed and still happily married, I mean.

 

One fellow from town swears he saw The Squeak take a running dive off the headlands that night, hat and all, and disappear smack dab in the Pacific. Somebody else says they’ve seen him holed up with his mother back up river in that old shack of hers.

 

Me, I’ve got a feeling he’s on a tour bus somewhere, pulling into a small town a lot like ours. Waiting and hoping for someone to give him a chance — a chance just like the one he gave the stranger.

 

But if he’s lucky, he’s already lying dead on some bar-room floor with a big smile blossoming on his face, and some other poor sap’s got that hat on his head.

           

Above published in Aiofe’s Kiss

Copyright Kyle Heger 2005