Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

Okay, go
.
I was very late getting to work. My sister and I had done a
foolish thing when we both moved back home. We had
done what we always talked about doing. We opened a
bar. We borrowed money from Amy to do this, eighty
thousand dollars, which was once nothing to Amy but by
then was almost everything. I swore I would pay her back,
with interest. I would not be a man who borrowed from his
wife – I could feel my dad twisting his lips at the very idea.
Well, there are all kinds of men
, his most damning phrase,
the second half left unsaid, 
and you are the wrong kind
.
But truly, it was a practical decision, a smart business

---

move. Amy and I both needed new careers; this would be
mine. She would pick one someday, or not, but in the
meantime, here was an income, made possible by the last
of Amy’s trust fund. Like the McMansion I rented, the bar
featured symbolically in my childhood memories – a place
where only grown-ups go, and do whatever grown-ups do.
Maybe that’s why I was so insistent on buying it after being
stripped of my livelihood. It’s a reminder that I am, after all,
an adult, a grown man, a useful human being, even though I
lost the career that made me all these things. I won’t make
that mistake again: The once plentiful herds of magazine
writers would continue to be culled – by the Internet, by the
recession, by the American public, who would rather watch
TV or play video games or electronically inform friends that,
like, 
rain sucks!
But there’s no app for a bourbon buzz on a
warm day in a cool, dark bar. The world will always want a
drink.
Our bar is a corner bar with a haphazard, patchwork
aesthetic. Its best feature is a massive Victorian backbar,
dragon heads and angel faces emerging from the oak – an
extravagant work of wood in these shitty plastic days. The
remainder of the bar is, in fact, shitty, a showcase of the
shabbiest design offerings of every decade: an
Eisenhower-era linoleum floor, the edges turned up like
burnt toast; dubious wood-paneled walls straight from a
’70s home-porn video; halogen floor lamps, an accidental
tribute to my 1990s dorm room. The ultimate effect is
strangely homey – it looks less like a bar than someone’s
benignly neglected fixer-upper. And jovial: We share a
parking lot with the local bowling alley, and when our door
swings wide, the clatter of strikes applauds the customer’s

---

entrance.
We named the bar The Bar. ‘People will think we’re
ironic instead of creatively bankrupt,’ my sister reasoned.
Yes, we thought we were being clever New Yorkers –
that the name was a joke no one else would really get, not
get like we did. Not 
meta
-get. We pictured the locals
scrunching their noses: Why’d you name it 
The Bar
? But
our first customer, a gray-haired woman in bifocals and a
pink jogging suit, said, ‘I like the name. Like in 
Breakfast at
Tiffany’s
and Audrey Hepburn’s cat was named Cat.’
We felt much less superior after that, which was a
good thing.
I pulled into the parking lot. I waited until a strike
erupted from the bowling alley – 
thank you, thank you,
friends
– then stepped out of the car. I admired the
surroundings, still not bored with the broken-in view: the
squatty blond-brick post office across the street (now
closed on Saturdays), the unassuming beige office building
just down the way (now closed, period). The town wasn’t
prosperous, not anymore, not by a long shot. Hell, it wasn’t
even original, being one of two Carthage, Missouris – ours
is technically 
North
Carthage, which makes it sound like a
twin city, although it’s hundreds of miles from the other and
the lesser of the two: a quaint little 1950s town that bloated
itself into a basic midsize suburb and dubbed it progress.
Still, it was where my mom grew up and where she raised
me and Go, so it had some history. Mine, at least.
As I walked toward the bar across the concrete-and-
weed parking lot, I looked straight down the road and saw
the river. That’s what I’ve always loved about our town: We
aren’t built on some safe bluff overlooking the Mississippi –

---

we are 
on
the Mississippi. I could walk down the road and
step right into the sucker, an easy three-foot drop, and be
on my way to Tennessee. Every building downtown bears
hand-drawn lines from where the river hit during the Flood
of ’61, ’75, ’84, ’93, ’07, ’08, ’11. And so on.
The river wasn’t swollen now, but it was running
urgently, in strong ropy currents. Moving apace with the
river was a long single-file line of men, eyes aimed at their
feet, shoulders tense, walking steadfastly nowhere. As I
watched them, one suddenly looked up at me, his face in
shadow, an oval blackness. I turned away.
I felt an immediate, intense need to get inside. By the
time I’d gone twenty feet, my neck bubbled with sweat. The
sun was still an angry eye in the sky. 
You have been seen
.
My gut twisted, and I moved quicker. I needed a drink.

---