got drunk, he sat at the bar silently, marinating in his past. All these years later, Rachel could finally sympathize.
She approached him carefully, stood next to him without speaking, as he drank and stared at the cement floor.
“I guess we’re neighbors now,” said Rachel. He glanced at her out of the side of one eye. “I didn’t know you were a fireman.”
“I’m not,” he said.
“How have you been?”
This was met with silence. Bert came from one of the oldest families in Quinn, and certainly the most tragic. He had earned the right to be taciturn.
“Gosh,” said Rachel. “I can’t believe it’s been nine years.”
“Stop talking,” said Bert. Rachel did not want to be seen alone. She remained standing next to him, because he was a native, and that offered her some cover. Bert’s father had been a hunting guide, specializing in finding black bears for drunken, fat assholes from the East Coast, and made thousands of dollars putting down the bears the tourists had grazed with bullets. They were terrible shots and too fat to chase the wounded bears. It was Bert Senior’s job to track them down and finish them off, sever the head or the paw. The souvenir depended on the cost of the package the fat asshole had purchased. Bert Senior left the rest of the body in the woods to rot.
Rachel tried to make small talk again. “I’m really here to talk to my mother,” she admitted. “I knew she’d be here.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” said Bert. Rachel regretted bringing up mothers. When Bert was seventeen, his mother went out to pick mushrooms in an area recently scorched by a small forest fire, and slipped on the new growth, cracking her head open on a bombed-out stump, bleeding to death overnight. The search lasted for a day, and Bert Senior shot himself in the head two hours after the memorial service. Bert had become an orphan in the span of five days. Instead of mourning, Bert had gone shopping. He blew his inheritance on a new truck and a trailer to haul his new speedboat. He forgot to tie it down completely, and it flew through the air as he sped toward the lake, nearly killing the people in the car behind him. A month later, Bert’s new truck and trailer were found upside down in the shallows of the Kootenai River, a truck-size hole blasted through the guardrails of the rickety bridge above. Bert became a cautionary tale, just like Rachel. Bert walked away from the wreck, left it there, knowing that someone else would have to clean up the mess. Rachel could identify with that as well.
Bert finally broke the silence. “I don’t want to be seen with you,” he said. He fled to the rear of the fire hall, and Rachel watched as the crowd parted for him. Enough time had passed that they did not whisper, but it was clear the town still worried that his speedboat of a mind was not completely tied down.
The heaviest drinkers never left the immediate vicinity of the kegs, sunk in garbage cans, slowly settling in their shawls of crushed ice. Rachel spotted groups of Clinkenbeards, Runkles, Giefers, and Dempseys. Ginger Fitchett kicked at a strand of crepe paper that had fallen from the ceiling, and lit a long and thin cigarette, the sole person in Quinn who smoked that brand. Ginger was the richest woman in town, owner of the Sinclair, the town’s only gas station. She was drinking a wine cooler with Martha Man Hands, her longtime cashier. Martha was a Russell, somehow related to Bert, but her last name was unimportant. Ginger hired Martha and her truly enormous hands twenty years ago, and the nickname had stuck. Those hands and hairy knuckles were hard to ignore, as they handed back change for a twenty, or a corn dog in a greasy paper bag. Rachel’s attention was captured as Tabby Pierce opened her compact, and the fires of the barrels flashed on the tiny mirror. Tabby powdered her forehead, shiny from the heat. Ten years ago, Tabby was hired to replace Rachel at the bar. She was also tangentially related to Bert, a toddler in the car that the airborne speedboat nearly destroyed. Tabby checked her teeth for lipstick and closed her compact, rejoined the noisy crowd. Rachel realized there was an order, groups were determined by genes, marriages, or restraining orders. Rachel’s mother was among them.