Winter · Beaux Bridge, Ohio 

Hanford entered the Blue Sky Café.  He removed his coat and gloves and waited for his eyes to adjust to the low light.  He crossed to the patronless bar behind which the bartender idly worked.  He took a seat, set his wraps upon the stool at his side, and ordered a beer.

“It’s a little early for a beer, isn’t it?” the bartender said.  She sat a glass and a bottle before him.

“Do I look like I give a damn,” Hanford replied with a glare.

The bartender redoubled her guest’s expression.

“Your pretty face doesn’t go with such a rotten disposition,” she answered.

Hanford pushed aside the glass and drank directly from the bottle.  When he put it down, most of the contents were gone.

“What’s your name,” she asked.

“Hanford Stone.”

“Umm.  I have heard of you.”

“Usually my fame follows me, not precedes me,” he replied.  “What’s your name?”

“Shana.”

“Shana who?  Don’t you Ohioans have last names?”

“You’re in a fowl mood for a weekend morning.  You could use a ride in the country,” Shana replied acidly.

“I just tried one.  I never made it.”

His reply came quipped and ended in a silent stare.  Shana matched his gaze until he turned up the remainder of his beer and ordered another.  He turned upon his stool to survey the café.  Two couples conversed over finished breakfasts at tables near the bar.  Another couple across the room ate sandwiches.  In the back, two young men and an older, with dark hair, tested their wits against entertainment machines.

Stretching from the bar, dining tables filled the front of the café.  A couple of pool tables separated the front from the back section where a dance floor and electronic band stand dominated.  The same working-class dinette suites that accommodated dining up front, also circled the dance floor on three sides.  Passage from the bar to the back area occurred along a corridor set between a bank of arcade games that lined the wall and the row of tables that lined the left side of the dance floor.

Hanford heard his beverage slam into the counter top behind him.  He spun around to face the puckered lips of the bartender.

“Isn’t that my friend Zeb back there?

“The same,” Shana replied tersely.

“Thank you,” Hanford replied with a counterfeit smile.  He laid a few bills upon the bar, took his beverage, and slid off the stool.  With an idle stride he entered the game section and approached the older of the players.

 

-  -  -

“He’s here!” Leah cried to Marie who followed, fatigued, huffing.

“How can you be sure?” Marie gasped.

“Have you seen any other cars without a windshield today, silly?”

“But where is his windshield?”

Leah stopped and sent her sister an eye of displeasure.  Their breaths, rapid and deep from the run, showed like two open steam pipes in the frigid air.

“He told us already!  He’s crazy.  Now, come on!”

The girls ran the final distance to the café.  They ducked before the plate glass window next to the door.  Upon their knees, their mittened hands clutched the snow-laden sill.  They found the plaid curtains pulled back, the wooden shutters open, and a full view into the depths of the café.  Excited, they nudged each other when they found the form of Hanford at the game machine of their father.

“I hope he hurts him good.  Better than he hurt Mama,” Leah said vengefully.

“Maybe he’ll pull Papa’s hair out,” Marie said eagerly.

“Men don’t pull hair, Marie.  They hit each other in the balls.”

“Oh!” Marie whispered.  She turned and looked behind her.  “I hope Hanford does it before Granddaddy gets here.  He won’t let us watch anything like that.”

“I know!” Leah replied nervously.

She grabbed her sister’s head and pushed it down below the windowsill.  Had someone peered into the bleak and snowy day from inside the old café, they would see of the girls only two pairs of bright, curious eyes topped by mops of blonde and brown.

-  -  -

“You know how to make this pinball machine sing,” Hanford said.

He stepped next to the game cabinet and set his beer upon the corner.  Zeb looked up from the bells, buzzers, and flashing lights into Hanford’s friendly smile.

“Yeah.  I’ve played a few;  picked up the knack.”

A ball sped past the flipper posts and fell into the play-wasted reservoir.

“I ruined your concentration.  I’m sorry,” Hanford said.

“Nah.  Forget it.”  Zeb eyed the visitor.  “Now, you’re . . .”

“Hanford.“

“Yeah.  Hanford . . .”

“Stone.”

“Yeah.  Stone.  The coal salesman I met at the Great Colonial.  You went to the Christmas dance last night with Mason Sedgwick’s wife.”

“Ex-wife.”

“Well, sure, but . . .you know.”  Zeb shrugged and sent Hanford a knowledgeable glance.

“Whichever way you like to think about it, Zeb.”  Hanford winked.  “And they tell me you’re the best supervisor the Big Veto Mine ever saw.”

“Nah!” Zeb replied, pleased.

“Oh, hell yes.  I hear it all over headquarters.  You make that place work.”

“I’ll work it, by God,” Zeb replied.

He returned to his game.  He released the plunger and another stainless steel ball sped up and around the first bank of bells.  The top board—its caricature of a nearly nude woman with hardened nipples, her breast and forehead tattooed here and there by score meters—flashed and turned impressively.

Hanford watched for a moment, took a long drink of beer, and replaced the bottle on top of the machine.

“Yeah . . .”  He drawled thoughtfully.  “At the Valentine’s dance last night you walked with a damn good-looking woman on your arm, Zeb.  Was that your wife?”

“Allison?  Yeah.  When I want her to be,” Zeb answered with a self-assured laugh.  He concentrated on the moving ball.

“You show good taste in women.”

“Yeah.  But you do, too.  Grace Sedgwick is good looking.”

“Yes, she is.”

“Yep, Grace is a good-looker.  My buddy, Mason, lost a lot when she ran him off.  He tells me she can really screw when she wants to.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Hanford replied.  “But what kind of screw do the people say that Allison gives out?”

Zeb raised his head from the pinball board in affront.  His hands remained glued to the buttons of the Arcadian monstrosity as Hanford’s fist plowed into the perfect target of his nose.  Zeb’s feet barely touched the floor as his body careened into a lounge set.  His momentum shot him across the table and dumped him onto the oak planks of the dance floor.

Hanford grabbed his beer bottle by the neck and slammed it against the edge of the game cabinet.  Beer-soaked glass spit through the air.  The stub in Hanford’s fist remained, jagged and lethal.  He sprang after Zeb’s sprawled frame and rammed his knee into the fallen man’s chest.  The blood that pumped from his victim’s nose further fueled the wrath with which he stuck the broken bottle neck against Zeb’s throat.

“I’ve killed better than you, scum breath,” he hissed, close in at Zeb’s face.  “If you ever touch Allison Torrance again, you’re a dead man.  A dead man!”

Zeb’s reply came as a knotted swallow and a nod of understanding which channeled the blood more quickly down his face, over his lips, and into his mouth.

“Now get up and get out of here, you wife-beating son of a bitch.”

Hanford backed away his knee and stood.  He glared down at Zeb who remained motionless on the floor and tried to convert an expression of fear into one that foreswore reprisal.  Hanford thrust the bottle neck at him once more.  “I said get up and get out before I decide to slice your beer gut into ribbons.”

Zeb crawled to his feet and, his nose clasped between fingers, staggered across the café to the door.  Shana stretched a paper towel over the bar to him which he snatched ungratefully and plastered to his face while he retrieved his coat.  Hanford stepped to the door behind Zeb and held it open while he crossed to his car.

“And tell your buddy, Mason, that he’s next on my list,” he shouted.

Zeb stopped.  He spun around, spit a mouthful of dark red saliva into the snow, and eyed Hanford loathsomely.  Then he got into his pickup, dug around for a second cloth which he applied over the saturated one, and drove away.

Hanford watched him go.  With creature senses heightened, he surveyed the outside of the café as if he sought more danger.  He savored the blood he brought from Zeb’s nose, and as he tasted it mentally, paid no attention to the unobtrusive hand, knee, and toe tracks that remained before the window at storefront.

“Animal therapy.  I love it,” he whispered to himself.

That sentiment did not escape him when he reentered the café.  Inside, he sent an apologetic nod and a smile to the patrons who kept their wide-eyed postures petrified, then went to the bar where he tossed the last shard of bottle to Shana.  He paused.  He sensed a big breath of tension locked in his chest and no sigh en route to relieve it.  He sensed more.  He peered at Shana.  His eyes caught hers and lingered upon them.

“Old Zeb ruined that one,” he said.  “I’ll need a replacement.”

A beer, minus glass, appeared before him.  He lifted it to his mouth and finished it in one shameless engulfment.  He hammered the empty bottle upon the counter top, caught the bar rail in his hands, and leaned over to Shana.

“I could fuck you,” he whispered hoarsely.

He retrieved his coat and gloves from the bar stool and, without comment or adieu, left the cafe.