The Buckshot Bar is the single establishment where you can buy beer on tap year-round in Muldoon. During fair time it never closes, and it’s basically standing-room-only, twenty-four hours a day, all weekend.
I don’t think anyone recognized Bryce Tripp when we came in. He turned the head of just about every girl he passed when we all made our way inside, and at least a dozen half-sozzled guys sized him up. But he looked so different out of his western clothes that no one realized he was the same guy on all the concert posters. Everyone figured he was just someone’s out-of-towner friend, some pretty boy from the city.
“Well, ladies,” he said, wedging himself into a place at the bar between me and Morgan on one said and Tuck Schroep, my second-grade teacher’s husband, on the other. “What’ll it be?”
I was already barely able to keep my balance, but I let him order me a whiskey.
It was while I was doing the shot that I saw Shawn at the back of the bar. He was nodding drunkenly at one of his friends from the mill.
For just a moment I worried he’d see me shoulder-to-shoulder with this extremely attractive stranger, the only guy in the bar in skinny jeans, and get upset.
But in exactly the next moment, I hoped he’d see me. I thought again about his complete inability to help Ian with the body in the locker room, and the way he’d laughed at me with Jason. Fuck him.
“Nate!” I yelled at the bar tender, pounding my hand and drawing as much attention to myself as possible. “Three more Maker’s!”
I had no idea if this worked because I lost sight of Shawn while a surge of a dozen people spilled in from the cancelled concert. I’m sure the bar was well past its legal capacity. I could hardly breathe.
By the time our next round arrived, Tuck Schroep was talking at Bryce and Morgan from beneath his hairy white mustache.
“. . . Clean off!” he was saying, making a chopping motion with his hand. “That’s right. I’m telling you. Somebody’d cut his thingy clean off!”
I realized he was talking about the body.
I knew the news of a mutilated corpse in the girls’ locker room was going to spread like prairie fire, but not this fast. Mrs. Whipple must have told anyone within earshot after the football game.
And now everyone was on edge. I could tell. People weren’t just drinking because it was fair time. People were nervous, afraid. Things like this didn’t ever happen in Muldoon. I’d never even seen Tuck Schroep drunk before, not ever, come to think of it.
“What’s he talking about!” Bryce laughed. He couldn’t seem to figure out if Tuck was crazy or not.
“I don’t know,” I lied. I was desperate to come up with a way to change the subject. Before I could think of how, though, Tuck broke in again.
“Fella was trying to rape one of the girls, I guess!” he declared. “One of the cheerleaders. I don’t know which one of them cut it off, but one of ‘em did. Well, good for them, I say.”
Someone put a hand on my shoulder. At first I thought it was someone trying to pay Nate, but whoever it was kept his hand there and pulled a little, gently turning me around.
“How you holding up?”
It was Ian.
I practically knocked Morgan over hugging him. “You’re already here! I didn’t think I’d see you.”
He looked at me a little warily. He’d changed clothes; he’d probably showered. He was wearing his Army hoodie. He glanced at Bryce, then back at me.
“How you holding up?” he asked again.
“Fine!” I yelled over the bar’s noise. “Fine! Totally fine. Drunk off my ass, but fine!”
Bryce Tripp held out his hand. “Hey I’m Bryce,” he said, charmingly.
Ian shook his hand. He was polite, but wary. “Ian.”
I was actually pretty drunk at that point, but I could see right away that Ian was the only person in the bar who recognized Bryce Tripp from the posters.
“Buy you a drink?” Bryce asked him.
“Nate!” Morgan yelled to the bartender before Ian could respond. “Four more!”
Ian grinned at me for the first time since he’d said hello.
“I did say I might have just one.”
Bryce raised his shot glass. “Well, then, to—where’d you say we are? Muldoon! Prettiest little place I’ve ever avoided getting my ass kicked. So far.”
Morgan laughed, we all clinked Bryce’s glass with ours, and I drank down yet another whiskey—who knows how many by that point.
After that point, things start to get hazy.
I remember Morgan talking to Ian about bear hunting with her dad, and Ian just nodding and listening to her drunken blather because he was too nice to tell her just to shut the fuck up. I remember actually grabbing Bryce Tripp’s arm and peeling him away from Tuck Schroep—something I never would have done if I hadn’t been so totally wasted—and staggering with him in tow onto the insanely crowded dance floor. I think I remember Shawn watching us dancing, but I can’t say for certain.
Next, I remember—just barely—asking Bryce if he smoked, and then I remember him buying cigarettes from the vending machine. I think I remember having one more shot at the bar and going outside to smoke, and I’m pretty sure I remember that Morgan actually talked Ian into having another shot with us. There was another moment outside—this one very hazy—when Bryce bummed someone’s last match, and he laughed when I told him he’d have to monkeyfuck me, which meant, I explained, lighting my cigarette from his. But I can barely remember this at all, and I can’t really say if it was before or after that round of shots with Morgan and Ian.
And that’s it, really.
The rest is totally gone. Anything else that happened that night is completely blacked out from my memory.
The next thing I remember is waking up alone in the Starlight Motel, without a phone, or a car, and, now, with night coming on.