Chapter 15 The Dowdry
The Dowdry was a tin hat, rock shack with cobwebs burrowed into olive green masonry. It sat on a rapidly failing compressed wood foundation that barely kept it from joining the rubble that slid down the mountain every spring. Lodge pole pines hemmed it in at the corners and kept the winter snow from drifting. Not far from the freeway, this backwoods bar was on the old rumbling bark highway – a road built by the logging companies in the forties that had never found its way onto any of the maps. It wasn’t the charm of the place or the owner that kept it in business all these years, off the beaten and even the unbeaten path. It was a marketing ploy that old Burly G’s second wife had come up with during the “good times.” They’d printed over a million matchbooks using the wooden sticks from the plentiful free lumber, and with the help of a few free drinks and miscellaneous favors, the bikers that stopped in made the bar known countrywide. Everyone who drank there was required to take three boxes of complimentary matchbooks and distribute them to bars from coast to coast. It was one of the first and most effective viral marketing campaigns that ever ended in divorce.
When Burly, short for a family name Burline, a huge Nordic looking man, found out that the news of the bar spread partially because of the renowned hospitality of his wife – he sent her packing with a thousand matchbooks and half of his savings. It might be expected that the bar hadn’t been the same since she’d left, but to the contrary, it had barely changed at all.
Driftwood mounted on the walls like trophies, harkening back to the days when forestry taxidermy was a rollicking good joke. Beer taps made from bark shed chips into the glasses like thick dendrological dandruff on creamy white beer heads. A different young woman kept bar, taller than his second wife, older than the fourth, she was the sixth, showing twice the skin as the fifth, but a little more modest in the mind than the others. She went by the name Snowflake.
Snowflake was sitting on the bar dangling her legs over a squeaky rotating seat. A smashed up juke box had been spinning the same record for over a year and nobody seemed to mind. One of the men from the group in the corner called out for another round.
They were the regulars, the only regulars. They played pool, talked heatedly about which one of them had the best shot at getting on reality TV, and got drunk at eleven am.
They hardly ever talked to Burly, and that was strange only because everybody else talked to him. He was the county’s central distribution hub for quiet concern. Burly once listened to a transient former engineer talk about industrial process adhesives and their uses for 23 hours solid. These new regulars stayed away from him, kept out of earshot. They represented an odd combination of coming to a public place to get away from everyone. One night they’d come in, sweat stains pouring down their shirts, and after three pitchers of beer, the short one told Snowflake that they’d raced there from the old Adventist summer camp about five miles off-road, and they weren’t leaving until they couldn’t find their way home. Two hours later someone came looking for the group. A greasy man with sunken eyes that she’d never seen before, and, come to think of it, had never seen since, showed up in one of those short school buses. He carted them off after he broke up the juke box with a rusty old three-sided chuck ax he’d pried off the wall. The incident had led to Burly’s non-controversial edict that furthermore “no weapons used as décor.”
Snowflake began her sashay over to the men’s table, brushing her hips on the chairs on either side of her in a figure eight motion. The show wasn’t for the regulars, or for her husband, it was for herself, and the part of her that yearned for a playful, graceful pace.
BEEP.
A small blackberry device on the belt of one of the regulars went off. The alarm cascaded quickly through the group and suddenly a chorus of alarms sprang from identical devices that each of them carried. Then one of the devices chimed in with a polyphonic tune, the song “Maniac” from the movie Flashdance. They all looked at him.
“It’s us. The song.” The beat of the tune led to him gracelessly reenacting the scene where the dancer runs in place with a wide smile on his face. The floor creaked.
A lean man with a Welsh accent and a shit-eating grin chimed in “where the hell did you get that?”
The dance ended “The internet, took me seven seconds to download it.” He nodded, smiling like a know-it-all prick that had absolutely no clue.
“What do you fucking mean it’s us?” A sinister voice challenged.
The young one rolled up the sleeve of his flannel shirt and flashed a tattoo. It was a woman riding a motorcycle, but not an ordinary cycle. The drawing depicted a morphing of man, sex, and machine. The handlebars were a man’s arms grabbing the spiked bracelets of the woman biker who rode the bike. The headlight was a man’s head and his legs made up the seat, wrapping around the woman’s back. Below the picture was scrawled “Rolling F maniacs”.
The sinister one said nothing, but crushed out his cigarette on the younger man’s arm. “That puts a period on it. Stupid bitch.”
The regulars were out the door; pained complaints and crude innuendo could be heard following them to their bikes, then the rumble of the engines into the distance. That’s what always happened, they’d get a page and run off like the president was waiting on them.
Snowflake, the person who actually did wait on them, didn’t feel like she was being treated at all like the first lady when she counted up the tip. Her eyes wandered to the window and the street in front of the bar. She looked out, pretended to be thinking about something far away, but her real thoughts were close by hovering around a new man in her life. Someone who didn’t remind her of anyone she’d met working at this place. She wished he would come in that front door again. She sighed looking at the painted hello kitty pattern on her nails.
“What’s the matter?” Burly hollered across the bar, spit shining the glasses.
Snowflake held up a single dollar bill. She let her fingers work their magic and the paper weaved like a snake around her digits so that a single middle finger was visible to Burly, punctuating her displeasure with the tip. “Cancel the trip to San Martin.”
Burly snorted in agreement. “You look out that window half the day. Nothing changed out that window except the weather in twenty years.” He smiled as she walked back to the bar, brushing her hips along the smooth aluminum sides of the tables then disappeared into the back room.
She couldn’t meet his eyes. He knew. She knew he knew. The only thing Burly could spot quicker than a customer without cash was a wife planning to leave him.