Opening Night at the Shamrock Bar & Grill, fiction by Robb T. White
Zeke’s
head was splitting from a migraine. The foreman Mariano was showing
the new guy over in molds how to pull parts, how to be sure the resin
had set before pulling the snowmobile cover from the mold. “We let
you make a couple mistakes when you’re new,” the foreman said.
“After that, it comes out of your paycheck.”
Zeke watched the
guy spraying the resin gun poke a wire into the nozzle. The women
hired to polish the molds stood around griping that the mix wouldn’t
set. Trouble was, if he came in drunk or hungover, his problems
became your problem. Everything depended on getting the part out not
a minute too soon or a minute too late. Same lecture he’d had years
ago. Now stuck on the drill press, Zeke was miserable.
Zeke Pattison didn’t need to be told he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. He’d been mocked all his life for lacking the brains or willpower to improve himself. His parents died disappointed in him and left their house and small savings to charity.
“A minimum-wage laborer in a car parts factory,” his wife complained. “You’re pathetic.”
“You see any UAW signs around here? That’s Detroit you’re thinking of, Lorraine.”
Worse, she cheated with guys on his shift. He was in the lavatory stall when he heard Mariano and Smith horn-dogging his wife’s name. Smith was in maintenance but couldn’t tell a claw hammer from a Phillips screwdriver. Snickers around the sinks. Zeke sputtered with humiliation.
Later, he saw Smith in the breakroom. He wanted to say something, defend his honor if Lorraine’s was a lost cause but couldn’t bring himself to do it. With his big arms slathered in tattoos and a mocking sneer on his face, Smitty dared him to start something. Had he said anything about what he’d overheard, he’d find himself in the parking lot after shift picking up his teeth. The thug would love nothing more than putting on a show. It was like high school where he was picked on all day by black kids who wanted to be the next Marvin Hagler and every white kid thought he was the reincarnation of Rocky Marciano. town where your chances of being the victim of violent crime were one in thirty-five and a factory hired ex-cons like Smitty who could barely write his name on the time card.
Nine years in a non-union factory pulling snowmobile tops out of molds, being scolded by supervisors like Mariano if the parts had to be scrapped. Lately, the company expanded to snowmobile covers after the auto industry cut back on orders. Bad as that job was, piece work at the press was worse. That hulking machine owned him eight hours a day minus two breaks and a half-hour lunch—a lousy pickle and bologna sandwich melted by the time he got to it. If he didn’t get the mix right, pour the resin exactly right to an eighth-inch to each edge of the fiberglass matting on the press bed, it wouldn’t cover the piece correctly and the finished part had to be junked. He'd had big chunks taken out of his paycheck when he began at the factory. Now he was in the same boat, learning to master a more difficult task. Seniority meant zilch-point-shit at the factory. Yesterday, Mariano barked at him over four pieces that missed by a sixteenth of an inch on one side.
What did he care now? He’d had enough. Yesterday convinced him to quit before he did what he’d been thinking of doing for weeks: stick his little finger past the safety line, hit the button, close his eyes and let the hydraulic press crush his little finger to pulp. Then he could apply for worker’s comp to keep the money coming in while he closed the deal on the Shamrock—his Shamrock Bar. Maybe an asskicking from Smitty was the better way to go.
Time was running out no matter which way the bank’s decision went. The loan manager said a decision was “imminent,” depending on Zeke’s liquid assets amounting to twenty-five thousand for the down payment on the property and another ten down for the liquor license before the bank would put up the remainder.
He’d been breathing in fiberglass particles into his lungs for nine years. OSHA didn’t give a turd whether anybody coughed up their lungs. One inspection in five years, the y bamboozled the EPA as well with their phony schematics on ventilation, and probably tucked a hundred in the guy’s jeans. Every day for nine years, he sucked in enough fiberglass to give him a permanent cough. Fibers drifted in the air like gnats in a sunbeam, yet the company wasn’t cited for poor ventilation.
Not that Lorraine cared. She was working nights with the clean-up crew when he hired on. His second week on the job during the night shift, he drove home eighty miles-an-hour during the first break to get out of his clothes. Washing his work pants and shirts was a mistake; you wore the same clothing and threw them away when they reeked or got old because washing only impressed fiberglass hairs between the threads making you itch like crazy all night. The old hands in the place laughed when he returned to the breakroom in fresh clothing.
“Didn’t nobody around here tell you not to wash work clothes?”
That was when they started calling him “Rocket Scientist.” He’d almost forgotten the grizzled, older man with a drunkard’s face who said that to him. The winks and yuks around the tables told him they were waiting for that moment. That old guy, one of so many he’d seen come and go during his time. Transients, misfits, ex-cons on parole like Smitty. People working for their first and only paycheck so they could get junked up on drugs.
Lorraine was a constant worry, not so much for her cheating. His ego was so blunted by her betrayals by then that he didn’t even bother to accuse her anymore. Having sex out of the house with other men in sleazy motels was actually something of a relief. It was her greed and spending he feared. He needed every dollar now in their joint savings and checking accounts to make this work. The loan manager had been clear about that when he looked over Zeke’s proposal—no deal otherwise: “Sorry to be so blunt, Mister Pattisson, but the loan is sitting on thin ice as it is.”
If Lorraine knew he was about to pump their life savings—his, rather, as she’d never done another day’s work since he proposed to her in the breakroom during her shift—she’d run to the bank with sparks flying off her shoes to clean out the accounts. Exhaustion must have lowered her reserve or made him bolder. He understood later that he was just a way out, an escape valve from the drudgery of her employment. Years later, he realized how she must loathe him to grind his face in her contempt, as though he’d swindled her into marrying him.
She hadn’t raided their accounts yet because he’d made her believe they were going to buy a trailer in Sarasota. He couldn’t stand Florida—the muggy heat, insects the size of your hand, the hurricanes, and old-timers driving around like they’re in bumper cars. Fuck that. He couldn’t count the number of times she’d said she was sick of the cold up North, the long winters, and their penny-pinching life together. What she didn’t know was that he checked her cell phone from time to time to get the real truth about her intentions. She’d done her zigzag password in front of him so often on the couch that he could duplicate it in his sleep. Flicking past dick photos and sex talk between her and her current lover was no longer a stab to his heart. Zeke was past caring. Once his loan was secured, he planned to quit the factory, spend all day making the place ready for the first customers, and give Lorraine the boot.
The Shamrock’s neighborhood around North Montello had gone downhill, but nothing like Brockton Heights steadily sinking into the morass of urban crime. The city tore down three abandoned houses across the street from the bar. The bottling plant next door was out of business but a security guard at night kept squatters out and taggers away at night. The black community rebuilt the Pentecostal church down the block, and Los Compadres, the new restaurant was doing booming business. Zeke feared that, if he waited too long, the Shamrock would be scooped up by some entrepreneur with cash on hand.
He had to tolerate the mind-numbing work of press work awhile longer. Meanwhile, he created pleasant daydreams of serving mixed drinks to customers, chatting about sports with guys who would never have asked him what he thought about the Pats quarterback woes after Brady or the chances of drafting a middle reliever for the Bosox bullpen. Best were reveries of chatting up girls from Fisher College downtown or Massasoit just north on Randolph, offering them his avuncular advice on finances, boyfriends, life. He was in the middle of one during Wheel of Fortune on the couch last night in front of TV with Lorraine when she suddenly rapped him hard on the triceps with her fist and told him to wipe that “shit-eating grin” off his face. His vision of the tops of their breasts bunched together in tank tops over the bar top evaporated. Rubbing his arm, he thought: Hell, any woman except Lorraine would be welcome in the Shamrock. He vowed never to treat anyone the way people had treated him all his life.
Loser . . . loser . . .’You’re a loser, Patty!’ . . .
God, he hated that nickname.
It was always Lorraine who snuffed out those daydreams. Her bitter words, her insults to his manhood, her reckless behavior making him the laughingstock of everyone who knew him—she was always the boat anchor that dragged him down and made him confront reality. The first and only time he ever suggested they buy a bar together she shot it down with contempt. “You think I’m going to be a slave back in the kitchen cooking and washing dishes while you ogle girls’ tits at the bar, you can forget it!”
No matter how much or how long he thought about it, he knew there was no way he could convince her to put in the hours necessary to help him make a success of the bar. He lied to the loan manager when he was asked why his wife hadn’t accompanied him—“She’s ill today” or “She’s out of town visiting.” Zeke had no qualms about telling him she was “enthusiastic” but he knew even a negative morsel of truth might sink his proposal. He needed Lorraine on paper, not in real life.
As the day he’d be informed about the acceptance or rejection of the loan loomed, the more anxious Zeke became. How could he keep it a secret from her? It was a miracle that the two times the bank called the house, she was out at the time. One whiff of his deceit and she’d be flying to the nearest divorce lawyer with sparks flying off her shoes to have her lawyer fillet him like a fish. Thinking about how to remove Lorraine from the picture was like asking a lab rat to figure out the maze he was forced to run in with all the exits blocked.
The solution, when it came, woke him from an uneasy sleep while Lorraine snored beside him. He’d heard her come in late, obviously drunk from the banging noises around the room as she undressed for bed and the slurred speech of her mumblings, defying him to complain about her whereabouts or turning on the lights in his eyes. Her current lover was a foreman at Iyusha Fiber, one of his company’s competitors in the plastics industry. Their big plant dwarfed his rinky-dink outfit and paid a starting salary four dollars higher than his hourly wage. When he last checked her phone, she was actually asking her new boyfriend to get him a job at his plant—asking her new lover to get her cuckolded husband a job at his factory! Instead of rage, he felt relief; she was too distracted to concern herself with him.
Zeke never heard of lucid dreaming, yet the nagging dilemma off his waking life had wormed its way into his dreams and become transmuted during sleep. How to get Lorraine out of his life became how to kill Lorraine and get away with it. Now he knew: the woman had to go.
All day at work, he seemed distracted, jumpy at familiar noises. The factory was normally loud with clanging metal, warning beeps of rumbling tow motors, fork lifts hoisting pallets loaded with fifty-five-gallon barrels of styrene. Men and women standing in front of each other’s faces shouting to be heard above the din. Now, every noise startled him.
“Get your head out of your ass, Pattisson,” Mariano bellowed.
Zeke jumped at the voice behind him.
His foreman shoved him away from the press and began redistributing the resin on the matt to cover the edges with a ladle.
“You’re making more junk, Patty!” Mariano shouted. “The resin’s not covering the corners!”
He reached in to pull the part free from the mold and toss it into the scrap pile beside the drill press. Zeke grabbed Mariano’s wrist to stop him but in the struggle, the half-finished part jerked free, bounced off the steel hydraulic shaft of the press and ricocheted back at Zeke, opening a slight gash on his forehead. Mariano stared at him as a sheet of blood poured down Zeke’s face.
Zeke was in shock, too numb to say anything.
“Go . . . go get cleaned up,” Mariano ordered and shoved him toward the doors leading to management’s offices. A medicine cabinet was kept near the service counter for minor accidents.
“My God, what happened?” Marsha said. Her co-worker in the carrel beside hers looked at him and fainted. Marsha raced to the cabinet, grabbed a wad of gauze and jammed it against his forehead to stanch the blood.
“I slipped,” Zeke said.
“You’ll have to file a report,” she said. “You need stitches.”
“I’m fine,” Zeke replied.
Mariano avoided him when he returned from the emergency room. He learned that Mariano’s accident report blamed Zeke for the accident. Word spread around the plant floor that Zeke had tried to hit the foreman with a scrap piece.
The next day, he concentrated harder on his drill press, made fewer scrap pieces, but the effort to focus on his work was too much. He couldn’t wait for the shift to end.
At quitting time, Mariano confronted him at the press. “Hey, Patty, management is denying your claim for compensation. I got a witness who said you tried to hit me.”
“Yeah, who?”
“Smith saw you. He filled out a report saying you tried to strike me with a part when I showed you what you were doing wrong.”
The man was a natural bully, a former all-city linebacker for the Brockton High Boxers. Zeke shook off his grip.
Zeke couldn’t believe it, even when he was standing out in the parking lot after he’d been escorted out of the VP’s office after being fired and told he was ”damned lucky he wasn’t going to be arrested for assault.”
He was back in high school, after a P.E. class, the one kid easily shoved against the lockers whenever the jocks rolled down the hallway. He married a woman who despised him and picked her lovers from the kinds of male who made his life miserable made Zeke want to pull his hair out. He got into his Hyundai and drove home, a rattlesnake coiled in his neocortex.
When he began revolving the options for killing her, his stomach clenched. He didn’t own a gun. Getting one off the street in Brockton wouldn’t be a problem but that involved another person. He knew he couldn’t stick a knife in her no matter what she did or said to him. No amount of rage could get him to do that. He couldn’t squeeze her neck and snap her hyoid bone; she was a big woman and would fight back. Besides, he’d have to look into her eyes while he did it and he couldn’t do that. He imagined himself slipping up behind her with a roll of Saran Wrap and suffocating her with cellophane. But Lorraine wasn’t the kind to stand still and let that happen. All his fantasies of murder declined into comic scenarios of chasing her around the house with various knives or hammers. Then the film stuck in its sprockets and reversed: now he was running from her while she wielded a poker in her fist. Stupid, hopeless—
Everything pointed the arrow of suspicion right back at him. He’d never withstand a burly detective grilling him in a tiny room. His nerves would betray him before the door closed. He didn’t watch cop programs like Lorraine, but he’d never stand up to a real interrogation or fool a forensics unit even if he killed her and dumped her unseen in the Salisbury Plain River in the dead of a winter’s night. He imagined the rictus grin on her face when her bloated corpse rose in the spring.
His reflection in the bathroom mirror confirmed it: it wasn’t the face of a man capable of murder.
“You’re a coward as well as a fool. A doormat for others all your life—”
“What the hell are you mumbling about in there?” Lorraine called through the door. “Hurry up and get out. I need the bathroom.”
“Yes, dear.”
“Loser.”
While she showered, he ducked into the bedroom to check her phone. If he didn’t have the balls to do it, he’d better keep tabs on her. He scanned her texts and found nothing. She must have deleted them. Odd. He scrolled back to her friends and family. Nothing but chitchat in her limited vocabulary enhanced with emojis and teenaged acronyms he didn’t know. No dick photos of her lover’s erection, or lewd suggestions about their next tryst.
What gives, Zeke wondered. It wasn’t like Lorraine to delete texts or photos. He suspected she knew he was reading them and liked the notion because it emasculated him and that would have appealed to her sadism.
He heard her stepping out of the shower and dropped the phone. Retrieving it gave him another surprise when his hand touched the plastic edge of a second cell phone, a burner, lying beneath the bed.
She was too lazy to create a different password. The texts between his wife and her boyfriend at Ayusha Fiber chilled him to the marrow. No salacious texts these, just grim resolve, and a tone of desperation in her clumsy texts:
Lorraine: I cant stand him he make s me sikc to my stomich
Davontae: I know babe. Hang on a bit longer.
Lorraine: When will it happen?
Davontae: Soon real soon
She was coming down the hallway. He hurriedly slipped the burner phone back under the bed and replaced her cell on the night stand. She stopped in the doorway, nude, her hair glistening. “What are you doing, Patty?”
“You said you’d never call me that again,” he said, the whine he heard in his voice made him cringe with self-loathing.
“Too bad, loser.”
“Are you going out, Lorraine?”
“Don’t change the subject,” Lorraine said. “You’re up to something.”
“I’ve had a rough week at work—”
“You’re boring me already.”
“So are you going out?”
“None of your friggin’ business what I’m doing!” she snapped.
That ended that. She stood there waiting for him to leave. In the kitchen, he stood looking out the window when she rushed past to the door.
“The right front tire light came on again in that junker you bought me,” she said. “Get it fixed, for Chrissake?”
“Take my car. I’ll work on it while you’re gone.”
“Don’t ‘work’ on it,’” she growled. “Fix it, you moron.”
Her late model SUV was used but expensive. Nothing satisfied her.
When he heard the door slam, he checked under the bed. She had both phones with her.
She’s planning to kill me . . . it’s like one of her bad movies on Netflix.
He was in the middle of a gruesome comedy but didn’t know which way to turn. He didn’t think she’d kill him; after all, a divorce would do the trick and leave her with half the money, more if he knew Lorraine. His insurance from the factory wasn’t much, something like fifteen thousand, and he hoped he was worth more than that alive. When they first married, she babbled a lie about a “beloved” grandfather leaving her money, which turned out to be a lie.
Zeke’s ringtones went off.
“Mister Pattisson, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but I thought I’d let you know now instead of waiting for Monday. We had a meeting yesterday. It was decided to deny your loan application on the basis of insufficient collateral. I’m sorry.”
Zeke’s throat closed up. He couldn’t respond to more bad news owing to the sob that climbed up his esophagus. He muttered something about “understanding the decision.”
“If you can find your way to more money,” the chirpy voice said, now that the guillotine blade had fallen, “I’m sure we can reconsider the loan under more favorable circumstances.”
Like I can find more money lying around on the ground . . .
Zeke sat on the corner of his bed with his head in his hands. He jumped up, agitated, and began pacing randomly from room to room. Now and then he’d pick up an object, one of Lorraine’s ceramic unicorns from a shelf and throw it against the wall.
Whenever he passed their wedding photo on the wall of Lorraine, he’d splutter something about “manning up.”
Kill her before she and Davontae kill you, Zeke.
It was like a second voice popped up in his mind. Lorraine with a baritone voice, raspier but bossy like her.
He drank himself into a stupor with a half-bottle of JB. He decided to do them both. He knew how: a car “accident.” He spent the next three hours disengaging the airbag sensors and jamming her seat-belt buckle with a cotter pin. When she came back from her motel rendezvous with Davontae, he’d find a way to get her to go for a ride and smash the car into a bridge abutment or a telephone pole at ninety m.p.h. He’d had enough of losing.
She came back soused, in a bad mood, and refused to leave the house for any reason. He gave up, collapsing on the couch, sleeping through the night and halfway through the morning. He had that dream again: Lorraine flying through the air like a black angel of doom. He decided his drunken stupidity about a romantic suicide was lunacy, and he went outside to work on her SUV with a spring in his step despite the hangover.
Hours later, covered in grease and ecstatic over his skilled workmanship on her vehicle, he came inside, showered, and collapsed on the bed. When he woke again, his car was back, Lorraine’s was gone. Muzzy-headed, he felt confused whether he’d been awake or dreaming the last few hours.
The two cops at the front door looked serious. “We’re sorry, Mister Pattison. But we have to tell you that your wife was killed in a car accident on North Quincy.”
Did he know why she was out there? He did not. His hangover was fierce; the officers couldn’t get much out of him as far as details. One asked if he’d like a ride to the morgue. He declined with thanks. The grin on his face wouldn’t unstick itself.
The cops looked at each other on their way out the door.
Zeke capered around his dining room, kicking over chairs and knocking Lorraine’s pewter tea service to the floor. He was elated. The gods had ceased dumping on him. He went to the morgue the next day whistling in the dank corridor, greeting staff, and told the M.E.’s assistant: “That’s her, that’s the bitch all right.”
“What do you want us to do with the body, sir?”
“Shove her back in the drawer before she starts to stink,” Zeke said.
He dug around in her closet and found a shoebox of papers, including the deed to the house in their names. Zeke’s factory policy. Another from a company he’d never seen before on him with his forged signature—for two hundred thousand. Lorraine’s plot unmasked. One on her for twenty-five thousand, also unseen before.
“Jesus God save my bod!” he exclaimed.
Zeke never danced to anything faster than a waltz; Lorraine used to tell him to stop stumbling around like a drunk in traffic the few times they danced together. He had the money for the Shamrock. The cherry on top was that he didn’t have to kill her for it. The awful woman gave him the best gift possible. He smiled thinking of her leave-taking the day before—in such heat to meet her beau. Fate, kismet, divine justice—something. He didn’t know and didn’t care.
During the week, Zeke called three times demanding the payout check. “I’m tired of waiting,” he said to the claims adjustor. “Send me my money or I’ll sue.”
He gave Lorraine a quick sendoff at a family mortuary that specialized in cremation. No one was invited.
“I’ll call you when the ashes are ready,” the owner informed him.
“Toss them in the garbage out back,” he told the man, whose face registered pure shock.
Two weeks later, the check arrived. With his checking and savings accounts now all his and the insurance money to boot, he had the money for the bill of sale to be signed, sealed, and notarized. He was the proud owner of the Shamrock Bar and Grill.
He drove to his plastics factory and strode past the office, ignoring Marsha’s greeting. He saw Mariano in a hard hat talking to Smitty. “Hey, motherfucker, eat this!” He flipped them a double bird and walked out laughing all the way to his car.
His giddiness lasted a week. Then the hard work settled him down. The repairs were endless. First, the sheetrock, then the plumbing and electrical. The work knocked some of the bliss from him as well as the twelve-hour days to fix everything. The money left over went to hire roofers to replace the shale, and masons to tuck-point and sand-blast the building’s brickwork.
He took out ads in the Enterprise News for the grand opening and tacked flyers to every telephone and streetlight pole in Brockton. He lost ten pounds starving himself, scrimping and saving, working all day, and surviving on crackers, peanut butter, and vegetables right out of cans. The beer distributors and food vendors were accommodating and agreed to give him extra time. Everything was going his way.
On opening night, he was nervous as a cat. He was beginning to regret the expensive LED sign with the curvy female silhouette with the green shamrock. Then around ten p.m., the nightlife crowds found their way to Zeke’s bar. By midnight, the place was packed. He was king of his castle.
One black male lingered after closing time. Zeke, feeling magnanimous, brought him a boilermaker. “On the house,” he said.
“You don’t know me, do you?”
No,
sir,” Zeke replied. “Have we met?”
“I was your
wife’s—friend. Davontae Burwell.”
“I’ve seen photos of your wang,” Zeke said. “This is the first time I’ve seen the rest of you.”
“We planned to marry,” he said; his hands twisted the bar napkin into shreds.
“Ah, that’s tough titty,” Zeke said. “Finish your drink and fuck off.”
“Did you know she was pregnant?”
“I might have read that in the autopsy report. Too bad, so sad.”
“She was going to ask you for a divorce.”
“Some divorce,” Zeke replied. “I saw the insurance paper you bozos intended to file.”
“Your mistake. Now finish your drink.”
“I know you tampered with her car,” Davontae said quietly. “She said she asked you to fix it the day before she died.”
“Life is all about timing, my friend. Now finish up and go. I’m busy here.”
“The police said the accident wouldn’t have killed her. She’d have survived if the airbag deployed but she slammed her head on the steering wheel when the car went veered into the telephone pole.”
“Now you’re boring me,” Zeke said. “Dust to dust, man.”
“You messed with the car, didn’t you?”
The man’s grin was conspiratorial, even friendly.
“Now that you mention it, I do recall working in that area.”
Zeke’s fingers mimicked scissors clicking. “A little adjustment to the sensor here and a little snip, snip there to the seatbelt—Voilà, instant bachelorhood.”
Zeke kissed his lips in the manner of a chef sampling a delectable cuisine.
“That’s good to know,” the man said, nodding, his voice even. He stood and drained the dregs of his beer chaser.
“Oh yeah, why is that, pray tell?”
“Because they’ve got it all on tape in the van outside, Rocket Scientist,” he said. “Cops are listening to your confession right now!”
“Hey, come back here, you!”
Davontae pulled open his shirt to expose the tiny microphone taped to his chest.
Zeke watched him walk toward the door at the exact moment two cops, the same ones who had informed him of his wife’s death, walked past Davontae making a casual beeline to him. They sported big grins.
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