At the Red Door

“We’ll be back in twenty minutes, suckers! Drink up!”

The stage lights went down. The house lights went up. Will was sitting in a booth by himself with a draft, a fresh pack of Luckys on the table. He wasn’t 21 but looked like it; he was a good 225 and didn’t wear his hair long like boys his age did then.

He’d pretty much decided he was going to enlist, thinking the navy would be better than just getting drafted and sent to who knows where in Vietnam. Will knew how to act in a bar because he’d gone with his older brother John to St. Jean’s Social Club many times; he knew you just keep to yourself or shout “yeah right” in reply to a joke or to deflect an insult.

But that night he didn’t feel like sitting with all those old men at St. Jean’s, men who took shots like medicine and sometimes asked about Will and John’s father who they hadn’t seen for months and didn’t want to talk about.

Will was wearing a sweat-stained tee shirt and the dirt-caked jeans he’d had on all day working with John, fixing a brick wall for Carey’s market, but now he wished he had showered and changed, as he saw the waitress come towards him with her tray balanced on three fingers above her head.

“You all set?”

Will was suddenly confronted with the expanse of her black tee shirt. He flicked his eyes up to hers and smiled. Her black hair was all around her shoulders like a mink stole. She was looking at the next booth where four loudmouths were sitting.

Will saw that her eyes would be lovely without those black lines painted around them and maybe with some softness in them, instead of the shadow he thought he saw.

“Need anything?” she asked.

“Yeah – oh, no. No, I’m all set.”

She smiled for a second and skipped past the next booth and moved on through the crowd. His eyes followed the sway of her black skirt and he watched the hem fall against one leg then the other. Someone whacked her on the ass. Her tray wavered but she touched it with one finger of her other hand and kept walking.

Will blinked his eyes and looked around. He saw people he knew. Everyone knew everyone in Riverton where he lived, and the Red Door was just over the town line in Milton, so if someone from Riverton wanted to drink and didn’t belong to St. Jean’s they came to the Red Door.

Milton people weren’t much different. Will and John’s father Walter, a brick mason like his own father and grandfather – who never stayed on a job long because he thought there was something better for him around every corner – got Will and John into the Social Club when they were 16 and 18.

It was loud even without the band playing.

In the next booth, Nancy was on Lenny’s lap, pouring beer into his mouth, and the two guys across from them in the booth were laughing their heads off. Will was close enough to the jukebox to hear someone put a quarter in and a hard bass started playing and a girl he knew and a new guy jumped up to do some obscene dance out on the dance floor.

Besides the people he recognized, he noticed a lot of out-of-towners looking for something they didn’t have. The shouting over the music made for a steady and growing roar and an occasional girl would shriek, or a guy would cry, “Whoop!”

“Hi Willy!” squealed Susy before she bent down and smeared lipstick on his cheek. She shoved him over in the booth with her hip and her sidekick Patti slid in on the other side.

“So, how ya doin’, Willy?” Susy asked. “What’s up?”

Will lit a cigarette. “Sky. Cost of living.”

“Ha!” She put her arm around his waist and squeezed. “Oh, you kill me!”

He looked over her head across the room. His eyes met with that girl’s – the waitress. He caught her eye and she turned back to the service bar.

She had been looking at him!

Susy put her head on Will’s shoulder. Will stood up and she fell off the edge of the seat. “Thanks a lot, Will!”

Susy grabbed Patti’s sleeve and marched away. Will started towards the bar, then stopped and sat back down. He would wait. Where do you live, where do you come from, what are you doing in this lousy place, when do you get off work… No, these would all sound stupid and she probably hears them all night. But he wanted to know. He wanted to know what made her sad and what made her happy.

There had been something in the back of his mind lately and he couldn’t put his finger on it and now just looking at her kind of pulled it out into the open. He usually made an effort not to think too much but he found that he did want to think about this thing. He wanted to share, that was it, he needed to share something.

He didn’t feel he could talk to any of his two brothers or four sisters, except sometimes his little sister Joannie, who was a waitress, too, and different from the others. When he went to St. Jean’s, Will tried to give the impression of the loner, the once and done guy, but in truth he longed for one person he could tell things to.

The people around him didn’t understand anything like that. He suddenly realized that the reason he tried not to think was to stay on their level. For what? He looked around him. The band was finishing their beers. He wanted to speak to her before the Marshals and Ampegs made it impossible.

She was on the floor again, standing at a booth down the aisle, picking up glasses. Her arms were long and brown, and that black hair tumbled around her shoulders. Why did no one else notice the way she stood out, the way she was different?

She moved to the next booth, glancing up at him for a second. He could see her face. She looked so young, yet he felt she had an understanding beyond any of the other girls he knew. He felt, in fact, that she would understand his thoughts by just looking at him. She reached his table and he was staring at her.

“All set?”

“Yeah. I mean, no. Tell me something. What’s your name?”

“Gina.” She smiled and began to walk on.

“Wait –” He grabbed her wrist, a little too rough, then drew his hand back. “I’m sorry.”

“Ok.” She turned to go again.

“No, don’t go. I – I want to ask you something.” Then his mind was empty, and he could not make any sense out of the thoughts he could remember. “Are you… Do you ever get lonely?”

No. Wrong. She was walking away again. The lead guitar was hitting a few practice notes. “Wait, Gina,” he grabbed for her hand again, but she pulled it out of reach. “I’m trying to tell you something!”

A few people sitting nearby stopped talking for a second. Gina was staring wide-eyed at Will, then he saw something like a transparent shield cross her face. It was familiar somehow; it was kind of like a glimpse of his reflection in the big mirror behind the bar at St. Jean’s. Gina flipped her head around and her black hair swung from side to side as she walked away.

“Like that, Will? Go get her!” Lenny yelled, and the whole table laughed.

“You ready to wail, chumps? Here’s something by Edgar Winters!” The room filled with the familiar chord changes and cymbal crashes. A couple of girls screamed and jumped onto the dance floor. Another girl on her way to dance stumbled next to Will’s table and knocked over his beer.

“Oh sorry!” she said and kept going.

“I’m enlisting,” Will said and walked out.

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Need more great reads? Check out other Will & May stories at the MockingOwl Roost, plus other amazing fiction from the fam.

• Before They’re Gone – a Will & May Story
• Emma’s Place – Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3
• Epiphany (in Peaches) – flash fiction
• Epiphany – flash fiction
• A Moment of Discovery – flash fiction
• Ripe with Anxiousness – flash fiction
• The Princess and the Pain – short story
• The Book – short story
• Squirrel – short story
• Smoke – short story