And She Was Read Free Page B

and treated him well. This is not to say he was Pollyannaish, just that the place he occupied liked having him around and never tossed up anything too ugly. He was the kind of man people wanted to please. He handed out nicknames that stuck and were accepted with secretive pride. It felt good to be among his circle. You sensed that by sticking close, he’d draw you along even if neither of you knew where you were headed.
    Thad laid down a ten-dollar tip for our twenty-dollar meal and followed me out the door. I felt his eyes on my ass. I have a great ass. I was wearing another pair of tight jeans, stone-washed to a nice marbled pattern with little front pockets stitched in arrows pointing toward my crotch.
    Thad had borrowed the boat’s truck for the first few days of my arrival. We climbed from the gravel parking lot into the new ’85 Dodge. The windshield had only one neat, thumb-size nick.
    I’d barely swung both legs in, when Thad’s hand followed the arrows. His fingers tightened around my pubis bone, and I arched toward his hand and ran my fingers across my tits.
    “Damn, I missed you,” he said, switching hands to slide his Ray-Bans on, then turn the ignition.
    We drove past beaches littered with rusty metal, old wood, slabs of shoved-over concrete, and across the short Bridge-to-the-Other-Side. Dutch Harbor is really two towns, on two islands. Dutch, on Amaknak Island, is the harbor town, with the big boats, the docks, the canneries, the HiTide. A tiny channel of Captain’s Bay separates this small island from the large one—Unalaska, where the second half of town lies and is formally called, of course, Unalaska. This is the old town with thelongtime residents, the church, and the Elbow Room. Thad pulled up and parked beside a battered blue building, nearly flush with the beach at high tide. Around the bar stood the village center, a series of similarly battered frame houses, all small, most with additions of one sort or another projecting from them. Dirt paths scattered across the stiff grass laced with buttercups, a map of who visited who and how often. And many of them led straight to the Elbow Room.
    I’d heard a lot about the Elbow Room in the last few months. Simplified, it was a bar. But, as is often the case in small towns, the bar is the community center, the concert hall, the therapist’s office, the job service. But the Elbow Room wasn’t just an any-town bar, or maybe it was the best and worst of all the any-town bars roughed up, scrunched down, and stuffed into a vintage World War II shack.
    I’d heard about the brawls, the knife fights, the drunks freezing in snowbanks steps from the door. I was expecting more. But at 2 P.M. on a weekday, the Elbow Room felt safe and familiar. The essentials were all there—the bar topped with some variation of Formica, backed by a dazzle of mirror-backed booze bottles; red vinyl booths pushed against paneled walls in the back and along the dance floor; a tiny room in the corner with a booth that overlooked the bay; a plywood platform in the corner of the dance floor; and bathrooms squared off across the long axis. Two classic barroom icons decorated the place. The spread of photos tacked on the wall flanking the bar, chronicling patrons’ stages of inebriation. And the lady painting—this one a black-haired beauty stretched among apricot chiffon on some kind of settee. The bar, like the town, seemed timeless. Only by flipping through the jukebox could you find yourself on the time line—the Eagles, Billy Idol, Fleetwood Mac, AC/DC. Notably missing were Madonna, Duran Duran, Cyndi Lauper.
    “Hey, Thad. What do you want?” The woman behind the bar leaned toward us.
    “Two beers.”
    She pulled the tap and knocked two glasses down.
    “What’s going on?” Thad said. We scootched up onto bar stools.
    “Not much.”
    “This is my girlfriend, Brandy. Marge.”
    I smiled at the woman. She was in her fifties, burly, and well madeup with gray-white hair