Page 106 of Levi

Bandana down tight, sunglasses on, and in. Nobody looks. I take the corner stool at the far end, back to the room, and keep to myself.

Sheila recognizes me the second she’s in front of me — I can tell — and she does the most merciful thing anybody’s done to me in a long time, which is nothing at all. A napkin, a dry crack about the Bash crowd drinking her dry, and a few minutes later a plate of mahi tacos I didn’t order, set down like I’m a regular. My shoulders come down half an inch, and I eat.

A little while on, Stormy sets a little plate of crackers and smoked tuna dip at my elbow and stands there till I take a bite. Doesn’t say a word. Nods once, like the matter’s settled, and goes back through the swinging door.

Tex finds me a while later, a rag on his shoulder, leaning on the bar. He looks right at me. They all know. Then he grins like he’s got a secret.

“Heard you play guitar.”

Not heard you’re famous or you’ve been lying to everyone. Heard you play guitar.

“Sometimes,” I say. “I play a bit.”

He nods like I’ve confirmed a rumor and then he’s off. “Had a fella come through here, oh, years back now. Tuesday night, dead as a church, nobody in the place but me and a trucker named Phil, who’s since passed, God rest him. Though not that night. Anyhow. This fella comes in carrying a guitar case held shut with a bungee cord and the guitar strap, except he’s wearing it with no guitar on it. Just the strap. Across his chest. Like a sash. Like he’d been elected to something. And he asks can he play for his supper. Now I don’t do that. I’ve never done that. You can’t get that stuff started up. You let one man play for his supper and by August you’ve got a goat in here, I’ve seen it happen—”

“Somebody brought a goat in here?”

“Don’t get me started on the goat, Levi, that is a different night.” He waves it off, already past it. “Point is Phil is poor company, so I say fine. And this fella sets up and takes about forty-five minutes to tune, which should’ve told me something. Man tuned that guitar to my ice machine. Said the compressor held a B flat. And I’ll tell you what still bothers me about it. He was right. I checked after. It does. I can’t hear that ice machine now without thinking of him. And the entire time he’s tuning he is telling me about his ex-wife. Named Darlene. And Darlene’s twin sister. Also named Darlene. Both of them. The parents just quit trying, I suppose. Or couldn’t decide which one got the preferred name. And how the one Darlene took the truck and the other Darlene took the dog, and he can’t decide which loss is worse, on account of the dog was smarter than the truck but the truck never once bit him.”

I’m starting to lose it.

“And right about the time he gets the guitar in tune, the power dies. Whole grid. Storm came in off the water that nobody called for and took the lights from Destin clear to Apalachicola. Have you ever been to Apalachicola?”

I shake my head.

“Good, don’t go. It’s awful and it smells bad. So now it is pitch dark in here, me and Phil and this fella and two Darlenes’ worth of heartbreak, and he says well. He takes the guitar off the amp he’s got no more use for seeing as there’s no electricity, and he climbs up, on the bar, boots on a stool, and he plays acoustic in the black dark for an hour and a half while the storm does its business. Every sad song ever written in the state of Texas, and two that nobody wrote at all, that he made up sitting right there. One for each Darlene. And Phil cries. Drove a truck thirty years. Weeping like a child over a song from a man whose name I never got.”

“You never got his name?”

“Asked him twice. First time he didn’t hear me over the storm. Second time he just smiled and said he was nobody, and packed the guitar back in the case with the bungee cord, and walked out into the weather. I never saw him again. Then about a month later, both Darlenes came by here together looking for him, and I had nothing to tell them. They cried too.”

He stops. He picks up a glass and looks into it.

“Best music I heard all year, that man,” Tex says, like an afterthought. “And I never knew his name, and it never one time mattered, because the name was never the thing.” He sets the glass down. “The playing was the thing. Fella could’ve called himself anything he liked. Wouldn’t have moved a note of it.”

And he claps me on the shoulder, once, gentle, and he’s gone. Back down the bar to his Bash crowd before I can get a word up out of my chest.

I came in certain I’d find out I’d wrecked the one place that ever let me be a person. Braced for the cold shoulder, the polite word at the end of the bar.

Instead, Tex told me a yarn about two Darlenes and a goat and a dead trucker. To Tex there’s nothing to be sorry for. I’m a fella who plays guitar. I’m allowed here.

I push the sunglasses up off my eyes, onto my forehead, into the bandana. Not one head at this bar so much as turns.

First time all night my face is mine.

Chapter 42: Dante

He comes in quiet and angles for the far corner of the bar. Black shirt, a bandana tied back over the hair, sunglasses on at nine at night indoors. He surveyed the room from the door and picked the one seat with its back to all of it. No one else appears to recognize him. Fifty people in here and he’s just another guy in the ballcap crowd, another tourist who found the place.

I’d know that frame anywhere now.

Shoulders in, glasses still on. And I get it from across the bar without a word. He came here. The one place where he can be Levi, not Lee Streeter. And he needed to wear a disguise to do it. Free enough to walk in. Not free enough to take the glasses off.

And even now, even angry at myself for it, my eyes go over him the old way. The line of his back on that stool. The forearms on the bar. A gas-station bandana, and he still wears it better than anyone in this room wears anything.

Sheila gets to him first. A napkin, a few words, a plate he didn’t order, and she’s back down the bar before anyone can make a spectacle of him. Then Stormy, out the swinging door with the tuna dip, standing there until he takes a bite. Then Tex, rag over his shoulder, leaning on the corner of the bar talking about nothing the way only Tex can, and Levi’s head coming up out of his shoulders by degrees. Tex claps him once on the shoulder, and leaves him steadier than he found him.

Nobody hurried. Nobody made a production. Inside of ten minutes my family looked at that corner stool and knew exactly what to do with it.