CHAPTER FIVE
THE GREAT LOST BEAR was a Portland institution. It occupied a space on Forrest Avenue, away from the main tourist drag of the Old Port, that had once housed a bar called Bottom’s Up. Semibig bands used to play there, groups that were either on their way up, or on their way down, or had just reached a plateau where all that mattered was a paying gig in front of a decent-size crowd, preferably one that wasn’t about to start hurling bottles when they departed from the hits to play a new song.
The stage lighting was still in place in the restaurant area, which always gave the impression that either the diners were only a prelude to the main act, or they were the main act. Half of the building also used to be a bakery, and at 11:30 P.M., as the bar was serving last rounds, the place would fill with the smell of baking bread, driving the customers into paroxysms of the munchies just after the kitchens had closed.
When the bar changed hands in 1979, it became known as the Grizzly Bear, until a pizza chain on the West Coast objected and the name was changed to the Great Lost Bear, which was more evocative anyway. The Bear’s main claim to fame, apart from its general conviviality and the fact that it served food until late, was its beer selection: fifty-six draft beers at any one time, sometimes even sixty. Despite its location in a quiet part of the city not far from the University of Southern Maine’s campus, it had built up a considerable reputation over the years, and now the summer, which used to be slow, was its busiest time.
As well as locals, the Bear attracted the beer aficionados, most of whom were men, and men of a certain age. They didn’t cause trouble, they didn’t overindulge, and mostly they were content to talk about hops and casks and obscure microbreweries of which even some of the bartenders had never heard. In fact, the more obscure they were, the better, for there was a kind of competitiveness among a certain group of drinkers at the Bear. Occasionally, the sight of a woman might distract them from the task at hand for a time, but there would be other women. There wouldn’t always be a guy sitting next to them who had tried every microbrew in Portland, Oregon, but knew squat about Portland, Maine.
I had been working as the bar manager in the Bear for a little over four months. I wasn’t hurting for money, not yet, but it made sense to find some kind of work while Aimee Price fought my case. I had a daughter to support, even if her mother wasn’t pressing me for payments. I sometimes wondered if Rachel might have preferred it if I wasn’t part of Sam’s life at all, although she had never uttered anything that might have led me to that conclusion. I was allowed to visit Sam over in Vermont any time that I chose, as long as I gave Rachel some notice. Even then, I had sometimes felt the urge to see Sam (and, truth be told, Rachel, for there was unfinished business between us) and had traveled to Burlington on a whim. Apart from the occasional disapproving look from Rachel’s father, for she and Sam lived in the adjoining cottage on her parents’ property, such unscheduled visits had so far caused no friction between us.
Rachel and I had slept together a couple of times since the separation, but neither of us had raised the possibility of a reconciliation. I didn’t think that one was possible, not now, but it didn’t prevent me from loving her. Still, it was a situation that couldn’t last. We were drifting further and further apart. It was over, but neither of us had spoken the words yet.
It was a little after four on Thursday afternoon, and the Bear was quiet for now. Well, relatively quiet. Three men were seated at the bar. Two were regulars, classic Maine winter types in worn boots, Sox caps, and enough layers of clothing to ward off the effects of a second Ice Age until someone got around to opening a bar in a cave and began brewing beer again. Their names were Scotty and Phil. Usually, there was a third guy with them called Dan, or variously “Dan the Man,” “Danny Boy,” or, when he wasn’t within ear-shot, “Dan the Dummy,” but on this particular occasion, Dan was absent, and taking his place was a man who was not considered a regular, but looked like he was about to become one now that I was working there.
This was not necessarily a good thing. I liked Jackie Garner. He was loyal and brave, and he kept his mouth shut about the things that he had done in my name, but something rattled in his head when he walked, and I wasn’t certain that he was entirely sane. He was the only person I knew who had volunteered to attend military school instead of a regular high school, since he liked the idea of being taught how to shoot, stab, and blow things up. He was also, curiously, the only person I knew who had been quietly expelled from military school for his excessively enthusiastic attitude toward shooting, stabbing, and, most particularly, blowing things up, an enthusiasm that made him as potentially lethal to his comrades as to his enemies. Eventually, the army found a place for him in its ranks, but it had never quite managed to control him, and it was hard not to feel that the U.S. military had raised a discreet cheer when Jackie was eventually invalided out.
Worse, where Jackie went, the Fulci brothers, Tony and Paulie, frequently went too, and the Fulcis, blockhouses in human form, made Jackie look like Mother Teresa. So far, they hadn’t graced the Bear with their presence, but it was only a matter of time. I still hadn’t worked out how to tell Dave that he’d have to get a couple of chairs reinforced for them. I figured that when he heard the Fulcis might be about to become regulars, he’d just fire me; that, or load up with guns and prepare for a siege.
“Dan not around?” I asked Scotty.
“Nah, he’s back in the hospit l±in the hotal. He thinks he might be schizophrenic.”
It figured. He was certainly something ending in ic. Schizophrenic would do to be getting along with until they found out for sure what it was.
“He still dating that girl?” asked Phil.
“Well, one of him is,” said Scotty, and laughed.
Phil frowned. He wasn’t as smart as Scotty. He had never voted because he claimed the machines were too complicated. One of his brothers, who was even less intellectually endowed than Phil, had ended up in jail after writing to Dateline NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” asking them to fix him up with a date.
“You know the one: not so smart,” continued Phil, as though Scotty hadn’t spoken. He thought for a moment. “Lia, that’s it. Dumb as a box of doughnuts.”
That old proverb about people in glass houses had clearly never made an impact on Phil. He was the kind of guy who would throw a stone in a glass house, and then be surprised when it didn’t bounce.
“Understatement,” said Scotty. “Girl gave herself a jailhouse tattoo, couldn’t even spell her own name right. Three fucking letters. How hard could it be? Now she has ‘Lai’ tattooed on her arm, goes around telling people she’s half Hawaiian.”
“Wasn’t she in a cult?”
“Yeah. Couldn’t spell that right either, or else her hand slipped. Now she has to keep her left arm covered up, especially in church.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not like Dan the Man is anybody’s idea of a catch,” said Jackie. “He lives with his mother and sleeps in a NASCAR bed.”
“Jackie,” I pointed out, “you live with your mother.”
“Yeah, but I don’t sleep in no NASCAR bed.”
I left them to it, wondering if those three should be the first guys I banned from the bar, and went to help Gary Maser stock the domestic bottles. I’d hired Gary shortly after I became bar manager, and he was working out well. When we’d finished, and I’d poured us both a cup of coffee, Jackie, Phil, and Scotty were still around, unfortunately. Jackie was reading aloud from the newspaper.
“It’s that guy again, the one from Ogunquit who got abducted by aliens,” he explained. “Says he can’t turn on his TV no more. Says the channels keep changing without him touching the clicker, and it makes his head buzz.” Jackie considered this for a time. “How come it’s always guys from Ogunquit that these things happen to?” he asked.
“Or Fort Kent,” said Scotty.
“Ayuh, Fort Kent,” said Phil. All three nodded in solemn understanding. It was a widely held belief down east that once you got a certain distance north in Maine, people became very strange indeed. Given that Fort Kent was about as far north as a person could go without taking out Canadian citizenship, it followed that its denizens had strangeness all wrapped up.
“I mean,” Jackie continued, “what do the aliens think they’re going to learn from snd ±learn froticking a probe up the ass of some fella from Ogunquit?”
“Apart from the obvious,” said Phil.
“Like not to do it again,” said Scotty.
“You’d think they’d abduct nuclear scientists, or generals,” said Jackie. “Instead, all they seem to do is take crackers and rubes.”
“Foot soldiers,” said Phil.
“First wave,” said Scotty. “They’re the ones the aliens will have to, y’know, subdue.”
“But why the probing?” asked Jackie. “What’s with that?”
“Could be someone was yanking their chain,” said Phil. “Some Venusian: ‘Yah, you stick a probe up their asses, and they light up.’”
“‘They play a tune,’” said Scotty.
“I just don’t understand it,” Jackie concluded.
At the end of the bar, there was a man scribbling in a notebook. His face looked familiar, and I thought he might have been in the previous week, although he wasn’t a regular. He was in his early fifties and wore a brown tweed jacket and an open-collared white shirt. His hair was short, and either he was aging well or he was spending a lot on Grecian. When I’d served him earlier, I’d caught a hint of expensive aftershave. Now he had a finger width of beer at the bottom of his glass. I wandered over to him.
“Get you another?”
As he saw me approach, he closed the notebook and glanced at his watch.
“Just the check, thanks,” he said.
I nodded and slipped him the tab.
“Nice place,” he said.
“Yeah, it is.”
“You been working here long?”