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Mimi's Bar

"The dry land of Louisiana is disappearing at an unprecedented and alarming rate. In some areas, the swamp is expanding at a rate of one mile every year. This emerging crises has put many coastal cities at risk, most notably New Orleans, and threatened thousands of homeowners. Unless something is done to stop the encroaching swamp, millions of lives could be disrupted and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of land permanently lost." - Jason Clark, spokesman for the Committee to Reclaim Louisiana

Mimi Delacroix never met Jason Clark, the spokesman for the Committee to Reclaim Louisiana, but it is probable she wouldn't have liked him. Mimi was a resident of the swamp and would have wanted to know just what was so alarming about the expansion of her homeland.

She was small of stature, not the broadest of minds, and was of no consequence in politics of any sort. She did nothing for her community. She brought no large tobacco companies to their knees; taught no children to read or play the flute; did no favors to the swamp in which she lived for two years, and in fact there is one less citizen in the world than there would have been had she never existed.

Mimi was small but powerful, with distinct arm muscles covered with soft, downy brown skin that faded into an egg-speckled whiteness. She had dark hair as clingy and heavy as the wet rope of a mop, and she usually kept it in a bright sparkly red elastic band which took some of her hairs with it every night when she pulled it out. She had wide caucasian eyes the color of the shadows of oak trees, deep sunk in her face and shaded with overhanging lashes of an extraordinary length. A wet and tropical smell continuously evaporated off of her, a sweet and rainy odor very much like some herbal shampoos, which was odd considering she rarely showered. (The chairman of Chanel would have given his eye teeth to get a whiff of her.) Her wardrobe consisted solely of: white cotton underpants; black silk bras; plaid flannel shirts; and dark, snug fitting Levis. She wore cowboy boots. That was all. She walked with a long, loping, even stride, the way a rocking chair would walk if it ever got a mind to go more than one step forward, one step back. She walked as though every step brought her closer to someone whom she was crossing a crowded room to talk to.

She was originally from New Orleans, where she had been heavily involved in the disco scene during the seventies, which lasted longer for Mimi than for the rest of the nation. By the time she was thirty she had spent over half her life in small, dark clubs, and knew that soon she'd begin to look it. She had strong self-preservational instincts, and saw quickly that unless she wanted to spend the next thirty years of her life in support groups and church basements, working low income jobs and paying back her monstrous debts to every loan shark in the city, she would have to make a speedy getaway. When she decided to leave it was 1993. She got out of the city of her birth fast, giving minimal notice to very few people. She certainly didn't give notice to the man she was going to see. He was an ambulance-chasing attorney, with several shady dealings and a couple of outrightly unethical courtroom stunts to his name. These violations had been brought to the attention of the county clerk, two local judges, and anyone else who might have been interested, by none other than Mimi Delacroix. He had lost his license to practice law and would have been jailed had he not agreed to leave the New Orleans area promptly and forever, and never come back. He now sold bad business insurance from a cruddy office on the edge of the swamp Mimi was planning to open a bar in. He was stupid, slimy, and simple. He was harmless, but he didn't know it. He had a silly haircut.

His name was Marty Merkle.

He was Mimi's ex-husband.

By all accounts, he was still in love with Mimi.

Mimi was looking forward to seeing the expression on Marty's face when she walked in the door …

Mimi just hoped he didn't still have that haircut. She didn't think she could refrain from laughing.

Marty opened the door to his office. He still had that haircut. Slicked over with about a tub of Dippity-Doo (they still made that stuff?), with a little duck's tail in the back. Marty still thought he was hot stuff. Mimi tried unsuccessfully to hide a smile. He couldn't contain himself.

"Here, Mimi, sit down, can I get you anything?" He was obsequious. Either he was still scared of her, or still infatuated, or both. He complimented her on her hair, on her shoes (she was wearing cowboy boots), on how nice she was looking.

Mimi had expected nothing less. She sipped coffee and waited for him to finish before telling him what she had come for.

"Insurance?"

"Yes. I'm opening a bar and grill and I need some business insurance before they'll let me."

"You know it's bad insurance." Marty was still stupid.

"Gee, Marty, sell it to me." Mimi decided to toy with him. "I can see why you're still selling from this dump. Maybe I oughta just go somewhere else."

"No! No, I think you oughta buy it from me, then sell it back. That way you can ... you can get around the four year requirement."

"Four year requirement?"

"Yeah. They only ask for proof of insurance every four years, so you can buy it back from me then and you won't have to pay the fees for four years."

Mimi sat back. She turned it over in her head. It was painfully obvious Marty was trying to get an excuse to see her twice every four years. But that was okay. She could put up with a hopelessly infatuated ex-husband if it meant a good break on bad insurance. She would have to check and make sure it wasn't every three years and Marty was screwing her over. There was always the chance that Marty was smarter than he looked. She looked at the haircut again. Nope. No chance. "Okay," she agreed.

Mimi built her bar in an uninhabited part of the swamp, about three miles from anything that could be called useable real estate, which was just the way Mimi liked it. She wanted no shopping malls or Piggly Wigglys anywhere near her bar. She was going to make a pearl in the oyster of existence. She ordered the Bud mirrors and pool tables ahead of time. She sunk telephone poles soaked in tar to the bottom of the swamp, guiding them with her own hands, not trusting the crane boat she'd hired at great expense to set the foundation pillars by itself. She stood in a little aluminum boat at the spot where the corner of the building would be and held onto the german shepherd colored column that was to hold up her building, scaring the daylights out of the crane crews who had never sunk a piling in this kind of muck before, screaming instructions, ready to go to the bottom with the telephone pole to make sure it got in straight. She insisted on four exactly straight telephone poles, one at each corner, and didn't let the crane crew go home to their wives and families until she was satisfied it was perfect.

She paid them all in the fading dusk light, writing out her name in black ballpoint on pale lavender blue cheques.

She built the rest herself, wobbling around in that slight and tiny boat with a level, a stack of lumber, and a coffee can of nails. No more checks were written. The crane that she had hired to place the pilings had put her in the hole over four thousand dollars. She could afford no more labor. She wore a piece of closed cell foam wrapped in orange cloth around her waist, and pulled herself out of the water twice by the ropes she had tied to the pilings. The water of the swamp looked more like mercury than water--as if, were you to plunge your hand into it, you would come away covered in some sort of reflective metallic goo instead of pond scum. If you fell into it, though, you discovered it was as clear and clean a water as you'd ever gotten up your nose. Mimi learned to kick extra hard when she fell in, to make up for the weight of her boots.

Every morning she drove to Denny's, nineteen miles away, for breakfast. Every few days she went to the grocery store near Denny's, bought baloney and sardines and five pounds of apples, and ate the lunch meat and fruit every day for lunch and dinner. She built a sturdy foundation out of two-by-tens on the four telephone poles, then laid down forty-two-by-sixes over the headers. She gauged the plumbness of each board with the level, which was sometimes hard when the boat was rocking. Soon she had a web so perfectly cornered and perpendicular it would have given Anansi a headache. She laid plywood and nailed it down so fast with her nail gun that beetles were sometimes trapped, legs flailing, by the nails - exhibits in scholarly plywood, sans the traditional scholarly cotton ball soaked in ether. She stood on her platform by sundown, hands on hips, comparing herself to the builders of oil platforms and coming out on top.

She put up the ceiling, roof, and walls. The bar was laid out very simply; there was a porch with Christmas lights wrapped around its supports and roof edge; then a door and then the main room. It was a simple, rectangular room, a grade school geometry question.

It sure wasn't a disco.

The shelf with all the booze took up the entire left wall. Mimi dealt in volume, not variety. The only wine there was in a jug. There was an ancient yellow calendar from a feed catalog and some pinups tacked to the side of the shelf unit, and that was the left wall. (Incidentally, Mimi's bar faced due south-west, so the left wall faced exactly north-west.)

The bar ran parallel to the left wall, interrupted at both ends by two waist-high swinging doors to allow for the comings and goings of the bartender and Mimi. There was a large wrought-iron stove with fancy Victorian moldings on its feet against the back wall of the room, a stove with five or six large cooking surfaces, each with covers, and a deep-frying tub in which Mimi would dip hundreds, thousands of pounds of breaded shrimp and Cajun-spiced French fries in the coming years. There was a small sink next to that with the plumbing exposed. No refrigerator was visible, though in a back closet there was a large top-opening freezer where all the meat was kept.

The bar was mahogany - the one place where Mimi had not skimped. She would allow her shingles to rot and all her other wood to go gray, but that bar was not gonna look like the pale yellow oak ones she'd seen in other redneck bars. People were gonna think twice before shoving a knife in this bar.

The stools were covered in red leather and studded with brass rivets. The floor was bare wood and already Mimi had started to break it in, to show it what it was in for. No varnish, no mops or brooms or yearly check-ups. This floor would be pounded on, scraped across, carved up with broken glass and steel-toed cowboy boots; soaked with grease and beer and swamp water, saturated with blood, spit, and tobacco, and finally danced upon. Mimi gave it one look as she walked in the door, as if to dare it to chip, rot, catch fire, or cave under the pressure. It shuddered once, then was still.

There were four or five tables out on the main floor, each one topped by ketchup, mustard, and barbecue sauce and surrounded by six or seven chairs all crowded together; and two pool tables luxuriant in their green perfection. No one looked just once at the pool tables - they were gorgeous. They glowed. They were unearthly. Mimi had ordered them from a company which soon went out of business, though nobody knows why; in fact, hers were the last ones made by that company and a very old craftsman named Hans. The pool tables would remain sexy even when those who stretched out over them were not. Their eventual scars would only make them more so. They kept, in the end, all their balls; except for one black eightball which disappeared one night and was never heard from again.

All this took up most of the middle of the room. On the far right of the room, the tables disappeared and a small dance floor was cleared. There was a tiny bandstand, a platform with a few microphones and amps for any band that wanted to come and sing in such a rough part of the woods, only six inches removed from the floor. It was a bandstand with small aspirations. The real star of the dance floor was the jukebox, which Mimi had pushed and kicked and swore at to get through the door. (Mimi was not a romanticist when it came to objects, though it might be argued that her bar was a flight of fancy.) The jukebox was a big one, pretty with neon lights and a curved strip that went all the way over the rainbow and curved down the other side, changing colors as you watched. It had a red velvet interior and had hundreds of buttons to help you choose what to play - Waylon Jennings or Shania Twain. Mimi knew her audience. There were fish, calendars and lots of Bud mirrors on the walls, and the stained-glass lampshades had rising ducks and Miller logos on them.

Midway through the room a hallway opened into it, a hallway with red rose wallpaper on one side, gray boards on the other, and a ceiling of white painted plywood. On the left side of the hallway there were utility closets and the big freezer with all the seafood frozen in white paper packages sealed with masking tape. On the right side there was the door to the restroom, several yards of boards with black and white pictures of old houses, silent movie stars, color photographs of an old Harley or two - Mimi's pictures, a subtle hint that you were getting into private territory in the building - and then a big, heavy, two-panel wood door with a brass doorknob and a lock on it the size of a coconut.

This was Mimi's room. No one else would have or could have gone here, so naturally the place reeked of pure Mimi, whose smell was pouring from the walls and seeping down the shower curtain. There was one thing you could say about it. It sure wasn't a disco. There was the rose wallpaper, for sure, but there was also a light, lemony sherbet colored design covering one of the walls, and the other two were light blue and white. The ceiling was the same painted plywood in the hallway, the seams between the sheets gaping open slightly in places and letting bits of dust, cobweb, and mouse hair down from the space between the ceiling and the roof. There was a set of drawers as high as your collarbone backed into a corner and another, lower set next to the bed. The lower set had a mirror and a jewelry box on it, with hairbrushes and bright red elastic bands strewn out across its surface. The bed was smallish, but had big posts on every corner and a mahogany headboard with stickers pasted way down out of sight proclaiming the name of the manufacturer, which happened to be the very same manufacturer that had years later manufactured Mimi's magnificent pool tables. The quilt was patchwork and beautiful. The blues glowed and the reds leapt with just as much verve as the little metallic flakes of green that flash in the water of swamps. There was an ironing board propped up by the door, an ugly ironing board if truth be told, one covered in bright orange and yellow flowered cloth that was very faded and dirty. There was a closet full of clothes she never wore - a leather jacket; a stretchy gray top and pants with some small, tasteful embroideries in green thread; a couple of dark pantsuits suitable for a funeral in L.A.; and one long white night-gown. Off in the far corner diagonal from the closet was the shower stall, a Spartan affair with one shelf (upon which sat one bar of green and one of orange soap, both of which smelled faintly of the grime that builds up on the exhaust pipes of pickup trucks and Harley Davidsons) and no door, just a shower curtain of indistinct color. This concluded Mimi's room.

Outside the swamp was green and sloppy, and washed up against the piles with a distinctly heavy sound, as if it was thicker than ordinary water. The mats of green lichen which sparkled with metallic flakes crumbled into little pieces against the lowest rafters supporting Mimi's room, and the sloshing sound calmed her to sleep.

This was Mimi's bar. She named it "Mimi's" after herself. There were always Christmas lights strung around the entire perimeter of the roof, serving as a beacon to all who came by boat. The nearest trees were either dead or strung with Spanish moss and nearly leafless for most of the year. You could not see in except by the windows to the side of the front entrance; and by then, anyone inside had seen you. The one window in Mimi's room was covered with a piece of faded red cloth, and when her light was on at night, a sinister square of red shone against the blackness outside. The wind blew through the trees on moonstruck autumn nights, and one could not hear a boat until it was within twenty yards.

One more thing.

You had to walk the plank to get to Mimi's. The last bit of solid ground was a leaf littered outpost of forest about an eighth of a mile from Mimi's. This muddy acre, surrounded by palmettos, served as a parking lot for all of Mimi's customers. They then had to walk along the long and zigzagging pier she had built to get them across the water and to the bar. It was like a boardwalk, though alligators and gigantic lily pads cruised underneath it instead of surfers and sunbathers. She erected a hasty railing to satisfy basic safety concerns, though the safety of anyone was never Mimi's primary concern. In retrospect, it's a miracle she managed to get that bar built at all, much less up and running, without any visits from the authorities. Lord knows she did not wash the dishes in water that was hot enough, keep the glasses in cupboards that were sterile enough, or keep the books in conditions uncooked enough to withstand a visit by federal inspectors.

Not that any of that mattered to Mimi. The human tragedy did not affect Mimi; nor did the human comedy or drama or blockbuster action adventure; to her it was all similarly beautiful and similarly remote. If she wasn't looking at you she'd forget your name, and that was true. Only a few people could break her trance.

One was Danny Simon, the DJ of WQXR, the local radio station Mimi listened to as she built her bar.

He had a thin, high voice not suited to his chosen profession. He was young and twitchy; Mimi could tell as she listened (or at least she imagined) that he had thinning brown hair and a worn-out, pleasant face. He had no idea how to interrupt callers and often let them rabbit on until the cows came home. He was not good at doing the lottery numbers - he got nervous and got the numbers wrong. The weather, when read by him, sounded like a recipe for hurricane stew. WQXR would have fired him if they could have afforded anyone else, but they were a backwater station with a very small budget and one advertising contract - every forty-five minutes there were six back-to-back ads for the National Guard.

Danny stayed.

But he had a horrible work environment. When he got the station call letters wrong (as he often did), his boss would come roaring in the door of Danny's booth, paying no attention to whether or not Danny was on the air, and proceed to ream Danny out with a supreme disregard for the sensitive ears of listeners. When this happened, Danny would be caught off guard, and during the moment it would take him to slip the needle into the groove of another record, Mimi would catch a snippet of dazzling obscenity culled from a vocabulary of obviously breathtaking extent. This always put a smile on Mimi's face. Danny would come back on later, sounding like he'd been attacked by bedding come miraculously to life: processed through an entire set of Maytag appliances, and wrung out. "Here's Lynryd Skynyrd," he'd pant, then collapse on the control panel. Danny enjoyed a wide variety of rock-and-roll to choose from and send out to his listeners, whom he always treated with the utmost courtesy. "Hi, how you doin' out there," he would say, in his soft and nervous voice, "I think it's a nice day, how about you? Here's some Stones." Danny played the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Aerosmith, Kenny Wayne Shepard, Sheryl Crow, and Stevie Ray Vaughn. He kept people moving. He played John Mellencamp, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Three Dog Night, and Dire Straits. He kept parties partying. He played Creedence Clearwater Revival, Black Oak Arkansas, John Fogerty, and Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. "People," he'd say; "when you live in a swamp; it helps to keep a sense of humor about things."

Mimi didn't have much of a sense of humor, but she believed that. She sang along with most of the songs on WQXR as she worked, and her voice, while as untrained as a heron's, was not altogether disagreeable. (When she pounded her thumb in the middle of singing, some old classics got some new lyrics.) And when she ordered her jukebox, she made sure the playlist was almost identical to that of WQXR.

Mimi's bar opened on June nineteenth, 1994. There were papers stapled to trees for a hundred miles in every direction, and not a phone pole in the four local towns remained unplastered. Fliers were put up on bulletin boards in all the grocery stores in Oupalousas, Melville, New Roads, Baker, Baton Rouge, Donaldsonville, Morgan City, Franklin, Baldwin, and Lafayette. You might have thought a small army of interns, agents and school kids were working in tandem to create such a massive promotional effort - but no, it was all Mimi. Mimi in her dark red pickup truck with a thick stack of fliers by her side and more by her boots, and a staple gun that should have required a carry permit.

In the final days before her bar opened, Mimi barely left the kitchen, going only occasionally to the front porch to sign for the massive shipments of liquor that arrived in large yellow cardboard boxes. Mimi would sign with a hand that was wet and wrinkly from hours spent submerged in hot dishwater, then hand the pen back to the delivery man, who would take it with a look of faint distaste, then turn around and make tracks back to dry land, pushing his dolly briskly in front of him like a jogger pushes a baby carriage. Mimi dragged the boxes back into the bar and began stocking the shelves, six bottles deep.

The night of the eighteenth, she took a shower. She breathed deeply and prepared herself for the coming day. She washed her hair twice. When she got out of the shower her eyelashes were wet and dark and stress furrowed her forehead and gave her eyebrows a critical bent. She got dressed in a blue flannel shirt with little teal flecks, a pair of jeans, and a silver-studded belt she'd picked up in Arizona once. Her feet were bare. She sat down at her dresser and combed her hair out in front of the mirror, tying it back in one of her red bands. As she was doing it up, she thought she heard someone on the front porch. She went to the door of her room and leaned out to look down the hallway. There was, in fact, someone standing on the porch, knocking on the wooden rim of the screen door.

"Bar's closed," she called experimentally. "Opens tomorrow."

"Open up Mimi, it's me." It was Marty Merkle. Mimi came out of the hallway and crossed the floor in her bare feet, not a wise move because the floor was still filled with splinters.

"Marty, what are you doing here?" she asked as she opened the screen door for him.

"Just checking it out," he said. He was leaning backwards and looking up at the underside of the porch roof, noting the solid construction.

Mimi leaned against the doorjamb, watching him look. He finally got back around to her.

"Nice," he said in a tone of voice more subdued than usual. "Can I come in?"

She let him.

He sat down on one of the stools.

"What'll it be?"

"Just a beer."

She got him one and leaned on the bar across from him.

"So," he said. "You ready?"

"I suppose," Mimi said. She did not feel like answering to Merkle as one would to a supervisor.

"Are you going to tend bar yourself?"

"Maybe. I might bring someone else in to do it if it gets too busy."

Marty nodded and took a long swig of his beer. "That's good."

"Yeah." Mimi reached under the inside rim of the bar and broke off a splinter before it could get a chance to embed itself in someone's hand. She held it up for a moment as if studying it would reveal untold secrets, then flicked it off in the direction of the trash bin.

Marty searched his mind for something to say to his ex-wife.

"I told someone up at the office you were opening tomorrow... she said she'd spread it around."

"That's considerate."

"I'm single now."

"Thank you, Marty, for that totally irrelevant piece of information."

"Have we had this conversation before?"

"Maybe."

"Boy, you're going to make one hell of a bartender."

"I'm saving my fire."

"You look tired."

"You know, I think that's the first honest thing you've said to me in four years. And yes, I am tired. Thank you for noticing."

"You're welcome... who did your pool tables?"

"Eckerdson."

"Oh. They're good."

"Yeah, I thought so too." They both stared at the pool tables.

"..."

"..."

"It's going to be a good bar."

"Yes. Yes, it is."

Mimi's bar opened the next day. The first customer was a secretary named Clarice from Marty's insurance office who had gotten off work early and seemed uneasy at being all alone, and over water, at four o'clock. Mimi tried to make conversation, but there was nothing she could say to a young woman who had driven three miles in a shiny silver Miata at four o'clock just to check out the new bar in town. She polished glasses and made change. "Come back again sometime," she called at Clarice's retreating back, but didn't expect anything of it.

The next customers came in a group of three, then a group of four. Fortunately, one of the people from the group of three recognized another from the group of four, and soon Mimi was dealing with a loud, happy and hungry bunch of seven. They were yuppies, all of them, the women in shapeless blue denim dresses with little darling buttons down the front and cream colored sweaters; the men in khakis and button-down shirts in forest green and cranberry stripes. Mimi fried shrimp and brought out dozens of green longnecks dangling between her fingers, the party lasted till eight, and the bill was huge. The group dug into their pockets and their purses and managed to come up with a reasonable splitting among them, and Mimi raked a pile of dimes, pennies, and five and ten dollar bills over the counter and into the cash drawer, grinning as widely as an Applebee's waitress living on tips. "Y'all come back now," she called as they left, waved to the women, and stood at the front door until she could no longer see them around the bend of the boardwalk. Then she went back inside.

It had been a truly masterful performance. She had smiled, joked and made small talk that did not nose into their conversation, but complemented it, adding local color and folksy wisdom. She had gamely responded to even their most nosy questions ("Aren't you worried living out here all by yourself?" "How does the plumbing work?"), and even come up with a little impromptu speech on the delights of living close to nature. She had referred to the business three times as a "grill" instead of a "bar" because people who order shrimp prefer to think they're eating at a "grill". She had laid the beers on their table with a cheer and gaiety rivaling the German beer maids portrayed on the bottle labels. She had even said "Y'all come back now", because she had read the women perfectly and saw their desperate need for someone to feel superior to and yet comforted by. As a final touch, she had watched them from the screen door as they left to give the impression she was altruistically "watching out for them" as they walked down that dangerous ol' boardwalk. She was glad she had made money, and probably gotten some permanent customers. But as she watched those people stumble, drunkenly giggling, towards land, she couldn't help wishing they would all fall into the drink and get eaten by alligators.

The next day was better. At ten a.m., Mimi wandered out of her bedroom yawning and brushing out her hair, only to stop short at the sight of another woman standing in the main room, looking around. The other woman had light brown hair straggling out in uneven, tangled ripples from under a large brown cowboy hat, and dark tanned skin on her arms, which were long and sinewy. She had a dead turkey hanging over her right shoulder from a string hooked on her index finger, and the feathers of the turkey's tail fanned out behind her like the decorations of a fancy dancer at a powwow. In her left hand there was a rifle, long and beautifully oiled, the stock resting against her side and the barrel pointed at the ground. She was dressed like Crocodile Dundee on his day off.

The woman finished turning around, taking in the walls, the ceiling, the jukebox and pool tables, and saw Mimi standing there in bathrobe and slippers with mouth slightly open.

"Oh," said the woman in a voice that was calm, quiet, and just a little bemused, "I didn't think anybody was here." She had high ginger eyebrows and a beautiful jawline.

Mimi regained her faculties of speech. "Um, yeah," she said. "It's just me."

"Oh, are you Mimi?" the woman said with a smile so subtle it made the Mona Lisa look goofy.

"Yes."

"Oh. I heard about you. I just thought I'd stop by and say hello."

"Would you like to sit down?" Mimi gestured at the line of stools.

"Yes." The woman shifted the turkey off her shoulder and lowered it to the floor, pausing and looking at Mimi. "You don't mind the bird in here, do you?" she asked. "I didn't want raccoons getting into it if I left it in the boat."

"No, of course not," said Mimi. "You live in the area?"

"I guess you could say that," the woman said, setting the bird down and leaning the rifle gently against the bar. "I'm about nineteen miles away. But we have a broad definition of 'area' around here."

"I see," said Mimi. "You know, I don't know your name."

"Karen," said the woman, stepping forward immediately and sticking her hand out on the long brown pole of her arm. "Karen Voorhies."

"Mimi Delacroix." They shook. Karen had the sort of handshake that one receives from a person sitting on the head of a temporarily downed steer - firm, friendly, authoritative, the shake of someone who knows what they're doing and will teach you the ropes, but only has one hand to offer you at the moment. Mimi liked her immensely.

"Can I offer you a drink? On the house," Mimi said, moving behind the bar.

"Sure," Karen said, nodding at the bottle Mimi held. She sat and Mimi poured.

"So, you've been turkey hunting?"

"Yep," Karen said. "Been out all night looking for raccoons, too, but haven't found any. I needed this." She made a little gesture in Mimi's direction with the glass, then drained it.

"You've been hunting raccoons... by yourself?"

"Yup. I used to go out with my dogs, but lately I go without them. I don't know why."

"Quieter," Mimi guessed.

"Yes, I suppose. And you don't have to be on dry land. You can go out to the islands and the trees where they roost for the night. Just you and the boat. Put that motor on trawl and the birds never even know that you're coming. Of course, I lack the beagle's sense of smell. So if I run across a coon or a possum, it's pretty much by accident."

Mimi refilled her glass. "Thank you. You run a nice place here."

"Well, I've only been running it for a day."

Karen looked at her. "Really?"

"Yes."

"I heard you built it yourself."

Mimi nodded.

"That's quite a job."

"Yes, it is."

They looked at each other for a moment with mutual respect.

"Look," Karen said. "I know you probably can't leave the bar tonight, what with this being the second night open and all, but how about you come by one of these nights later this week, and I'll make you dinner. Sort of in honor of a new resident of the swamp."

"That sounds great."

"Terrific. Now, I see you have a boat out there. You're going to need to use it, because my house is way out there and the closest way to it from here is by water..." and Karen drew a map on a paper napkin. Mimi pointed, asked a few questions, and they settled on next Tuesday. Karen asked how much she owed Mimi, and Mimi said no, they were both on the house.

"Well, okay," Karen said, slipping off the stool and rearranging the turkey over her shoulder. "I've got a lot of dogs to get home to. Mimi Delacroix, it was nice to meet you."

"Nice to meet you too," Mimi said, reaching over the counter to shake Karen's hand again.

"See you Tuesday," Karen said, slipping out the door. Mimi heard the thump and thunk of her boots going down the porch stairs; the "vwishhh, vwishhh" of Karen's outboard motor cord being pulled twice; then the slight rumble of the motor, and she saw Karen troll by in the narrow vertical strip of light between the doorjamb and the edge of the heavy inner door which had swung nearly shut. A hissing trail of bubbles sifted through the water behind her, and she was gone.

Mimi went back to bed.

No one came during the day; she stayed on her front porch, reading catalogues and wondering whether she should have ordered a stuffed pheasant to hang up on the wall somewhere. That night she got three customers, all buying about two beers apiece and gone by ten o'clock. She thought, for just a moment, of getting a TV; then remembered the radio. She turned on WQXR. Danny was in the middle of one of his "Great Guitarists" jags; every once in a while, he decided to spice up the lineup by playing a straight shot of Hendrix or Satriani or Clapton, all night long, with no commercials. He only did this when his boss was on one of his yearly fishing pilgrimages to the Rockies and wasn't within listening range, and the next day he'd have to play extra commercials for the National Guard to make up for the lost advertising time--but it was worth it to Danny.

Mimi had her own private reasons for listening.

Five days later, Mimi made a phone call.

"Merkle, I need you to help me out for a night."

"How so, Mimi?" The smirk was evident in Marty's voice.

"I need you to tend bar."

"You're kidding." The smirk was gone.

"Nope. You think you can do it?"

Marty was silent for a minute. You could hear the favors being added up in his head, subtracted, multiplied, added again. In fact, you could hear him do everything short of plot the favors done and owed on a Cartesian coordinate plane, and she still came out on top. He sighed. "All right, Mimi, I'll do it."

"Good. Now here's what you do..."

It only took a few hours to explain everything necessary to run a backwoods bar for one night to Marty, but to his credit he took it in his stride. Most of it, at least. The idea of deep-frying made him nervous, and he flatly refused to have anything to do with the pickled pigs' feet that floated in a jar just behind the bar.

"If anyone wants one, they'll have to fish it out for themselves," he said.

Mimi rolled her eyes and showed him how to open the surprisingly springy cash drawer without getting slammed in the appendix. There were about nine people coming in on a good night by now, and word was spreading quickly. They hadn't managed to book a band yet, but at least Mimi didn't have to worry about Marty electrocuting himself with the amp wires. She finished instructing him on the art of crawfish preparation, and wiped her hands on her apron.

"I'm going to go change," she said. "If you run into anything you can't handle don't call me."

"Okay," Marty said, and smiled a little self-satisfied smile at being left to do this all by himself. The odd pleasure of being once again on the receiving end of Mimi's sarcasm had put him in an upbeat, even optimistic, frame of mind. This lasted for approximately five minutes.

Mimi brushed her hair and changed into some black jeans she had ironed the day before, and which were consequently stiffer than the ironing board itself. She charged past Marty and out the door like a woman on a mission, ignoring his gulps and "Uh, Mimi"s and the small grease fire he had going already. She took the stairs two at a time while slinging on her jacket, jumped into the bottom of her aluminum boat, yanked the cord on the little Honda outboard, undid the lines, and took off without looking back.

She had forgotten a flashlight and had to squint, but the ride was pleasant anyway. It was easy to forget the map which rested on her knee, for every turn in the river looked exactly the same as the three previous turns. Soon the hypnotic sameness created in Mimi the peaceful trance that can induce a driver on the highway to miss six exits and a couple of state boundaries before realizing he has overshot his mark. Small green seed pods shaped like the propellers on top of beanie caps floated down from the overhanging trees and rested unnoticed in Mimi's hair. The greenish grey water parting before her boat looked like silk rippling before the tailor's scissors, and made about as much noise, thanks to the "troll" setting she had the motor on. A small dragonfly hitched a ride on her right running light, and trout bumped, audibly, against the hull of her aluminum boat - at least she told herself they were trout. Occasionally a tangle of redbud trees and green briar blocked her path, and she ducked the dry twigs and flexible green barbed wire in the same manner as Karen must have, for Karen had left two or three tell-tale long brown hairs caught in the green briar. Her hand, on the black rubber grip of the engine throttle, flexed at the wrist ever so slightly, up and down, modulating the hum of the engine by fractions of decibels. Her mouth curved up in a smile.

When Mimi got to Karen's house, it was getting dim. She came around a bend in the river, and sensed, more than saw, a large embankment to one side of her, thick with brushy redbud that had not yet bloomed. (In this borderline edge of the swamp, water and "dry land" intermingle freely and create a boundary so fiendishly complex that it has caused more than one cartographer to throw up his hands and his t-square, then duck as the t-square part of the equation came down.)

Mimi did not look closely at the brush embankment - she had gone around thirty of them already - until she heard dogs yelping. She saw the kennel - thirty feet of chain-link fence, punctuated by the paws of beagles standing on their hind legs and baying - before she saw the house, which was hidden up in the brush and dark-sided. Karen was coming down the bank, waving.

Mimi turned the boat carefully and moved it toward shore. "Hi," she yelled over the engine. "Where do you want it?"

"Right here would be fine," Karen said, pointing to the large eucalyptus tree she had tied her own boat's bowline to. Mimi nudged the nose of her boat in, careful not to ding the other, which seemed as placid on the water surface as if it had been painted there.

"Don't worry, they won't hurt each other," Karen said. "No waves through here."

Mimi finished tying her bow line around the worn, shiny bark at the base of the eucalyptus tree, and used the gnarled, exposed roots hanging out over the water as a stepping stone to get off the boat. They stood a moment before hugging, awkwardly and briefly.

"Did you find the place all right?" Karen asked, as they started their way up the bank, hands in their pockets.

"Yeah, it wasn't too hard," said Mimi, pulling something out of her pocket - the paper napkin map. "I had this," she said, showing it to Karen.

Karen laughed. "Oh, that thing! It's a wonder I didn't send you to Baton Rouge with that."

"No, it was fine. I knew exactly where I was going."

"The No Trespassing signs didn't throw you?"

"I figured they weren't yours." Mimi had seen No Trespassing signs at more or less regular intervals of twenty yards or so for about four miles, on only one side of the river. They were metal, rusting, and the barbed wire they were tied to the trees with was choking the trees. Barbed wire is insidious - a tree may survive for years getting sliced through, slowly, by a wire, but eventually it will die. Mimi was taking a gamble that Karen didn't do this to trees, or like the people who did.

"You got that right," Karen muttered under her breath as they reached the top of the bank, between the dog kennels and the house. "Someday I'm gonna take a wire clipper to the son of a bitch who put those up. And then I'm gonna rescue his trees." She grinned wickedly.

They stood at the top of the embankment and looked around.

"Well, this is it," Karen said. "You wanna see the dogs?"

"Sure."

The kennel was not, as Mimi had previously thought, one big rectangle. It was two narrower enclosures with a walkway between them, swinging chain-link doors off to each side. It was sort of like the setup in an animal shelter. The beagles ran back and forth in their pen on the right side, their nails skittering on the concrete, yapping and pressing their noses up against the chain-link. There were about six of them, most fairly young.

"I only bring out two at a time when I hunt, that's all I can handle. And most of these are still in training. But when they're old enough, I'll sell them to folks around here. People will buy a good hunting dog, whereas they'll let a puppy get put down. I save them the trouble of training the dogs, they pay for all the Purina."

She went to the other cage and shook it gently. An old german shepard lifted her head from the ground near her house.

"This is Layla. You're a good girl, aren't you, Layla?" Karen crouched down and offered her fingers through the wire. Layla got up and licked at the digits, and Karen fed her a dog biscuit from her coat pocket. "I would keep her out of the cage during the day, but she just stands there and whines, looking at the other dogs. She likes being around the puppies. And she's not very athletic any more, are you, old girl? She's got arthritis."

"How long have you had her?"

"Fifteen years."

Mimi said nothing like "wow, that's old" or "you must be very attached to her", because Karen had worked her wrist through the chain link and was petting the old dog's head. Layla was nudging at Karen's palm with her nose, looking for more dog biscuit, and anything Mimi could possibly have said would have been superfluous.

Adjacent to Layla in the right-hand cage was a little black dachshund with a ginger face. "I don't know what I'm going to do with her."

After that were the dachshund's puppies, a squirming black bunch. "I really don't know what I'm going to do with them."

And finally, one gorgeous white chow the color of new milk. The chow had eyes remeniscent of Victorian paintings of mischievous elves, and a happy curled tail that coiled tightly over the back.

"Now she, she's a handful."

"I can see that," said Mimi, but they both couldn't refrain from grinning back at the chow.

The mad glee in the chow's eyes intensified, the ears perked, and the tail wagged so frantically it seemed it would unfurl.

"I get up in the morning, she's under the porch. I lock her in the cage, two minutes later she's under the porch. I tie her to a tree, she's back to the porch before I am. I'm about to give in and let her live there, but the thing is she digs around the supports and I'm afraid the porch will collapse. And I'll be on it when it happens."

Mimi grinned.

"And she whines and begs for hamburger patties when I cook them, and she steals them off the barbecue grill if I barbecue them, and she chases the cats and the ducks, and is generally not a nice girl!" Karen rattled the cage for emphasis on the last words. The chow whimpered and bowed, and laid her ears down and looked goofy, and both Karen and Mimi burst out laughing.

They went inside and ate dinner, which was stew involving turkey, then went and sat out on the porch. They had a beer and talked till late into the night, even though the mosquitoes were chewing them up, the air was chilly, and they could hear the sounds of digging underneath the floorboards. Sometime around eleven Karen went inside to see if she could dig up the bug zapper she could vaguely remember getting for Christmas, and came out saying, "You know, I wonder how that dog does get out of her cage. I'm gonna find out." She hung the bug zapper and turned it on, and a blue glow diffused through the night. She hopped off the porch and Mimi squinted to see her in the dark as she led the chow by the collar to the pen. The dog went in obediently and Karen came back wiping her hands. "Now we'll see how that dog gets out."

They sat on the porch and waited. Silence from the dog cage. Karen looked up at the bug zapper. "Wouldn't you know it, the second you put one of these out, the mosquitoes stop for the night." As she said it, a slight movement from the kennel made Mimi look up.

"Don't move," Karen whispered. The chow was climbing over the fence. It jumped high enough to get its front paws on the top bar, then scrabbled with its back paws, looking for a hold. When it found it, it tenuously hung there for a second, claws caught in the chain-link, belly bluish-white in the light from the bug zapper, then one little twist, a jerk, and the chow was over the fence and down on the ground outside. It sniffed the ground, looked up hesitantly at Mimi and Karen, who were sitting open-mouthed on the porch, and set off into the dark around the house.

"Son of a..." Karen muttered. "That's gotta be ten feet."

"More," Mimi said.

Three years later

"This is Danny Simon on WQXR radio, your home for the best rock n' roll. How're y'all doin' out there ... good? I hope you're all having a nice and ... pleasant day out there ... here's "Down on the Corner"."

Danny had improved a little bit. His voice was smoother. He was more relaxed. His boss was roaring into the control booth much less often, and sometimes even let it go completely when Danny got the station call letters wrong, which was a great load off Danny's nerves.

Mimi's was doing fantastic. The bar was now the busiest in the tri-county area, and Mimi was raking in money hand over fist. Every night the bar was filled to maximum capacity, which by Mimi's definition was a lot of people. People sat out on the boardwalk leading up to Mimi's, heels swinging over the water, just to be near the party and drink and watch the phosphorus on the water surface undulate below them. Sometimes they were looking at alligator eyes and didn't know it. There were bands every night, local bands with names like The Good Silver and Water Landing. There was also Clyde Owens and the Ocelots, Grammy Material, Limmonade, and Until Further Notice. These bands were all good, believe it or not.

Mimi was looking taller. She was now the head honcho of a very high-traffic place of business, and the responsibility had rendered her silent and quick on her feet. She had lost much of her hearing in both ears due to the loud music, and had instead developed a powerful stare she was completely unaware of. She could move like a rumor when it was to her advantage, and could vault over the bar in two seconds flat to stop fights already in progress. Most fights never got a chance to develop - Mimi was escorting the contestants out before they'd even become aware they were having an argument. Mimi could smell trouble like a thunderstorm in the air.

Her eye became a critical and appraising tool, her eyebrow a focus that only narrowed. Her face, when she was not concentrating, was blank. Her skin was white - she rarely left the shelter of her bar. She was a fish, hiding among the weeds and rotten timbers sunk to the bottom, all pale belly and oxbow mouth. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that she did not have an inner life. When the bar closed for a day, when the morning sun tilted at an eleven o'clock angle, she would walk out to the small personal porch she constructed for herself on the south-east side of the bar. She would let her foot dangle down into the water in its Carhart working boot, protection from reptiles and gators. From underneath, the dark aquatic weeds covered in their fur of silver bubbles reached up to caress the sole of her boot, and the small minnows flashed in and out among the trailing laces.

She would think. In these few years, she had fixed her moral compass on some new stars in the sky. In order to salvage what was left of her own personality, she had stopped putting it out as a freebie, along with the pretzels and beer nuts. She no longer pandered to her customers as she had to those first few who came in her door. She assumed a public face that did not change noticeably from one patron to another, as a bartender, or any public figure, must if he or she is to remember what their true face is. Mimi was by nature an antisocial creature, and the relative absence of others in her true personal life confirmed this. Karen was still a good friend, though she didn't come to the bar on Saturday nights. "Too dangerous for me," she confessed. She had a point - you had to have your wits about you when you went to Mimi's. The local chapter of the Hell's Angels had taken a liking to the atmosphere, even claimed a table for themselves which the other patrons (or at least the smart ones) steered clear of. The Louisiana Vikings, another biker gang, showed up every once in a while to ruffle the Angels' feathers. The state troopers became intimately aware of the hairpin turns on the road to Mimi's, and there were one or two who claimed they could drive there blindfolded.

Mimi's also got the reputation of being something of a meat market, and lots of young ladies came there of a Saturday night, many of whom were involved in long-term relationships with men who were commonly referred to as "the jealous type". These young men had a habit of showing up late at night, wielding bats, crowbars, and other implements with which to get their sweethearts back. Usually Marty could explain things to them. He was good at the "let's go outside and have a man-to-man" thing, at listening to their long and doleful stories of love for one Doreen or Louisa or Candy, and at sympathizing and offering manly advice until they packed up their toys and went home. This sometimes took hours. But it was worth it if it avoided a confrontation; because when you came right down to it, Mimi was a small woman, Marty was a small man, and they did not make for the most convincing of authority figures when pitted against rage and/or an astronomical blood alcohol count.

Now, there were about thirty men well known in the area as "the jealous type", and twenty of them were Jackie Wallace. He was a local character much known for his relationship with Leia Higgins, a beauty all of twenty two years old. Jackie was fifty, or sixty, or seventy. No one could tell. He was that type. Possibly if he had learned anything during his fifty, sixty, or seventy years on this earth, it would have been possible to carbon-date him by his wisdom, but there was none of that in evidence. He had spent hundreds of nights in jail, all separate because he possessed the ability to ingratiate himself to the local judges, and they never gave him more than one night in jail for beating up Leia when drunk and disorderly. Leia did not possess this talent - she was rather aloof and inarticulate, (it might have had to do with being twenty two) and none of the judges could dig up much sympathy for her. Jackie, on the other hand, was colorful, funny, and threw barbecues famous throughout the county. He was a living legend. Anthropologists came to his doorstep to hear him tell stories and record them on little black tape recorders, publishing them later in hyperventialting articles about the "rapidly vanishing oral traditions of Louisiana". He was that charming.

Mimi was not fooled by him for a second. She said to Marty one night after the bar closed, "If he ever comes in here, call the state troopers right away. Not because he'll be out of control. I will." Mimi was not the world's number one fan of Leia, but she hated wife beaters with a passion that far exceeded any other moral indignation she felt. No one deserved that, she thought. Whether Mimi herself ever had any close-up experience with abuse remains unknown.

Danny Simon still managed to make an impression on Mimi during even her most personal and reflective moments - though how is certainly a mystery.

And Marty ... Marty was an employee.

This had happened sometime around the late fall of 1995, when Mimi started to become seriously short-handed on weekends. Marty started coming over to bartend and stuck around after the bar closed to do odd jobs, nail down a floorboard that was coming up, fix a bulb that was flickering, wash the dishes. He was only too glad to be doing these odd jobs for Mimi, and they joked and sometimes even sang along to the music of the jukebox when they did it. Marty was, of course, still in love with Mimi, but it had settled into a sort of Bogart and Bacall-ish banter between them, and Marty could even joke about it once in a while. He didn't come anywhere close to Mimi's heart, though, and deep down he probably knew that. It was painful, but he was beginning to learn to live with it and even be reasonably happy. When she offered him a job at the bar, he took it because he liked the work and liked Mimi. Now he tended bar three nights a week and did the cooking the other four, as well as various odd jobs.

"Marty, I need the ignitor on the stove fixed," Mimi would call to him after the last customer had left, and the chair jammed underneath the inside doorknob. (Mimi never got a proper lock put on the door.) Marty would come out from the hall where he had been rearranging the fish packages in the meat freezer to get ready for a shipment coming in tomorrow, wiping his icy hands on his sweatshirt front.

"Which one?" he asked, leaning over the cast-iron stovetop.

"Back right," Mimi said, pointing from her stool behind the bar, where she was balancing the books. "It's been misfiring all evening."

"Right," Marty said, lifted the burner ring, and reached inside with one finger. "Oh, what's this? There's your problem," turning around to face Mimi with the finger lifted high in the air and a piece of burnt something stuck on it. "You had a whole hash brown down there."

Mimi looked at the hash brown. "It must have fallen in when I made breakfast."

Marty popped the hash brown in his mouth, trying not to cringe at the taste. "Mmmm, good."

"Don't come crying to me when you get carbon poisoning."

He laughed and found a garbage bin to spit the little blackened bit of potato into. Then he lifted Mimi off the stool from behind. "C'mon, we'll find a whole feast in the stove if only we look! An entire land of milk and honey awaits us!"

Mimi shrieked and laughed, and Marty swung her around in circles on the dance floor. The jukebox sprung to life as they passed by and started wildly spinning out some totally terrific Cajun waltz music. Its button had been pushed, so to speak.

One night in late October of 1997, Jackie Wallace showed up at Mimi's. It was a cool night and the leaves were blowing off the trees and swirling around above the water, coming to rest on the heads of alligators that had come up for a breather. Mimi was working behind the bar that night, polishing the glasses with a white cloth she kept tucked in her belt. She was maintaining a conversation with Karen, who was down at the end of the bar nursing a beer and enjoying the warmth after a long day of hunting. Marty was flipping steaks on the grill with a long spatula and tossing jokes and wisecracks over his shoulder. The dance floor was full, but not too full for free movement, and a nice song was playing on the jukebox. I think it was "Elementary Things" by Clyde Owens and the Ocelots.

When Jackie Wallace opened the door, Marty heard the familiar squeak of the door hinges, and looked up with a friendly expression to see who it was. Mimi stopped drying glasses and her face slowly registered shock as she saw what was happening.

Jackie lunged for Leia, who was sitting quiet as a mouse about midway down the bar and whom no one had noticed until now. Mimi was over the counter and jumping on Jackie. Karen's face made an "o" and her drink went crashing down on the floor, sending glass fragments speeding and skipping along the beams. Marty yanked the towel off his shoulder and dashed around the counter. And Leia howled out and bit Jackie. And then Mimi and Karen and Marty were all heaving at him at once, pulling him off her and out the door, his hands pinned behind him. As they were moving him to the door, Leia regained herself, grabbed the nearest heavy object - a napkin dispenser from one of the tables right next to her - and threw it at Jackie's head, which towered above all three of the people holding him.

Jackie collapsed with a sound like a steer hitting the ground, and everyone stood still for a moment. He had literally shaken the building. Mimi was the first to recover.

"Okay, boys," she said, wiping her hands together. "We're going to take his feet."

Three men stepped forward silently.

"That's good. Now you take his feet. You take his head. Careful, that's it. You take the right arm, Marty you take the left, and I'll get the middle. Now one, two, three, lift!"

They all hoisted at once, and the figure of Jackie Wallace was raised silently and all at once to shoulder level.

At that moment Jackie stirred and groaned, and Marty looked up in a wide-eyed panic at Mimi. Mimi looked down at Jackie, then over at the beer bottle Marty had hooked by its lip underneath the string of his apron where he could grab it easily when he wanted a drink. Marty looked down at the bottle too, then slowly up at Mimi. She nodded at him, and held out her hand, waggling her fingers once, then twice, in a "give it here" motion. Marty unhooked the bottle and handed it wordlessly to Mimi. She took a moment getting her sweaty hand attuned to the grip of the neck, then raised it above her head and brought it down in one sharp smack against the side of Jackie's head. Jackie went limp. Mimi passed the bottle to the guy crouching next to her, and he did the same. Then the next guy, and the next, each passing the bottle off the whoever sat next to them and sitting quietly, looking down. None of them wanted to do it more than once. When the bottle got back to Marty it was clear Jackie was already dead. Marty stood up and flung the bottle, giving it a nice horizontal spin that rid it of all its liquid, off the railing side of the walkway. Then he came back and crouched again, silently, near the head of the body.

No one spoke. They all listened attentively. Their ears were more or less as bad as Mimi's, but they were attuned that night and heard every whisper and chuckle and grunt of snake and coon and gator. Nothing. No spinning cop lights, no flashlights coming. Nothing. Mimi heard an owl, and felt at that moment about as low as any human being can feel.

They waited. There was no sound, and he did not move again. Marty, Marty the ever-squeamish, reached forward and put his fingers on the dead man's neck, right below the jaw. He then looked up at Mimi and she nodded.

"Let's do it," she said. The other men scrambled to their feet and bent to pick up their pieces of Jackie. One hauled Jackie's arm over his neck, then thought better of it and held onto the arm as one holds the arm of a little sister one is preparing to throw into the water of the lake during summer vacation.

One, two, three, heave-ho. Jackie floated downward and Mimi cursed herself for not remembering he would later float. But, one by one, the alligators were coming through the water to save her.

There was a full investigation of Jackie Wallace's disappearance. The judges and the sheriff's office wanted blood. No one had approved of Jackie's drunken conduct, but they all missed his stories. They went on television and waved his picture, angrily demanding that anyone who knew anything step forward. No one did. Leia was arrested as procedure (one judge was heard to mumble on his way into his corridors, "I never liked that bitch"), but they could find no evidence to connect her to the crime. She had an airtight alibi - more than sixty people had seen her that night at Mimi's bar, and all of them swore up and down that nothing, absolutely nothing, out of the ordinary happened that night. Jackie had no known enemies, unless you counted Leia's parents, but they had been dead for over two years. ("Dead of shame," one officer was heard to mutter.) Leia was kept in jail for sixty days during the investigation and then released.

Mimi, on the other hand, was interrogated quite heavily about what she saw the night Jackie disappeared, and what she saw in the days and weeks immediately following. Mimi's status as the single (and divorced) female owner and manager of a bar she purported to have built herself did not fit in with the officers' idea of a credible witness. These factors combined with the fact that she had previously and on several occasions made known statements indicating an unnatural hatred of and ill will towards wife-beaters made her a prime suspect, in the officers' opinions. But they could find nothing to pin her down with.

Marty claimed he had had his nose in a steak all evening.

Karen told them to fuck off and slammed the door in their faces, at which point a large husky dog came running out from under the porch and attacked the deputies.

All the patrons of Mimi's claimed to have seen less than nothing, which one deputy pointed out was mathematically impossible. He was a young deputy with a fresh face who had an interest in mathematics and in the intricacies of the universe above and beyond the disappearance of Jackie Wallace. His supervisor frowned at him in front of the person they were questioning and told him to concentrate on the case at hand. But the young deputy tipped his hat quite nicely to the witness when they left, smiled, and said "Sorry to have bothered you, ma'am". The witness, a woman who'd never been called "ma'am" before in her life, smiled after him long after he'd gone.

After the Jackie incident, Marty and Mimi and Karen stayed apart for a while, just because they needed a break from one another. Mimi closed the bar for a few weeks, and spent a lot of time sitting out on her front porch, her legs dangling over the edge, watching the birds flit from tree to tree and humming odd little snatches of song. For some reason, her entire perspective seemed to be tilted in a happy direction. Getting away with it had knocked the ferris wheel of her mind slightly off balance, but for some odd reason it was running better than ever before. Mimi was functioning, for the first time, as a gloriously bejeweled, merrily spinning, loudly singing, just slighly off-kilter TILT-A-WHIRL, and she loved it. There was only one thing wrong. She felt, for the first time in her antisocial life, lonely.

The next day

Karen was sitting at home with her head in her hands, rocking. Deputies from the Office of Animal Control had come by and shot her dog. They had ignored her screams, raised the rifle, and shot Layla, the beautiful old german shepherd whom she had loved for fifteen years. They had treated her like a hysteric afterwards, holding her, telling her they were under orders, it was all for the best, that the dog had attacked a deputy. The chow stayed under the porch and whimpered. Only one thing saved its life. Karen was screaming and crying so loudly and incoherently that the deputies did not understand what she was saying: WRONG DOG.

The next day

Marty sat in his office at Tidewater Insurance, watching reruns of "L.A. Law" and eating leftover pizza, not taking any phone calls. He had locked his office door and his boss was pounding on it intermittently, threatening to break down the door unless Marty opened this door right now. Marty simply turned up the volume on the television set and yelled, "I'm not in right now, but if you leave a message at the beep I'll call you back." He was enjoying himself. But when his boss began to cut through the door with a chainsaw, Marty realized the terms of his employment were in serious jeopardy and let himself out the office window, leaving by the fire escape.

He walked around. He wandered. He had left his keys in his desk drawer. After a while, he started wandering in the general direction of Mimi's. It was a sunny day, and the dragonflies were humming and zipping around in their speedy, businesslike way. The walk, though somewhat muddy, was pleasant. Marty felt reenergized and brisk. For the first time in a year he didn't feel the need to curl up in front of the television and zone out.

When he saw the walkway leading up to Mimi's he began to lose his nerve. Seeing the water brown instead of the clean black of night he remembered, and all those trees in broad daylight, really took it out of him. But then he heard something across the water - a rough voice, untrained and unused but not altogether unpleasant - singing along with a radio. Marty forgot his fear and stepped out onto the boardwalk. When he got to the bend in the walkway his knees buckled a little, but he straightened himself up and walked on. He saw, as he neared the building, that the door was standing open. And when he got closer, he saw the golden flash of his ex-wife's leg, for just a moment, inside. She was dancing around the room in shorts, singing to the radio. He climbed the stairs slowly.

"Hey, anybody home?" he said, knocking on the doorjamb and smiling. Mimi halted in the middle of her spin and looked at him through a curtain of dark hair. "Merkle, is that you?" she asked. "Yup," he said, stepping inside. Mimi went and turned off the radio. She looked down at herself, blushing. "Let me go and change out of this," she mumbled, and padded off in the direction of her bedroom. "Take your time," Marty called after her. He stood and looked around at the old digs. They were nice, if a little dusty. He could get at those cobwebs with a ceiling sweeper, if Mimi'd let him. He needed a job.

Mimi came back into the room, gathering her hair back into one of the red bands she always used. She had changed into a pair of jeans, so she could respect herself once again. They stood there and looked at each other across the room.

"It's good to see you again, Marty," Mimi said in an unusually soft voice. "Yeah, well, it's nice to see you too, squirt," he said. "Don't call me squirt." "The place looks nice." "Yeah. I've been doing a little work on it. Nailed up the drywall on the ceiling." She pointed. They both looked around in the sunny, slanting afternoon light. The bandstand was empty, the microphones dangling various wires forlornly. The wood of the floor near the bandstand and jukebox was especially scuffed with years of steel-toed boots and scraping table and chair legs. The pictures were tilted, the old beer mirrors thumbprinted and dusty. The pool tables were glorious. The bottles behind the bar were dusty, and speaking of the bar, no one had yet shoved a knife into it. Mimi considered this a personal victory.

"You remember when I first walked in here..." Marty started out. "And sat down over there." Mimi pointed. "I said it would be a good bar," Marty said in a hushed, almost reverent whisper. Mimi nodded. "You said it would be a good bar." They stood in silence.

Karen showed up on Mimi's doorstep in the pouring rain. "They killed Layla," she said right off the bat, and Mimi immediately enfolded her in her arms. Karen sobbed. Mimi patted her on the back, and again wisely said nothing. "I can't stay there," Karen said. "Can I stay here?" "You can stay as long as you like," said Mimi.

One day later

Mimi had a lot to do. There were tables to be moved back out onto the floor, chairs to be gotten out of storage. The stove had to be cleaned out before it could be restarted. A whole new mess of fish and shrimp had to be ordered in, since she used all hers up during the hiatus of business. She went to the phone and gave Marty a call.

"Marty. We need you down here. Yes, right now. I need you to fix the stove. All right." She hung up the phone and went to the pool table where Karen was sleeping. "C'mon Karen, wake up," she said, shaking Karen's shoulder gently. Karen moved and moaned under her sheet, which was the warm thick nubbly flannel kind that you never want to get out from under. "We gotta lot of work to do," said Mimi.

"Okay, okay, I'm up, I'm up," Karen said. "I had the nicest dream."

"Yeah?" said Mimi, leaning one her elbows on the edge of the magnificent pool table and looking down at Karen. "What about?"

"You know, I don't remember. But I think it had to do with an eightball, and all I heard was ‘all signs point to yes’, and I felt really comforted. You got any ideas what that means?"

"I have no idea," said Mimi, and she truly didn't, but she was happy. She held Karen's hand for one minute longer and smiled into her eyes, then went to go get her coat from the door.

"You stay here and make yourself some breakfast," she told Karen. "I've just got a couple of errands to run. I'll be back before long."

"Okay," said Karen, and she sat up, stretched, and looked around at her surroundings with new eyes. She leaped out of ‘bed’ and began to make coffee. When Marty showed up in the middle of the pouring rain, water dripping off the brim of his hat and the tip of his nose, she offered him a cup and they sat, sipping, looking out at the rain.

Mimi was moving ahead of the rain. She was driving fast in her pickup truck towards town with her windshield wipers on even though she didn't need them. She was going to see someone.

She found the building on Main street. It was just an ordinary brick building with a logo painted on the glass door, which pulled outward. You went inside and up a flight of steps with a window visible at the top, turned a couple of hallway corners, passed three ficus plants and an indignant secretary or two, and found the room you were looking for. There was a sign on the door. It wasn't hard to find at all.

Mimi looked through the window of the door and saw who she was looking for. He was young and nervous looking with thinning brown hair and a slightly worn-out, pleasant face. He was speaking into the microphone and reaching forward to drop the needle into another record. Mimi went in quietly and waited until he had the record playing before clearing her throat. He looked up, startled, and both of them had to catch their breath. She stuck out her hand and he reached out and took it. "Hi," she said. "I'm Mimi Delacroix."

Post Script

Since 1997, some people have written asking me what's been going on at Mimi's lately. Well, I always suggest that they go down to Mimi's and find out for themselves... but just in case some of you can't get your bosses to give you a night off, here's all the news that's fit to print.

Danny Simon and Mimi got married sometime in the winter of '98, and Mimi had her first child, a girl, the next December. The girl's name is Jackie Diane, which I suppose is a play on that John Mellencamp song, though I'm not sure.

Marty Merkle left his job at Tidewater Insurance and has since started up his own restaurant, an indoor-outdoor joint on the edge of a river about sixteen miles from Mimi's. The theme of the restaurant is sort of like what you'd get if "Pirates of the Caribbean" and a Red Lobster were involved in a head-to-head collision. There are lots of tiki torches and stuffed parrots, and Jimmy Buffet plays on the radio all year round. Marty can usually be found on the back patio with one of the waitresses at the restaurant, who are all young and beautiful, and very, very blond. He is looking very well. He still has his haircut.

Karen Voorhies still lives alone; she has started a larger kennel and has hired three employees to help her with all the dogs.

Leia Higgins left the area about two years ago, though some people have reported seeing a woman who looked a lot like her at Karen Voorhies' house. Once she bought a German shepherd from Karen's kennel.

Christopher Jason, the young deputy who pointed out the meaninglessness of the expression "less than nothing", now has his superior's job.

He has since begun dating one of the witnesses he questioned in connection to the disappearance of Jackie Wallace.