Mimi's Bar, Jane Halpern, Page 6

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.

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