Then Bob saw a larger sign. “We’re having dinner at… a hotel?” Bob said.
“Nope,” Feeney countered. “That’s the inn next door. This here is Buck Owens’s place.”
The Crystal Lounge was the biggest saloon Bob had ever seen, an old-fashioned Western bar, thousands of square feet of floor space, a big theatre-style stage with a red-velvet-and-gold curtain, a second-floor balcony fronted by wooden bannisters that wrapped around it all. They were barely through the front doors when the band picked up again, the volume rising above the crowd, a pedal steel guitar kicking in as they began a rendition of “Move it on over.”
Their table was the furthest from the stage. A waitress offered to get them drinks. Feeney ordered a beer, Sharmila a coffee.
“Water,” Bob said, forcing a smile. They were clearly trying to be sociable, nice to someone they thought was doing a good thing. But Bob had given up being sociable after Tucson.
Eva. He hadn’t thought about his friend in months. He didn’t want to revisit the lasting image of her dying from gunshot wounds, unaccountably happy, a quick and meaningful death so much better to her than fighting cancer, but the sense of her loss immediate and numbing.
The waitress brought along menus. He checked his six, then looked for the exits, anyone positioned near them.
Sharmila put a hand on top of his for a moment, a reassuring pat. “Relax, okay? We’ve got things to worry about, but nobody here is on the clock or a threat.”
He felt a flush of shame, that she could be so courageous in the face of her father’s death as to try and make him more comfortable, more accepted.
When his fiancée, Maggie, had died in a car crash, storming out after an argument he could’ve prevented, Bob learned to avoid the places they’d gone, the club near his old dive where they’d danced to live blues, the market, the restaurants in Chicago’s West Loop.
As he’d moved further away from people, away from the world of pain and suffering, time had passed, too. After a decade, avoiding his grief had become second nature. He didn’t want to see her make the same mistake. To see her forget how to live.
And maybe she already knows that. Maybe that’s why she’s trying for normalcy. Even when you’re being awkward… you make it about you, Bobby. Just give them this, and try to relax.
The dance floor ahead of the stage filled up, folks two-stepping together, cowboy hats bobbing, skirts spinning, as the band extolled “A Working Man Ain’t Working Out for Me,” the pedal steel going into an extended solo.
“So… does he play this place himself?” Bob asked.
Feeney looked a little taken aback. “Who? Buck?! He’s been dead going on twenty years now!”
“Sorry. Now I feel a little foolish.”
“It’s okay. I take it you’re not a big country and western fan, though, as he’s sort of royalty.”
“Yeah… not much of it in my neck of the woods. More a blues and jazz guy, I guess. A little rock.”
“Lots of parallels,” Feeney said. “Lots of similarities. Blues is working-class music from black folks. Country is working class music from white folks. But lots of slide—or pedal steel to us—lots of tales of working, and drinking, and love gone wrong.”
Sharmila seemed less impressed. “If you grow up here,” she said, “you’re fully versed in Buck and Merle by the time you’re in grade school.”
“Is that why you didn’t bring the family?” Feeney said. “Lots of big tables. Could’ve come.”
“I’ve told my husband Ajay that I don’t want him or them involved in any of this. But speaking of families…” She turned Bob’s way.
“Hmmm?”
“Bob… who are you exactly? I mean, not to be rude or anything, but until the Kopec brothers decided to chase us, I thought you were a real estate attorney from Malibu.”
“Good question,” Bob said. “I’m… a friend of Marcus’s. I was headed to Seattle to talk to a psychiatric specialist about some… issues. I tried a guy in Vegas, but that didn’t go so well.”
“You didn’t like his answers, you said. On your way to Seattle for a second opinion.”
“Something like that. Anyway, all that stuff—my baggage—it’s in the past. I was… between jobs for a while, fighting stuff out,” he said.
“Fighting stuff?” She looked puzzled.
He grimaced. “Figuring. Slip of the tongue. I’d… drifted away from people.”
It sounded better than “being a drunk who slept rough.”
“Ah. That… No, wait… that tells me nothing whatsoever. You’re from Chicago originally, like the police said of Marcus?”
“Marcus isn’t even from Chicago, not really. He grew up in Hickory Hills, a suburb forty minutes out of town. I’m from the U.P., a Yooper.”
“The ‘you pee’?” she asked.
“Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the bit that stretches into Canada, sort of. You ever heard of Marquette University?”
“I think so. I’m not big on sports but it’s familiar.”
“Good school,” Feeney said. “So… you’re a country boy… sort of.”
“That neck of the woods, though in my family’s case it was very much the actual woods. My background is pretty… rustic, I guess you’d say. If you want good cell phone service, you don’t go to the U.P.”
The questions were becoming uncomfortable. If they learned personal details about him, maybe they’d become closer. Then they’d be another pair to worry about constantly, two more people to protect. “Maybe we should discuss what we do tomorrow.”
Sharmila sighed and leaned back, placing her fork on the edge of the plate. “Okay, Bob.”
“We’re just being friendly,” Feeney offered.
