Easy Beverly is (ajar) wrote in repose, @ 2020-08-01 20:52:00 |
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Entry tags: | *log, easy beverly, janus allen |
Easy + Janus: a bar
Who: Easy and Janus
When: Recent
Warnings: Language, maybe
Don't shit where you eat.
His dad had said it. More'n once, back when his vowels were slack and lazy with booze. He said it proud, like he had that figured out. Didn't make a damn bit of difference, because Isaiah Beverly had screwed waitresses who worked alongside his wife, picked bar fights with the guy who sold his groceries or did maintenance at the high school. But he said it, and it seemed sound to Easy.
Drinking had never done anything to the thing. The 'thing' was unoriginal as hell but it was what Easy dubbed it, back when he realized other people didn't see things or hear 'em, watch 'em hang out and wait a while. Fact was, when he was small he'd felt them too. Scared him to hell and he'd called it the 'thing' partly because he didn't know a word for it, but partly because naming it something else made it more real than not. So it didn't change, when he drank, least that he knew of. Easy changed. The way beer or liquor made any man stupid. A little slower. A little reactionary. More ornery. Gone a whole year without drinking. Not like another man let out of jail might drink like the first glass of water in a desert, Easy was scared of getting put back inside. Whether a temper, liquored up, matured inside no matter if you fed it or not.
But drinking was what held the town together nights, so far as he could see. And the cottage, the old one without air, except a piece of shit unit stuck in the window that blew a fuse now and then, was lonely. Easy was used to sleeping hearing someone else piss, or breathe, or cry. Drinking was a way in, least ways one he knew. But the town was full of people who looked strange. Some he saw, clear as day and some he didn't. But the thing, and drinking, didn't mix. So he took himself out the limits, in a pick-up he'd bought from a farm guy who took cash and he parked it up behind a bar that had nothing to sell itself by. Neon in the window, music every time a door opened. A little country, a little rock. Nothing that meant anything.
Anonymous, and Easy went in with the old truck dusty in the lot, and he stopped in the door and looked around, uneasy. Didn't look uneasy, had to be said. Looked like a tall man, heavy with muscle, in a gray t-shirt over his jeans and worn work-boots. Wasn't nothing like the bar in the Capital where he worked, and he watched the guys playing pool a little, before he walked on over to the bar. Sat down, ordered himself a beer that came glossy with condensation. And before he could have a damn sip, he saw someone else in the bar who looked just as strange as anything in Repose and Easy swore, quiet and dirty under his breath.