The bartender is suddenly before him. The man next to him, he has noticed, gets quiet when the bartender comes over. It’s like he wants others to think they are strangers. Inside his cloud of intoxication, Mitchell doesn’t like how the man is acting.
Mary Baldwin watches. When the bartender isn’t looking, she adds cheap vodka from airline bottles to her giant glass. She gets the bottles at the neighborhood liquor store—she steals them when the clerk isn’t looking. Eventually she will stop coming to the bar, when it becomes easier, and cheaper, to just drink handles.
“I’m cutting you off,” the bartender is saying, and the thought crosses his mind that if Mitchell were a woman, he would suggest he sleep it off in the back room. He doesn’t like the way the young man’s eyes are moving.
“Okay.” Mitchell is having a hard time moving his lips, too. His legs feel like they are barely attached to his body. At any moment, his soul might fly away.
“Won’t let you drive, either.”
“I live close,” Mitchell hears himself say. It sounds like a voice speaking from far away. Like the ceiling.
“You work at that factory, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Never seen someone get drunk as easy as you.”
“I can walk. Let me take a piss first.”
He usually didn’t say words likepiss. He had been raised too well for that. If the ghost of his mother was watching, she was screaming at him.
Surprisingly, his legs work well enough to walk. They carry him, woodenly, to the bathroom, and he returns, having even washed his hands. He thinks he is feeling better.
“See?” he says to the bartender, but the bartender is not there. He is down the bar, serving a large group that has just come in, and Mitchell is talking to empty air. The people from this group will later testify at the trial, confirming that they saw Mitchell leave the bar, but little else.
No one else is aware of Mitchell except Mary Baldwin, the cook who finished his meal hours before and is now reading the handicapping form, and Wes Rogers, who is in the corner, scoping everyone out, as is his habit. The cook is waiting to go home until he knows that his wife will be there, after her late shift at the local hospital. Wes is thinking about following Mitchell out and robbing him, but something tells him that the husky young man might be strong in a fight, even if he looks shit-clobbered.
Mitchell, finding that no one is talking to him, including the man he thought he knew, leaves. He finds himself in the parking lot, confused. It is cooling off with night, and the fresh air feels startling. His truck is suddenly before him, and he reaches, instinctively, for his keys.
The man waits until Mitchell leaves, and, with calculated ease, finishes his own beer. Fingering something in his pocket, he heads for the door.
No one notices him leaving—except Mary Baldwin, the cook, andWes Rogers. All would mention this fact later in their interviews. It probably meant nothing, they all said.
A sea of eerie green, darker with night. The feeling of a warm wind rushing in his window. A flickering light in the distance.
Mitchell knows he took a wrong turn. He has driven out of Union City without even realizing it. The intoxication comes in waves. One moment he feels he can think, and his arms and legs seem to be working fine, and then minutes later he comes to again, aware that he has blacked out and has been driving the whole time.
He has no idea how much time has passed. It might have been minutes, hours, or days. All he knows is that the road is straight, it is impossibly dark out, and he is lost.
He is beginning to get scared. Someplace deep inside him, a voice cries out.This is not right,it says.
There, up ahead. It is a gas station.
In his relief, he feels sweat pop out all over him. He will stop here and get help.
Betty Dubois watches the young man almost fall out of his truck. The truck is old—she is used to that—but she sees that the plates are not local. Neither is the drunk young man, clearly. She can tell that just from the color of his skin.
She thinks that maybe the fellow is high, too—there is something beyond booze in the jerky way he leaves his truck. He walks like he is clearing hurdles. He looks at the concrete step outside as if it is a million feet high. He makes his way up the six inches and finds the door handle. His face is beaded with sickly-looking sweat.
She expects him to fall over, but he does not.
Instead, in a brief moment of lucidity, he makes his way to the cooler and grabs a soda. He brings it to the counter. He tries on a grin, but it looks more like a grimace.
She smiles cautiously at him. She takes in his handsome features, paralyzed with drink.
“You okay, son?” she asks. Where she lives, people still call Black men “boy,” but this Betty refuses to do. Any man under a certain age is “son,” any girl “darling” or “honey.”
“Fine,” he rumbles, then clears his throat. He wipes dry lips coated with a white substance. His mouth is dry, and his stomach heaves.
