Page 53 - Vol.VI#5

on the Pennsylvania Railroad drive their cars in to Fairmount and angle park them, but most cus- tomers just walk here. Forty houses, in one block, are bookended by our tavern on one end, and on the other, by Wishnow’s bar and packaged goods store. The city bus stops up there on its way to Dundalk. I am never allowed to walk past Wish- now’s, and my mother, who would prefer that I never go down to the tavern with Daddy, doesn’t want me to play with Kresson Street children. There is one girl older than me, with a harelip. We play step school with some others, and she appoints herself the teacher. I have a photograph of us on the steps, but I cannot remember any of the other children’s names. My little sister is with us, in a white dress with a red collar. It must be spring, because we’re not wearing coats.
As I grow older, when I go to work with Daddy, I spend most of my time reading in the big arm- chair next to the jukebox. More than one custom- er calls me a bookworm, a word I grow to hate. I sit in an easy chair my father has installed near the jukebox in the long second room because he needs to get off his bad leg as much as possible. I read biographies of presidents and naval heroes, mysteries, adventure stories—a book a day. I have no idea why I am here with him or where my sister or mother are. When Dad and I return home, we have to shower and change our clothes because they smell of smoke and beer.
The regulars were not necessarily regular, nor were they faithful customers; there were about ten of them, but the cast changed weekly. The
one I liked best was Henry Canary. Everyone called him Hats. You may wonder if he wore a hat, and indeed, he did—in the summer, a straw hat, perhaps a fishing hat. He was slim, brown-haired, and wore glasses. From time to time his wife Miss Hilda tended bar for my father, but she was slow and she probably stole from him as mostly all his bartenders did, skimming cash in the busy times. So often as not, she was a customer, and since women never sat at the bar, she usually brought in a half-gallon pickle jar. My father would fill it with draught beer, make up a price, and Hilda
was off to drink at home. By the time I was in high school, Hilda resembled a caricature of Rosie the Riveter, hair poking out at a forty-five degree angle from her forehead in a helmet-like pouf, and protruding from the back in a dime- store hairnet. She always smelled clean and of cheap perfume, and she was always nice to me. Eventually I began to feel sorry for her. She grew fatter and fatter with each year, still wearing those tight orlon sweaters, straight skirts and seamed stockings that must have looked so fash- ionable fifteen, twenty years before. The Canarys had some kids, but I can’t remember ever seeing them. In my mind, Hilda and Hats were a child- less couple caught in a 1940’s time warp.
None of this would be particularly important had it not been for what happened one day when I was helping out my dad. I was only seventeen, in my last term of high school. The law said you had to be twenty-one to serve beer or liquor in the city. I was supposed to be washing glasses and fetching things for my father and Whitey, Dad’s latest in a never- ending series of bartenders, but as it got busier around noon, I was pressed into service.
I’d been watching my father and the others pull drafts for years, and it took me only a minute
to master the art of filling a glass up to the top without spilling the head and making a mess.
I was feeling competent, taking orders, pull-
ing drafts or pouring shots, taking money. The number of customers dwindled a bit towards late afternoon, around four. The front door flew open and two guys in dark fedoras pulled down low over their faces started yelling. I was hold- ing a ten and getting ready to put it into the cash register. All the time they kept yelling, though
I wasn’t able to distinguish what it was they were saying. I couldn’t move. Everyone down on the floor, they said. They made Whitey take the money from the cash register. They were waving these guns around and yelling, Nobody move, this is the real thing.
Coke’s the real thing, I thought. What the world
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