The bootlegger’s is a pinched, dim shack, surrounded by brush, set adrift from a wiry dirt road that’s barely perceptible from the main artery. But the boy could find his way to it in the darkest dark, so familiar is the beaten path that leads to the shack’s wooden, whining door. He would never venture alone to this place, a place that renders his stomach watery with dread; he goes because his heart is strung taut to his father, a man who treats the shack like a ruinous mistress.

Today, it’s just before noon, and there are only four people in the bar, because it’s a Sunday morning and it’s too early in the day for a drink for most. The bartender Jenny is wearing a peachy-pink lipstick that makes her skin seem sallow rather than enlivened, and though the boy knows she’s younger than most of the people he sees in this place, there is something aged about the way her eyes recede behind thick circles of black makeup. The way her teeth have grown ashy from the cigarettes she smokes. And though she may have once been pretty, and may still be considered pretty by some, the boy has a difficult time looking at her, like something has gone wrong with Jenny and whatever’s gone wrong is contagious.

At the edge of the makeshift bar top, beside the boy, sits his father. In the corner of his eye, the boy watches his dad tip a pointed chin toward Jenny.

“Another,” his father says.

Jenny obeys his command with a skinny grip on the bottle: she pours him a double shot of spiced rum in his dirty glass and tops it with a shudder of coke. An oily ponytail slithers between his shoulder blades. The boy has, upon more than one occasion, wanted to take a pair of scissors to it, but he would never do so, even though his father takes the razor to his head even when he doesn’t want it, even when he yelps in pain from the nicks his father leaves upon his scalp like a shoddy, indifferent artist.

“Dad,” the boy says to him. “Dad?” he asks.

But it’s as though the man isn’t even aware his son sits next to him, as if he is only aware of the throbbing coke and alcohol and the relieving singe the boy knows the mixture leaves upon his throat, because he too has tasted it, sneaking sips with his father passed out one afternoon in their trailer. He has felt the edges soften and the pain diminish. But after, it left him with a headache and with a feeling of sorrow, a lingering self-hatred that was enough for him not to try it again.

His father takes another drink from his glass with a tremulant hand, eyes staring straight ahead, seeing nothing. The boy looks at his father and then beyond him, but sees only half-empty liquor bottles and a scummy wall.

Jenny pulls the boy out of his reverie by standing in front of him. He is embarrassed by the sight of fleshy breasts poking out from the neckline of her T-shirt, and is unsure whether it’s rude to look or whether it’s rude not to. He looks into her glassy eyes instead.

She asks, “How’s school going?”

“It’s ok.”

“Just ok?”

“Just ok.”

“Rumour has it you’ve got brains.”

The boy glances at his father uneasily and then he shrugs.

“Not sure that’s true.”

Jenny smiles at him, but the boy flinches, and he’s unsure why. Instinctively, he gnaws at the scab on his index finger and is relieved to taste the stannic tang of blood. The boy is nervous and he thinks it’s because of Jenny and because he knows he doesn’t want to be in this stupid hole of a place ignored by the only person who knows him, but it’s also because there’s a stranger who sits near enough that he is a distraction to the boy’s sensibilities. This man is not from here. He wears a suit and his face is freshly-shaven, and through the antiseptic smell of alcohol the boy can smell a fragrance that reminds him of his mother when she was alive, and he realizes quickly it’s the stranger who carries this scent. The boy doesn’t know that the man is wearing a bespoke suit that costs more than his father makes in three months as a lineman. The boy sees only that this man is alien, that he doesn’t belong. Jenny wanders over and asks the suit man something the boy can’t hear.

“I heard about this place from a client,” the suit man says, too loudly. “I would’ve come sooner had I known.”

“I’m sure,” Jenny replies, unconvincingly.

“Good to get away from the madding crowd. No one has any charity these days. None at all.”

Jenny gazes at the suit man’s empty bottle and clicks her tongue against her teeth. She seems bored.

“Want another?”

“One more. One more for the road.”

There’s nothing sorrowful about the suit man, none of the dankness that surrounds most of the drinkers this boy has come to know. Jenny sets a new bottle down before him. The man takes a sip and the boy thinks he looks at him before beer and spittle float through the air, a dirty mist.

“Piss-warm,” he declares.

Jenny smiles and it’s then that boy knows she’s frightened, because her grey teeth are bared and she’s hugging herself tightly with her hands in a way he’s only seen once before, when his father threw his hunting knife at the wall when she cut him off one afternoon a year ago.

“Sorry ‘bout that. I’ll get you another one,” she says brightly.

The suit man has caught the boy staring, but the boy doesn’t look away; he can’t. He knows what happens when he doesn’t meet a man’s eye.

“What is it?”

The boy can’t answer. Whatever he says will be wrong.

The suit man stands up and walks toward the boy who’s now rigid with fear though his face doesn’t show it. It’s a tired feeling for him, knowing when a man is angry and when he’s needing to unleash, a primal repetition from the men he’s come to know. The boy sees that the suit man might have been handsome had his face not sunk to the contours of his skull, had he not carried the same yellowed eyes as his father. The boy can smell the man’s breath; the alcohol can’t mask a smell the boy will later identify as decay.

“What is it?” the suit man repeats.

But the boy still won’t answer.
“What the hell are you doing here anyway?” the man demands. “You’re not even old

enough to fuck.”

The boy knows it’s an insult meant to make him feel smaller than he already does.

So quiet has the father been, so cataclysmically empty with his dead eyes and quivering hand, that he had been mostly ignored to everyone present except his son, who carries the dead weight of his father with him always, who knows intimately the shortened spectrum of his parent’s emotional existence, though he only understands it now as knowing when his father’s drunk and when he isn’t.

“Get away,” the father says, without looking at the man. He takes a sip of his drink.

The suit man shoves the father so that he stumbles from his bar stool and into the boy, spilling the last remnants of a half-drunk rum and coke onto an already sticky floor.

The boy sucks at his fingers; his cuts sting and he takes pleasure in the pain. His father’s muddled eyes gleam.

“That’s my boy,” he barks at the suit man. “That there’s my boy. And you don’t touch either of us.”

The father closes the distance between himself and the stranger, until his chest bumps the suit man’s, and it is then that the boy sees his father is a head taller than his foe, which strangely surprises him. The suit man laughs, and the boy sees that he’s scared now, that he mustn’t be a man accustomed to a challenge. The suit man steps back and shakes his head.

“It was only a joke,” he says.

“Hit me,” the father whispers. “Go on, hit me.”

The suit man stands there, dumb. He shakes his head and backs away. The father though closes the distance again.

“Hit me,” he repeats, savagely, eyes blackened and bloodless. “Hit me.”

“No,” the suit man says.

The father swings, cracking the man’s mouth with a bare knuckle. Blood spurts, unstaunched, marking the suit man’s white shirt like spilled paint. And then the father lunges, sending the bar stools toppling, straddling the bleeding stranger and slamming his face with a series of sharp punches. The boy does not see the father take a shafted knife from his pocket. He does not hear the swift unsheathing or see it catch the glint from the stale early light. When the suit man’s face is unrecognizable from a mask of blood, the father shows it to everyone.

“I could kill you now,” the father says. “I could slice you right up and bury you out back and no one would fucking care.”

And then he looks at the boy as though he’s asking for his permission. And though there is part of the boy that wants to see the suit man suffer even more for what he’s done, the son shakes his head once with his fingers still in his mouth; the father smiles sadly as a man gasps on the floor beneath him, and then he gets up from off the floor. The suit man might be crying, but no one can see the tears beyond the blood. The boy watches with shame and delight and disgust, because he liked the brutality and he is proud of his father in a visceral way, not knowing that this pride is really gratitude, is really relief from seeing his father protect him in a way that feels something like love.

After a few seconds, the suit man gets up gingerly, dripping crimson on the laminate floor and staggers toward the door.

Jenny delivers a parting, absurd warning, “You’re not welcome!”

The suit man leaves without turning to acknowledge the three left behind.

“You gotta help clean that up,” Jenny says to the father. He waves his hand, dismissing her.

“Yeah, yeah.”

They watch as she exits a side door in search of something or nothing. The father hauls up a stool and sheaths his knife before placing it back in his pocket. He does not wipe the blood from his knuckles. He closes his eyes briefly so that the boy can see the map of veins that travel along his eyelids, as if they have a story to tell.

He finally says, “Sometimes the most merciful thing is to be unmerciful.”

The boy doesn’t know what this means, but he knows that it is a lesson that must be absorbed and remembered. Before he can say something to hold his dad to the present, he is forgotten once more, as his father sings out a command into the emptiness.

“Another.”

No one answers his call.

“Another one, Jenny!” he hollers into the void.  

– Alexis MacIsaac