A NIGHT NOT SPENT IN COLORADO

I was on my way to Tucson.  I had been driving for hours and was tired.  I was in the eastern plains area of Colorado, about an hour and a half south of Denver, when I decided to quit for the day.  I found a room in this little town, had a meal, then went out for a walk to see what there was to see.  There was a tavern called the Moonlight, which had a pool table in the back, some video games along one wall, and a long bar with swivel stools in front of it.  I like places like this, so I went in for a beer.  There was a guy sitting at a booth, sipping a beer, and after I took a long pull on my own, he motioned me over and asked if I was passing through.  I said I was, and he said I should sit and join him, no point in sitting alone.  “Right,” I said, told the bartender to bring us both another round, and sat down.

     This guy said his name was Roger Shallot.  I told him my own.  Then he asked me where I was from, where I was going, why I was going there—usual things, which I took as small talk and didn’t mind explaining.  But then he asked me if I had heard of strange things going on where I’m from.  I said, “What do you mean?  Strange in what way?”

     “Oh,” he said, “in any way.  Just strange, people doing things you wouldn’t expect them to do?”

     I said I didn’t know what he was talking about.  He was plump and bald, about thirty years old, and had a couple of days’ growth on his face.  He was dressed O.K., but there was something about him that warned me I had made a mistake accepting the invitation to sit with him.  His eyes were red, as though he had been rubbing them, or as though he hadn’t slept for a long time.  And he drummed the table with his fingers, a definite sign he was nervous. 

     “Well,” he started to wind himself up, with a serious look in his face, “I mean people doing things that are just plain crazy.”  He was speaking in little more than a whisper and looked over at the bartender a couple of times before continuing.  I began to really regret coming into the place.  Usually, in places like this, people like to complain about work, gossip about what’s going on in their neighbors’ bedrooms, or gripe about local politics.  I get the flavor and mood of a town by having a beer in its Moonlight tavern.  But it looked like I was going to come up dry tonight.  This guy seemed like the local nutcase, and his apparent fear of the bartender’s overhearing us proved it.  The bartender was paying no attention to us at all.  He was near the back of the place, smoking a cigarette, reading a magazine, sitting on the last stool in front of a basketball game on the TV.  He couldn’t have heard us if we were shouting.

     “I have eyes!” this Roger Shallot said, in a tense whisper, looking again at the bartender.  “I see things!  Ears!  I hear things!  People I know have been acting strange.  Something is going on and I don’t know what, but I’m convinced that something is.  When I talk to these same people, though, they seem normal, and that scares me.  It makes me wonder about myself.”

     I told him to calm down, for he was making me nervous with the intensity of his whisper.  He seemed to have a need to talk, an urgency in him.  I figured I was captured for the moment, or until someone else should come in and give me an excuse to get away and start another conversation.  Hoping that would happen, I put him off by telling him I wanted to hear his story, but I wanted a couple more beers first.  So I got up, crossed to the back of the bar, and asked the bartender for two more.  The bartender made a face at me, rolling his eyes, and smiled.  I thanked him for the beer and told him the warning was too late. 

     When I sat down again, this Roger fellow was anxious as hell and ready to start.  “Yesterday, I was passing Jack Flint’s place.  We’ve played golf together for years.  Spring, summer, fall, two, three weekends a month.  After seven, eight years, you come to know a person.  We sat together, too, on the board of the municipal golf course. We made a lot of changes for the better.  He brought his financial skills and I brought my retail skills to the job.  Between us we made the pro shop successful enough to pay most of the cost of maintenance, keeping the fees down.  That was a big service to this community, for anybody can golf here if he is interested—cost doesn’t keep people away like it does so many other places.  The kids benefit the most.  Many play golf who would’ve never had a chance other places.  I’m proud of that.  So is Jack.  Which is only right.”

     “Sounds like a nice guy,” I said.  “So you have retail experience?” I asked.  “What do you do?” 

“I own the S&J sporting clothes shop on Main Street.”

     “What does the ‘J’ stand for?” I asked.

     “That was my father’s brother’s name.  They started it years ago, when they were young.  Steve’s and John’s, but after a while it was shortened to S&J’s.”

     “But here I am passing Jack’s house,” he said, anxious to get back to his story.  My attempt to divert him having failed, I resigned myself to hearing him out.

    “It’s on the outskirts of town, a big house whose two acres were carved out of the eastern-most edge of his father’s farm.  Behind the house Jack is building a boat.  Nothing wrong with that, except this is a big boat.  He has the keel laid in a set of ribs propped up by two-by-fours.  Looks neat.  Imagine it.  It’s two-hundred feet long!” he nearly shouted, gagging on the words trying to keep his voice down.  “Behind the barn there are four mountains of lumber, of all kinds.  He has his machines out scattered all across the compound—band saws, table saws, drill presses, planing tables, router tables, all with cables leading to an electrical service drawn straight from the telephone pole. 

     “Why?  What’s he doing?  I don’t understand.  We are fifteen hundred miles from the Atlantic or Pacific, about as mid Midwest as you can get.  Put that boat in any river you can find and it’ll sit in the silt and list to its side.  When I stopped, Jack saw me and came round to the driveway, wiping his hands.  He was glad to see me.  Offered me a beer, which I took.  I stood by this huge thing, feeling as queer as it looked.  Jack seemed completely unaware of anything out of the ordinary.  He acted like he was building a barn.  He talked about it, too.  Told me it was going to look grand when it was done.

     “I scratched my head.  He had all that air about him that made me certain he was mad.  Think of it.  When it’s done, that boat will be so heavy and so big it will never leave the property, never.  You had to see this thing to get the full heft of his madness.  I humored him, ‘Sure, Jack, it’s going to look grand.  Just grand.’  I wanted to say, ‘Expectin’ rain?’ but I knew if I said that he would think I was mad or he’d get pissed off at me for pokin’ fun.  But it was the winking that scared hell out of me.  When I finished the beer and told him I had to get on home, he winked at me.  Jack.  I was shocked.  I thought maybe I imagined it.  But in the driveway, just as I hopped into the pickup, he winked again.  It was one of those ‘We know the truth, don’t we?’ types of winks.”

     I was listening to this, letting him go on to see what depths of lunacy he was scraping at, but after a while he didn’t sound loony, he sounded scared, serious, and bewildered, and I began to wonder about him and about his town.  I, too, began to look over every once in a while at the bartender, worrying if he was hearing.  What was that gesture he had given me all about?  I was feeling spooked.  Roger went on, though, hardly pausing to sip his beer.

     “I’m driving home saying, ‘Poor Jack.’  But it’s not just Jack.  Others, too, have been doing and saying things.  I hadn’t seen that wink before, but Sarah Luckett, my neighbor on the east, did confide in me that she just had the electrical service taken off her house, ‘Meter’s gone!’ she said, proud as could be; and Harry Wilterdink bought a mill and just had it installed at his place.  Imagine that, a mill.  Like there’s anything around here to mill.  Like anybody’s going to haul his wheat from Kansas so Harry can mill it.  Major undertaking, though, with independent power supply!  How’d he do that?  Two ways, one was the gas-driven generator, which Harry said would be temporary, and the other was the huge wheel to which he intended to harness the oxen, as in the old days.   And there’s more.  So many bizarre things.  Ken Bobbin and his wife Dorothy had their back yard excavated.  In the hole, about twenty-five feet deep and fifty across, they built an entire house and had it buried!  It’s down there now.  They walk on it.  They had the ground sodded.  No one would ever believe if they hadn’t seen it with their own eyes.  And then Kevin Anderson started buying horses.  Kevin owns the jewelry store next to my sporting clothes shop.  He knows a lot about carats and facets, I guess.  About crystal and objets d’art, and all that.  But horses?  He has a herd of them now, more than fifty.  Nothing has reached me, though, about what’s going on, not a whisper.  Nobody has told me anything.  Everybody acts normal.  Jack is the farthest out, the clearest sign that something’s wrong, though Ken and Dorothy come awfully close.  Something’s wrong with people around here.  Or something’s wrong with me.  And I’m not certain which it is.  When you get that feeling everyone knows something you don’t, it tends to spook you.  Everyday, it seems, it’s someone else doing something strange.  It’s like an infection that’s spreading.  That, or I’ve become delusional and should just go to the Center for Neurological Sciences in Denver, check myself in, and take a holiday.

     “But it’s not me.  I hate to say that with conviction; once I begin to feel certain, I know one of two things is the case: either it is me, or something really frightening is going on.  Either way, the situation is driving me crazy.  Neither alternative is an easy thing to accept.  So, for the present, I am maintaining what I call in my better moments a healthy skepticism and in my worst just plain dumbfounded confusion.”

     His story was finished, I guessed, for he sat back, took his beer up and drained it, set it down again, and just looked at me.  I motioned to the bartender and raised an eyebrow.  Roger said, “He’s been collecting guns and ropes and those old wooden barrels, you know the kind?  The ones with the iron hoops holding the staves together?  He has a couple dozen of them now.  If you don’t believe me, go to the rest room and look into that back room beside the toilet door.  Go ahead.  Look.”

     So I did what he said.  I went to the bartender, asked him for another round and where the restroom was, and when I opened the toilet door, I got a good long look at that storeroom.  It was filled with wooden casks all right, stacked one atop another.  I did my business and went back to the booth.  Roger said, “Did you see them?”  and I nodded my head. 

     “What do you think?  Is that strange?  And the ropes.  He doesn’t keep them here.  They’re in his garage.  He’s got hundreds of ropes.  Ropes, for God’s sake.  Doesn’t it give you goosebumps?”

     “You said guns, too.  What about them?”

     “Oh, he has been collecting guns all his life, but it’s become an obsession in the last couple of years.  Since everything has gone crazy.  What I want to know is what he thinks those barrels are good for and those ropes.”

     “Years?  This has been going on for years?”  I was suspicious of him again.  He had to be nuts.  “Why do you stay?  Why not cash in and leave, go to Denver, or Boulder, Omaha, go anywhere?”

     “I can’t leave.  I tried to.  I hope you can.  You’re not one of us.”

     “What the hell do you mean?  Someone’s going to stop me, they actually stop you?”

     “No, no, they don’t have to stop you.  Maybe not you, though, you’re not one of us.  But that can change,” he said, lowering the whisper, looking again toward the back of the bar.  “If I were you, I’d leave now, go get in your car and take off, while you can.  That’s what I’d do.  I can’t do that.”

     “Why not?” I said, expecting his reply to betray the paranoia that I suspected this was really all about.

     But I was surprised again.  He said, “I have no will.  Do you see now why I’m so tormented?”  Just then, the bartender looked up and smiled at us.

     I didn’t finish my beer.  I was, well, unnerved.  I guess they all had a good laugh the next day, talking about Roger Shallot and what he did to me.  I really don’t care, and didn’t at the time.  I left.  I didn’t finish my beer.  I threw a couple dollars on the bar for a tip, waved towards the back, and walked out like nothing unusual was going on.  I made my way to my car and took off.  I drove for hours.  I was in Santa Fe before I stopped and was glad to see the sun come up as I finally turned in.