The stars burned holes of light in their distance of black. The bar glowed red and orange and lights strung up around the dilapidated stucco building, alive inside with salsa music and people swimming in their drinks and moments. There was no door on the front of the building, and an outsider could look in and see the men and women with a sheen of sweat, on the crowded dance floor holding each other up, their glasses spilling on their dresses and their boots and their bodies swaying. Men with ten gallon hats came and went from the bar, alone in the desert, taking to their ’59 Chevys and kicking up dust in search for something more.
Dale showed up, and as always he came in breathless and sweating and grinning and a drink already in hand before even approaching the bar man. His button down shirt was buttoned wrong and his hair, which at morning might have been slicked back neatly, was disheveled, hanging in strands about his eyes. He came in briskly, and first one soul saw him and greeted him with a loud “Dale,” which set the entire bar in an echo, “Dale!” And people rushed up to him, and slapped him on the back, pushing him to the bar and offering him drinks and wanting to know where he had been for the past couple of months. Where was Cindy, his wife? Where was Anne Marie, his girlfriend? Was there a new girl? What was he driving? What was he drinking? What did he see? What did he do? They all crowded around him.
Dale was a man who always drank, always smoked and always said, Go. Constantly pacing from coast to coast in some borrowed convertible and returning it dented on the door with a couple thousand miles added to the odometer and an engine beat down and sputtering and smoking. His feet seemed to take him before his quick-paced speech could keep up – they seemed to be keeping time with some jazz improvisation that no one else heard. He flitted all over bars and parties and cities and jails, speaking of philosophies of the moment, inspiring the men and impressing the women. No one was ever sure how this thoughts traveled and where his ideas sprang from or how. He bought drinks all around to keep the mood alive, and if it didn’t lift spirits, he was gone, before anyone could catch their breath by his whirlwind nature.
Gradually his stories of his run-ins with the law in the Oklahoma pan-handle and his day-long discussions with an Arapaho chief came to a close. His stories carried the cadence and rhythm of the poetry his child-hood friend Jack – who seemed to have all the words nestled in his beard – wrote on the floorboards and bathroom mirrors of his apartment in Chelsea. He left his audience wide-eyed when he told them about dodging bullets in El Paso and the twelve year old who smoked Lucky Strikes and drove him from Cheyenne to Las Vegas on a stack of phone books in his father’s Cadillac to bring him home from the slot machines. The boy left Dale under the glittering lights, crooning voices heard from beyond the glass doors of hotels. His stories were extravagant and he shouted and swung his arms as he ranted to the crowd in the bar.
The people gradually dissipated and the music began again softly, rising into its brassy swelling and mambo beats. And Dale took a girl with dark curls and swung her on the dance floor until her feet blistered. On-lookers saw them whispering to one another until finally he replied, “Mañana por favor.” She smiled sadly and kissed him on the cheek and walked off the dance floor. Dale returned to the bar and ordered another drink, offering an older overweight business man in cowboy boots and slacks – too tight for his hefty thighs – a drink. He muttered no, and turned to his wife seated next him, who wore broad rimmed glasses and a mouth that turned down into her wrinkles and toad-like features. The night lingered several hours longer, people sitting beside Dale and delving into stories of his adventures, his latest schemes for returning to San Francisco, to Cindy, to where things were going to be different. The music dwindled to soft Mexican lullabies and people began staggering out the bar smiling into the night and wrapping arms around their lovers or strangers that they’d take home with them. Dale remained at the bar, his high energy diminishing with the music, until he sat alone, gazing into his glass. The bar man watched him curiously, never knowing Dale to sit so quietly. Dale drained the last of his whiskey, and tiredly pulled his wallet from his pants pocket, throwing all the bills he had on the counter.
“Señor,” the bar man said softly, staring at the money. “It’s too much.” Dale shook his head, standing and pulling his arms wearily through the sleeves of his jacket. He slid the money closer to the bar man.
“Buenos noches,” he said and walked out the doorway, the red and orange glow on his back, shining on his hair and shoulders. The bar man watched the lights drape over him, then the darkness as he walked out into the night.
The nights close to the border were long stretches of dark and cold. The winds picked up and Dale didn’t quite notice whether his fingers went numb from the cold or the whiskey. He stumbled over small shrubs and his own feet, his head lowered, heavy. His mind was gone, perhaps, deep below the copious amounts of drink. Perhaps it lay in bed alongside Cindy or Anne Marie, pushing bare legs between theirs and pulling them closer. Perhaps it sat sprawled on the hard wood floors of Jack’s New York apartment, scribbling away notes for hours, unable to know what was being written – not caring – because all that mattered was that his hand kept scrolling over the paper. It might have gone back to the music, the throbbing sound, almost liquid in his ears and the down beat pulsing through him, moving him.
The lights from the bar were only specks on the horizon over Dale’s shoulder and out of drunkenness or fatigue his knees buckled and he fell, sprawling out across the sand. His body shivered, beginning to feel the cold creep up around him. The ringing in his ears from the music finally faded and he heard the low moan of the desert stretching from him. The eyes of a coyote flickered and its panting came and went in the wind. Dale craned his head up and could just make out train tracks a few paces away. Dale’s mind perhaps remained in the desert. It lingered on the quiet of the night, the stillness of the sky above, in hopes his body would follow, in hopes for rest. Perhaps it led him and laid him on the sand that soon picked up and howled dully down the flat arid landscape, ribbons of it trailing along the ground. It took the feeling from his callused hands and frenetic eyes – ablaze and unrelenting for so long – and gently lowered them from the waking night.
The bar man counted his tips and watched his customers dance nights thereafter. Jack went on scribbling away in New York. Anne Marie found new men to share a bed with. Cindy dressed her children for school and fixed them dinner in the evening. It was hard to tell where Dale’s mind had gone to and it was some time before a hitch-hiker had found him on the desert floor.
