A Talk With Henry - a short story

When I attended Northeast Louisiana State College (Now University of Louisiana Monroe) in the 60s, there was a bar called the Trianon not far off campus. An old black man named Henry was the bartender, and he always looked regal in his white coat and black bowtie. He was also always there for the students and available for fatherly advice across the bar. After graduating, I let fourteen years elapse before returning to Monroe. On a trip to Florida with former girlfriend Gayle, I'd regaled her with tales of my adventures at the Trianon, and she'd convinced me to take a side trip to see if it was still there. The bar was there, though the name had changed. Everything about the place and the nearby college campus, in fact, had changed. I contemplated as much during our driving leg from Monroe to New Orleans.

Though I don't remember the exact year I wrote A Talk With Henry, I do remember that the trip to Florida and the side trips to Monroe and New Orleans got me thinking about writing a novel that would encompass some of my memories. More years passed before I wrote Big Easy, Book #1 of my French Quarter Mystery Series. I never owned a red Mustang convertible, but I've always wanted to.

A Talk With Henry

I'd driven past that specific Interstate off-ramp more times than I cared to count. This day was different. Something took control, guiding me down a winding southern byway to a place I'd buried beneath the shifting sands of time. I soon realized it was a journey I'd long anticipated.

The pitted country blacktop soon became a tree-lined boulevard leading to a college rectangle. I stopped, got out, and stared. Little had changed in twenty years. Visions of the old college, devoid of even a single student, assaulted my brain, and I couldn't turn away.

Waning summer had left a pall in the air, the place deserted except for a pigeon pecking at a cigarette butt and a lone jogger bent over in a huff. A lazy water sprinkler did little more than cast slow-motion rainbows against the sidewalk. If the campus had been a corpse, I was a curious child peeking through the mortuary window. A horn honking behind me broke my trance.

 Just off campus, I found what had drawn me—a barroom catering to college students. It caused my broken crux of faded memory to flash like southern lightning. After a gasp of humid breath, I wheeled into the parking lot.

 The building was mostly the same except for a coat of garish paint. The same railing of rusted steel surrounded the parking lot with pea gravel and broken oyster shells. Faded warehouses have framed either side. Mike's Place flashed in purple and gold lettering from a neon sign. For a moment, I thought I was at the wrong place. But only for a moment.

 A weather-beaten sign on the roof proclaimed the name I remembered. Trianon. It beckoned me from the car, and I hurried to accept its invitation.

 The hot Louisiana sun sucked oxygen from my lungs as I strolled across the parking lot. An explosion of trashcans erupted on the side of the building, followed by a brindle cat screeching as he bounded from the heap. The big tom skipped past me in a frightened sideways motion, then disappeared in a rush behind the building. The trash lid revolved like a percussive top before falling silent on broken concrete.

 Silence returned me to reality when I reached the black-painted door. Light-headed from the heat, or maybe suffocating demons from my past, I grabbed the handle and pulled. Icy refrigerated air blasted my face. Engulfing me in a dry wave, it sent a chill down my neck, reviving memories of many sweltering southern summers.

 "Come in heah," the little man behind the bar drawled.

 I took a quick glance around the room. Things had changed. Once dark, the walls were now vivid white, decorated with black stripes. Fluorescent brightness, reminiscent of a New York bistro, replaced the dim coolness of my memory. I sat on a tall stool and waited for the smiling bartender.

 He had a crooked grin and mortician's complexion, his shirt the color of a typewriter ribbon. White double-pleated linen pants matched the barroom's theme, and connected diamonds decorated his tie. When he smiled, his eyes focused on a spot between my eyes.

 "What can I get you, big guy?" he said.

 He continued to polish a glass with his white cloth and waited for my answer. I looked at pictures of colorful specialty drinks taped to the smoked-glass mirror behind him. It only took me a moment to point to a picture.

 "Hurricane. House specialty. Three-fifty with the souvenir glass. Two-fifty without." he said.

 "With."

 “You bet,” he said with a wink. “Everybody needs a memory. Where you from?"

 "Oklahoma," I answered, more interested in the bar than conversation.

 "Oweeee, boomer sooner! What'cha do up there?"

 "Work in the oil patch."

 "Got a cousin in Enid in oil," he said above the whining blender. "Jake Perkins. Know him?"

 My shake of the head didn't surprise him. He continued pouring the icy pink concoction into a large glass decorated in reds and greens. Adding a straw, cherry, and slice of orange, he slid it across the polished counter.

 "Not too fast," he said. “Name's Mike. What’s yours?"

 "John Tolliver."

 "What brings you to town, Mr. John?"

 "I went to school here years ago."

 With a knowing grin, he returned to his aimless glass polishing. "Summer vacation," he said. "Ain't many people around right about now."

 "When I lived here, an old black man waited bar."

 "Henry," he said. "Died a few years back."

 Before I could reply, a couple entered, sitting on the opposite end of the long counter. The man made a production of lighting his companion's cigarette as Mike popped the cotton cloth across his arm.

 "Yell if you can handle another," he said.

 Hot and thirsty, I sipped the syrupy drink and pivoted on the stool to look around. Then, either the rum or the moment nailed me. Maybe both. Like a motion picture fading into another scene, my imagination recreated the room as I remembered it. In my brain's recesses, fluorescent lighting dimmed, and the walls darkened. Jarring ring of pinball machines in the back, and labored strains of Mick Jagger began emanating from a jukebox.

 Scratched marble and corroded chrome replaced Mike's white plastic tables. His black and white tile had become dark, oiled wood. Blinking twice, I turned around.

 Gone were the bartender and his two customers, replaced in my mind by an old black man with short, snowy white hair and a tiny mustache. A bow tie girded the collar of his starched white shirt as he polished a glass with a soft cloth clutched in his gnarled hands. When he spotted me, he pushed his wire-framed glasses up on his forehead, leaving two burnished dents in the sides of his nose. He grinned, revealing a complete set of shining teeth still firmly set in his sunken cheeks. I stared in disbelief.

 "Henry? That you?"

 "Sure is. Where you been?"

 "Away. I wasn't sure you'd be here."

 Henry's chuckle dissolved into a rheumatic cough. He stopped polishing the glass, leaning for a moment against the bar.

 "Where else would I be? Ol' Henry's always here."

 It was no lie. Henry had seemed a permanent fixture of the place. As much as its worn stools and dark wood. I couldn't recall visiting the Trianon without seeing his ageless face behind the bar.

 "Whatcha gonna have?"

 "Draw one," I said.

 Winking, Henry took a frosted mug from the freezer, filling it from the tap behind the bar until a foamy head poured over the lip.

 "You remembered," he said.

 I did remember. During my seventeenth year and first visit to the Trianon, I was anxious about what to order.

 "Beer," I'd said.

 "What kind of beer?" Henry asked, staring over his wire-rims.

 "Tap," I'd said, spying the spigot.

 "You mean a draw. Next time you want a beer, just say Henry, draw one. That's all you gotta do."

 I smiled as the recollection evoked a much deeper memory that sent a melancholy wave cresting across my bow.

 "Your lady friend never came," he said, handing me the draw.

 "No."

 The loose layer of ebony skin on his neck wriggled. I nodded when he said, “You made it anyway, didn't you?"

 Once, long ago, I'd tutored a girl in math. Not just any girl. The homecoming queen. A gorgeous young woman who wouldn't have otherwise noticed a confident, shy sophomore. She was flunking math and resorted to asking for my help. When she aced the course, her warm kiss thrilled me. Enough so that I managed a stammered invitation to her for a beer at the Trianon. I waited alone until the place closed, hoping for an explanation that, like my date, never arrived. I remembered Henry’s commiseration as I sipped the draw.

"She musta got sick or something."

 We both knew she hadn’t. Didn't matter because the old man had helped ease me through the crisis. It was a moment I'd never forgotten.

 "Getcha another?"

 My eyes popped open. I leaned against the counter for support, trying to focus on the smiling man bedecked in black and white. Henry was gone, as was the dark interior of the bar. I gasped for a reply to his question.

 “No," I finally said, seeing the empty Hurricane glass. “How much do I owe you?"

 “Three-fifty," he said.

 I started for the door, handing him a five, advising him to keep the change.

 “Wait up," he said. "You forgot your glass."

 “Keep it,” I said. "I don't need it now."

 He scratched his head and returned to wiping the bar as I walked out.

 Glaring sunlight and a blast of humid air struck me square in the face when I stepped outside. Still light-headed from three ounces of rum, I wobbled back to the car, my dilated eyes burning from barroom smoke. I found the brindle tomcat perched on the hood.

 He bounded off in a single fluid motion, finally stopping at a safe distance to yawn and lick his paws. After stretching, the feral prince strolled away to view the garbage cans awaiting his afternoon inspection.

 I watched him in the rear-view mirror as I drove away until his graceful image melted into a warm summer daydream.

###

Born near Black Bayou in the little Louisiana town of Vivian, Eric Wilder grew up listening to his grandmother’s tales of politics, corruption, and ghosts that haunt the night. He now lives in Oklahoma, where he continues to pen mysteries and short stories with a southern accent. He authored the French Quarter Mystery Series set in New Orleans, the Paranormal Cowboy Series, and the Oyster Bay Mystery Series. Please check it out on his Amazon author page. You might also like checking out his Facebook page.

Total Eclipse of the Moon

Thanksgiving circa 1980s,
from left to right: Mavis,
Anne, Jack, Grandma Dale, Isey

When I went outside very early this morning to watch the lunar eclipse, I realized I was in for a mystical treat. A golden moon brightened hazy sky, back dropped by luminous Christmas lights decorating neighbors’ houses. My big tomcat Goldie joined me as I watched the unfolding event.

I had no telescope and only gazed up at the lunar phenomenon with my naked eyes. The realization that I was witnessing a total lunar eclipse the same day as the Winter Solstice, two events that occur on the same day only once every four hundred years, or so, caused me to recall another story recounted many years ago by my Grandmother Dale O’Rear Rood. Grandmother Dale was born October 27, 1891. She was nineteen when she witnessed Halley’s Comet in 1910.

“Halley’s is the only naked-eye comet that a human can witness twice in a lifetime. Mark Twain saw it twice and so did Papa Pink. I’m going to live until it passes one more time.”

Grandmother Dale didn’t quite make it, dying February 27, 1985 at the age of 93, less than a year from the date (February 9, 1986) Halley’s Comet last passed close enough to Earth to be seen with the naked eye. She actually came closer than Papa Pink; despite his boasts to the contrary, John Pickney O’Rear was born September 9, 1837, almost two years after the comet’s passing November 16, 1835.

I thought about Grandma Rood’s story as I watched the moon disappear into darkness, and then reappear the color of burnished bronze. Goldie didn’t seem to care, but shared my moment like a spiritual being that somehow understood the importance of the celestial event.

Marilyn usually leaves the radio in our living room on all the time. I’m not a religious person, but I couldn’t help but reflect on the Christmas song, Oh Little Town of Bethlehem, playing as I opened the front door and cast one last glance at the sky. It caused me to reflect on my own existence. I won’t be around in 2061 when Halley’s Comet appears again, much less in four hundred years.

Giving Goldie, my big tom a last scratch behind the ears, I grinned, deciding not to ponder the thought further as I plodded off to bed.

Eric'sWeb

Another Revolution

A rainy mid-April night in Edmond, Oklahoma, I noticed my cats staring into the house though the storm door. With full matted coats resulting from an extra-cold winter, they both seemed in need of a little maintenance. Grabbing my trusty scissors, I proceeded to try and remedy the situation.

Fang is not really my cat. He belongs to a family down the street. Still, he likes my Maine Coon Rouge. They are almost inseparable. When she comes to the front door, he is usually following her. I enjoyed sitting on the damp front porch tonight with the two kitties, watching their tails twitch a bit as I cut off several large hunks of dead hair.

Oh, and the two ducks that come every year about this time are here again, but living about a block west, near a little creek. I saw them during a walk the other evening, and again a few days later. Marilyn scoffed at me, saying “How do you know they are the same two ducks?”

I just know. It’s spring once again, and the world has made another full revolution.

Eric'sWeb

Barn Kittens and Backyard Spirits

I have had many cats as pets through the years. My first was King Tut, Anne’s cat, which became part of my family when Anne and I married. Glancing through some old pictures today, I found images of the second and third cat members of my family.

Anne and I were in the oil business. A drilling contractor named John was dating Sheryl, a young woman that worked for Anne and me. He had a little ranch on the west side of Oklahoma City, several horses and a barn. Blessed by many barn cats, he gave two kitties, Buster and Squeaky, to Sheryl. Sheryl kept Buster and gave Squeaky to Anne and me.

Squeaky was the first female cat Anne or I ever owned and neither of us realized how fast cats mature. Because of our oversight, Squeaky became pregnant and soon had a litter of beautiful kittens. We soon found good homes for all the kittens except for one, a calico we kept and named Chani after a character in the Dune series that Anne loved. Squeaky and Chani soon became inseparable.

The oil business soon busted. Anne and I lost our home and moved to a rent house, Chani, Squeaky and Tut moving with us. During the difficult years that ensued, we moved five times. Some of the cats didn’t live that long but Chani made all five moves.

Calicos are three-colored cats and they are always females. Chani was a gorgeous, three-colored cat with a distinctive voice. She always let you know when she was around. She loved affection and would live on your lap, if you would let her. She also liked to drink water from the tap.

Chani died at the age of nineteen, still the queen bee of our cat family until the time of our death. I buried her in the flower bed where she liked to lie, among the flowers, in the spring and summer. Spirits abound around the Wilder household and I’m sure she still holds sway over her departed brothers and sisters. I’m also sure Squeaky is also around and that she and Chani are again inseparable.

Fiction South

A Cat Named Max

Cats are graceful creatures that never really have an owner and I’ve told many stories about those that have occupied large places in my heart. One of them was a big tom, a little special and just a bit more memorable than most.

All our acquaintances knew that Anne and I were cat people and rarely a week passed that someone didn’t try to give us one. We usually resisted or else we would have had hundreds of cats instead of the handful we felt responsible for. A cry for assistance occurred one day that we couldn’t ignore.

Friends of friends owned a small apartment complex and someone had abandoned two cats in an upstairs apartment. A week had passed before the property owner found out and by this time the two felines were traumatized. Anne and good friend Bruce rescued them from the locked apartment after much ado and lots more trauma.

Both cats were solid white, one a young female, the older a grown male. Bruce fell in love with the little female and took her to care for. The big tom was half-crazy from his stay in the apartment and it was soon apparent that if Anne and I didn’t take him we would have to have him put down.

We named him Max because there was a Mel Gibson movie out at the time called Mad Max and this new addition to our family qualified as more than a little wacky. Max was a cross between a Siamese and a Manx. He was solid white with slightly crossed blue eyes. He had only the semblance of a tail and his hind legs were longer than the front ones. Even though fixed, Max had a heavily muscled torso and tufted ears that caused him to look like a white bobcat. Oh, and he was very strong.

For the first few days, we fed and watered Mad Max while giving him a wide berth. There were other cats in the family and soon he began to cozy up to us. He liked King Tut and followed him wherever he went. Tut was as regal as his name implied and I think he liked having a lieutenant around.

After a year or so, we noticed Mad Max was looking sick so we put him in the cat carrier and took him to Dr. D our friendly vet. He spent the day there and when we picked him up, Dr. D explained what had happened.

“Tailless cats tend to rub their rear ends in the grass and occasionally get plugged up. Max had an excretion ball that solidified to the point it wouldn’t pass. We gave him a sedative and then soaked his rear in warm water until we could extract it.”

Dr. D gave us some antibiotics for Max and the big boy was back to his normal self in a day or so. As time passed, he became an integral part of the family. He loved his daily full body strokes and began demanding his share of the attention. He was still sort of nuts and if you rubbed him once too often he would take a swipe at you with his powerful paw.

Another couple of years passed, along with the oil boom. Anne and I were struggling and had little money to go to the doctor or dentist, the cats relegated to emergency only vet visits. One incident finally occurred that we had no money to let the vet remedy. Max had developed another petrified poop ball in his rear and he was miserable by the time we noticed it.

“You’ll have to fix it or he will die,” Anne said.

I knew that she was correct. Drawing a bucket of very warm water, I pulled on a pair of gloves and prepared for the worst. I needn’t have worried. Powerful Max was too sick to fight. He didn’t even squirm when I lifted him and lowered his rear into the warm water.

I don’t know how long it took but the petrified poop soon began to soften. I finally got hold of it with my gloved hand and worked on it until it finally came loose, Max and me both breathing huge sighs of relief as it did.

Max and I both survived the petrified poop ordeal and he lived with us altogether for almost ten years. He met his demise early one morning in a dramatic fashion. Anne was walking outside to get the morning paper when she heard a commotion in the garage. The cats liked to sleep there, roosted on the hoods of our car and we always kept the door cracked so they could go in and out.

As Anne stood looking at the garage door, a large German shepherd came bounding out with Max in his mouth. Anne chased them down the street in her robe and nightgown, yelling at him to stop as she ran. The dog paid her no mind and quickly outdistanced her, disappearing down the block. We never found Max’s body.

Max was limp, his eyes closed when the large dog came running out of the garage with him. Our vet told us the dog probably killed him the moment he got him by the neck.

“He probably never knew what hit him and I’m sure he never suffered,” Dr. D told us, hoping to make us feel better.

Mad Max met his dramatic demise, hopefully without suffering, and Anne and I consoled each other with the knowledge that he was a grown cat when we got him. He lived another ten very good years with people that cared for him deeply before the dog got him.

Yes, Max was a little different and slightly crazy but we loved him despite his less than perfect qualities. Max was a special cat, and sometimes you love special beings in ways hard to explain – except in your heart.

Gondwana

Fixing Bootsie

A large field overgrown with brush separated the last rent house that Anne and I lived in from several giant apartment complexes. Tenants in the apartments were constantly coming and going, often abandoning their unwanted pets along the way. Since we had three cats of our own and treated them like kings and queens, some of the cast offs naturally gravitated toward our house.

Our three cats were Hamlet, a black male; Whiskers, a black and white female and also Hamlet’s mother; and Chani a calico (calicos are always female). We fed them every evening on the front porch and it wasn’t long before we had other hungry cats nosing around, looking for food. None of them ever went away hungry.

We soon had three new cats that called our place home. The O.J. Simpson trial was in the news at the time so we named the stray orange fixed male O.J. The female brindle that appeared about the same time naturally became Nicole. Bootsie was a very large black and white tom with a black marking on his white chin that looked like a boot. Unlike O.J. and our other cats, Bootsie still packed all his equipment.

O.J. was friendly. Nicole was standoffish and Bootsie aggressive, terrorizing all the other cats and generally acting like the bully on the block. We weren’t doing well financially at the time and couldn’t afford to take them to the vet for their shots and examinations.

“When we get some extra money,” Anne said, “We’ll take them to Dr. D and get their shots. And when we do, we’re getting Bootsie fixed.” The thought worried me because Big Black was a grown cat. “He’s a cat, Eric, not a human. We need to neuter him and that’s what we are going to do.”

“But -” I complained.

“No buts. The only thing saving his little balls is we can’t afford to take him to the vet right now.”

Anne had lung cancer at the time and she told me, “Please don’t let me die in a rent house.”

It was 1997, not a very good year in the oil biz, but I had somehow managed to sell a geologic idea to an oil company. With my profit, I leased three-hundred and twenty acres on a prospect idea that I had in Major County, Oklahoma. It was a wonderful prospect and a company offered my money back and a twenty-five thousand dollar profit. I was hungry but I knew the deal was worth much more. It didn’t matter because I still got a very large lump in my throat when I turned down the offer.

Two weeks passed, my rear-end puckered, praying that I hadn’t fallen in love with a prospect that was never going to sell, at least for the price that I was asking. After another week passed, I considered returning, hat in hand, to the company whose offer I had rejected and beg them to take it for twenty-thousand dollars. As things would happen, I didn’t have to.

Another company finally decided they couldn’t live without the prospect, almost doubling the first company’s offer. I probably could have sold the deal for even more money but I didn’t reject this proposal. With it, I had enough money to make a large down payment on the house where I still live, and my good friend Banker Bob bent his bank’s rules slightly to lend me the rest. We even had enough money left to take the cats to the vet.

I was nervous for Bootsie but needn’t have been. Following the operation, his aggression quickly disappeared. He also stopped fighting and bullying the other cats. When Anne and I got the two Maine Coon Kittens, Rouge and Tabitha, Bootsie took them under his wing, lying with them on the couch and grooming them with his tongue. When people came to visit, Bootsie would jump into their arms and put his arms around their necks. All the other cats, needless to say, were very happy with his new persona.

Sadly, Bootsie, like Anne, has gone to the great beyond, but while he was here, his operation transformed him into one of the most lovable cats that I have ever had. I’m not really sure what the moral of this story is, but just in case it gave any of you ladies out there ideas about your tomcatting husbands, I ask you to remember Anne’s wise words:

“He’s a cat, Eric, and not human.”

Louisiana Mystery Writer