BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 63

AUGUST 1979

DAVID

It's a good thing I'm mechanically unskilled, David thinks, arriving at the end of a long string of morose thoughts, or I'd have killed myself by now. He silently laughs, then falls through the thin sheen of amusement. He recognizes the joke's truth.

He sets his fingers on his just-delivered Stubby, its contents so cold that slush forms at its neck. He resets his attention to his barstool companions, T.T. and Ed, old men drinking coffee. They don't need coffee, they don't want it, but drinking coffee is something to do, something to deflect time. David shares their ambition, is an early beer drinker today, unwilling to absorb this morning's hangover. Last night's rain stopped combining and it won't resume until the humidity burns off. A couple beers won't hurt before work starts back up, probably in an hour or two.

Stillness, they seek stillness, like David but more forgivably so. But maybe not, David thinks, maybe not stillness but movement. Maybe they seek movement. Or a center, stillness amid movement. They are old, their present engulfing them, swirling chaotically. They are on a dance floor and have forgotten the moves. Style has changed. The vernacular includes words they don't understand. Jokes are made that they don't get. Worst of all, others understand and only they feel confused, or so it seems. They remember plowing with horses, the winter of '48, the bomber crashing at Ed Harrington's. They recall the main roads being elsewhere, the flats when they weren't a reservoir. A time when alfalfa seed, not potatoes, was the main crop. The stretch between then and now gives them an excuse for bewilderment. David is only twenty-two, though, so his laments about changing times fall flat and unforgivable, sound more like whining. For he is part of those times.

And yet, he isn't.

Down the oaken bar, at the support post where cattlemen throughout the last six decades have left their brands burned into the wood, Vern Underwood, another old timer, sits by himself. David nods to him, eliciting Vern's strange, twisted grin—it seems part agony, part amused.

The two don't communicate much, their first meeting ending awkwardly. David provided his name and heritage but Vern, when asked, said he couldn't remember his. David, thinking Vern was joking wryly, laughed, spurring Vern's fury. "If you'd faced what I did in the war," he sputtered, meaning World War II, "You'd have problems, too." David bought him a beer and apologized, stanching the damage, but the interaction left a scar in the relationship.

T.T. leans over to Ed. "There'll be trouble there," he whispers conspiratorially, nodding at the pool table where two local brothers—of a total of eight Walther boys, not counting the three sisters—play doubles with two out-of-towners. It's the newcomers' first time here, by David's reckoning.

There's a tension, little barbs being launched and landing. The needling would be deflected by the brothers' local acquaintances, who are accustomed to such annoyance, but are taken as challenges by the uninitiated. Ever since the Walthers discovered Joe's, there's been a little taint to the atmosphere that wasn't there before, an undercutting of violence common elsewhere but absent since Deon reopened the bar. Their appearance is enough to end a good binge for David, he often finishes his beer and leaves when they show up.

Further down the bar, his boss, John Johannson, and the custom grain cutter, who happens to be the local state representative, each sip on beers. They wait, like David, for last night's minimal rain to dissipate. A little wind is all it would take, but the day remains unusually still, a slight fog rising from swales, providing clear evidence that the wheat kernels are swollen with moisture. They had cut a partial round a couple hours ago, just to check, but the moisture reading was fifteen percent, two above what the grain elevator takes.

Ed twirls his coffee, an ivory half-cup, a thin green stripe encircling it. The style is common in diners throughout the vicinity. "A little early for roosters," he says.

"Never too early for roosters," T.T. counters. He cocks his elbows out and emits a weak crowing sound—"er. er er. er, errrrr..." Ed and David laugh and others along the bar look at them, confused. They appear to get a small charge from issuing, rather than receiving, perplexity for a change.

David knows the Walther strut, their appearance at the bar this summer signaled the end of an era for him, Deon's democratic-anarchy style finding its inevitable end. Bikers and hippies mixed with cowboys and farmers and were joined by doctors, lawyers and any others spun from the fringes of their typical social groups, but that ambience became challenged by the Walther presence, a more common group warfare typically present in dive bars throughout the world. Never appearing singly, the Walthers showed up in pairs or even threes to display their supremacy, and as state wrestling champs considered themselves immortal. Successfully fighting in school parking lots within a fifty mile range and bar rooms elsewhere, they thought to press their advantage locally, too. Initially, the spirit of tolerance here shed their verbal thrusts—the clientele just swatted them away—but the Walthers keep grinding away, prickly banter their sole tool of social interaction.

David watches the outsider wearing a USMC baseball cap come to renew his beer. The taller one, less muscular with a scruffy beard, visited earlier with David—the two were just discharged from the Marines, planned to drive home across the country back to New Jersey. They were already ten days into that tour, assumed they might never get a chance again to see the nation, and were staying in Pocatello with another recently discharged Marine. He advised them that Joe's was about as authentic as it got. David, hearing that, translated it into "backwoodsy and quaint."

They seemed civil by David's standards, but he could see they weren't the backing-down kind. Where they were from, he guessed, you might not have the space afforded here to just let things dissipate. There's a subtle dynamic between a certain kind of men that allows only confrontation or withdrawal, the latter seen as weak, so situations can only escalate unless some outside event occurs or a person inserts a random influence.

It would be a matter of how deep their patience was before they left. If they left. If the Walthers were called to work, that would stop it. So would girls appearing, that would distract them. Any spark, though, he could see, could be lighting a fire. There was just too much testosterone about.

The bar is filling, gathering energy. The rain was holding up harvest elsewhere, too, so other farmers and crew are coming in to wait out the humidity. Horst and Elgin come in, the Inskeeps right behind them, the desert apparently suffering the same storm and all of them working as a team cutting each others' grain as it ripens. They order, Deon is on it, and they sit at the remaining open seats at the bar. Horst immediately catches the drift of the pool table drama. "That's not going to end well," he says, lighting a cigarette.

When the Walthers win the game, they gloat, having bet beers. The Marines deliver the drinks, a show of good will, but Dennis can't help himself. "A little practice wouldn't hurt," he says. "Let me know if you need a few tips. You might not see real pool playing back East." Even from David's stool thirty feet away he can sense the mockery, Dennis glancing wit a smirk to those in earshot to make a stringlike connection that identifies an 'us' and a 'them'.

He sees John and Dwight rise, takes the cue and guzzles what's left of his beer. Time to get back to work.

© 2025 Ralph Thurston