Burned in Broken Hearts Junction Read online

  Chapter 6

  “That was sure something you did back there,” I said, pressing the bag of frozen peas up to my cheek. “I’ve never seen anybody break up a fight so cleanly.”

  That numbness was quickly coming back as the ice bag worked to stunt the inflation.

  “Well, not that cleanly,” he said. “Somebody did get hurt.”

  “I’ll be okay,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “I guess you could say I’ve seen my share of bar brawls,” he said. “The trick is to make guys like that big fella believe you mean what you say. Which is hard to do. Guys like that don’t usually have much sense to begin with.”

  “I’ve never seen Kirby listen to anybody around here,” I said. “He’s as senseless as they come.”

  We were in the bar’s kitchen. The kitchen was sort of a leftover remnant of The Cupid’s glory days, when they had a real chef and a real menu. These days we hardly used it. Dale and Courtney couldn’t afford to hire a line cook, and it seemed easier to them to throw peanuts and chips at the customers and have them go across the street to the sandwich food cart if they got hungry.

  I sat on the kitchen counter, giving my feet and head a break. The stranger had no reason to linger on with me, but he did.

  The sound of Cattle Carnage rumbled on from the front, the beat vibrations coming up hard through the floor.

  “So let me see if I’m understandin’ the way this saloon works. You’re the bartender and the bouncer?” he asked.

  “Bartender, yes,” I said. “And bouncer only when Dale can’t be found.”

  I sighed.

  “Which seems to happen a lot these days.”

  “Dale is the owner?” he said.

  I nodded.

  He crossed his arms and leaned back against the steel counter top, and I could tell what he was thinking.

  “I can manage just fine,” I said. “I might not have the, uh, mediation skills you have, but I get by when I need to. Tonight’s just a special case.”

  “I’m sure you do a fine job,” he said. “But it just seems to me like you’re wasting a perfectly pretty face on a job like this.”

  “Well, what should a pretty face like this be doing?”

  He came over and gently pulled away the bag of peas from my cheek, inspecting the damage.

  Normally, a stranger looking at me like that would have made me feel uncomfortable and on edge, but there was something about him that calmed me.

  That didn’t happen to often when it came to me.

  He sucked in wind like it caused him pain just to look at my injury.

  “That bad?” I asked.

  “Well, let’s just say it might be worth it to talk to that boss of yours about giving you a few days off of bouncer duty,” he said. “Or at the very least, a raise.”

  “Fat chance of that happening,” I said.

  “Really though, you ought to not get in the middle of fights like that. You should just let that kind of thing play out.”

  “Are you kidding? I wasn’t going to let those two fools destroy my saloon,” I said. “No way.”

  “Your saloon?” he said, leaning back again. “I thought you said Dale was the owner.”

  “Well, I may not have any money in it, but I reckon that it’s just as much mine as it is his. I love it more, anyway.”

  The stranger smiled.

  “Well in that case, get this saloon of yours a real, live bouncer with a neck bigger than a tree trunk.”

  “You want the job?” I asked.

  “Tempting, but I’m afraid…”

  Just then, the music died down, and I heard a familiar voice out in the front of the house.

  He was shouting.

  “Listen up! It’s closing time. Everybody leave the premises or face the consequences.”

  The music stopped all together, and a wave of grumbles erupted from the room.

  I sighed.

  Someone must have called the cops when Kirby started throwing punches, and now they were shutting us down.

  Dale wasn’t going to be none too happy about this.

  “I should get back out there,” I said, placing the bag of frozen peas on the counter.

  “Just don’t try to take on that cop,” the stranger said. “That pretty face doesn’t belong staring out from a jail cell, either.”

  There he went with that pretty face thing again.

  “That won’t happen,” I said, heading for the door. “The cop’s a friend.”

  The stranger laughed and stood up.

  “Is there such a thing?” he said.

  Chapter 7

  All right, maybe calling Officer Raymond Rollins my friend was a bit of a stretch.

  Ex-boyfriend was what I meant to say.

  But that was a lot to drag up this late on a Saturday night, right after the aforementioned Deputy Rollins shut down The Stupid Cupid Saloon and killed the best business night of the week.

  “You really didn’t have to kick everyone out,” I said, placing my hands on my hips and scowling at him.

  Raymond slowly walked around the nearly empty bar like some sort of conquistador. He took his blue deputy hat off and stuffed it under his armpit as he pulled out a notebook and ball point pen from his breast pocket.

  “What brute did that?” he said, his voice trembling a little with anger as he glanced at my swollen face.

  “I took an elbow off of a kid,” I said. “But this wasn’t his fault. Kirby’s the one who started it.”

  “That S-O-B still around?” Raymond asked, scribbling something furiously into his notebook.

  I shook my head.

  “Well, next time I see that bastard, I’m going to—”

  “I’d rather you just drop it, Raymond,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  I’d gotten tired of Raymond acting like that. In fact, that’s one of the principal reasons why I broke it off with him three months earlier. He had a rotten temper that came on like heat waves, and I was tired of dealing with it.

  Not that he ever lifted a hand to me. Raymond had some principles. But he just liked to yell a lot.

  And he got overprotective of things he thought were his. Like me, for instance. We’d only dated a couple of months and been broken up for longer than that, but sometimes I got the sense that he still considered me one of these “things” that belonged to him.

  But I’d never belonged to him. Even when we were together.

  No. Officer Rollins with his navy blues of the Broken Hearts Police Department wasn’t the man I’d been talking about earlier. He wasn’t my soulmate. Not by a long, long shot.

  But I got lonely sometimes. And after half a year of him coming down to The Cupid and badgering me for a date, I finally gave Raymond a chance. He seemed like a nice enough guy at the time. And for a few moments, he’d even been able to take my mind off of Jacob.

  But Raymond and I were poorly matched. I should have seen that right away, but I’d let false hope carry off all sense.

  I regretted ever getting involved with him. Especially because I knew so much better.

  He turned his back to me and started pacing the bar in that conquering soldier way he’d done a few moments earlier.

  “Where’s Dale this fine evening?” he asked.

  The boys from Cattle Carnage were still putting away their instruments and clearing out the stage. One of them dropped a guitar on the floor, and the sound of wood and strings clanged loudly, echoing throughout the bar.

  “Him and Courtney have been at it again,” I said. “I suppose he’s probably fuming somewhere, getting drunk and laying down bets, leaving the rest of us to clean up this mess.”

  Raymond shook his head.

  “Dammit, when in the hell are you going to get a respectable job, Loretta?” he said.

  The muscles in his neck bulged slightly.

  “Couldn’t you get a job doing hair or something? Some place where I don’t get called out to every weekend for a bar fight or noise dist
urbance?”

  That was the other reason I broke up with Raymond. He didn’t know the first thing about me.

  This job was a lot more than mixing drinks. It wasn’t something I could trade out with hairdressing.

  He liked me working here until we started dating. Then he started throwing those kinds of words around. Respectable job… was there such a thing?

  His job wasn’t all that respectable. Showing up late to the fight and squashing everyone’s Saturday night didn’t seem all that great to me.

  I almost said that to him, but I held my tongue. The night was over and I didn’t feel like rehashing things that were better left buried.

  “I appreciate you coming by, officer,” I said, going to the tables and collecting a round of empty beer bottles. “But I can handle it from here.”

  He stopped pacing, and then ran a hand through his closely-cropped salt-and-pepper brown hair.

  “Don’t be like that, Loretta,” he said. “I know you think I came to make trouble for you, but I didn’t. Things were getting out of control here.”

  “What do you know about it? You showed up late,” I said, collecting the empty old-fashioned glasses from off the bar counter.

  He let out a defeated little sigh.

  “I didn’t come here to fight with you,” he said. “For once can we just talk and not fight? There are things I’ve been wanting to say to you.

  I stacked the whiskey glasses together and started wiping down the sticky bar.

  I knew what he wanted to talk to me about. The same thing he’d been trying to talk to me about for weeks now.

  That he’d gotten himself together. That he’d been controlling his anger better. That if I’d only give him another chance, things would be different.

  But it was a conversation I didn’t want to have. Especially not tonight.

  “I don’t want to fight with you either, Raymond,” I said, looking across the bar at him. “But it’s been a long night and I’m tired. I don’t have a talk like that in me at the moment.”

  “Well, when, then?” he asked, scanning my face.

  “I don’t know.”

  He bit his lip, and I knew he was trying to keep down the anger that would normally shoot up and spill over the sides whenever I gave him an answer he didn’t like.

  After a few moments of looking hard at me, he put his BHPD cap back on.

  “You never even gave me a chance,” he mumbled underneath his breath.

  “What was that?” I said.

  I shot a jagged look in his direction.

  He let out another sigh and took a moment to collect himself before speaking.

  “Well, maybe you’ll be ready to talk the next time I get called out to this dump,” he said, looking around the walls. “Shouldn’t be more than a few days, I’d think.”

  I held my tongue, and he gave me another of his tough-guy looks before turning and heading for the exit.

  He tried to slam the door behind him, but it was one of those pressurized doors that closed slowly.

  I got some satisfaction out of that.

  I looked around the bar, realizing that it was now completely empty, and that I was all alone. Courtney had gone home, or maybe gone to find Dale. The guys from the band had finished packing up, taking their bad songs and racket with them.

  The stranger, too, had left.

  I felt a twinge of something in my gut when I walked past the seat at the bar where he’d been sitting earlier in the night.

  That had been nice of him, breaking up the fight like that.

  Nice of him to help me to my feet and keep me company while I iced my face.

  There were plenty of other things to think about, but my mind kind of settled on him without me really having a say in it.

  The stranger had nice eyes.

  I wondered for a second where he had come from, where he was going. What he was doing on this road of life.

  He said he liked to wander.

  I imagined in the morning, Broken Hearts Junction would be far in his rearview mirror. A tiny blip in whatever journey he was on. A foggy memory of a bar fight and a barmaid with a busted-up cheek.

  Just another small town behind him.

  I collected the empty glass of orange soda from his seat and the coaster it had been sitting on.

  I smiled at the ten dollar bill that he’d hidden underneath it.

  Chapter 8

  I let out a gasp as I peered at my face in the rearview mirror.

  There wasn’t any way around it.

  I looked like a monster.

  My left cheek had puffed out like an inflatable beach volleyball, pulling my eye downward into a slant. My facial symmetry had lost any sort of balance.

  I wasn’t looking too pretty. Not too pretty at all.

  But there was nothing to do at the moment except drive home and put another frozen vegetable bag on it.

  I started up my ‘94 Chevy truck and pulled away from the deserted saloon parking lot, the wind shield wipers sliding back and forth across the window, pushing off heavy drops of rain.

  It was March, meaning that you had to expect anything and everything from the weather around here in Central Oregon. You could step outside in the morning and it’d be a bright sunny day holding whispers of spring. And then by early afternoon, a freezing fog bank could roll in and cover everything in a sheet of ice.

  But tonight, it was all rain.

  I pulled out onto Bond Street, the main drag of Broken Hearts Junction. I drove through the old Western-style downtown area, with its wooden door frames and saloon-style facades. Past the large Wagons Ho! mural painted on the side of the Bank of the High Desert building. The one that showed Oregon Trail pioneers smiling as they passed through the area, putting a big happy face sticker over the dark truth of how the town really got its name.

  I turned onto the highway, rumbling down the empty stretch of road for a short way before pulling off onto Juniper Lane, and past all the old houses on my side of town. I pulled up into my driveway, killed the engine, got out, and walked up the old wooden steps to the paint-peeling front porch.

  I grabbed the keys from by bag and was met by an embarrassingly giant, wet kiss after I opened the door.

  “How was your day, babe?” I asked, rubbing his back.

  He responded by knocking me over and pinning me to the floor playfully before planting a few more sloppy kisses on my face.

  I started laughing before pushing him off.

  I guess you really didn’t need a soulmate when you had a 130-pound St. Bernard to greet you after a long day of work.

  “How was my day, you ask?” I said as I stood up, locked the door and flipped the light switch on in the living room of my cozy cabin bungalow. “Well, not great to tell you the truth. Look at this.”

  I pointed to my swollen cheek.

  He looked up at me with a concerned expression on his large, oafish dog face.

  “Yeah, good idea, Hank,” I said, taking off my jacket and hanging it up on the coat rack. “A few Advil might help bring this swelling down.”

  Believe me—I knew carrying on conversations with a dog was crazy.

  But hell. Maybe I was crazy. Sometimes talking to Hank was just about the only thing that kept me sane.

  Hank followed me into the kitchen, wagging his large, heavy and hairy tail. I grabbed a can of dog food from the sparse cupboard, pulled out the can opener, opened it, and poured half of it out into his food bowl. The saliva started dripping down the sides of his jowls as he pushed his large face into the plastic bowl. He scarfed the meaty food down like he was one of those hot dog eating contest competitors.

  While he ate, I threw back three Advil and then poured myself a generous glass of whiskey. I kicked my cowgirl boots off, changed out of my tight-fitting t-shirt and threw on a baggy sweater. Then I put on an old live Townes Van Zandt recording so the place didn’t feel quite so empty, and I let myself fall onto the burnished leather sofa that Lawrence had given me after
he moved into the nursing home.

  I pressed the cold whiskey glass to my cheek and shuddered.

  Maybe Raymond was right. Maybe I should settle down and get myself a respectable job. Lord knows I wasn’t in my 20s anymore. And frankly, Dale wasn’t paying me enough for the aggravation.

  Damn Dale. Courtney wasn’t the brightest, but she was right about him. He was running the saloon into the ground. With his gambling and drinking, and general neglect of the place, The Stupid Cupid Saloon had gone from a premier venue for country bands on their way to the West Coast, to a dive bar with bad music, watered-down drinks, and a sketchy clientele.

  All of which was a real shame.

  When I was growing up around here, The Cupid, which had actually been a saloon in the old days of the Wild West, was the kind of bar that had that rare magic that most establishments try to have, but few really do. A feeling that anything could happen, and that lives were changed for the better because of that place.

  Something about that old bar had always just felt like home to me.

  But Dale was destroying it. Maybe not intentionally, but either way you looked at it, the place was circling the drain.

  And it was becoming harder and harder to watch.

  Maybe it was time to start thinking about a new reality.

  I glanced at my phone, sitting on the coffee table in front of me, feeling the old urge to pick it up and call somebody I shouldn’t.

  Hank jumped up on the sofa, took a seat, and stared at me with big sorrowful eyes.

  “I know,” I said. “You’re right. It only makes the hurt worse. You’re absolutely right.”

  Hank knew better, and so did I. The practical side of me anyway.

  But my heart… my heart was another story.

  I leaned forward and grabbed it.

  Hank gave me a disapproving look, but I ignored him, placing the phone up to my ear.

  It rang. Once. Twice. By the third ring, I knew he wasn’t picking up. But I stayed on the line anyway, listening to his message. My heart thundering in my chest when I heard his voice.

  Jacob, why’d you have to leave?

  I hung up before leaving a message.