THALIA'S TAIL
G.W. Cox

“You can’t have snickers in here,” the little guy shouted at me over the disco music.

He had to be crazy, drunk or both. He watched me check the drink in my hand and the damp jungle fatigue shirt I wore as a raincoat. No Snickers or snickers.

“Your choos,” he pointed downwards. “You can’t have snickers in this bar.”

True, I was wearing tennis shoes and jeans, what I usually wore to work. The rain had driven me into this, the kiddie bar, on my way home that night. But this guy with his frilly shirt and leather pointy shoes looked like another one of the kids. “Who the hell are you?” I asked.

“I am the assistant manager. We have a dress code here.”

I looked over at the clusters of underage kids, went to the bar and got a to-go cup. The bartender shook his head furtively, knowing that my tips were likely to be the only ones for the evening, and refreshed the remains in a red plastic cup.

I waited outside below the eaves of the building for the waves of rain to subside. The ornamental wrought-iron lights shot deep blue beams off the cloudy cobalt cobblestones. The crushed curbs and broken sidewalks seemed to take on amorphous life with sliding shadows and sluicing reflections. There was a break in the beating and I stepped out, lengthening my strides with purpose.

The old city smelled like freshly turned earth. Every patch of grass or dirt between ancient paving was oozing this odor. This was the backwash of Hurricane Thalia who, earlier in the day, had turned her eye away from this unsightly island by ninety miles.

At the next corner, up the concrete stairs from the shantytown built on the beach outside the city wall, I walked past two wiry guys about my age, in animated conversation like a salsa danse macabre, mouths dangling cigarettes as accompaniment.

Heavy raindrops reasserted their beat on my head and torso. I heard steps echoing behind me. At the next corner I pretended traffic etiquette, though looking to the rear too. It was them. The staggering, tiny glowing ashes and careless clothes.

But a curtain of rain was rushing up the street, and I ducked into a sheltering doorway. I looked from the direction I had walked and my two shadows were under the next opening.

A thin smiling face broke the monotony of the uneven wall of home fronts. “Hey, man, that’s a nice watch you got there.” He stoked the cigarette glow in front of his face and flicked it into the street. “Me and my friend, we don’t have no watches. Throw it here. Then we can see what time it is.”

I looked away from him, forward to San Jose Church, a blanched building braced behind its empty featureless eponymous plaza. On the busiest days not even a few people would be there, perhaps cowed by the crime rate which was compared to American cities only in multiples.

The noisy volume and force of the rain was creating a dense mist. I was safe as long as it did not let up.

I stepped into the downpour and soon my hair was plastered wet guiding rivulets inside my collar. Soaked to the skin, I thought. [thank god for clichés].

After two blocks, I entered a moldy, mildewed empty bar, its two slow ceiling fans trailing dark dust streamers and giving me a slight chill. The lonely jukebox was belting out Tony Croatto’s “Temporal”, a magic song about a storm.

Alan threw me a clean; dry bar towel from under the counter. He had a well-groomed red beard that looked like it was trying to grow a mouth. “Where you been?”

“I had to take the bus home and stopped at the kiddie bar when it began to rain.”

He set the usual on the bar in front of me. “Are they doing any business?”

“Half full, half empty. After I left, a couple of guys from La Princesa started tailing me.”

He reached under the counter again and slapped a billy club on the bar. “Advertisement. So what happened to those guys? Should we be expecting company?”

“When the rain got thick, they went into one doorway and me another. When they began making noises about my watch, I started walking.”

Alan looked out the door and its complementing French door window on the front wall. “And no self-respecting thief is going to get wet, maybe catch pneumonia, to roll someone. That could be dangerous”

“Yeah?”

“You’re dangerous, man.”

© G.W. "Gyro" Cox 2004

Late of the fourth estate, Jerry Cox (gwcox2@comcast.net) now submits and is accepted or rejected—the story of his life, an ongoing fiction not to be missed or messed with.

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