San Tortola, Texas 2005

The tiny man said I looked as miserable as a thumb. The expression on my face must have been one of bewilderment. Incidentally, he thrust his truncated thumbs in my face. They looked like the tops had been sawed off at the knuckle. The flesh looked jagged—corrugated.
"Miserable as a thumb," he said, "miserable as my poor lost thumbs."
His head shook as he spoke and the reddened skin of his jowls gesticulated accordingly. He reminded me of someone's sad uncle. The one that always steers conversation toward something that you might have once had in common, maybe a million years ago, but now is completely irrelevant.
Certainly strange, I thought. I bought him a beer as a bribe for his silence and as consolation for his misfortune.
It seemed to work. He clammed up and pawed at his beer with the type of shamelessness that you only see in the very old, or very young. He was lapping at his beer for a good two minutes, and I had almost grown used to the sound when his head shot up and he said, quickly, almost as an aside, "Don't blow your brains from your head tonight."

He didn't arrive at the bar until later in the evening, not until the place had crowded up with rain-flushed professionals on their way home from their offices and students from nearby colleges, all looking for excuses to have one more drink. You weren't allowed to sit at the tables unless you were eating, so the seating area remained curiously empty regardless of the activity at the bar. It created an interesting effect. Like the dining area was a stage, and the standing-room drunks were a rowdy but rapt audience.
Hours before the tiny man with the lopped thumbs appeared, before the professionals and college students, I was there. Sipping my lager. Listening in on the scant conversation around me. For a long stretch of time, there was only one couple sitting in the dining area.

"You aren't my ideal," she said, "I just can't see us liking each other very much."
The man rearranged himself in his seat. He leaned forward, cocked his head expectantly, like he was asking a rhetorical question.
"You're a pretty piece," he said.
"Oh?"
It didn't seem like the right reaction, and I leaned my body to get a better angle on their voices. At that moment, the front door opened.

The woman at the table turned toward the sound of the bell above the door. Another couple came in from the rain and shook matching black umbrellas into the bin against the unoccupied host stand. The pair crossed through the middle of the room, slid past the couple at the table, and took seats near me at the bar. They looked around, surveyed the half-full place, and took inventory of the bodies peppered throughout the establishment. Possibly, they were waiting for more of their party. They must have noticed me sitting alone, hunched over my lager, trying to look disinterested in my surroundings.
I stared at the bar for a moment before I let my attention return to the couple at the table. I noticed for the first time, possibly in contrast to the vaguely Mediterranean-looking couple that were now trying to get the bartender's attention, that the couple at the table were both strikingly fair. Blonds. Skin like cellophane, evident even in this dim light.

The man at the table whispered something into his drink.

"Excuse me?" the woman said. She raised her hand to her mouth and gave a little cough. I decided this was her nervous habit.

"You make me feel uncomfortable," he said, a little too audibly.

The couple at the bar were taking their coats off, placing them on the high-backed bar-seats. The man whispered something to the woman and they both gave surreptitious glances at the table.


The couple seated a few feet from me at the bar ordered Sapphire & tonics. Good choice, I thought. It made me thirsty for my own beer and I took a long drink.

The bartender made a show of dropping the lime slivers into the bar-couple's gin drinks. He hadn't been doing this long.

"It's something awful out there, pouring like that," the woman said to the bartender.

"Sun showers all this week," he responded. It might have been the fourth-or-so time he'd said it since I got there.

"It's a real pain," the man at the woman's side said.

"Just rain," I said. I didn't mean to. I was absentmindedly watching the couple at the table, I might've meant to just think about the rain.

"Excuse me," the man leaned on his elbow and lolled his head over at me, "did you say something, pal-o?"

"Me? No."

"Sounded like you said something."

"I was talking to myself."

"Oh. All right, then. You have fun, then. Talking to yourself."

He made a sort of scoffing or snorting sound at me and turned around. I had a vision of myself standing up, him turning around. I saw myself moving faster than him. Overpowering him and smashing his face against the shellacked bar and meeting little resistance from his inferior physique. I saw his blood come as a rush from his gums and ruined teeth. I felt his weight in my hands as an insignificant thing.

I nodded and sipped my beer, tried to look more inebriated than I was. My ears radiated heat.