Dawn At The Presto by Michael Fontana

In 1987, Stony worked the counter at the Presto Lounge, deep inside The Mumbles, a neighborhood already known for its poverty and crime, so much so that even the police stayed away. He rubbed a rag inside a whiskey glass as if cleaning it, when he was just wiping it over and over for something to do. He admired the tattoos on the backs of his hands, spider webs, like the images behind his eyes when he shot heroin a few years back, before he kicked the habit, went on methadone, and kept clean despite the urge to shoot up anyway.

He wore jeans with rips in the knees, a T-shirt with an airplane going down in flames, and biker boots. The cold outside didn’t faze him, so he wore no coat. His reflection nodded from the mirrored glass behind the bar: prematurely white hair grown long, blue eyes oozing enmity, wiry build. At six-foot tall, he towered over his patrons. He looked much older than his twenty-five years, though no one asked his age and he never offered it.

It was nearing time to open. A few shadows gathered outside, their shapes on the frosted glass inset of the door. They cursed the cold and smoked cigarettes and stamped their feet and spat into the distance. Car horns blew at them, and they flipped the drivers off.

Stony never could understand drunks. He didn’t trust them, how easily they changed moods once the booze crawled deep inside them, like they kept alter egos in a compartment there that only opened to the sound of him pouring them a drink. Heroin, on the other hand, made a person stoic. Hence his name, as cold as stone.

When he opened the door, the group came in cursing him as well as the weather. He had waited two minutes past the opening time of five a.m. and thus left them to further suffer in the elements. He, in turn, flipped them off and they all laughed, raw, hoarse, sore laughs that bordered on inhuman.

He began pouring drinks and soon everyone settled onto a stool or into a booth and lost themselves in the liquid sluicing down their throats. One then approached the bar. Petey-Petey was a beggar a few inches shorter than Stony, dressed in rags, smelling of sweat and stumbling around as if he had already drunk too many whiskey sours, his beverage of choice.

“Where’s my wristwatch?” the beggar asked, slapping his hands on the countertop.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Stony said.

“I had a wristwatch on the last time I came in,” Petey-Petey said.

“Then maybe you ought to keep a better eye on your crap,” Stony said.

Stony knew that Petey-Petey was pissed off at his response, but he didn’t care. The beggar wasn’t welcome in any other bar in the neighborhood, especially the up-and-coming ones for yuppies invading the neighborhood and renovating the abandoned buildings at its edge. Petey-Petey always made himself a nuisance and no one wanted him around. Stony didn’t give a shit one way or another. The beggar paid for his drinks. The money felt good in Stony’s hand.

An hour or so later, a stranger entered the Presto and stood at the far end of the counter. Stony approached him. That’s when the stranger pulled out a pistol. “Hand over the money, pal,” the man said. He was probably in his early twenties, five-ten if an inch, solidly built under his overcoat, a little too fancy for the Presto but slumming for the night. Black hair. Blue eyes. A pasty complexion. Too-perfect teeth.

“I ain’t handing over shit to you,” Stony said.

“Maybe you didn’t see this in my hand,” the stranger said, raising the pistol, his teeth clenched so the words came out choppy. “Hand it over.”

“Fuck you,” Stony said. He flipped the man the bird. Stared him dead in the eye. Dared him to pull the trigger.

The stranger’s hand wobbled just enough that Stony grabbed the nose of the pistol and yanked it away from him, flipped it around and beaded on the stranger’s forehead. “Now get the fuck out of here before I mop the floor with your blood,” Stony said.

The stranger sat there stunned, eyes buggy with it, mouth open. His hands vibrated like tuning forks. “You can’t do that,” he muttered.

“The fuck I can’t,” Stony said. He shot out one of the overhead lights just to prove his point, shards of glass and dust and other debris falling over everyone.

This woke the whole crowd. Even Petey-Petey bitched about the dust on his clothes, like there wasn’t a Great Depression’s worth already on them.

“Look at this asshole,” Stony announced to the crowd, pointing the pistol at the stranger. “He thought he could rob us.”

The room erupted in laughter, cacophonous, wheezing, back-slapping laughter. The stranger stood up from his barstool and looked around him, seeing nothing but ghosts and monsters, not a person among them. He quickly fled into the dawn. Petey-Petey chased him, cursed him, and spat at his shadow as he ran away.

Michael Fontana is a retired activist, college instructor, and nonprofit fundraiser who lives in beautiful Bella Vista, Arkansas. His fiction currently appears in Potomac Review, Dark Horses, and Blood+Honey. Read more at http://www.michaelfontana.org