Our Guy by Caleb Ross

He's that guy we all want to know, a man with flammable breath and teeth bathed in whiskey. People have names for him—none of which are that given by his parents, whom, we've all heard, have something to do with the way he slouches so deep on that barstool (the only one with a backrest). "His childhood..." "His father..." "His mother..." "His disease...": all of these statements begin everything anyone thinks they know about the man. And these people here aren't his first admirers. This isn't his first home. He's nestled all over. The bars all are his homes, us too, and Our Guy is the reason we return.
    He started writing about the same time his drinks made him believe he had stories worth telling. It's all markers and razors against paint; graffiti, chipping away letters and words to bide his time between dry heaves and pisses. Soon he'll run out of bathroom stalls and the walls they won't hold still for him anymore. Bartenders are starting to recognize his handwriting.
    Stand up in one bar. Sit down in another.
    Nobody knows for sure if what he writes is anything more than the textualized hallucinations of a brain swimming in alcohol and pills and, even, I've heard, gasoline. Kerosene, too, and lighter fluid. I don't want to believe in the flammability of this man, but I wouldn't deny the possibility. Taking into consideration what he's carved into stalls and walls all over this town I fear that to deny this man any possibility might put me as the unfortunate subject in one of his tales.
    According to the third stall of a small bar in Southtown—Royale is the name—this man doesn't believe much in mercy. And if I can believe what I've read on the floor of a bathroom in The Lasso I can understand why. The toilet seat at Magdalena spells out his first:
    Three years ago a bartender, a good guy named Millie, found a man passed out in his bar's bathroom. The man was bloody, smelled like a career drunk, and refused to stand no matter how hard Millie kicked at him. He kicked and kicked and kicked until ribs snapped and all the breath remaining in this man's lungs escaped to join the piss-vapor around him. The man was dead, had been dead "for hours," the coroner said. Nobody knew the dead man.
    Again six months later at Fat Tad's.
    Again two weeks after that at Glass.
    Again four months ago in The Blue House.
    Nobody knew the dead men.
    If we tell ourselves the culprit sits right there, in front of us all, then we're free to ignore our backs. In this place of kindreds the last body part you want to have to protect is one you have a hard enough time seeing sober.
    So this guy became "that guy" became Our Guy and nobody assumes otherwise. Nobody does, anyway, until this safety-net logic disintegrates tonight as a live news feed from the TV above the bar interrupts an uneventful ballgame to inform us all of a body found warm and wet in the basement of bar I hadn't called home in years. Our Guy sits underneath the screen—has been planted there for hours—a highball of whiskey soaking his tongue. He says nothing.
    We watched the woman on TV with a collective eye. She let the camera pan the yellow tape around the bar, let the camera follow the gurney and its bloating mass underneath pale sheets. "...heard gunshots less than an hour ago," she says into the camera. Our Guy stays still. I'm certain I could find cobwebs clinging to him if I got close enough. But I wasn't going to. And neither was anyone else.
    We spend the rest of the night avoiding Our Guy, acting like we aren't cultivating theories between thrown darts and missed cue balls. He sits still despite the oft outbursts of speculations voiced loud by a mouth drunk enough to feel quiet. He sits still despite the blatant accusations voiced loud by mouths drunk on ego. He sits still despite the follow-up reports and police insistence that "whoever did this will serve his time."
    I couldn't blame him for his null reaction. What could he say in his defense? Any words would be his first to this crowd, and I'm guessing just the shock of his voice would be enough to change any neutral party to hostile. We've always counted on Our Guy to stay silent. A single word would change everything, and if there is one thing an incestuous bar family like ours hates it's change.
    Somebody made the phone call. Two officers in uniforms dusted with snow ran into to bar, guns drawn, screaming for everyone to stay put, "no hiding." The only patron to heed the instruction was Our Guy, stoic still at his barstool under the TV. I ran the moment I saw the glint of our dull bar light against a gun. We all have certain histories that warrant staying as far from legal authority as possible. My brothers, sisters, and all the rest of our bar family dispersed slowly as the officers followed their pointing fingers to Our Guy under the TV. We couldn't leave—one officer blocked the only door—so I slid away in tune to nervous breaths all the way to the bathroom.
    The stalls are busy with Our Guy's ramblings. He's filled the door, the walls, even etched into the matte metal of the toilet paper housing, stories, histories, events that we all know to be true and all accept as belonging to Our Guy. In detail he's carved all the motivations behind random murders. He's described scenes with the sort of detail upon which report's careers are built. He mentions names, personal facts, and even buried within all this sterile information he manages a few moments of philosophical clarity: "I am a monster. A real and tangible and flawed monster."
    I flush the toilet for effect and walk out of the bathroom with a look of faux bewilderment. My bar family remains silent. Our Guy sits still because, I learn, Our Guy is dead. Paramedics drag him away, no sweat broken. The heavy bathroom door rattles the walls.
    The bar remains silent enough to hear the news anchor on the TV above the now-empty barstool drag on and on about the recent gun-shot death in the bar across town. The police officers stay with us long after the paramedics, questioning every stunned drunk still planted in this bar. We've assumed for years that Our Guy committed those murders; our guy beat those people and raped those people. Now we have a dead source of blame and an open door for suspicion.
    As the months carry on we slowly dissipate from the bar. Family becomes friends become strangers. We might bump into one another at a bar across town or in a convenience store as the morning sun just breaks the horizon, but we're never the same people we were before that night Our Guy decided to die. We're paranoiacs without a monster, straining our necks to keep one eye to our backs and one eye to all the strangers now flooding our world.

About the author:
Caleb Ross lives in Kansas City, KS. His fiction and non-fiction have been most recently published in Flint Hills Review, The Green Muse, Vestal Review, online at Dogmatika and is forthcoming to Bust Down the Doors and Eat All the Chickens, a journal of absurdists fiction. He likes email. Send to caleb@calebjross.com.