“The Buzz Kill,” by C.J. Hribal
Fiction faculty member C.J. Hribal was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of “The Buzz Kill” below:
The Buzz Kill
Get a grip, Porter Atwood tells himself. This is no time to be acting like a fool.
Then again, there’s no time like the present.
Which is why he finds himself seated on a stool just down from Luther Krake and some other men over at the Y-Go-By. Porter, deep in his cups, nods to Luther, who’s well on his way, as Alvin Beyes sets him up again.
“You’re getting married tomorrow, ainna?” Alvin asks Luther. Luther nods this is so. Luther’s nearly sixty. Alvin pours him a shot and pulls him a draft. “This one’s on me.”
Porter’s known people like these men all his life. Men—some women, too, but mostly men—who can’t quite get a grip on their life until they’ve squeezed with the pads of their fingers the fluted wet coolness of a seven ounce glass of beer in the velvety half-dark of a tavern. The word itself, rhymes with cavern. No matter how bright the day, it’s always full shade in a tavern—twilight at mid-day, with electric lighting and the slight buzzing of those neon beer signs. Almost like a different kind of pulse.
Men like Wally Czabek, seated two stools over, a decent man given to periodic failures of focus. Men for whom the world only makes sense here, in the company of other men given to similar failures and weaknesses, men who find a kind of sullen joy in each other’s company, comparing notes on the conspiracy outside. “The world’s a mess,” says Wally Czabek, who orders himself another brandy Old Fashioned with a beer chaser, as though that is somehow going to fix things. In here it’s okay. It’s okay, really. It’s fine. Outside it’s wrack and ruin, and if the sun weren’t such a blinding rectangle of light each time somebody opened the door to join them, they could even forget entirely that that other crazy world existed. And then something would remind them, a wife phoning them or an errand remembered, some destination that required you to get off your barstool, and they’d go home, carrying their unspoken heartache and longing like a disease. Until it was time for the next afternoon’s transfusion, the bolstering of meaning and courage and perseverance that could only be gotten here.
It’s this bolstering Porter’s drawn to. He’s been out of sorts for the last two weeks, ever since that kid drowned in his subdivision. Can’t concentrate, keeps thinking about how that kid ended up pinned beneath some branches in that little creek—barely a creek, really—the water tumbling over him, a bunch of other boys standing around with rocks at their feet and defensive, guilty looks in their faces. No, the two didn’t have to be connected, only they probably were. And Porter made sure, given it was their parents who bought his houses, bought them in his subdivision, and the drowned boy was from some cheap-ass rental unit somewhere else, that nobody, including Police Chief Jones, looked at this as more than an accidental drowning. There’s what you know, and there’s what you feel. What he knew was what was good for his business. What he felt was something else, and he tried not to think about what he felt.
Read the story in its entirety here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-7-c-j-hribal/
