CTAS 17: Squid's Bar Again
Cycling Through a Storm
“No, Roger, I swear it!” Stewie placed his right palm on his chest. “Lloyd was gonna just be rail meat, Vic said!”
Stewie and Roger were rehashing the race. Lloyd sat between them at the bar, head swiveling like he was watching them on a pickleball court. Vic sat to Roger’s right, where he could more easily see the door. He was watching for Gust.
Roger laughed, gripped both of Lloyd’s shoulders. “Stewie, it’s a damn good thing you own the boat, or you’d be fighting to keep your spot at the helm!” Then he stood halfway off his barstool and turned to try flagging the bartender down by waving a twenty dollar bill in the air.
Lloyd’s thick gray brows arched higher and he twisted to face Stewie, then Roger more directly. “Oh no—I’m no racer!”
“You sure were racing tonight! Where else have you sailed?” Roger said.
“I used to sail some, but, to be fair, we weren’t racing tonight while I was steering. Stewie wasn’t on the boat!”
“And you got him back onto the boat, during a storm! You must have done man overboard drills before.”
“I suppose, but not racing, just drinking.”
“See?!” Roger leaned down at Stewie, pointing at Lloyd with his free hand. “He is a racer!” He resumed waving the twenty above his head.
“Gimme that.” Stewie snatched the bill out of Roger’s hand, put it on the bar. “Steve-O!”
The bartender jogged over. “Stew-E! Whatcha need?”
Roger resumed interrogating Lloyd. “And those other times, when it was just drinking, did you use the spinnaker to rescue people who’d gone overboard?”
“No, we didn’t have a spinnaker, but I’ve pulled some water skiers, and that’s what you do after a skier goes down. You run the boat ‘round to bring ‘em the tow rope.”
“Right,” Roger nodded, smiling. “Same thing, except with sails instead of a tow rope and motor.”
“That’s right.”
“Cosmo?” Stewie asked.
Roger nodded, accepted the cocktail from Stewie, kept talking. “So do you have a ride for tomorrow, Lloyd?”
“Hey!” Stewie grabbed the cosmo back from Roger. “No poaching!”
“Oh! Well, top-shelf margarita, then!”
Stewie wagged his head. “Steve-O! I need a margarita over here.”
Steve-O nodded from the other end of the bar where he was filling beer pitchers. “Top shelf?”
“Rail!”
Roger squinted. “I don’t mind having the cosmo while I’m waiting.” He reached again for the drink.
“Mine now!” Stewie spun away on his barstool, sucking on the fufu cocktail’s little plastic straws.
“Since when do you drink vodka?”
“Since you started trying to poach my crew!” Stewie flicked the straws away, gulped half the drink down. “Not so bad!” He wiped his mustache against his hairy forearm. “Hey Lloyd! Wanna race with us again tomorrow?”
In the dining area, Sue made space for Vic beside her on the picnic table bench.
“Riz race tonight, huh?”
Vic nodded. “Shit show. Did Windswept get to the finish?”
“Nah, got Windswept right outta the race. All the cruising class boats did.”
“Most of the racing boats retired before the finish, too.”
“Literally blown away! I heard you guys took second though.”
Vic laughed.
“How’d you pull that off, after Stewie went overboard?”
“We got him back on and the ungrateful fucker made us keep racing.”
“Early bird gets the worm, I guess.”
“Uh, right.” Vic drank some of his beer. “He really thought we could still catch Blow.”
“How were you even close to them?”
“They might have had some trouble in that wind too, I guess.”
“Or Blow just sucked at sailing tonight.”
“They did win the race.”
“Sucking wind.”
“Keep trying—I’m sure there’s a joke in there somewhere.”
Sue stared at the nearly naked ice cubes in her cocktail glass. “I feel ya, man. I mean, it woulda been a dis to Stewie to not finish after shredding his spinnaker and making him swim that last leg.”
“That’s about the way Stewie saw it.”
“All’s well that ends.”
“Huh?”
Sue strained the last of her cocktail against her teeth. “So where’s Gust tonight?”
“Working at the bike shop. He said he’d come over after.” Vic looked at his watch.
Sue nodded. “His girlfriend’s here, so I figured he must be, too.” She nodded over at the table where Lisa was sitting with people who weren’t sailors.
A dog’s muzzle snuffed in between Vic’s elbow and chest.
“Maasai!” Vic pushed away from the table to greet Gust’s dog.
Gust was at the door, greeting the yoga shorts waitress with a hug. Young people were queuing up behind her to greet Gust, as if he had just returned from a long time away. Gust hugged them all, one after another. The guys were mostly getting quick bro hugs, but a few got Gust’s special bear hugs, one or the other man being lifted off his feet in the embrace. The women hugged Gust with less physicality, but no less enthusiasm.
“Everyone always wants to look like they’re Gust’s best friend,” Sue said.
“I think he just has a lot of best friends,” Vic said.
“How come nobody ever lines up to hug me like that?” Sue slurped a cube out of her glass to suck on. “I guess that would be a real clusterhug, huh?”
Vic laughed. “Clusterhug?”
Sue shrugged and stood up, rattled the cubes in her glass. “Want another?”
“I’m good.”
Lisa, who had been hovering just outside the clusterhug situation, found her way to Gust.
Gust caught Vic’s eye while Lisa was talking to him, gave his dad an acknowledging nod.
After dinner and the usual exchange of perspectives among the fleet’s skippers and crews, Gust joined Vic, Lloyd, and Stewie at the bar. He took the corner stool beside Stewie, furthest from Vic. It was still noisy in the barroom, difficult for Vic to hear the conversation. He heard Stewie say Jigs while resting his palm on Lloyd’s back. He got off his stool to stand closer.
“So,” Gust summarized, “you’ve been hiding an eighteen-foot dinghy from your wife underneath a chicken coop in your backyard.”
Lloyd nodded. “Six meters, so closer to twenty feet, I guess.”
“How long have you been hiding it there?”
“You’re what, thirty or so?” Lloyd asked.
“Twenty-seven.”
“About that long, I guess.”
Gust laughed. “Why? What are you going to do with it?”
“I’d like to sail it!”
“Race?”
“Could—from what I see around here, there isn’t a lot of difference between racing and cruising, really, except that in a race everyone agrees about when and where they’re going to sail, and a guy with some flags on a pontoon boat takes attendance at the beginning and end.”
Gust nodded thoughtfully. “I gotta see it.”
“I’m hoping to get her in the water again, make sure she still floats at least,” Lloyd said. “I could motor it down river, maybe, if the outboard fires up—”
“No, I mean I gotta see the whole picture—boat, chicken coop, cockatoo, all of it.”
“Oh!” Lloyd’s eyes went wide. “You could come by tomorrow and have a look, maybe give me a hand with the motor or whatever?”
“Defs.”
“Come again?”
“Sorry—yes, absolutely, I could meet up at your place, check it out.”
“I could help out some tomorrow,” Vic offered.
“You could?” Lloyd asked.
“We could ride up together if you like,” Vic said to Gust.
“What time?”
“Mid-morning, I was thinking, but could go in the afternoon if that’s easier.”
“Afternoon will probably be better—I promised Lisa I’d help with something at her place in the morning.”
“Anyone want another?” It was not Steve-O.
“Where’d Steve-O go?” Stewie said to the bartender, which to Vic seemed a sensible thing to say, particularly since the bartender wasn’t Steve-O, and he wasn’t a bartender Vic recognized. He was neither tall nor short but wiry, had dark scraggly hair. His lips were full and he had a slight gap between his front teeth, one of which was turned a bit, though not exactly snaggled.
“He left,” the bartender said.
“Oh,” Stewie said. He took a look down the bar, then back to the new bartender. “That’s weird—what happened?”
“Din’t fuckin’ tell me,” the bartender said, smiling in a way that was not particularly friendly. His puffy lips put quite a frame around that not-quite-snaggly incisor. “I just got a fuckin’ call that they need me at the fuckin’ bar, so I fuckin’ got outta bed and drove in here ‘cause they said it was fuckin’ busy.”
“Ya fuckin’ say.”
The bartender looked at Stewie and his smile grew bigger but his eyes didn’t change.
The two were just staring at each other, so Vic spoke. “Well, now that we’ve established that fuckin’ Steve-O had to fuckin’ go, can we maybe get some fuckin’ beers?”
The bartender’s head turned Vic’s way but his expression stayed fixed. When his eyes caught up to Vic’s he said “Yeah, fuckit,” and reached for a pint glass. “What kind beer ya having?”
“Bells,” Stewie said.
“All a ya?”
“Just the two of us,” Vic said to the bartender. “Lloyd’ll have a whiskey and Gust probably wants another bottle of St. Pauli.”
The bartender tapped one beer and set it down in front of Stewie with no coaster. Stewie lifted the beer, took a coaster from a stack next to the beer faucets. Before the second pint was full the keg blew and shot foam across the glass and onto the bartender’s shirt. The shirt had wide navy blue and white horizontal stripes, and the foam made a cream-colored splotch on the blue stripe at the bartender’s sternum. He pushed the tap handle back and stared at the foam sliding down his chest, pawed at it with his free hand. He angled his gaze toward Vic again and said “Gotta go tap the fuckin’ keg.”
“Just give me something else. The other IPA’s fine.”
“Still gotta tap the keg.”
“How ‘bout you do that after you get our drinks?”
He nodded, took the glass that still had foam and a little beer in it, and topped it up from another tap.
Stewie laughed.
“What,” The bartender said.
“I guess you’ll still get a little Bells in there,” Stewie said from the side of his mouth to Vic while still staring at the bartender.
The bartender slid the glass with the foamy mix of beers in front of Vic. “Here’s your fuckin’ beer.”
“Well, fuckin’ thanks,” Vic said, figuring this must be the new guy’s shtick.
“What is it?” the bartender asked, nodding at Lloyd’s glass.
“Just a Jack Daniels and water,” Lloyd said.
“Whiskey,” the bartender said, still looking at Lloyd.
“What?” Lloyd asked.
“Jack Daniels is whiskey,” the bartender said.
“Yes,” Lloyd said. “It’s the one I usually drink.”
The bartender nodded, reached for the Jack Daniels bottle. He made the drink and put it in front of Lloyd, then held a bottle of St. Pauli up, looking for a place to put it.
“That’s for Gust,” Lloyd said, indicating the spot beside him where Gust had been sitting.
“He still want it?” the bartender asked.
“I’m sure he will, when he gets back,” Lloyd said.
“Took the fuckin’ dog with him,” the bartender said, nodding at the bar’s rear exit.
Previous Episodes of Cycling Through a Storm 1: Cycling Through a Storm 2: A House, a Boy, a Girl, a Car, a Dock, a Boat, a Hug 3: Starting Sequence 4: Yacht Race 5: Save the Hat! 6: Squid's Bar 7: Sailors and Fishermen 8: Maxhole 9: Schwinn Continental 10: Psycle Snobs Café 11: The Sultan of Strings 12: Fetching 13: Spelunking 14: The FNG 15: Crashing Corvus 16: Stewie's Rescue
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