Winnie’s Bar
/The man was about forty-five, tall, thick and tough looking, with longish dark hair and bushy dark eyebrows. He had a Guinea pig shaped face that held a perpetually dumb expression. Rich had never seen him before. He was a stranger to Morgan’s Landing.
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At six-o-clock in the evening, downtown Morgan’s Landing sparkled with snow covered Holiday décor. Strings of colored lights and wreaths hung across Main Street from telephone pole to telephone pole, and the shops windows twinkled with colored lights.
It was a freezing December night. Wind came icy from the North. Dense falling snow blew around like a dust bowl, with visibility at about ten feet. Snowdrifts were five feet high and climbing. It was three weeks before Christmas and the severe weather had turned the village into a ghost town. The streets and sidewalks were vacant, except for three teenage boys standing on the corner of Main and Otsego Street, throwing snowballs at the overhead hanging wreaths.
On Union Street, looking South off Main, Winnie’s Bar was the only place in town with its inside lights on. The small barroom was lively with a dozen Remington Rand factory workers just off their day shifts, along with a few festive women. All of them were laughing, drinking and toasting the Holidays. The jukebox played Jingle Bells, and Winnie’s interior was decorated with seasonal array.
Rich Hooper walked into the bar to a humid atmosphere of booze, cigarettes and perfume that hit him like a swamp of human stench. The inside heat was jacked up so high, it turned the place into a sauna. Rich Hooper settled in at the end of the bar near the door, took off his heavy coat, scarf, gloves and worked at getting Winnie’s attention. She was tipsy and singing with the crowd: Oh, what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh. Until she saw Rich.
“Hi, Rich, you good-looking son of a bitch, what’ll it be?” Winnie puckered her lips and leaned over the bar for a Holiday kiss.
Winnie inherited the bar from her deceased father, which he had named after her. Her father had turned the joint into a popular watering hole with the village locals. Winnie was in her late thirties and single. She was a platinum blonde with a large solid ass. She was five-foot-six, with tits like artillery cannons above a thick tight waist. Winnie had no problem getting laid by many of the single men, and by a few of the married men, too. Incidentally, she was not popular with the tight-lipped church-women of this conservative Upstate village. Winnie said many times that ‘these prudes need to rinse the starch out of their panties, pull up their skirts and have a little fun in this all too short life’.
“Hi, gorgeous,” Rich said as he laid a full-mouth kiss on Winnie. He pulled her a little across the bar to bring her closer. Neither wanted to end the mouth-to-mouth.
“Hey, you two! Take it to the backroom and finish it off.” Yelled the gin drinking door-to-door salesman Billy-boy. The crowd broke into laughter, then went back to singing, toasting and dancing.
“I’ll have a double bourbon,” Rich said after releasing the kiss. Winnie slid back down to the floor and set him up with a drink.
“It’s on the house, lover-boy. For you, anything you want tonight,” she said with a hot twinkle in her eyes and a sideways grin. Rich winked and nodded in agreement.
Standing five-nine at two hundred pounds of muscle mixed with some fat, Rich was a tough man. He had a round expressionless face and narrow distrustful eyes––the kind of eyes that war inflicts on a man. At thirty-three, Rich was one of those veterans who still wore his Army issue fatigue shirts. His last name and company patch were still sewn on, a decade after his discharge from combat in Korea. Though he was cordial, he didn’t talk much, which was a problem for his once longtime girlfriend. She eventually left him for another guy––a skinny nervous car salesman who never stopped talking.
Rich and Winnie had lived together for a while, but she had to end it due to a lack of sleep. All Rich wanted to do was screw non-stop, day and night. He screwed her brains numb and dumb to the point where Winnie was in a Wonderland-daze all of the time. The sleep deprivation affected her responsibilities as a pub owner. She was late opening the bar too many times and, on a few occasions, she forgot to order supplies.
Rich threw back the double and motioned for another. Just then the door opened, and a man came in pushing his woman around and yelling at her.
The man pulled his woman over to a booth, slammed her into the seat and told her to stay there and to shut the fuck up. He staggered up to the bar and, standing close to Rich, ordered a straight double Scotch and a glass of white wine. Looking at Rich, he said boldly,
“Fuck women. All of ‘em. What a pain in the ass they are. Right, buddy?”
Rich didn’t acknowledge the asshole, and stayed silent. Though he did look over at the woman, who was crying, and trying to hide her eyes with her handkerchief. Rich said to the man, “You should treat your woman with the respect she deserves.” His tone was severe and disciplinary. He stared into the man’s nervous, bloodshot eyes.
The man was about forty-five, tall, thick and tough looking, with longish dark hair and bushy dark eyebrows. He had a Guinea pig shaped face that held a perpetually dumb expression. Rich had never seen him before. He was a stranger to Morgan’s Landing.
The man threw back his whisky and said to Rich, loud enough for the entire bar to hear, “Mind your own fucking business. Asshole.”
The crowded bar went silent, and the music stopped, for lack of money being fed into the jukebox. Rich turned back to his drink, ignoring the drunk’s ineffectual aggressiveness. The guy ordered another whisky and went back to the booth. His woman was wiping tears from her eyes. The man slammed the wine glass on the table in front of her and said,
“Drink this and stop your bullshit whining.” He sat down across from the woman.
“I want to go home,” the woman said softly. “Just take me home.” She started to cry again.
“Shut the fuck up. It’s the Holidays. Put a smile on that sour puss of yours,” the man shouted.
The woman, thin and plain looking, was in her late thirties. She had long blonde hair, a small sad mouth, and was dressed in drab clothing. The woman finally stood up from the booth and said out loud to the drunk, “I’m leaving.” Her lower lip quivered. Tears fell from her chin. Everyone but Rich looked at the couple. Winnie walked over and stood close to Rich. He seemed impassive to the situation.
“Sit your skinny ass down and finish your drink,” the man yelled.
“No. I’m leaving. And don’t you dare follow me,” the woman said with a raised voice.
The man got up from the booth, grabbed a handful of the woman’s collar, and with a backhand slapped her across the mouth. She covered her face with her hands and cried harder, while the man shoved her back into the booth. When she looked up again, a trail of blood appeared along the side of her bottom lip. The blood slid down in a lazy line to her chin, where it mixed with tears.
“Hey! Asshole,” Winnie yelled as she approached the man. “What kind of a low-class coward are you? Get the hell out of my bar. Now!”
“Go fuck yourself, you fat cow. I’ll leave when I’m ready to leave,” the man yelled back.
Rich Hooper got up from his barstool and walked over to the crying woman. He knelt down in front of the woman and consoled her with kind words, while using a napkin to clean the blood from her mouth and chin. The angry man grabbed Rich by his shoulder and yanked him back.
“Like I said before,” the man yelled, “mind your own fucking business. Or I’ll give you a slap, too.”
Rich Hooper stood up and turned around, slowly, facing the man eye-to-eye. Then with hurricane speed, Rich gave the asshole a backhand across his mouth so hard and solid that a wad of spit and blood flew through the air. The man’s eyes bulged out of his face like his head was squeezed. He staggered backwards, stumbled over a chair and fell to the floor. He started bleeding from his cracked bottom lip. The quiet bar broke into laughter and cheers. The man tried to get up, only to fall back again. The crowd cheered louder.
Winnie sat down next to the woman and comforted her. Rich Hooper went back to the bar and to finish his whisky. The entire place fell silent again. The holiday cheer had been zapped by the pile of bleeding trash lying on his back on the floor. Rich didn’t look at him again.
After a short time, the humiliated man pushed himself up from the floor and staggered out of the bar, his tale between his legs. Some of the men and women booed him until the door closed.
Winnie took the injured woman into the ladies room, and somebody put more money in the juke box. The holiday music started again, but there was no singing, or cheering. Everyone was looking at Rich. A few of the women tipped their glasses toward him. He tipped his glass and nodded at them, though his hard round face was expressionless.
Fifteen minutes had passed since the incident. The battered woman was sitting at the bar surrounded by some of the other women. They were trying to cheer her up, while she waited for a cab. She lived in the village of Little Falls, several miles from Morgan’s Landing.
Rich was sitting on a barstool with his back to the door. Most of the other men were quietly talking to one another in small groups. Nobody was playing pool or shuffleboard.
In a flash, the front door opened with a bang against the wall. Wind and snow blew in like a freezing whiteout.
Winnie yelled, “Rich, behind you!”
When Rich Hooper turned around, the asshole man stuck a four-inch pocket knife into the side of Rich’s stomach. It happened so fast that there was no way of stopping it. The entire bar gasped. The women screamed. With his dumb rodent expression, the drunk man just stood there, looking at Rich, who was unfazed by the blade stuck into his gut. Rich looked down at the knife, and without a whimper or a grimace, pulled the blade out of his body, slammed it on top of the bar and shouted, “Don’t touch that.” The drunk man’s face was dead-white. He froze in place, standing in front of Rich. Rich’s dark eyes were ablaze. With a powerful left hand, Rich Hooper grabbed the man’s throat, and with his right fist, Rich hammered the woman-beater’s mug several times, so fast and hard that you couldn’t see his hand move more than once. When Rich let go of the asshole, he dropped dead weight, hitting the floor with a dull thud. His face looked broken in several places, and a few of his teeth were lying on the floor next to him, glistening from the ceiling lights.
“Somebody call an ambulance,” Rich Hooper yelled, while pointing to the lifeless man on the floor. “That pile of shit needs medical help.”
The next day when Rich’s younger brother Dan was told about the stabbing, he rushed to the hospital, concerned about his older brother. When Dan walked into Rich’s room, he expected to find his brother in rough shape and heavily drugged. Instead, Rich Hooper was sitting up, watching a television gameshow and laughing at a joke that the game host had just made.
“Rich,” Dan said sympathetically. “That’s gotta hurt, big brother. How ya feeling?”
“Oh, this little scratch,” Rich said. He pulled up his hospital gown to show the small bandages. “This is nothing, just a few stitches. It only hurts when I laugh. But you should see the other guy.” He started to laugh, while holding his injured side. Dan nodded with a smile, knowing what a tough son-of-a-bitch his older brother was.
Rich Hooper spent two days in the hospital, then walked out on his own. The woman beater spent several days in ICU and four weeks lying on his back in a ward. His face was disfigured and his brain was traumatized. When he was discharged from the hospital, he had to be wheelchaired to the village courthouse, where he pleaded guilty to first degree attempted murder. He was also found guilty of assault and battery towards the woman. Serving seven years in prison, the man was finally released, but he was never seen again in the village of Morgan’s Landing.
By D.A. Helmer
From: United States
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