Chapter 23. A New Regular at the Outlaw Saloon
The Black Hat Man’s Odiferous Honky Tonk and Outlaw Saloon straddled the city limits of Lone Tree. It was an old pole barn with warped siding and flaking paint that stood as an edifice decrying every bit of decency that the town could muster. It smelled of stale beer and staler cigarette smoke and the staler yet bodily byproducts of its inhabitants’ diet: bar pretzels, antelope jerky, and pickled eggs.
Gasbag, when he found the place, felt immediately at home.It may interest to the reader to note that it was a younger of the trolls who found the Black Hat Man’s establishment. Where the older and supposedly wiser trolls were sniffing out doggies and dumpsters and department stores, Gasbag had a more lofty sensibility. His sense of aesthetics was more subtle and more tasteful than any mere lapdog or conglomeration of human refuse could satisfy.
It was the music that first intrigued him. At first, he didn’t even know where the sounds were coming from: the building had no lit sign, and the windows were darkened with years of smoke accumulation, but what Gasbag couldn’t see he could hear. The twanging of a guitar, the melancholy voice of life gone wrong, the vague hopes encapsulated in the open road, an open bottle, the slightly open eyes of a nearly used up woman: these sounds resonated with Gasbag. They plucked at the strings of his heart. With tears stinging the corners of his eyes, Gasbag made his way toward the source of those sad sounds, those desperate melodies.
The saloon had a front door, of course, but it was rarely unlocked, even during peak business hours. The regulars all parked their pickup trucks, those who could still drive, in the back, and had long ago developed the habit of entering through the back door. Anyone who showed up at the front door was no regular, and was thus treated with suspicion. The cops, on their rare forays into the saloon, always used the front door, and the rare tourists of course used the front door, both in the entering and in the rapid departure. Still, every now and again the Black Hat Man would open the front door, once the sun went down. He propped it open with a five gallon bucket full of bottle caps to let the building breathe a little.
Tonight, that open door allowed the sounds of the jukebox and the buzz and rumble of human conversation out into the night. For Gasbag, these sounds were the sounds of home. As he approached the decrepit building, the establishment’s unique aroma added to the glorious sensory experience. As he reached the front stoop, Gasbag could see dimly through the haze of smoke and the dim light to recognize, right in front of him, the array of people propped up against the bar: short beings, skinny, with strange costumes of cotton and leather and denim. Of course Gasbag knew nothing of the people’s language or custom, he knew nothing about the use of clothing, he knew nothing about cigarettes or cowboy hats or electric guitars, but he certainly knew about beer, and perhaps that was enough to bridge the cultural divide. As he looked upon these people, he suddenly knew that he had been lonely all his life. These people, land trolls or not, were his people.
The inhabitants of the saloon, of course, were nowhere near as open and accepting as Gasbag. To have anyone show up at the front door was usually bad news, and this monstrous creature—a bit taller and a bit wider than the doorway itself, with somewhat greenish leathery skin and a frightening lack of hair and a mouth wide enough to ingest the bar’s smaller inhabitants without trouble—looked like bad news indeed.
To be fair, though, the inhabitants of the Black Hat Man’s Odiferous Honky-Tonk and Outlaw Saloon were less afraid than the typical resident of Lone Tree might have been. They didn’t call the cops (of course), nor the National Guard. They didn’t saunter over to the trolls with their chests puffed out and their thumbs in their hip pockets like old-time cowboys ready to draw. They didn’t say, “You ain’t from around here, are ya boy?” as others from town might have been inspired to do. And, though the folks at the bar tended to be amongst the better armed in town, they didn’t leap to their feet to retrieve the shotguns from the gun racks in the back windows of their pickups. But Gasbag showing up at the door certainly got their attention. Over the space of perhaps 20 seconds, everyone in the room came to be aware of his hulking presence. When he tentatively ducked his head and edged sideways through the door, there was a single point in time when everything stopped, as if a conductor in the room had dropped his baton. The rumble of conversation ceased. Someone pulled the plug on the jukebox. Only one reedy voice broke the silence with an unsubtle and inebriated whisper. “Now just what on gawd’s green earth is that?”
The Black Hat Man himself, having just poured yet another pitcher of beer for a patron at the end of the bar, stood, pitcher in hand, and eyed Gasbag. The troll in question now stood inside the door, and looked shyly around the dark, cavernous spaces of the bar.
Somewhere in the back of Gasbag’s head, he noted the loss of the soulful music that had originally drawn him to the place. But his forebrain was too overwhelmed by sense data, or perhaps it was simply social anxiety disorder, to wonder about that. The smell of the place was nearly overwhelming in its hominess. The land trolls here, though they were pitifully small, had a robust scent about them, of cigarettes and perspiration and digestive systems bested by too much beer and pickled eggs. Gasbag felt a great pain of recognition welling up within him. He wanted to fall to his knees in gratitude.
Instead, he took a few more tentative steps forward. Everyone in the bar had now turned on their stools, and looked at him with their rheumy eyes. Behind those eyes was some amount of fear, of course, but also a certain amount of knowing indifference. Those eyes communicated the fact that they had seen too much of the world already, and that they wouldn’t be surprised by whatever they saw next. Gasbag, full of grief and empathy and hope and gratitude, opened his mouth to thank them for being there, for having him into their nice dank cave, for their insistence that though it wasn’t easy being a land troll, trollish values still thrived.
Of course, Gasbag’s throat was too tight with longing to be able to get out all these words. He, like all trolls, was more of a strong silent type, and probably wouldn’t have been able to line up the words in a straight line anyhow. Brumvack was the troll with the true gift of speech. Then there was the fact that these people wouldn’t have been able to understand the troll language in any case. The barrage of snorting and wheezing sounds that accompanied troll speech might have been the straw the broke the action on their shotguns. So, Gasbag was probably fortunate that when he opened his mouth none of the few words he could muster came forth. Instead, a mass of botulism-ridden effluvium erupted from the depths of his belly in a greenish belch. It wasn’t a belch that would have won any challenges, but it wasn’t too bad, either.
It was the Black Hat Man himself who broke the spell of silence under which the population of the bar comported themselves. The Black Hat Man would serve the occasional stranger who might show up in the bar, but no one else would interact with that person unless the Black Hat Man gave his tacit approval. He showed his approval by buying the stranger a drink. Once that drink was bought, the stranger was a stranger no more. He was a part of the bunch, a regular at the Outlaw Saloon. A regular, even if only an honorary one. A regular, even if he hadn’t done the hard work of showing up every day to earn the title. When Gasbag let loose with the greenish belch, the Black Hat Man knew with his uncanny sense that this…this man, however deformed the ravages of the world might have left him, was one of theirs. Before the last wisp of gut-air had left Gasbag’s mouth, the Black Hat Man replied: “Nice one.” With a slightly shaking hand, he proffered across the bar the pitcher that he had already poured for someone else.
The patrons on either side gave Gasbag some room as he stepped forward and delicately grasped the pitcher. Though they showed some amount of trepidation to be so close to him, the tension had already begun to seep out of the room like a released sigh. Gratefully, Gasbag tipped the pitcher into his mouth and downed it. Downed it, as if it were no more than a pint. Which, given the relativities of scale, it might as well have been. This action punctured whatever pockets of tension that might have remained. The regulars at the Black Hat Man’s Odiferous Honky Tonk and Outlaw Saloon appreciated someone who appreciated beer.
The beer was a surprise to Gasbag. Trollish beer is rich and dark and heavy with floating gobs of fermented plant material and whatnot. This beer had none of that. Instead, it was bright and tangy and (and here Gasbag sloshed a bit on his tongue, searching for just the right descriptor) nearly tasteless. But it was refreshing nonetheless, and he was grateful for it. He belched again, this time more from the beer than the botulism, and once again the Black Hat Man said, “Nice one.” And this time, all the patrons lined up along the bar lifted their own glasses, their own pitchers, and repeated the mantra: “Nice One!”
Gasbag set his pitcher back down on the bar, and the Black Hat Man moved to refill it. Before he had even started the tap, though, an older man with a white wisp of a beard and a couple of missing teeth held up his half-empty pitcher to Gasbag, urging him to drink. Before he had downed that, a young woman, following the old man’s example, offered hers as well. Gasbag drank them both with a newfound thirst and a great deal of gratitude.
Sensing that Gasbag was new to the country, and surely would have only foreign currency, the patrons of the bar bought all the beer he could drink. Someone plugged in the juke box again, and filled it with enough quarters to last the night. When it was obvious that Gasbag was hungry as well as thirsty, The Black Hat Man filled and refilled bowls of bar pretzels, and emptied the gallon jar of its pickled eggs. He even broke out the fifty pound bag of peanuts that he ordinarily saved for Thanksgiving, which the patrons shared amongst themselves as if it truly were that holiday. Gasbag ate the lion’s share of the peanuts, shells and all.
As the night progressed, it came to take on a dreamlike quality. Gasbag reflected that it had been an awfully hard day in the life of a troll. He had been rudely awakened from the Big Sleep, he had been nearly drowned by Schmoozeglutton, he had barely survived the barbarism of his fellow trolls with their graphic custom of the challenge. Gasbag was perfectly comfortable letting out the occasional belch, and tonight had only cemented the notion that on occasion a bit of gas can ease social relations. But there was a point at which belching became uncivilized. Obscene, even. Maybe it was the point at which one’s food started to fly out of one’s mouth and into the far corners of the room. Maybe it was the point at which even strong-stomached trolls began to pass out. Wherever one drew that line, though, that line had been crossed— crossed with a vengeance—on this day. A day of infamy, it was, when the indecencies of former generations of trolls were allowed a comeback amongst a generation that on a better day would have considered themselves to be above such things.
And, of course, there was that big blue bug that Gasbag had faced down. If that didn’t deserve a beer, what did? He had been pretty sure that the bug was dead, or he wouldn’t have touched it. But being pretty sure wasn’t enough to keep his heart steady in his chest as he had reached out his arm, not knowing if he would pull back an arm or a stump. He shuddered at the memory. He downed another pitcher of beer, grateful to be alive and glad to have found these new friends.
The patrons of the bar were by now competing with each other to impress their guest. One older guy, dignified in a leather vest and a cowboy hat, tried to show Gasbag how to play darts, but his hands were too big to really control the delicate projectiles. A stringy woman, a tough old broad with skinny hips and leathery skin, asked Gasbag to dance, and even got him to move a bit to that slow, sad music that he found so evocative of his finest sense of being. Gasbag was sure that the twanging guitar on the jukebox uttered meaningful syllables, if he could but understand them. The guitar had a language.
He was becoming less certain, however, of the language capabilities of the land trolls. He could certainly see them opening their mouths, and hear the odd noises they uttered, but he wasn’t so sure that the noises accreted toward anything like meaning. If it was a language, surely the folks wouldn’t need to gesticulate so wildly as they spoke. Certainly, though, these creatures had their own quaint culture and traditions. Even if they didn’t hold any conscious intelligence, he felt friendly toward them. He thought of telling them so, but, given their simple-minded ways, that seemed a little silly. And then, of course, there was the fact that his tongue was starting to feel a little disconnected from the back of his throat, a known side-effect of good trollish beer and evidently one that came too with this light tangy yellow version. So Gasbag just smiled and raised his pitcher and nodded his head slightly. This, they understood perfectly.
For the first time in years, a sense of liveliness and goodwill infused this most battered of establishments. In the space of an hour or two, a sort of creative energy overcame the place, an energy that insisted upon the breaking out of the beer steins from their glass case behind the bar, that insisted that the juke box be turned up past the Black Hat Man’s strict limit, even that, after a point, the juke box be turned off for a soulful and evocative version of “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”
They were down to 28 bottles when an eerie call echoed across the land. A foodwhoop. Gasbag would recognize it anywhere. He had been raised to follow the sound of a foodwhoop since he was small. No troll refused the call of a foodwhoop. Still, he felt conflicted. It didn’t seem fair that it should come just when he was beginning to settle in. But tradition—or maybe it was just habit—was strong amongst trolls, and before the foodwhoop had echoed its last, the newest regular of The Black Hat Man’s Odiferous Honky Tonk and Outlaw Saloon stood up to leave.
The patrons watched him go. They had lived long lives of gain and loss, heavy on the loss. They accepted with a depressed and resigned version of equanimity the fact that he had to leave. But they knew, somehow, that after tonight nothing would be exactly the same. After tonight, the Outlaw Saloon would lose a little of its shine. After tonight, they had little to look forward to for the too-long remainder of their lives.