Spencerville

Courthouse Square. Now, everyone, including the farmers, bought most of their food in supermarkets, prepackaged.
    The commercial strip outside of town probably got the majority of Friday night shoppers, Keith thought, but there were a few shops open downtown, and the bank was open late. Also open, with cars parked nearby, were Miller’s Restaurant and the two taverns—John’s Place and the Posthouse.
    Keith pulled into a space near John’s Place and got out of the Blazer. It was a warm Indian summer evening, and there were a few people on the sidewalk. He walked into the tavern.
    If you want to know a town, Keith had learned, go to the best and the worst bar, preferably on a Friday or Saturday night. John’s was obviously the latter.
    The tavern was dark, noisy, smoky, smelled of stale beer, and was inhabited mostly by men dressed in jeans and T-shirts. The T-shirts, Keith noticed, advertised brand-name beers, John Deere tractors, and locally sponsored sports teams. A few T-shirts had interesting sayings such as, “Well-diggers do it deeper.”
    There were a few video games, a pinball machine, and in the center of the tavern was a billiards table. A jukebox played sad country-western songs. The bar had a few vacant stools, and Keith took one.
    The bartender eyed him for a moment, making a professional evaluation that the newcomer posed no potential threat to the peace of John’s Place, and asked Keith, “What can I get you?”
    “Bud.”
    The bartender put a bottle in front of Keith and opened it. “Two bucks.”
    Keith put a ten on the bar. He got his change, but no glass, and drank from the bottle.
    He looked around. There were a few young women, all of them escorted by men, but mostly this was a male domain. The TV above the bar broadcast the Yankees vs. Blue Jays in a tight pennant race, and the sportscaster competed with some country singer sobbing about his wife’s infidelities.
    The men ranged in age from early twenties to late fifties, mostly good-old-boys as likely to buy you a beer as split your head with a barstool, and meaning nothing personal by either. The women were dressed like the men—jeans, running shoes, and T-shirts—and they smoked and drank beer from bottles like the men. All in all, it was a happy and peaceful enough crowd at this hour, though Keith knew from experience it could get a little rough later.
    He swiveled his stool and watched the billiards game awhile. He’d had little opportunity to hang out in any of the few taverns in town because he’d been drafted and was being shot at about the time he could legally vote or drink. Now you could be shot at and vote, but still had to wait until you were twenty-one before you could order a beer. In any case, he’d hit John’s Place and the Posthouse once in a while when he was home on leave, and he recalled that a good number of the men at the bars were recent veterans with some stories to tell, and some, like him, were in uniform and never had to buy a drink. Now, he suspected, most of the men in John’s Place hadn’t been far from home, and there seemed to him a sort of restless boredom among them, and he thought they had the look of men who had never experienced any significant rite of passage into manhood.
    He didn’t recognize any of the men his own age, but one of them at the end of the bar kept looking at him, and Keith watched the guy out of the corner of his eye.
    The man got off his stool and ambled down the bar, stopping directly in front of Keith. “I know you.”
    Keith looked at the man. He was tall, scrawny, had blond hair down to his shoulders, bad teeth, sallow skin, and sunken eyes. The long hair, the jeans and T-shirt, and the man’s mannerisms and voice suggested a man in his twenties, but the face was much older.
    He said in a loud, slurred voice, “I know who you are.”
    “Who am I?”
    “Keith Landry.”
    A few of the men around them glanced their way, but otherwise seemed disinterested.
    Keith looked at the man again, and realized that he did know him. He said, “Right, you’re…”
    “Come on, Keith. You know me.”
    Keith searched his memory, and a profusion of high school faces raced through his mind. Finally, he said, “Billy Marlon.”
    “Yeah! Hell, man, we was buddies.” Marlon slapped Keith on the shoulder, then pumped his hand. “How the hell are ya?”
    Keith thought perhaps he should have gone to the Posthouse instead. “Fine. How are you, Billy?”
    “Just great! All