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Itâs twenty minutes, maybe a half hour, from my office to Mandelbaumâs. My office is in the Languages Buildingâexcuse me, the Randall J. Simonson Foundation Languages Building. You lose points if you forget to name the benefactor. The university knows which side its bread is buttered on. Oh, you bet it does. When thereâs butter. Hell, when thereâs bread.
By the time I got to the bar, I needed a beer a lot more than I had when I set out. Somebody a couple of blocks from the campus side of Mandelbaumâs had walked in front of a car. Not just any car, either. A Lincoln Navigator. Dead, of course. Never knew what hit him, I hope.
Cops and paramedics couldnât have pulled up more than half a minute before I walked by. Theyâd thrown a sheet over him, but it was still pretty bad. Worse than you see on the news, âcause the news cleans up the gore or cuts away. You didnât only see it there. You could smell it, all thick and rusty. Made my stomach turn over.
A couple of little animals or birds were scurrying around the edge of the pool. I couldnât tell what they were up toâmaybe scouting for chunks of meat in the soup. Believe me, I didnât check it out too close.
The woman whoâd been driving the Navigator was talking to a cop. She was sleek and blonde and middle-aged: plainly part of the one percent, not the ninety-nine. Things like this werenât supposed to happen to people like her. But one had. She still sounded stunned, not horrified. âI couldnât do a thing, Officer,â she was saying. âNot a thing. He didnât even look. He just walked out in front of meâand bam! â Bam! was right.
When I walked into Mandelbuamâs, Victor drew me a Sam Adams and slid it across the bar. Then he eyed me and said, âYou okay, Stan? Youâre kinda green around the gills.â
So I told him why I was green around the gills.
âOh, Jesus!â He pointed to the beer. âOn the house, man. That same thing happened to me last month. Still creeps me outâIâve woke up from nightmares in a cold sweat, like, two or three times. Mine was a gal.â
âMakes it even worse somehow,â I said.
âIt totally does.â Victor nodded. Then he did it again, in a different wayâtoward the pint of beer. âSo get yourself outside of that right away. Itâll take the edge off. Then have another one, slower, and you oughta be good to go.â
âSounds like the right prescription, Doc,â I said, and set to work on the first part of it.
There were only a couple of other people at the bar, but it was early yet. Things would perk up. They always did. Mandelbaumâs is a good place. Itâs half town, half gown, you might say. Not a meat market bar, though there are a gay one and a straight one within a few blocks. Mandelbaumâs is more like a permanent floating cocktail party. You run into all kinds of people there, some fascinating, some ⦠well, not so much.
But you do hear some out-of-the-ordinary answers when you get around to asking, âSo what do you do, then?â
I started talking with somebody who came in a little while after I did. By then, I was halfway down the second Sam Adams. I definitely had a little buzz. I wasnât smashed or anywhere closeâIâm a big guy (six-three, two-twentyâoh, all right, two-forty, but I am gonna start working out again RSN). Still, the alcohol put a transparent shield between me and that poor damn fool dead on the asphalt. Smashed on the asphalt. Puddled on the asphalt. I might need one more to firm up the transparent shield a bit.
âSo what do you do?â he asked.
âGermanic languages at the U,â I said. âSpecialize in Gothic.â
âIn what?â he said.
Which was the same thing everybody said, including my mother. Well, except for a few who said Never heard of it . But the ones who
Learning to Kill: Stories