Chapter 1: The Welcome
“He talks about you in his sleep
And there’s nothing I can do to keep from crying
When he calls your name, Jolene”
“Si porque te quiero, quieres, Llorona,
quieres que te quiera más.
Si ya te he dado mi vida, Llorona
¿Qué más quieres?
¿Quieres más?”
“(Because I love you, you want, Llorona,
You want me to love you more
If I have already given my life to you, Llorona,
What more do you want?
You want more?)”
“Keep up, your disease spread quick
But how did you learn to be sick?
So cunning”
CHAPTER 1: The Welcome
Somewhere, closer than you might think, there is a place.
It's the type of place you avoid — unless you truly belong there. If you do, your heart will call you back forever. Your name will be spoken aloud there on the day of your birth. A drink will be poured there in honor of your death.
You will visit this place in your dreams.
As a child, you were either told to stay away from places like this, or you practically grew up in one. If you were of the unfortunate former variety, your parents may have preached to you of the interminable vice and perversion occurring behind those darkened windows, or just sped up slightly when passing through the dingy neighborhood this place occupies in your town.
But if your childhood was of the latter sort, especially if you grew up in a "rural community" — where such places usually serve the function of restaurant, coffee shop, watering hole, meeting room, social club, dance hall, gas station and/or feed store — you probably spent your younger years stuffing your face with popcorn, drinking Shirley Temples, watching westerns and football on the corner television, and losing endless quarters to the elderly pinball machine while the grown-ups drank and had conversations that grew increasingly louder and less comprehensible over the course of the night.
This place exists in every city and town, every vast metropolis and tiny village. If you live in a real community, this place is probably there, even if it's only on Friday nights in someone's garage.
This place is a bar.
More correctly, The Bar.
Many drinking establishments and nightclubs may be found in a municipality, but only one within a certain radius can be The Bar. This is the hallowed forge wherein the iron of a community is tempered. It is the central axis upon which your little world spins — even if you've never stepped foot in the place. The people who make sure your little world keeps on spinning do step foot in there, probably often.
Three such people were there on a Tuesday evening in early spring, occupying the corner table and arguing between themselves.
"You promised them you would stop," growled the figure seated facing the door. The figure wore a big black jacket with a deep hood pulled over its head, casting its face in shadow. The voice emerging from the hood was low, resonant, and vaguely female. "You said you were done for a long while."
"I promised 'em I would stop around here," said the second figure, about whom the word "figure" had a decidedly different implication. This was a woman with a figure, and a face to match.
"This one," she added, with a smile like a mousetrap full of free cheddar, "is from out of town."
There was a duet of disapproving noises from the table.
"Out of town?" exclaimed the third companion. He was a big, barrel-shaped man with gentle eyes, round cheeks, and a long, dark blond beard shading to gray. He gestured plaintively. "Martie, no. Not an out-of-towner."
"I met him," said the woman called Martie, "on the Internet."
The man groaned softly, covering his face with both hands. The hooded figure slammed down its beer.
"How in hell did you figure out how to use the Internet to pick up men?" the hood screeched. "You make me look up recipes for you, for fuck's sake. You're tellin' me you can't go online to find out how long to bake a potato, but you can get strange dick delivered to the bar?"
This particular incarnation of The Bar was called The Covered Wagon — so named for its original location, a wooden wagon from which its 19th-century proprietors sold beer, whiskey, beans, and tits to the enormous gang of miscreants constructing the first railroad bridge over the Platte River. The bridge took a long time to build; the Platte was shallow but very wide, and the presence of cheap whiskey didn't help matters. By the time the rail construction crew completed work and moved on, the settlement of Big River, Nebraska, had firmly established itself along its marshy curve of the Platte, between the Sandhills to the north and canyon country to the south.
In time, Big River grew to a bustling metropolis of 25,000 souls, with The Wagon still at its center. In homage to its humble pioneer origins, a great steel-and-wood wagon wheel hung from the ceiling of The Wagon. It was wired with lights as a sort of chandelier.
"He's not coming from that far away," Martie said calmly. "He's from Fetterman."
This revelation produced another chorus of aggrieved moans not just from the table, but from the bartender, at least two patrons seated at the bar, a bedraggled quartet of men playing darts near the back door, and the cook leaning halfway out of the kitchen. All were clearly listening now.
"Martie, I love you, but you'd better not be invitin' Fetterman people to my bar," called the bartender.
Located two counties over, population nearly 45,000 when the local college was in session, Fetterman was the closest "big town" within driving distance of Big River. To Fetterman people, Big River was a sinister backwater full of toothless white trash and shifty Mexicans and railroaders, all of whom probably manufactured methamphetamine. To residents of Big River, Fetterman was a city of jumped-up liberal college snobs who shopped at the type of grocery store where they paid $5 apiece for bananas.
"Not people," declared Martie, turning towards the bar. "Just this one man. And he says he's not actually even from Fetterman, originally. He's from down south. Louisiana. Just be nice to him."
"He's ain't from fucking Louisiana," snarled the hooded apparition from the corner. "We know people in Louisiana. Plenty of 'em. He's not from Louisiana, he's from Fetterman."
Christian A. Tyler was, in fact, originally from Louisiana. He announced this fact to anyone and everyone he met, usually within five minutes. He spent his first 10 years of life in Baton Rouge, and as far as Christian A. Tyler was concerned this made him a Louisiana man, born and bred — despite the inconvenient additional fact that he had spent his last 35 years mostly in the town of Fetterman, Nebraska.
His father, a doctor, moved the family to Fetterman in the middle of little Christian A. Tyler's fourth-grade year. It was a rough transition. The food in Nebraska was bland and the winter weather was terrible. Too many of his new classmates were a foot taller than he was, and almost all were white. (Most kids at his old school in Baton Rouge had been black; he himself was the common bayou mix of Cajun, Scots-Irish, Spanish, and English, solidly white in Louisiana but suspiciously "multicultural" in this whitebread hellhole.) The teachers at his new school called him "Christian T," or just "Chris," both of which he hated. Like many children of the South, he had been known by a nickname since infancy. That nickname, in Christian A. Tyler's case, was "Cat."
This had been a decent name back in Baton Rouge, far more respectable than what a lot of Southern males got saddled with — Cat had known any number of Chubbs, Peanuts, Gators, and Pookies during his decade in Louisiana, to say nothing of the more creative sobriquets. "Cat" was sharp and short, like Cat himself, and right there in his initials. It was easy to spell, and easy to remember. Even the beloved mascot of Louisiana State University, the Tiger, was basically just a big cat.
But getting these Yankee assholes to use the name he had been called since birth turned out to be a labor. His teachers just nodded and smiled, then called him "Christian T" again at the next opportunity. The other kids would relentlessly meow at him, or suggest that "Cat" was supposed to be a girl's name.
He got into fights a lot.
Later on, he pointed to the struggle over his name — among other things — as evidence that he had fallen on hard times early and honestly. His life hadn’t ever been what he’d hoped for. He hadn't wanted to be 45 years old and still stuck in Fetterman, living in the same little house his parents had helped him pay a deposit on, with three teenaged kids who barely talked to him and a string of ex-girlfriends who hated his guts.
In a court of law, there exists a legal maneuver called the "Alford Plea," in which a person maintains their innocence but acknowledges that enough proof exists to convict them of a crime — a sort of "guilty, but not really" plea. Cat had spent his entire adult life engaged in a perpetual Alford Plea of the Soul. He acknowledged that his life was shit, and getting shittier by the day; he acknowledged that all available evidence showed he, Cat, was the party most responsible for his current condition. But he still maintained that he was somehow the innocent victim in all this. That his family, friends, romantic partners, children, the state of Nebraska, and above all the town of Fetterman had conspired together to drag him down.
Cat resembled his fellow Fetterman residents far more closely than he wanted to believe. For starters, he looked scornfully on Big River, which he considered worse even than Fetterman. "River Rats" were all small-minded, cranked-out trash; his buddies who had moved to Fetterman from Big River swore that it was so.
But Cat had burned too many bridges in his own town over the last three decades, and gotten himself a troublesome reputation. So here he was on Interstate 80, near the end of the hour's drive west to Big River, on his way to meet a girl.
You probably aren't supposed to call them “girls” at our age, thought Cat. She had looked his age, maybe a couple years younger, but it was hard to tell from pictures and hers especially. Most women on the apps posted a variety of brightly-lit selfies taken on beaches or in bathrooms. Cat's prospective date sent only one image: A grainy photo of a pretty-looking woman standing under a willow tree, silhouetted by the sunset.
He'd been a little put off by this — too many profiles on dating apps were bots or scammers, and a lack of photos was a bad sign. But when they started chatting, Cat knew right away that this was a real woman, who he really wanted to meet.
Her name was Martha.
"I've always liked the name Martha," he found himself typing on the night they set a first date. This was only slightly a lie; “Martha” was warm and homey, and reminded him of his grandmother's church friends. Not exactly a sex-kitten name, but they were behind the times over in Big River. "I can't wait to see you."
He was a little afraid he might be walking into a catfish situation, but it was a risk he was willing to take. Cat was lonely in Fetterman, lonely and bored. His most recent girlfriend had caught him soliciting nude photos from other women on the Internet. At least one of those "other women" turned out to be practically half Cat's age, a friend of his now-ex's 21-year-old daughter. A lot of people around town had heard about that one.
That was nearly a year ago. It had been a long dry spell for Cat.
Squinting into the sunset, he steered northwest onto the first exit for Big River.
Things started going sideways as soon as he arrived at the bar.
Being in Big River always made Cat skittish. He was certain its mongoloid residents were all staring at him, plotting some kind of anti-outsider hate crime. Walking cautiously through the dark parking lot of The Covered Wagon Bar & Grille (they probably think the extra "E" makes it sound fancy, he thought), he spotted a figure near the front door, leaning against the wall in a distinct "about to light up a cigarette" posture.
"Hey, can I bum one of those?" asked Cat, relieved. He had quit years ago, but a smoke was just what he needed to settle his nerves.
The dark figure wordlessly pulled out two Marlboros and handed one to Cat. From a pocket somewhere inside its black hooded jacket, it produced a lighter. Cat accepted both gratefully.
"Thanks, man," he said, taking the first appreciative drag. "Drove all the way from Fetterman with the first-date jitters." He handed back the lighter.
"Welcome to Big River," said the figure from the recesses of its hood. "I'm Martha."
The lighter flicked to life. It illuminated a face masked from cheek to collarbone in a black bandana, and eyes covered by mirrored sunglasses. The flame's reflection in the glasses — the big, cheap, round kind you saw in novelty shops — glowed electric purple-green.
They looked at each other for a long moment.
"Just a joke, bud," the figure finally said, exhaling smoke through the mask. "Martie's inside."
The hot knife of panic rising in Cat's gut turned to relief, then a flicker of anger.
"Real funny," he said, stubbing the borrowed cigarette out on the wall. "You seem like quite a character. You must be a comedian or something."
The thing in the hood shrugged noncommittally.
"You sure got jokes. I bet they love 'em around here," Cat added, grasping for the door handle. "Real Mark Twain shit. I bet you could write real funny stories if you wanted to."
The figure held its gaze on him.
"Maybe I'll write one about you," it replied.
"You do that," said Cat, and walked into the bar.
Inside the Covered Wagon, things improved somewhat.
Feeling irritated by the strange conversation and jittery from the cigarette, Cat walked directly up to the bar. He needed a shot of whiskey, maybe two.
The bar itself was an old-fashioned cedarwood affair spanning most of the north wall. The shelves were lined with a variety of dusty bottles, Cornhusker football paraphernalia, and a hand-painted sign that read "I'M ON THE WAGON" next to a cartoon of drunken cowboys crowded into a prairie schooner. The bartender was chatting with a stout, bearded guy wearing khaki cargo pants and a green shirt advertising some kind of plumbing business. Cat drew close, respectfully waited a few moments, then pulled out his wallet.
A big paw suddenly held itself over Cat's own, blocking his progress.
"Two shots of whiskey, Bruce," boomed the bearded man in a round, jolly voice. "One for me, and one for my friend here. Cat, right?"
Cat smiled and nodded. Normally he would have lost his temper at something like this, but the man seemed genuinely warm and friendly, and free liquor was free liquor.
“C-A-T, that’s me,” Cat said, shaking the man’s hand. “Christian A. Tyler, at your service.”
She probably brought a couple buddies to keep an eye on things, he thought. I get it. There's weirdos everywhere on the Internet.
When his new friend winked at him, leaned over and whispered, "I'm Martha," Cat actually laughed. They clinked glasses, and Cat swallowed his generous pour of Jim Beam.
"Good to meet you, Martha," he drawled. "You're as pretty as your pictures. I think I met one of your friends outside."
The big man clapped him on the back. "So Reina beat me to it," he chuckled. "She likes to give 'em a scare. Don't worry, Martie really is around here somewhere. She'll find you. You can call me Ozzie."
Cat smiled again.
"Two more shots, if you don't mind," he said, handing a $20 to the white-haired bartender. Leaning toward Ozzie, he asked, "What kind of music do you listen to?"
"Both kinds," his companion deadpanned. "Country and western."
"Fair enough," Cat replied. "I've got something I bet you'll enjoy." He turned and moseyed toward the big jukebox sitting in the opposite corner near the dartboard.
It was, like most modern jukeboxes, basically just a big touch-screen computer that for $5 would play practically any song known to man. Cat was feeling good. The whiskey was making its way into his blood, and he sensed an opportunity to bring some culture to the people of Big River.
Cat fed the juke a $10 bill and began typing in names, becoming aware as he did so of the conversation behind him. It was, unsurprisingly, about Husker football.
"That running back probably can't remember which direction to put his jock strap on," declared one voice. “Real fucking geniuses they're recruiting over there these days. Hey, you. Hey, man, don't do that. DO NOT PLAY THAT —"
Cat finished queuing up his songs, and turned.
Four men, ranging in size from large to 4XL, sat at the high table nearest the dartboard. All were looking directly at Cat.
The opening notes of “Last Of My Kind" by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit began to roll smoothly from the jukebox speakers.
“Maybe she won't notice this time," muttered one of the men. He was the approximate shape and size of a gorilla, wearing a chinstrap beard, flat-brimmed hat and diamond stud earrings. "I think she's still out smoking. Maybe —"
"DO MY FUCKING EARS DECEIVE ME?" roared a voice.
Their heads turned, as one, toward the door.
It was the hooded apparition from outside. She — this thing is a "she?" thought Cat — sauntered over to the bar and grabbed a waiting beer.
"I'm sorry," she said, voice loud and accusatory. "Perhaps I am confused. Maybe it's really 9 a.m., and this is a Starbucks. That would certainly explain why this dickless, NPR-lib bullshit is currently pissing down my ears."
Three of the men at the high table groaned loudly, throwing up their hands and glaring furiously at Cat. The fourth — an enormous, orange-haired creature wearing a baby-blue hoodie and matching sweatpants — rose from his chair and drew himself up to his full, impressive height. He was one of the largest human beings Cat had ever seen.
"How about you shut your god-damn mouth and listen to some decent music for a change?" the giant bellowed, in a voice that started low and rose into a high, breathy falsetto, like a whistling tea kettle.
"Here we go," Cat heard someone mutter.
"JASON ISBELL SINGS PRODUCT JINGLES FOR THE SLOW DEATH OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT," hollered the dark figure at the bar. "Every song sounds like it's on SSRIs. A fitting threnody for a cursed age."
"THAT MAN WROTE 'SOUTHEASTERN,'" the giant screamed, edges of his mouth turned dramatically downwards like an angry puppet. One big, freckled hand gesticulated wildly; the other tucked an unlit cigarette into its plunging lip. “Isbell is a modern-day legend, for Christ's sake. A poet. He's won every award the Americana Music Association gives out."
"I just fuckin’ bet he has," the hood shot back. "Country music’s supposed to be about two things — being old, and being horny. Pop country might be bad, but at least it knows how to be horny. Americana is about never having been horny, ever, in your entire pants-pissing life."
The huge orange man frowned even more furiously and took a deep, slow breath.
“IT’S BLOODLESS, COWARDLY BULLSHIT,” the dark figure at the bar added, before the giant could muster a response. “THERE'S NO SEX IN IT.”
"What in hell do you know about sex, Reina?" shouted one of the men still seated at the high table, in an obvious attempt to change the subject. He wore a black Huskers shirt and torn jeans, bare arms tattooed with flames up to the elbows. "Do you even know what sex you are?"
"Why don't you ask your mom about that, Spacey?" Reina crowed, rounding on this new opponent. "Mrs. Spacey knows all about it. She's had a good long look down there, a few times, and she tells me she likes what she sees."
"KEEP MY MOM'S NAME OUT OF YOUR MOUTH," declared Spacey, rising to his feet.
Cat felt a gentle tap on he shoulder. He turned.
It was Martha.