Last Night at the Dairy Bar

LAST NIGHT AT THE DAIRY BAR Tod Goldberg Summer comes and Pelican Bob dies. Doctor Evans said it was pancreatic cancer. He probably had it for a year or more. You know Bob. He never complained about a damn thing. A proud man. Came to the Dairy Bar every day for lunch, never gave anyone trouble about anything. He’d get the ham and cheese melt, or sometimes he got the BLT on toasted sourdough. Usually had a chocolate shake, or—if no one was around who ou didn’t have to do this,” Pelican Bob’s wife Janet says. The funeral might call the health department—I’d make him an old-style egg Yparty retired to the Dairy Bar, so I closed the cash register and just cream with a real raw egg mixed in, because that’s how an egg cream started making food and dishing out ice cream and pouring sodas for is actually made. Somehow no one ever died from drinking them everyone and now it’s almost eight o’clock and people are starting to get that way before people determined raw eggs could kill you, not even scarce, things having gotten a little too happy after a time, which made Pelican Bob. Doctor Evans said Bob was probably in great pain for everyone realize that they should be sad. It’s hard to be sad when you’ve a while. got a belly full of cheeseburgers and hot fudge sundaes, but anyway, now Seems the whole town turns out for the funeral and in the back of it’s just Janet and me and Pelican Bob’s son Travis, who flew in from Cali- the crowd I see my brother Vince walking around the gravestones, fornia where he’s going to school, and then a few friends of Bob’s from stopping every now and then to lean down and touch the engrav- back when he was in the Navy and first got his nickname, and then Bob’s ings, which I’ve always thought was bad luck, but then I guess Vince sister Patty and her husband Kevin and some kids who belong to I don’t doesn’t care about luck anymore. I’m standing up since I was one of know whom. And Vince, who last I saw was sitting on a stool inside by the pallbearers, but I can’t make direct eye contact with Vince. Then the dry storage. I don’t know when he showed up. I just looked up from I remember that Vince probably doesn’t have any eyes, seeing as he’s the grill at one point and he was there. I gave him a nod to let him know been dead now for going on ten years. I try to get to him mentally, try I saw him, but I was just too damn busy. to tell him that it’s not his time, that this is about Pelican Bob today “It’s the least I could do,” I say. “Pelican Bob, you know, he was a good and that if he wants to make an appearance, well, do it at a more friend and a good customer.” appropriate time. But Vince he just doesn’t pay that any mind at all. “That’s not what I mean,” Janet says. We’re sitting out front around He keeps moving around in the periphery of things, stopping every one of the concrete picnic tables. Janet’s been sipping on a Vanilla Coke now and then, like I said before, and then one time I see him pick but I haven’t seen her eat anything all day. After the funeral, she changed up a rock and put it on top of a tombstone, which makes me think out of her black dress and put on a yellow sundress, something that befits it must be either Jerry Rosen or Daniel Cohen’s grave, since those the season more, since Janet was never the kind of person to walk around are the only two Jews I can think of who are dead. I don’t even think wearing black in nice weather. “You ever wonder what might have Vince really knew them. They both died in Vietnam, so maybe Vince happened if you’d gone off to Vietnam, too? How things might have was ten or eleven then, which means maybe he knew their names or turned out differently for you? For me? For us?” saw them at the Dairy Bar or maybe he remembers that I went to “Janet,” I say, but then I don’t say anything else right away, because school with them and he’s just being considerate. Vince comes and sits down next to me. He’s wearing the same blue- the normal school • fall 2010 | 43 flannel shirt he always wore, except that it’s “Your dad,” I say, “sure was proud of you.” clean. He smells like Barbasol, which is pleasant “Really?” Travis says. “And how would you to me, and though I can’t see his face (I never know that?” really can; that’s the thing of it) I feel like he’s Used to be sarcastic people got me angry, like happy today. Summer and the Dairy Bar is it was a personal thing, like they were trying full of the residual energy of people; that weird to pull something over on me, because you electricity that sits in the air, so that everything know how it is when you work with the public: and everyone feels wired to everything and everyone is looking to screw you, thinking that everyone else, like the past and present and the maybe you charge a nickel too much for this or future could all be happening at the same time. that or the other thing, making cracks that for Close your eyes and maybe by the time you three dollars, they ought to get ice cream and open them back up, it’s already yesterday. “That the rest of the cow, too, or how they could make was almost forty years ago, Janet.” cheeseburgers for their whole family for the cost She smoothes out a wrinkle in her dress and of just one of mine. But somehow it’s the kids thenormalschool.com then reaches out across the table and casually who made me feel worst of all, thinking they takes my hand in hers and just holds it. “Maybe could best me mentally, getting me to make I’ll move,” she says. “Or maybe take all of my change and then saying they gave me a twenty Visit us at at us Visit , , but it could Maybe happen. Lenny would. Kravitz Something for every idol—even Billy—if only they relatives up on their offers. Every night a different and I gave them change for a ten, like I don’t couch in a different state.” know how much money is in my register at all “Where would you move?” times. And sometimes it was just the sarcasm “California maybe,” she says. “Hawaii? I itself, like they thought I was so ignorant I don’t know. A place without winter. I’m not couldn’t pick out when the joke was on me. a young woman anymore, right? Haven’t I And a guy like me remembers that sort earned the chance to live where I want now? of thing. The The Normal School What do I have left here? I mean, honestly?” Maybe the next time they come in with a knew about it. Subscribe? Subscribe? Sure, it’s hard to imagine Bon Jovi kicking back of with a copy Or Fiona Apple. Or Stephen Colbert and Jon George Stewart. Dave Clooney? Chapelle? yet. it Beyoncé? reading aren’t Cindy exclusive the even Crawford? exclusive so is hands your LeBron in magazine James? But the The Normal School. “This is where you live,” I say. “Where you date or with their families or maybe ten years raised your son. Where you and Pelican Bob later, or twenty, I remember how they made me had a life. That’s worth something, isn’t it?” feel and so I cut up a clump of pubic hair real “You should know now that he hated that fine and mash it into their burger or pinch it name,” she says. along with the seasoning salt onto their fries or That can’t be true. Everyone in town called I just do something real nice for them instead, him Pelican Bob. His store downtown was remind them that I’m a bigger person. called Pelican Bob’s Fish and Gun. Damn near Strange thing about Travis, I don’t remember every birthday someone gave him a pelican of him ever coming to the Dairy Bar without his some kind. One time Grady Bauer even stuffed mom or dad. Not once, not never. a dead pelican he ran across when he was “I don’t have any kids,” I say, “so maybe vacationing in Florida. Brought it home in his I’m not that smart about fathers and sons, but suitcase and everything. A man goes by a name one time last year your dad came in for lunch most his entire life, that’s who he is. and told me that school you’re going to in “Why would you tell me that?” California was bankrupting him. Didn’t know “To hurt your feelings,” Janet says. She’s still how he was going to pay for it, really. He was holding my hand when her son Travis walks up sitting right here where we are now, eating his a few minutes later.

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