The Old City Bar

Let me tell you a story that you won’t believe, even if I told it twice, in case you didn't believe me the first time. It all started at the old city bar. In its corner—my corner—I sat nursing my ale and watching the snow come down in droves on a Christmas Eve night. This old bar, you see, is what many would call a relic of the past. One that is not too far gone, but enough, I reckon, that no one who hasn’t grayed yet remembers the time when bars smelled like cigarettes and machine exhaust. Yes, this place is where the blue-collar man drifted in to find his swill beer and some peace and quiet after a hard day. You didn’t need much to come, just your own business to mind. You didn’t need much scratch either, for even the homeless would come in occasionally to save a dime. It was a stop for the tired or lost soul.

About my corner, I had established it many years ago; every patron who worked within a five-mile radius of the factory knew this. Each of us had our place here. The ashtray at the end only knew the foreman’s Marlboros, the mugs hanging over the kitchen belonged to the welders, and Boxcar Bill, who lived in the freight car at the abandoned railway just half a block away, always picked up his pack of smokes from the bench where he left them the day before. When an out-of-towner had the unfortunate inkling to enter and violate these tacit treatises between inhabitants and their places, Petey the bartender would always say, “Oi, someone sits there,” and toss his head in the general direction of the no-man’s-land table near the restrooms. When they left, they never came back, and we liked it that way. By extension, we liked Petey. He was curt, unpleasant, and better yet, uninviting. His neck tattoos and caterpillar eyebrows added to his menacing presentation. In this bar, you had to be welcomed before being welcomed. It’s a complicated thing, but Petey had an instinct for it, and we trusted his adjudication.

As to why he bears such a surly disposition, well, I have my theories, but a significant one stems from the night his parents died. Since no one really chatted in this bar, I suspected no one knew the tragic tale of Petey's folks. It was after school one frosty afternoon, and out in the snow stood the spry fourth grader, Petey, waiting for his parents to pick him up for the holidays, but he wouldn't make it home that night. On a hairpin turn, Petey's folks caught some ice and drove through the guardrail. Unfortunately, the dead don't provide details on their comings and goings, so it wasn't until nightfall that the police realized where they were headed. My father was the patrol officer who discovered the nearly frozen boy, Petey, curled up in the doorway of the gymnasium, hence my knowledge of this story. He bobbed in the foster care system for some time until landing with some ne'er-do-wells, and that was the last I heard of him. That is, until my first day on the job, I ambled into this old city bar and sure enough, there was Petey—manning the taps and tops, and it has been that way since.

During this time of the year, a blast of frigid air would burst through the narrow front door, followed by Petey’s brusque, “What would you like?” if you were one of the chosen, coming in for the first time, or “The usual?” if you were a regular. So, it came strange to me on that night, Christmas Eve, a shadow moved through the window towards the bar. I was half-drunk on my seventh when I saw it, so I assumed it was one of ours coming in late. A gust of wind came in through the front door, followed by silence. The chairs creaked as the burly welders turned in their seats towards the door. I, too, mechanically lifted my head from the melted spot on the window and turned to a snow-covered boy standing in the middle of the room.

“Excuse me! Does anyone know the girl outside? She’s all alone!” said the boy.

We all lifted our trucker hats or bent down to see through the window. Sure enough, there at the streetlight corner next to the only pay phone in the neighborhood, which was broken, stood a short figure in a pink coat, with no one else in sight. In situations like these, of course, we turned to the barkeep for guidance.

“What's the matter, son?” Petey asked the boy.

The boy, cherub-faced and earnest, looked toward the barkeeper and replied, “Mister, there is a girl out there in the snow alone!”

Petey lumbered toward the end of his bar and gazed through the window.

“What’s she doing out there?” he asked.

“She’s lost, and she doesn’t know her way home,” said the boy.

“Do you know her?”

“No. I’ve never met her. She’s not from here.”

Petey scratched his head.

“Not that I care, but how do you know this? Maybe she’s waiting for her parents or something.”

The boy widened his eyes at the bartender and said, “Mister, I’ve noticed that if someone could be home for Christmas, they’d already be there, wouldn’t they?”

It didn’t go unnoticed by us to see Petey’s face reddening darker than the boy’s frozen cheeks. It also did not go unnoticed, but was never sworn to, that the shimmer upon his cheek came from a tear.

“What are you all looking at? Back to your drinks,” said the bartender. Their stares backed down, but not mine. No, something about Petey and that boy kept my attention. Petey chewed on the inside of his cheek, mulling over what to do with the unexpected visitor. He glanced up at the Coca-Cola clock across the room.

“You heading out soon, Ted?” he said, looking toward the foreman at the end of the bar.

The foreman turned around from his barstool at the clock.

“Why, is it ten-thirty already?” he said. “Shucks, I s’pose I should be.”

“Let me ring you up.”

The boy's eyes followed him as he came out from behind the bar and approached him.

“Take a seat over there, son.”

Petey had nodded to an empty chair. The boy went and sat in it. The bartender then made his way to the cash register that stood right by the door and across from my corner—directly in my line of sight. It ticked and scratched as Petey punched out the bill. The foreman sifted through his wallet.

“What’s the damage?”

“Same as always,” said Petey.

The foreman pulled out seven dollars and handed it to him. The cash register

sprung open.

“I s’pect you’re closed t’morrow for Christmas, isn’t ya?” he asked.

“I most certainly will. Why? Don’t you want to be home for Christmas?”

The foreman gave an awkward grin.

“Home? What ya mean by home? Look at us.”

Petey followed the foreman’s eyes, staring out at the clientele.

“It’s like that boy said, if we had one, we’d already be there,” said the foreman.

"Well, where do you go then when you leave?"

The foreman guffawed. "I have a house, but it isn't home."

Petey pursed his lips.

"And what 'bout ya?" added the foreman. "Don’t ya got a family to get home to?”

“Well, when you put it like that, I can't say that I..."

It was then that Petey paused and looked on at the boy. For a while, he watched as the boy surveyed the rusty and unseemly bar paraphernalia along the walls.

"That I do," he said.

Petey remained in a daze until the foreman leaned toward him.

"Pete, you there?" he asked.

Uh, yeah? Yeah. D—Do you want your receipt?” said Petey.

“No thanks. I’ll see you after Christmas, I s'pose.”

“I suppose you will.”

“Well, Merry Christmas, then, Pete.”

“Merry Christmas.”

As the foreman reached for the door, he stopped.

"Oh, and Pete."

"Yeah?" Petey replied.

"This is home."

A gust of wind blew past the foreman as he walked out. I waited for the soft thud of the cash register drawer to close as usual when someone paid their tab and left; alas, I heard nothing. My curiosity got the better of me: I angled my line of sight and noticed movement in the space between the wall and the cash register. There I watched, sure as day, Petey’s hand stuffing a wad of cash into his pocket. He must have cleared the whole register, for he repeated the action ten times. I turned to my fellow citizens to ensure they were spectating this anomaly; however, they remained hunched over their drinks and enthralled in conversation. When he had finished, he looked toward the boy.

“Son,” said Petey.

The boy turned, and without a word, Petey beckoned for him. The boy hopped down from the chair and followed the bartender to the door, and outside they went. Now, for the first time in my life, I heard that door open three times, and each event that followed had never happened before, for Petey never left the bar before anyone. In fact, I don't recollect the last time I saw him outside of the old city bar. Nevertheless, there he was outside, amongst streams of snow, hand-in-hand with the boy, jogging toward the girl across the street. We watched him approach and kneel down to speak with her. It looked mighty cold, especially from our warm seats inside. For a few minutes, they were like this until Petey swung his head around at some approaching headlights. He shot to his feet and waved his hand. A yellow taxicab came into our view and stopped alongside them. Petey leaned on the driver's side of the cab and spoke with its driver. He did so earnestly and seemed to ensure the driver understood what he was relaying. He then reached into his pocket and handed him the entire wad of cash. The driver looked through the bills, then gave a thumbs-up. Petey flew the car door open and ushered the girl inside. After saying a few words to her, he closed the door, and the cab sped off into the night. The steam from its exhaust dissipated, and the boy along with it. Now, I can attest to this account and will swear my life on it that the boy, indeed, disappeared, because when Petey turned to the spot where the boy was, he wasn’t there. The bartender frantically twirled around, certain the boy could not be more than a few feet from him. Yet nothing was there, just the wintry dust dancing in the wind. When he surmised the boy was gone, he began to trudge back to the bar. All of us, who had been more or less watching this spectacle, scuttled back to our seats and drinks.

Petey brushed off the snow when he came in and stood at the mouth of the door next to the cash register. He looked onward, scratching his head. Oddly enough, he looked in my direction. I didn’t know what to do, because I was just as confounded as he was. So, I did what any man would do: I gave him a nod and a smile, and for the first time in my life, he smiled back.

“Tonight will be Christmas," he said. "Drinks on the house.” A shoddy round of applause came from the few of us in the bar; others weren't quite sure they heard him correctly. We then watched him return to his post behind the bar. Boxcar Bill stood up from his spot with a crooked smile and waddled over to the place in front of the tap handles. Several others followed. When the keg was nearly empty, he came out from behind the counter and started pushing the tables around. He asked the welders to get up and help, and they arranged them into a long, family-style table. We sat together, for the first time in the history of the old city bar, sharing stories, drinks, and laughter into the wee hours of the night. It was the strangest, merriest Christmas I had ever been a part of.

Many folks later would say that it was just some kid who had wandered in on some witless bums, but I don’t think so. Something happened that night at the old city bar—I’m not sure what, but something beyond my reckoning did. For those of us who were there, we still talk about it and do so fondly. As for Petey, he seemed to know. I recall one day from my corner some out-of-towners, a husband and wife, came to the register to pay their tab.

The woman said, “Say, isn’t this the bar that ‘that kid’ came to visit? You know, the one that people say was a Christmas angel.”

Petey didn’t look up from the register as he punched in the bill.

“So they say,” he said, flatly.

“Were you there that night?”

“I most certainly was.”

“Wow! So, what actually happened? It wasn’t really an angel, was it?”

He then looked up into the woman's eyes.

Then he said, “He was just some stranger, helping a child find their way home before Christmas.”

"And did they?" she asked.

"They most certainly did."