Breathing Trouble

Five bottles of dollar-fifty beer had come and gone in front of me when I saw her glide into the bar and sit at a booth behind me. Above the bar, the Budweiser horses circled around and around, pulling their plastic wagons of beer into infinity. In my peripheral vision, she moved like time passing, smooth and solitary, wearing a white T-shirt tucked into faded jeans. I limited my sidelong glance at her to exactly one second. Then I went back to my increasingly difficult job of watching the plastic workhorses turn in their lighted globe.

Just taking another breath became hard labor on muggy nights like tonight, and it had been a long, desolate night already. It was eleven o'clock. I tried to count to sixty, slowly, but my eyes betrayed me, and I looked at her again. With her face hidden in the shadow of the high-backed wooden booth, she sat alone, sipping from a bottle of Bud Light that Bob had carried to her. I'd never had service that quick. She rested her long, thin arms on the table, elbows jutting out at sharp angles, and she slowly unraveled the label from her beer bottle.

When she tilted her head in my direction, tossing her long brown hair back out of her eyes, I turned back to the bar as subtly as possible, covered with the prickly feeling that she was looking right at me. I wondered if she was waiting for someone to take her out of this bar, out of this town, out of this state. Since I'd dropped out of school at Wayne State College and took the job at the video store, the only beauty I'd seen in this one-horse Nebraska town was pasted on movie boxes.

At the other end of the bar, grunting and scraping, Bob struggled to slide a keg over the warped floorboards. His pants hung low, and his rear end half-mooned me. Sitting at my stool, a spring poking me in the leg, I realized I could either look at Bob's ass the rest of the night just, or I could go over and try to lose myself in the best eyes I'd ever glanced at. With the careful toes-down-first walk of a drunk trying to appear sober, I passed by her booth, slanting my eyes towards her and holding my breath. Her lightly-tanned hands continued to tear at the label on her beer bottle.

Then I was past her, the dimly-lit booths and tables blurring like the countryside seen from a speeding car. I dropped my bottle into the garbage can with a hollow clank, and she looked across the room at me. My feet somehow moved towards her table, and the words were out before I could restart my stalled brain.

"You know, you don't have to take it out on that bottle," I heard my voice say. "It never did anything to you, and here you are picking it to death."

"Excuse me?" she asked, with the slightest trace of a Southern accent. A tiny crinkle formed at the corner of those incredible eyes. They were light blue, like the middle of the sky right when the sun hits the Nebraska horizon.

Continued...

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