Changeling - The Lost.pdf

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A Storytelling Game of Beautiful Madness
Jeremiah Alonzo (order #525483)
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Alec Bourbon
What
Said
They called the guy Alec Bourbon because he loved to drink, but aside
from that, he had a strange way about him. It made some people nervous and it
made some people laugh, but Alec never left anyone around him untouched.
Whenever he and the regulars who hung around his shithole local heard that Van
Morrison song on the jukebox, “Jackie Wilson Said,” Alec would change that
line to “Alec Bourbon Said,” and then he’d follow it up with any bit of doggerel
that came to mind and howl it to the bar at top volume. Even weirder was that
people played along — if he said, “Alec Bourbon said thumb your nose,” every
(other) rummy and souse in the joint would thumb his nose and laugh like it was
the greatest joke in the world. They’d pound the heavy oak tables in that old bar,
and for a brief moment, the air wasn’t so heavy with stale smoke or the smell of
losers.
The bar was named after some almost-forgotten church, a haunted ruin
where witches danced as the drunken protagonist stumbled home in an old
poem. This wasn’t a place where ironic hipsters or slumming socialites went to
drink beer from cans. This was a place where men who had witnessed hard
lives went to die slowly, poisoning themselves along the way. It was always winter
inside, the end of something, cold and melancholy but for the few brief moments
when something comic happened. Even then, though, that mirth was momentary,
like the time Old Dom slipped in a pool of spilled beer and fell on his face,
shoving his glasses into his baggy eyes. The whole place guffawed at Dom’s
goggled peepers! The surgery left him entirely blind in one eye and mostly
blind in the other, though. Old Dom owed Alec $20. Alec Bourbon liked it cold
and dark inside the bar.
Our man had a face like the bole of a tree and hands like a tree’s gnarled
roots. His hair, when he didn’t wear that greasy New York Jets cap, looked like a
crow’s nest of thatch and twigs. Even Alec’s disposition could grow as dark as the
wooden surfaces of the bar on occasion, especially when women were involved.
They hated him, and he hated them. Butch, behind the bar, said that Alec
Bourbon had been married years ago, but that she was a beer woman, so he
eventually had to kill her. Alec said Butch had a shit sense of humor, to shut the
fook up and that puns were the lowest form of language. Butch told Alec to pay
his tab and that was the only time in 37 years that Alec didn’t offer a returning
remark. It was Alec’s bar anyway, even if he didn’t own it or work there. He was
there more than anyone else.
So it was that the mumblesome old regulars who shared Alec’s bar were
surprised one night when in walked a pretty young woman looking at least a
Jeremiah Alonzo (order #525483)
144.89.188.69
Credits
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century Alec’s junior and asked for him. She wore a bright green dress. Her eyes were
wide and dewy, her legs long and strong, and more than a few coarse words passed
among those hoary men when she arrived.
“Alec’s in the shitter,” Butch said.
“I will wait,” she replied. Not “I’ll wait,” but “I will wait.” And so she waited.
When Alec returned from the bathroom, he carried his glass with him. “Thirsty work!”
he called to no one in particular, and all those no ones in particular laughed, just like they
always did, before returning to their own drinks. This time, though, they kept their eyes
on him.
He walked back to his bar and sat on his high, wooden stool. The woman, her hands
clasped before her, approached him. “You are Alec Bourbon.”
He replied by looking at her, eye-to-eye, and downing his drink in a long gulp.
“I am Anne —”
“I know who you are, rabbit,” he cut her off, “and if you want what you want, you have
to have a drink with me.”
“I do not drink,” she protested. Short, quiet laughs and vague comments about
femininity floated through the air from patrons seated at the oak and mahogany recesses of
the bar’s tables.
“You do if you wan’ talk to me.” This much was true. Alec rarely received guests at the
bar, but when he did, they always drank with him, some more willingly than others. Several
loud young men from Boston once drank with him eagerly. An enormous steelworker who
came to see him drank reluctantly. “You drink with me, I do as you ask,” Alec said.
“You do not know what I shall ask,” the woman continued, though she took a seat next
to him (even though he never stood for her or offered it to her, the cad).
“I didn’t get to be the man I am today by hiding my head in the bushes!” Alec
bellowed, slapping his hand on the bar with a sound like a cudgel.
The woman skittishly agreed. “I assume we drink bourbon?”
“Bully for you, honey.”
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After that, no one heard what they said to each other for the rest of the night. The
woman left, but no one could tell you when, or how many drinks she had or her apparent
mood when she left. Everyone at the bar just nodded and looked the other way. Butch
swore he put the woman’s only drink on Alec’s tab. Butch vaguely remembered her
saying something about a year and a day.
B B B
Muttering to himself, Alec rode the downtown train. “Promises, promises,” he snarled
at the world, or maybe to anyone who had the power to do anything about them. That was
his life, promises and dreams. He imagined that in anyone else’s life, a world of promises
and dreams would be a beautiful thing. Not so for him. He kept promises because he had
to. For the same reason, he kept so many dreams at bay.
At the second stop after the transfer line, the woman with the dewy eyes and long
legs got on the train. She wore a dour gray dress and a raincoat almost the same color as
the dress, only a little more blue.
Alec noticed her but paid her no mind. She saw him, but her eyes betrayed no hint of
recognition.
Other people boarded the train, too: teenagers going home late from friends’ houses,
short-order cooks coming off the mid-shift, lawyers who put in long hours. Alec didn’t know
any of them. A man in a suit on a cell phone bumped his knee and said, “Sorry, old man.”
Alec offered a half-hearted reply, “Promises, promises.” The man in the suit gave Alec a
curious look that expressed a lack of comprehension, but then turned away and returned to
his cell phone conversation. Alec was obviously senile. Just another nut on the train.
Alec sat in the same seat for the whole trip, his left hand wrapped around the railing
like a tree branch that had grown around an intruding fence post. He kept his right hand
in his pocket, except for the dozen times he brought it out to raise his flask to his lips.
At the south eight stop, the woman with the dewy eyes and long legs got off the train.
Alec left the train, too. She went down the stairs and onto the street. Alec followed, 99 steps
behind her, sipping from his flask. She turned left on Third, left again on Alder and then
right on Sixth. Alec had gone left on Fifth, left again on Holly and then left onto Sixth.
Alec wanted her to have enough time.
When he turned onto Sixth, no one was there. It was too cold to be out long this time
of year, but that was the way Alec liked it. The bourbon in his flask kept him warm, and he
smoked a cigarette, clutching it between his fingers, feeling its heat through his cutoff gloves.
That was probably long enough, he reasoned, and took a few steps down the block.
The brownstone he lingered in front of was lit up with cold light, only a few of the
windows displaying any hint of the season’s coming holidays. Presently, a couple dressed
in running gear came out the front door, walking a pale-eyed Weimaraner. Alec grabbed
the doorknob before the door closed and pushed his way inside. He found the foyer
damnably warm.
D7. Fourth floor. Alec took the stairs.
As he came to the landing on the fourth floor, Alec checked his jacket. There, inside,
he felt the length of polished flying rowan he carried with him. It had always done the
trick in these circumstances. He squinted his eyes and pursed his lips, as if the thought
pained him; the club always helped him fulfill his promises.
Alec Bourbon knocked on the door of D7.
Credits
Jeremiah Alonzo (order #525483)
144.89.188.69
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