Benediction

I’d seen him around town but we had never really crossed paths. I knew that he liked to drink, and I knew that he liked to talk, but aside from these things I knew little else of Hermes Baker. I did know that he’d burned a friend of mine a few months back though. Not literally, but through the presentation of some information that sent my friend into psychosis. For days (four to be precise) he wandered all over Olympia, a frazzled mess, muttering about the reasons why he would die. When asked about it, he would only reply “Hermes Baker is full of shit.” Two months later, this friend shot himself in the mouth.

Hermes had lived in town since long before my family arrived. He was a tall, lanky man who slinked down the street with a candidly exposed bald head on top, flanked by stringy blonde hair trailing off the sides. He seemed to be ill-accepted in the community, and from my stand- point, he was suspect. My step-mother was a native Olympian, and had been I and my father’s reason for moving from Seattle when I was 16. On our first day in town, she was quick to warn me about him. He’d delivered the mail for many years when she was a little girl, and in all that time had never taken the chance to speak with him. There was a strange, sharp uneasiness in her eyes whenever he walked past our house now. With each smile and nod in our direction, it was as if she’d watched him kick a thousand puppies and cried for each as it happened. I couldn’t bring myself to ask her the full story, I simply accepted her as a good woman, and he an inherent plague.
As he passed store fronts the proprietors didn’t look up, and the parents inside discretely shielded their children. He was a ghost to them; nonexistent, but always around. There was something that emanated from Hermes Baker that people just did not like. There was only one place where he was openly welcomed: Arcadia Bar, the bar he owned. It was an establishment that I presumed had very few customers, but was paid for and open seven days a week: His legacy.

I can not say what it was that made me follow him to the bar that day. Perhaps it was the dry August sun, or perhaps it was the fact that it was my twenty-first birthday and I was spending it alone and sad; but whatever it was that propelled me was exhilarating. I waited and watched from the porch as he walked down Arch Street towards Arcadia, and after he’d turned the corner I hopped from my seat and shadowed him. Down Maple, down Pine, down Spruce, and all the other tree streets, past the storefronts on Main, I watched him from a safe distance.
Outside the bar, I waited for a few moments, breathing and gathering the nerve to enter. I was quite sure that it would just be he and I, and I had nothing to say. ‘Surely anyone else who drank here had encountered the same thing.’ I thought.

Beyond the door my assumption was confirmed. There was near silence, broken only by the light chatter of the television behind the bar which Hermes watched intently. I approached slowly, with caution, fearful that he hadn’t heard me come in and might be startled. Upon choosing a stool in the corner, nearest the door, I sat down and waited for him to turn from the courtroom drama he was already invested in.
A cool minute passed before a commercial interrupted the program and Hermes formally recognized my presence. When he turned to me, my ID was already in hand.

“What’s yur dwink, guy?”

I was slightly dumbfounded by his lack of enthusiasm and speech impediment. Looking directly at me with one eye, and off to the other corner of the bar with his other, lazier, eye. It was the first time I’d seem him so close.

“I’ll…I, um…what do you have?” I said.

He turned, brushing his skullet off of his shoulder, and glanced at the bar as if he’d forgotten his own inventory, before turning back with a crack-toothed smile.

“You can see bettew than I can pwobably. It’s all wight thewe.” He said
“Oh, ah, can I have a beer then?” I replied.

It seemed that he didn’t care for my answer, and after an easy reach below the bar he retrieved a Budweiser, popped the cap, and placed it in front of me. I thanked him, but as the commercial had just ended he returned to the television.

“Can you hewe? I can tun it up, if ya want.” He said in my general direction.
“Ok.”

For the next twenty minutes I watched over his shoulder as the old man on the television took the stand to defend his innocence, only to be shut down by Sam Waterston and later convicted of rape and murder. I couldn’t really hear the dialogue, but I’d seen the episode before and still didn’t care. Afterwards, Hermes turned towards the cash register and put a tape in the sound system which sat below it. A few short moments later “Marrakesh Express” was playing at an uncomfortably loud volume. A smile shot over his face at the first mention of ducks and pigs and chickens.
Suddenly his mood lightened and he began wiping down the bar. I sensed that I’d been his only customer in quite some time; that he was simply paying me a certain amount of distanced attention. And so, in keeping with my original decision, I finished my beer as the song was concluding, and ordered another.

“You know, I’ve nevuh been to India. But, aside fwum that song, it sounds awful.” He said, rag in hand, handing me the beer.
“I haven’t either…Been to India.” I replied.

The tape continued and the dinghy bar windows grew more and more dim. There was little I could do, except pretend to enjoy the first few beers of my adult life, and wonder what would come next. In time, sides A and B had finished, leaving us in peace. I was 4 beers deep, and wanting desperately to ask him what it was that he’d told my dead friend. In stead:

“What else you got?” I said “musically – for music. What else is there?”

Taking his cue, Hermes Baker fumbled through the tapes behind the bar.

“Almon’ bwuthers ok?” he posed.
“I dun know them.” I said.

It wasn’t long before I too was tied to the singer’s proverbial whipping post, learning about the pains of the years to come. The tape continued and another man joined us. He sat at a few stools down, and was greeted by a smiling Hermes offering a beer and a shot. I then realized that the pariah I had set out to find was actually a businessman with a few regulars to entertain now and again; possibly even friends.
The evening wore on and a small crowd assembled. All of us swilled away, and after my second visit to the bathroom I could tell that I was, what I thought of as, drunk. My legs weakened, and my toes pointed every-which-way I didn’t want them to as I walked back to my stool. Once seated, I watched the patrons—all men—tend to their drinks, exchange laughs, and then tend to their drinks again. Between the fraternization (of which I was not included) and the bubbles welling within me, I gradually began to fade; somewhere, wondering why I’d come to this place.

There was a man at the end of the bar, staring into his drink, that looked like my dead friend’s dad, but he spoke to no one and wore a crusty ball cap pulled down low. I thought about the way my friend had described his father to me. Perhaps his honesty, and our grievous dads (mine: not fully recovered from his wife’s death, and his: a man who’d seen everything within his small sphere), was what drew us together as friends. That sense that all hope was lost; it was something that we feared and revered, I being new in town, and he being naturally timid. I remembered his father drunk, picking him up from school; later handing my father nails as he worked on building a new shed; the bruises on my friend’s arms that kept him in long sleeves all through high school.
I remembered the last sip of warm beer and then a flash of days past. (Suddenly I was back in high school on the day I realized that my friend was in serious trouble. It was another one of those days in which his father was running late and I stayed behind with him to pass the time. We were sitting outside throwing rocks into the woods across the street. It was getting dark and we walked to my house. Thomas didn’t want to because he said his dad would get mad if he wasn’t there, but it was also getting cold, so we started out. I remember after a while of playing video games he was getting itchy and uncomfortable. He went to the bathroom, and returned asking where the band aids were. When I asked him why, he showed me a series of scratches on his leg that resembled the word help. I was scared for a little while, but he just kept laughing about it; said he “found a nail on the floor.” I never told my dad.)

I woke up on the floor with three of the patrons, and Hermes Baker, watching over me.

“Hey, hey dere guy…You awite?” Hermes said.

My eyes cleared and I tried to figure out what had just happened. The only answers were provided by my surroundings and the tepid pool of puke that laid by my side. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I was at Arcadia. I felt around and became alarmed by the fact that I didn’t know how long I’d been out. Hermes tried to quiet me.

“Now we’wr gonna call you a caw.” He said “But we need to know yuh addwes.”

I couldn’t think clearly enough to recite it, but after fishing in my back pocket, producing my wallet, and finding nothing, I began to frantically search my other pockets. In the hip I found and fumbled my ID out before handing it over to Hermes.

“You’d the Johnson kid, I know you’w mom! And happy biwfday!” he said.
“Youdunknow, my mom’s dead.” I sputtered.
“No, I usedto dewiver her maiwl. Bwonde, right?”
“She’s notmy mom.”

He called a car and got me back to my stool. I no longer cared about my original mission, whatever it had been. The car company said that it would be about 10 minutes. After fifteen had passed, Hermes came around the bar, passed his trusted patrons, and escorted me to the street.
We stood in the cool night, under a dim and flickering light, as I swayed and hiccupped. Hermes told me about life as he knew it, relating it, of course, to my current situation. I tried to listen, but retained little. After a while of waiting, I sat on the sidewalk with my back to the bar and remembered my only question.

“What’d did you tell my-fren?” I said, hazy.
“What?”
“Thomas Aaron, what’d did you tell him to make him die?”
“Tommy Awon?”
“Yesh.”

There was a pronounced pause.

“I knew Tommy’s father. He’s inside wite now…I just towd Tommy the twuth… I told him the twuth and nufing else.”
“And just what do you think was the twuth?” I asked, un-mockingly.
“I told him that his fathew was a dwunk and that, one day, he’d pwobably be just like ‘em.” He stopped and looked at me with an empathic grin. “You, you though. You don’t have anything to wouwy about. You’we gonna wiv longuh than evewybody you know…I just call ‘em as I see ‘em... Maybe pway about it.”

I was done talking and waiting, and tried to stand. (My mother used to talk about prayer.) My stomach was churning curds.

The car pulled up outside the bar and I didn’t want to get in. But after being guided by Hermes I really had no choice. He jimmied me into the backseat, handed the driver $15, and told me Happy Biwfday again. On the short ride back, I watched the night flash by, wondering about why Thomas had done it, and, moreover, why he blamed the surprisingly delicate Hermes. It was true that my friend had started drinking and cutting himself early in life, but it didn’t seem to be a death sentence. It was all just supposed to be fun and release.
I thought about Thomas and I thought about how sad it would be to see everyone around me pass. My mother and my friends’ demises had been enough. I didn’t want to see more caskets or bottle more memories.

I stumbled up the drive and made it to the porch. Sitting where I’d been hours ago, I looked out on the same street I’d looked at for years. It didn’t last long though. It was still early in the night, and my father and stepmother—having not been informed of my impromptu plan—came out onto the porch to find me drunk, bowing my brows to them.
They walked me inside, and I was led past a table containing dinner, and a chocolate cake centerpiece. They led me up the stairs, lovingly, took off my shirt, put me in bed on my side, and placed a trashcan within easy reach. When they left my bedroom door cracked I knew that, despite our personal histories, they both loved me. I couldn’t stand to lose them too.
As I lay in bed watching the wall spin, wishing that I’d stuck around for dinner and stayed away from the bar, the only answer I could come up with was that Hermes may have been a little bit right in Thomas’s case. He already had things to fear. He’d never even had the chance to be taught about redemption.
My outcome would be different though. I’d prove him wrong. Right then, I would have shot him if I could. ‘There is no place in the world for those who can predict the truth.’ I thought. After that, I rolled onto my back, closed my eyes, and thought hard before praying.