They’d come to a darkened bar in the city where they were laying over between shifts, ostensibly gathering for one of their birthdays or workiversies or some other celebration that was happening, or had already happened, or would soon happen, back on whatever day it was wherever they called home.
“Shift work disorder,” Sean, one of Match’s spicier coworkers, had called it.
The bar was little, divelike, named no-name bar, with a roulette wheel in the back someone had hand-painted black and red. Everyone in Match’s group was voluntold they’d be spinning that night. In the solidarity of peer-pressure and boozy-bonding, in commemoration of something that mattered somewhere else.
Had anybody had a turn already?
A single spin, a single moment in time.
One of the flight attendants won a bottle of champagne (“Sparkling wine,” Sean had called it).
Another a Moscow mule in a boot.
A pilot Match knew to have a curved penis got a dickle and a pickle (“No comment,” Sean had said).
And then blurred extras in their crowd—those she’d yet to either bond with on smoke breaks, or use, seeing and licking naked in a Hyatt or Westin in some place where time didn’t exist—won or lost forgettable drinks, like a bucket of beer or a “thyme after time” in a stem glass. Maybe a free spin.
When it was Match’s turn, all she’d hoped as she walked across the sticky floor towards the contraption was that it didn’t land on anything golden brown. She knew she’d turn if forced to swallow something hailing from Ireland or Scotland or Kentucky memories.
The wheel went around and around on her turn, clicking the nails fast and hard, then gradually slower and softer, until it landed on the slice that read “Cement Mixer.” Pint-holding locals lingering nearby oooohed in a knowing way, their shared vowel, that o, a chorus of foreboding dialects and accents. Match turned toward the bar counter to claim her fate. The bottoms of her feet stuck, heavy in the dry liquid spillage of the bar’s floor, perhaps worsened by somebody mopping each closing shift while the rest of the city was asleep.
“So, what’s a cement mixer?” Match asked propping her elbows on the bar, taking in the bartender, who had a sleeve of inky portraits cascading down her toned, bare arms, cranking the taps. Match didn’t have any tattoos on her, just sleeves of stamped pages in her passport, notches in her hotel bedposts since starting this job a few years ago.
Had it been that long already?
Had it only been a few years already?
“Irish creme and lime juice, hun. I recommend you down it immediately. The longer you wait, the more it curdles,” the bartender’s voice, not raspy or crackled as Match had imagined it would be, came out soft like warm, gooey honey.
Match was reminded, as she watched the two ill-paired liquids begin to blend in the bartender’s pouring, of her father.
He’d had a concrete pumping business back in Paducah, a detail she now remembered for the first time in twenty or so years.
Had it really been twenty-something years?
He’d called it “A-1 Pumping” when people were too simple to flip a page or count past one. It had been summertime—Match remembered she’d just learned to ride a two-wheel bike and would take the turn down at the end of their court again and again, trying to keep up with her older brother James—when it happened.
Her father had been out on a job, pouring a client’s back patio in the morning, when he took a break at lunchtime, and never came back. That’s the short story.
“Here you go hun. Faster the better,” Match heard, as the bartender slid the clear little glass towards her. Match took a second to hold it up to the flickering light of one of the red-jarred candles nearby, watching the acid poison the cream.
Curdling.
The longer story involved a violent fight between her parents the night prior to his disappearance, a fight which—according to Match—started because she’d dropped a hefty bag of groceries she’d carried into the kitchen. She remembered the brown paper bag caving in on her, its bottom gone pulpy, and breaking a bottle—splattering what smelled like getting shots at the doctor’s office—all over the floor. Match remembered the carton of milk bursting like a sped-up deflation, the eggs crashing, the peaches and lemons rolling far like flares at an accident site. The kitchen was filled first with silence as Match looked up at the ceiling, willing her tears to defy gravity. Below, her feet were little islands surrounded by the mess she’d made, a sea of liquids and lettuces and egg innards and a bunch of grapes like tangled seaweed, washed up to the shores of her white—now brown-splattered—keds.
Nothing was salvageable. Of all the bags she could’ve grabbed…
That silence and gravity-defying didn’t last, of course. Her mother yelled, the peaches bruised, and her dad came home to her mother’s rage. So then he left again, ricocheting back hours later with his blood coursing warm and brown, as Match and James lay in their beds in the dark, listening, both their bellies churning.
The longer story involved a six-year-old girl going to sleep and seeing ghosts truck-driving down a road at night, the truck’s cab trailed by a swirling agitator, then crashing, waking her from a sweaty nightmare again and again. Anxiety, stomach issues, bad decisions, running away herself.
The shorter story goes, that next day no one said anything about that spill or explosive fight, about that night where more was broken, the stickiness still underfoot. Her dad went to work as always, and then left. Poof. A ghost disappeared in a truck that churned a mix made permanent if poured into place, if kept from moving.
By the time that last patio he poured surely had dried and set, they’d have thought their mom’s tears should’ve too, but hadn’t. Her wet salty mixture kept leaking, loud and unsettling at first, then just a nuisance, turning the kids into statues or hardened molds themselves.
“He should’ve called his business heavy pourers,” James joked once or twice. She didn’t know what he meant back then.
She didn’t know how she’d even carried such a heavy bag as far as she had gotten.
They’d still find tiny shards of glass in distant corners of the kitchen now and then, well into autumn and winter.
Before it could curdle more tonight, Match took the shot from the glass she’d been staring at, but let it linger on her tongue before sliding down her throat, sticking to her teeth and the roof of her mouth, like tasting the dust of a chalky memory. She could hear the roulette wheel spinning again, turning and turning, giving someone else a chance to time travel, on their 48-hour layover here, in the dark middleness of late night or early morning, on who knows what day it was.
Yesterday, today, tomorrow.
Match couldn’t wait to get back in the sky, to feel weightless breathing in the recycled air, bored by passengers’ dilemmas and messes. Crumbs in the seat folds, sudsy splatters on the tiny lav mirror. Every time she was in the sky, she was no one and nowhere and time was an illusion; she drank bottled water or ginger ale. She felt queasy whenever she poured a jack and coke or bourbon on the rocks for a passenger in first class, lucky to only pass tiny sealed bottles to the thirsty masses in the back, to recycle their empty cups and bottles with gloves on.
Every time she was on the ground, she felt heavy and her stomach ached; she’d find the worst possible contender to go home—or rather, go hotel—with, to see if their bases could mix with her acids, counteracting the churn.
“It’s like you like to suffer,” Sean had said, sharing a cigarette with her down an alley on another continent one time, some time ago.
The cement mixer’s grit still coating her throat and sticking to her gums, she left the shot glass on the counter and made her way towards the back again. She passed the handsome chiseled pilot who’d been making eyes at her here inside no-name bar to go default to the round married one from Wisconsin again, ready to have him breathe his salami and vinegar breath into her ears and then her mouth, to let him and his heaviness try pumping into her.
Roulette.
Just for tonight. Or this morning. Or whatever it was, wherever she was, however old she was.
Had anybody not had a turn already?
“I want another turn,” she said, her tongue heavy and bound in citrus and cream chalk, waiting for the spinning wheel.