The Right Bar

My daughter called me one night from the bar. I could tell from her drawn out words and the insistent way that she was talking that she'd had a couple of drinks. I could almost hear her leaning in and poking at the air with her finger to punctuate her sentences. Luckily, I could hear her boyfriend in the background, the more sober and calmer of the two, and I knew that he'd be there to drive them home. She wanted me to come hang out with them at the bar. She tried to give me the address, but I could hardly hear her over the noise and the music, and the call started breaking up and the line dropped and went dead before I could ask her to repeat what she had told me.

I knew that the bar was in one of the small little towns to the east that were scattered among the mountain passes, little towns with roads that go nowhere and dead end in the night under sad streetlights swirling with moths and gnats. I drove up and down the same streets, looking for the right bar, bumping along over the ruts in my old pickup truck. I went into bar after bar, pumping quarters into their jukeboxes, trying to find the song that I'd heard in the background, trying to match the chatter and noise of the bar room to what I had heard over the phone, looking around at the faces huddled over the candles in the middle of the tables, their smiling eyes and laughing teeth dancing in the dark.

But the song eluded me, and the faces were all those of strangers. I had to stop at a gas station along the highway before heading to the next town. There was an old man sitting on a stool behind the counter slumped in the occasional breeze of an occillating fan. We consulted over the dog-eared pages of an old map. He apologized that the map was out of date, and he explained that some of the roads shown on it had been gone for years, replaced by other roads not shown that he cut into the empty space on the paper with the edge of his thumbnail. I studied the marks he'd made on the map. I thought to hum a little of the song I was looking for, to see if he knew it. He said he remembered it, but it had been years since he had heard it. He held up a divining finger, casting about, north, east, south, and west for the direction of the town where he might have heard it in his younger days. Finally he settled on the road ahead, the way that he'd showed me on the map. He seemed to have definitely made up him mind, grunting and nodding and tapping his finger on the paper. I thanked him for his time, and I went out and got back into my truck and headed back out onto the dark highway.