THE DARK PLACE by JoLynne Buehring

Note: This is an excerpt from JoLynne’s anthology, Oddballs and Other Folks.

A slow night at the Sorry Gulch Saloon is boring, and this one was beyond slow. The big festival at the city’s recreation center featuring a barbecue, beer tent, and skateboard park demonstrations had attracted nearly everyone in town and kept almost all the regulars away from the Gulch. At nine o’clock, with Bud and Wylie anchoring the back end of the bar as usual, Ray Moody was my only other customer. He’d come in about eight and had been nursing a single scotch and water at the other end.

“Sally, I think I’m ready for a refill.”

“One more of the same coming up, Ray.”

Ray used to be a two or three night-a-week regular, but hadn’t been in for quite a while.

“I haven’t seen you lately, Ray. I thought you’d gone to some other watering hole.”

“Had to lay off the sauce. Doctor’s orders.”

“The big C, liver, what? Sorry, guess I’m being too nosy, ‘cause I’m bored.”

“S’okay. You’ve heard about Agent Orange, I’m sure. I was a tunnel rat in Viet Nam where that orange crap was the heaviest. Out of the twenty-seven diseases the Man admits it causes, I have nine of them. At this point, it doesn’t matter what I drink, so fill it up.”   He laid a couple of large bills by his glass.

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that news, so I poured a refill and latched onto one little piece of info. “What’s a tunnel rat?”

Ray took a big sip of his drink and sat staring at his glass for so long I thought he wasn’t going to answer. I guess he noticed I was getting restless because he suddenly looked up at me,   his eyes focusing in from a thousand-yard stare to look directly into mine.

“Do you have time for a long story?  I haven’t told it before and maybe it’s due.”

“As long as business is so slow, and I fill Bud’s and Wylie’s glasses every hour, they’ll sit and bicker until closing time. Doesn’t look like we’ll have a crowd, so my time is yours.”

“Let me buy you a drink then, Sal. Pull up a pew.”  He patted the bar stool next to him.

I settled with my whiskey and soda on the seat beside him.

“I never knew my parents. I was in the foster kid system from before I could remember. When I was about seven years old, I went to live with Mrs. Stiles. I was there until I could join the Army.”

He took another swallow of his scotch, and I refilled his glass from the bottle I’d left on the bar.

“Mrs. Stiles was a widow who lived in a big three-story house. Foster kids moved in and out all the time. I was the only one who stayed. Guess they couldn’t find any other place for me, and I was too scrawny for anyone to want to adopt me.”

I’d never given Ray’s stature much thought but realized he’d probably barely made the minimum height requirement for the service. My calves were thicker than his thighs and my wrists bigger than his biceps. I guess you’d call him small and wiry.

“That old woman seemed seven feet tall, was bony like an old barnyard rooster, and was as feisty, too. She always wore cotton print housedresses and pulled her hair back tight in a bun. She took good care of me, as far as food, clothes and education were concerned. I’m sure she believed she took good care of my soul, too. Her ‘instruction manual’ on how to be a good Christian woman and a proper parent was kept on top of the TV set, no doubt to sanctify the ‘godless’ programs she wouldn’t let me watch.”

Ray moved his shoulders like he had back pain, grunted a little and sipped more of his drink.

“That Bible was as big as a boot box and as heavy as a concrete block. It surprised me she could pick it up, but whenever I misbehaved or she thought my soul needed shoring up, it became a weapon she waved in my face. To scare the devil out of me, I guess.

“I had to stand in front of her sometimes for an hour, depending on my offenses, while she preached her version of scripture at me.”

His voice took on a high pitch and without a breath, he said, “Boy, I’ve told you time and again the wages of sin is death, and you’ve been spending more than your share. As a righteous God-fearing woman, it’s my duty to make sure you don’t take the dark, slippery slope straight to hell. The flames of Satan are just waiting to burn up boys like you in the lake of everlasting fire. The cries of the damned go on for eternity. I can feel the heat and smell the brimstone when you stray from the narrow way. Now, boy, you go out in the backyard and contemplate your sins. I won’t tolerate a heathen in my house.”

He gave a dry chuckle and took another swallow of his drink.

“I spent a lot of time in that backyard. During one of my ‘hours of meditation’ over my doomed future, I discovered a pair of slanted doors below the kitchen. It was only natural to open them to see what might be there. A gust of hot, smelly air came out of that dark hole, and I was sure everything Mrs. Stiles said about hell was true. I couldn’t bang those doors shut fast enough.

“When I was about fourteen, I learned from one of the other foster kids about coal chutes. Because they teased me for being afraid, I made up my mind I would go into that hole to defy Mrs. Stiles and challenge my fear.”  He grinned.

“I got the lecture of my life when I came up out of the basement covered in coal dust, but it didn’t bother me. Once I slid down a short way and hit the concrete floor, I could tell it was an ordinary basement. I stopped believing her dire predictions right then.”

I topped up his glass again. The grin slid off his face as he went on.

“Because I was small, I was picked to be a tunnel rat. I was cocky about the assignment when I got it. I was proud of my conquered fear of small dark places. I learned quick enough my job was to crawl into the gooks’ holes to kill anyone there and set explosives to blow up their underground fortifications. The passages were full of horrors you can’t begin to imagine. I see those pictures in my mind every day.”

Ray picked up his glass, drained it, and set it carefully on the bar. He stood and walked toward the exit. Stopping with his hand on the door, he said, “Thanks for listening, Sal. I’m not afraid of hell anymore.”

As the door swung shut, I heard him say, “I’ve already been there.”