The dwarf shushes me down with his one free hand. “You’d probably like to meet someone less overbearing. Someone wimpy and cerebral. Yeah, I know just the dude—can you handle morose?” He hops off the bar onto a stool and does his thing spinning routine until…
A little guy with a mousy mustache and a morose countenance with sad sanpaku eyes framed by dark brows above and bags beneath regards me blankly from his barstool. Breaking his trance, he studies me with pupils dilated and dark as coal. But only for a few seconds because his gaze quickly shifts to the booze behind the bar.
He smiles and rubs his hands in glee, delighted I gather by the selection. He cranes his neck to glance around and finally speaks. “Maybe he got eaten by cockroaches,” he chuckles.
“Who?” I ask.
“The bartender. Sorry, I have a morbid sense of humor. Name’s Edgar—but my friends call me Eddy. The few I have. “He pauses to consider this. “Some call me The Tomahawk Man.”
“Why?”
“I scalp people.”
“With a tomahawk?”
Eddy smirks. “I wish. I scalp people with my pen. It’s my God-given duty.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a literary critic. Well, I’m really a poet. And a writer of short stories. But that doesn’t pay the rent. Or more important, it doesn’t pay my bar tab. When I use my sabre to eviscerate pretentious fools… well, it still doesn’t pay the rent but it makes me feel good. And feeling good equates to decent brandy. And though I make enemies, tis better than making enemas, as much as my enemies need them.” He shakes his sad head. They don’t seem to understand that my jabs are meant for spurring them on to do better.”
“Well, if you write as you speak no wonder you upset them.”
“I write as I write. But right now a drink would suffice.”
I look around. “I don’t think the bartender is coming back. The last customer served himself.” I walk around to the inside of the bar. “What would you like?”
“Cognac.”
“I actually have the best right here,” I say, pointing to Louis XIII.
He nods solemnly. “Exactly as I was promised.”
I retrieve the bottle from its top shelf, pour a two-ounce jigger into a snifter and set it in front of Eddy.
He shakes his head.
“Something wrong?”
“I need at least twice that.”
“My apologies.” I pour another two-ounce jigger into the snifter.
Eddy raises his glass and empties the entire four ounces down his gullet. His eyes suggest a glimmer of a smile even if his mouth does not cooperate. “Now another for sipping,” he says.
I refill his snifter, four ounces.
“Got any opiates to go with it?” he asks out the corner of his mouth.
I shrug and shake my head.
“I thought not. Absinthe will suffice.” He points to his snifter.
“In with the cognac?”
Eddy drills his dark eyes into mine. “Where else?”
I go around the bar, find a bottle of the green fairy and add a half-ounce to his cognac.
Eddy glances around. “Dreary in here.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s just as I like it.”
“You seem oddly familiar,” I say.
Eddy shifts with discomfort. “You think I’m odd?”
Maybe he can read my thoughts because, well, I do, though it’s not what I meant. “Well, I’ve never seen anyone drink a whole glass of cognac in one gulp. But I was thinking I know of you from somewhere.”
Eddy postures himself with chest pumped out. “I wrote the best poem ever written.”
“Really? Which one?”
“The Raven.”
“Oh,” I say, getting into the spirit (emphasis on spirit) of the occasion. “You must be The Nevermore Man!”
Eddy shrugs. “More likely, based on my presence here, I must be forevermore!”
“Good one,” I say, starting to feel at ease with the absurd situation in which I find myself. “Tell me about Reynolds,” I add.
“Who is Reynolds?” he asks suspiciously.
“Exactly.” I pierce Eddy’s piercing eyes with my own.
He stiffens, then nervously glances over his shoulder. “What about Reynolds? Is somebody else here?”
I shake my head. “Just the dwarf. I don’t think he’s Reynolds. And before you, Rasputin.”
“Who?” he asks suspiciously.
“You wouldn’t know him. He came after your time. You do know you’re dead, don’t you?”
Eddy smirks. “I know more about death than anyone who ever lived. My business as a writer was death.”
“Let’s get back to Reynolds.”
“Let’s not.” He looks right, then left, them back into my gaze. ‘Why are you so interested in Reynolds?”
“On your deathbed, the story goes, while you were delirious after disappearing for several days, you repeated the name “Reynolds” over and over again. Ever since it has remained a huge mystery among those who revere your memory.”
Eddy chuckles, amused. “But why should anybody remember me—or care?”
“Because,” I say. “Thanks to the French, you became one of the most important literary figures in this country.”
Eddy spits out a mouthful of the cognac-absinthe concoction he’d been intending to swallow. He studies me squinting then growls, “Don’t patronize me or you may feel the sting of my pen.”
“I’m not patronizing you,” I say. “I’m dead serious.”
“Ha! And I thought only I fixated on death.”
“Just a figure of speech.”
Eddy nods solemnly. “Be careful what you configure with speech. Do you know what the writer asked the alphabet?”
I shake my head. “No, what?”
“May I have a word. How often are you in a bar this late?”
“Most nights,” I reply.
“Then you better start fixating on it.”
“On what?”
“Death,” says Eddy.
“So who was Reynolds?”
Eddy shakes his head. “I think you misunderstand.”
“About Reynolds?”
“No, about your presence here—and mine, too. This is not about you solving old mysteries about me.”
“Then what is it about?”
“Ah,” he says.
“Ah?”
“This is about your own madness.”
“But I’m not mad.”
“No?” Eddy toasts me, drains his potion and slowly fades from view. “Then why are you talking to a dead man?”
Eddy fades from view and is replaced by the dwarf, who is now wearing a black Calvary hat.
“Very cute,” I say. “Did you fuck up again like you did with Rasputin?”
The dwarf picks something from his teeth, inspects it, flicks it away. “Nope. Spot on.”
“Where are you going with this?”
The dwarf shrugs. “Why, your next drinking companion, of course.”
“Another drunk?”
“Last time I checked, this was still a bar, no?”
“What if I don’t want another drinking companion?”
The dwarf shrugs then mimics me in a munchkin voice. “What if I don’t want drinking companion.” He looks at me with sternness. “This is not about what you want or don’t want. I’m in charge, not you. And like I said before—you got no choice. Geddit?”
I scoff. “How about if I just walk on out of here.” I slide off my bar stool… and tumble to the floor. “What the…?”
The dwarf laughs—a high-pitched giggle. “You’ve drunk yourself leg-less.”
I begin to crawl toward the door. “I can still leave.”
The dwarf’s giggle morphs to all-out laughter as I raise an arm to the doorknob and discover it is beyond my reach.
“Damn,” I say, trying to propel myself higher.
“Now you know how I feel,” says the dwarf. “This ain’t a fair world for a little person.”
“So I’m really stuck in this bar? With you?”
The dwarf jumps down from the barstool and comes face-to-face with me. “Guess so,” he says, googly-eyed.
I crawl back to the stool and hoist myself up.
The dwarf pulls out a bugle from somewhere and blows a series of notes.
As the final note vibrates and fades, so does the dwarf, until…
…next Monday.