Opening Day - In the Beginning

The bar room was cold. The big windows looking out onto the street were frosted around the edges, snow outside piled on the corners. Winter in Chicago, when the sun disappears for a couple of months and there are days when it doesn’t seem like it’s ever coming back.

It was after midnight when the Lincoln pulled up, a powder blue 1967 Continental that looked out of place in all that ice and snow. The driver parked halfway out in the middle of the street so his passengers could get out without stepping in a puddle. There was enough room to the side that another car could squeak by, although it would be tight. This being Chicago there would probably be a little honking and finger waving that would accompany the maneuver. I waited but the car just sat there, engine idling; whoever was inside were taking their time. I would have kept the engine running too, with the heat on full blast.

Up until that Lincoln showed, it had just been another slow winter’s night tending bar.

“How many batters have hit the scoreboard at Wrigley during regulation play?” My boss, Mike Connelly, was concentrating on our game; he was up two points and he thought he had me. He was sitting in his usual stool, what was left of his salt and pepper hair wreathed in smoke from his cigar.

It was a trick question, “None.”

Mike scowled and pulled at his stogie; I was good, he had to give me that. If anyone complained, that cigar would earn him a citation and a fine, but Mike was never one to sweat the little stuff. The way he figured it, it was his house, his rules and the city be damned.

“Who was the pitcher who beat the Cubs in the final game of the ‘45 World Series?” I said.

Mike didn’t have to think. “Hal Newhouser.”

I was good but Mike was the all time pro.

Mike’s a big guy, solid under a layer of suet. Connelly’s was his baby, an old time Chicago saloon; tin ceilings, long cherry wood bar, bottles lining the mirrors on the back. It was a comfortable throwback in the middle of a neighborhood where the parasites had torn down all the original housing stock and tossed up half million dollar condos with wrought iron balconies turning to rust and concrete stoops that would be cracked and broken the year after they were poured.

I’d been bartending there for three years and the Cubs trivia thing was something Mike and I had come up with to pass the time. We played for a buck a point – lose a point if you can’t answer, lose two points if you ask a question and your answer’s wrong, and the loser paid up at the end of every week. Mike was like an encyclopedia; he knew a little bit about almost everything and he knew almost everything there was to know about the Chicago Cubs.

I’d only stumbled onto the cult of the Chicago Cubs a few years earlier, but when that Cubbie bug bites you it gets in deep and you’re hooked for life. When we first started playing, Mike would run me ragged. Now, I still lost more than I won, but not by much.

Down the block, slipping past where the Lincoln was idling, I saw a lone pedestrian hustling up the sidewalk to the bar. The front door opened, swirling in the frigid wind off Lake Michigan.

“Jesus, Russell, shut it will ya?” I reached into the cooler to grab him a beer. Russell came over and shook Mike’s hand, pulling off his hat and gloves as he came.

“Colder than a witch’s tit in a brass ball,” Russell wicked the frost out of his goatee, putting up a fist for me to tap.

I knocked my knuckles against his and slid a bottle over the bar.

“Nice ride,” Russell nodded toward the window.

I glanced out again, “Yeah, what’s it doing out in this weather?” The car looked familiar, tickling a memory.

Mike looked out then, and he sat up a little straighter in his barstool.

“Hey Danny,” Russell said, “What do you call a zit on a blonde’s ass?” He was grinning, getting ready for the punch line, when the front doors of the Lincoln swung open.

Two guys stepped out, playing like the cold didn’t bother them; leather jackets unzipped and open to the wind, no hats, no gloves. The guy who got out of the passenger seat was a little taller than the driver – late thirties, jet black hair, big, swarthy features and a schnozz that must have got him a lot of grief until he toughed up.

“Shit,” I muttered. I knew him, the big guy with the nose.

Mike glanced over at me when I said that. He wasn’t smiling. He stood up, watching the men in the street.

The driver came around the car and stepped up onto the sidewalk, kicking snow off his shoes. I realized that I knew him too. He was shorter, more compact, with a flat, dead stare that could have melted the snow on the corners. I watched them through the window, standing there, talking things over. There wasn’t any conversation I could imagine that could keep me standing out in that cold.

The big guy opened one of the suicide rear doors and a woman got out of the back, so bundled up that I couldn’t see her face, or much of anything else for that matter. She didn’t stand around to chat; she headed straight for the bar and the two guys followed.

“A brain tumor,” Russell grabbed his moment. Both Mike and I stared at him. “A zit on a blonde’s ass is a brain tumor.”

He waited for a laugh. I forced a grin. Mike shook his head and waited for the door.

They came swinging into the bar, the guys loud, stomping their feet, staking out territory like a couple of feral dogs. The big guy had his roll out right away, a stack of bills thick around as a horse’s cock, with the large number stuff visible on the outside; he hauled it out of his pocket like it was his personality. The other one brought up the rear, looking around in the corners.

The woman moved out from between them and over to the side, away from the draft from the door, and started to unwrap. Knowing the guys she was with I was looking forward to the unveiling. I figured her for the stripper type, a girl who liked bad boys, fast cars and easy money. I turned to look at Mike and I saw right away that he wasn’t happy; he knew these guys too.

“Well, well, Tommy Minola,” Mike said, talking to the guy with the bankroll, “What brings you around these parts?”

Tommy looked at Mike kind of cocky, “I’m in town taking care of a little business. Thought I’d stop in and say hello.”

“How’s Jimmy?”

“Jimmy’s Jimmy, you know.”

Jimmy was Jimmy Capps, Tommy’s boss. The quiet man in the white suit and Panama hat who controlled a good portion of the Miami drug and skin trade.
Mike looked back over Tommy’s shoulder. “Who’s your associate?”

“This is Sal.” Tommy jerked a thumb back, “Sal, meet Mike Connelly, this is his dive.”

“Salvatore’,” Mike said, “Doing a little slumming this evening I see.”

Sal gave Mike the tough-guy eyes back, kind of smiled just to show he knew how to take a joke. “Yeah, well, what you gonna do?”

All this time, the chick’s off to the side, pulling off those layers that she’d bundled herself into. I was too busy watching the play between Mike and the other two to pay her any attention. But she’d managed to slough off most of her insulation, and I caught a whirl of blonde hair swinging out of the corner of my eye. I turned to give her the once over, ready to be pleasantly surprised.

I was right. I was surprised. I picked my jaw off the floor quick, but not quick enough that everyone in the room didn’t see the effect she’d had on me.
Tommy actually looked at me then for the first time, and it was his turn to be caught off guard. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

I ignored him.

She was looking back at me, and she was surprised too, blinking back the questions that were rising like thunderheads behind those liquid blue eyes. Surprised and off-balance but playing it cool; and that had always been one of the things that I liked about her, that ability to keep her head on straight when everything around her was spinning out of control. We stood there for a minute, both of us waiting for the other one to do something. That didn’t last long. Neither of us had much patience with uncomfortable silence.

“Well, Roxanne, it’s been awhile.” I wasn’t saying anything she didn’t know.

“Danny Menary,” she said, “And at first I thought I was going to like this place.”

— Ric Hess, May 10, 10:05 AM

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