Detached
by Noel Sloboda
I don’t want to sound judgmental, but Rodney really should have stayed away from local bars. Everyone in town knew about the pacifism pledge he made back in September, ‘01, and many wanted to test him.
Boys from the local community college would surround his table, baiting him with remarks about his mother, calling him names. Sometimes they threw bottle caps or peanut shells in his hair, or they tried to trip him when he got up to leave, or even to go to the bathroom. It wasn’t raw-mean, but it wasn’t exactly light-hearted. Still, I liked to watch these little scenes play out. Rodney’s response to the goads was always the same, studied and collected. Nodding slightly, as though he could discern something sensible in the abuse, he locked his eyes on a spot miles away. He never said anything, just breathed like some Buddhist monk, in through the nose then out, long exhalations from deep in the lungs. He seemed so at peace. The boys inevitably grew bored and moved on. Sometimes, they even left a Troegs Pilsner for Rodney, as if to say thanks for the sport.
This routine would have continued for a long time if that woman from the local community college hadn’t visited the same bar as Rodney one Thursday night back in November. She was an anthropology professor, I think. She might even have been doing some sort of fieldwork. Right after she entered the bar, she settled at a table near the door and started to write in a little green notebook. She kept at it for about half an hour, scribbling away. Then the boys arrived. They didn’t even take off their coats before they started in on Rodney. At first the professor just watched as they practiced their rituals, circled Rodney’s table while making faces behind his back. Next they peppered him with little gin-soaked paper balls blown out of straws. He only sat there doing his breathing. It seemed like business as usual.
But all of a sudden, the professor was up. Some line, visible only to her, had been crossed. Pocketing her notebook–and breaching all scientific protocols–she moved in on the boys, waved a blood red press-on in their faces, and started shouting. I couldn’t hear what was said from where I sat, but I could tell they listened to her. They might have known her from the school, or maybe they were just surprised. As they stepped away, though, Rodney stood up. His face was crimson. He placed a hand on the woman’s shoulder and shoved her back, hard.
“Back off,” he barked in a voice that wasn’t quite his own, a voice loud enough to be heard across the room. The professor teetered and bumped into the bar.
She seemed like she was about to say something, for a moment. Instead, she plopped down on a barstool, took out her little green notebook, and began to write again. Rodney seemed confused as he dropped back into his seat. His face was still bright and shiny, but now it looked like a balloon with a leak left behind at the county fair. His face seemed to fold in on itself as he let out several sharp, little breaths and waved irritably for a waitress to bring him a Troegs. The professor bobbed her head up and down almost imperceptibly as she continued to write, watching Rodney as he guzzled his beer and then let out an uncomfortable belch. I couldn’t actually hear the burp from where I sat, but I was sure I could hear that pencil scratching, over the clink of glasses and the buzz of the crowd. I wondered what the professor saw and what kind of story she told about her encounter with Rodney.
Although I’ve kept my eyes open for the professor, I haven’t seen her since that night back in November. And I haven’t seen Rodney either. He went to county lock up early the next morning, after he was pulled over on his way home. Nobody knows all the details about what happened–only that he made a dash from his car after being stopped at a sobriety checkpoint. He hadn’t had that much to drink, maybe two or three beers all night. People speculated that maybe he was worried about the smell from those gin-soaked paper balls, which he never bothered to clean out of his hair. Others said he had just bottled up so much anxiety after all those years of silently enduring taunts that he panicked. But I think Rodney probably lost it when the cop started to write in one of those little books cops always have. With that official ledger in his face, Rodney might have decided he didn’t want to wait for the conclusion to the story. So he fled the scene, counting on strong lungs to give him an edge as he made his break.
Copyright © 2009 Noel Sloboda. Published on Monday, 20 July 2009. The permanent link for this story is http://angler.donavanhall.net/03/?n=3.
Noel Sloboda lives in Pennsylvania, where he teaches at Penn State York. He is the author of Shell Games (sunnyoutside, 2008). His fiction has appeared in a number of places, including Keyhole Magazine, Sein und Werden, and Skive.
