She walks through the empty bar, heels clicking like glassware in a sink on the wooden dance floor as she checks the back door and gives the men’s room a quick glance, a quick peek into the ladies’. She admires the shine of the hand-worn wooden rail, runs her fingertips across the rounded edge as she walks to the far end of the bar. Sits down. Pours a glass of something strong.
The silence seems louder than the thrum of the live band that played her stage earlier tonight and she settles into the soft well-worn leather of the stool, glad she sprang for the kind with backrests all those years ago. They’ve held up so well for the beatings they take.
She lights a cigarette and the sharp sting of acrid smoke hits her first, followed by the lingering swirl of the heady perfumes and colognes that graced the air tonight. It’s probably her favorite part of the honky tonk, the smoke and the perfume. The cologne and the leather of the boots that were shined hours ago. The way it all mingles on the dance floor like secret dance moves.
She loves dancing. She loves the line dances and the boot stomps. She loves the promenades and the two steps. She loves the slow, slow dances where the couple barely remembers to move because time is standing still and so are they, mesmerized.
She’s mesmerized by it all. By the dancing, the live bands, the customers. More than customers, most of them are family. It’s a small community and this is a comfortable place that by day draws a food-crowd; and a loud, rowdy, good-time crowd at night. The honky tonk is just large enough to rage each night but small enough to make it feel like home. And it really does, she realizes.
Old Man Joe brought her a war flag to set on one of the many shelves. Says it’s for a friend of his, lost to the war. Says this place would’ve felt like home for him. Sometimes Old Man Joe and his friends meet at the table way in the back on a quiet Tuesday afternoon, and get lost in their memories and their glasses. She put the flag on the shelf way in the back. Next to the table. The bar is filled with ephemera and trinkets and artwork of indiscriminate origin. An animal head here and there. Knick knacks on random shelves that tell a story of local history and local legends.
People tell her their stories. And their joys. Their pains. Their triumphs. And sometimes they don’t tell her anything. She’s come to know them. To cherish them. Even the ones who grunt when she talks to them (there are two of ‘em). She loves em anyway. She loves watching them all from her spot behind the bar. The frat boys who come to party. The spitfire gal at the end of the bar with the tequila loosened tongue, the woohoo girls in the back corner. The cowboys, the rockers, the goth couple with the matching piercings.
It’s a frenetic energy that buzzes through the place when the dance floor is full and the boys are being rowdy and the girls are laughing, heads tilted back. The bartenders are moving at full steam, doing their own dance with the customers. Everybody leaving at light’s-on feeling energized from the vibe, the pulse inside a honky tonk.
She throws open her arms and feels it still pulsing in her soul, and to her tippy toes. She sighs happily and finishes her last drop of whiskey, letting the silence and the bubbly scent of suds and hot water fill her senses. She skirts behind the bar with a twirl to a tune that only she hears. Begins humming it. Glassware is calling.
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