Like Mandarin - Kirsten Hubbard [8]
Solomon’s sat at the other end of Main Street, as far from the high school as possible. It wasn’t the only bar in Washokey. In a town of just thirteen hundred people, there were four places for cowpokes to get shitfaced—not even counting Della Bader’s seasonal Farm Bar in the unincorporated south.
But Solomon’s was one of the most popular. Mandarin served cocktails there until two in the morning on weekends, though she wouldn’t be eighteen until September.
On Saturdays, sometimes I hid in the doorway of the Sundrop Quik Stop across the street and watched Mandarin arrive at work. She had to pass the Methodist church, where a cluster of sunburned men often gathered out front, waiting for the afternoon service to begin so they could enjoy their evening festivities. I liked to imagine their conversations:
Would you look at that, the first man would say.
If only she wasn’t just interested in them out-of-towners, the second would reply.
Hell, I’d risk a jail sentence to have that girlie squallin’ in my bedsheets.
Shee-yit, I’d risk it all.
But if Mandarin heard whatever they said, she never reacted—even though she had an epic temper. Maybe she kept quiet because she knew she’d be slinging them beers that night.
She never paused to read the card-stock signs taped to the bar’s foggy windows: Happy Hour, Doller off Domestics, and Karyoke Singin Thursday Nites! Stepping over the yellow chow dog that slept in the doorway, she disappeared through the swinging saloon doors into the murky, smoky gloom.
So far, Mandarin had drawn a lopsided three-dimensional cylinder on the blackboard. She dragged the chalk beneath the shape with a deliberate screech, causing all the girls in the class to clap their hands to their ears.
The boys didn’t even twitch. Like me, they were spellbound.
They knew they had no chance, though. Mandarin’s men were usually five years, ten years older, and from other, larger places: Casper, Laramie, even Denver and Billings. Men with no reason to stick around, except for her.
At least, that was what everybody said.
Mandarin never broadcasted her flings the way other students did. She never parked at the A&W for floats and chicken fingers, or copped feels under blankets at autumn bonfires. All that was too time-consuming. Mandarin treated her men like the apples she bit the good parts from, then pitched; like the still-smoldering cigarettes she famously crushed beneath her bare feet.
I wondered how many of them she thought about afterward, and which ones, and why.
I’d actually seen Mandarin with a man just once. It was early the past October, the limbo between scorch and freeze. I remembered pressing my braid into my nose and mouth as I walked down Plains Street, as if the scent of my shampoo would ward off the wind, the tang of impending snow.
Plains Street had no sidewalks, only pebbled borders where dry lawns crumbled into asphalt. Mandarin’s house was small and shabby, like all the homes on her block. Some fortressed their yards with chain-link fences and padlocked gates. Others hid in thickets of cottonwoods or billowy lilac bushes. Mandarin’s blue-gray house looked naked in contrast, without a single bush or tree to shade it from the sun and wind.
I took advantage of any excuse to pass by, though I rarely saw her. But just catching a glimpse of the place where she slept, ate, and got dressed—the place where she brought her conquests on nights her father worked late at the bar—gave me a thrill.
When I had approached Mandarin’s house that day, I’d seen her standing outside, talking with some guy. Though I had no experience guessing the ages of men, I supposed he was in his midtwenties. As soon as I was within earshot, I stepped behind a tree.
“It’s just that I’m real busy,” Mandarin said.
“But I’m only gonna be in town till Tuesday.”
“There ain’t nothing I can do about that.”
“I just can’t stop thinking about you. And I can’t stand it, the thoughta all them brainless bastards pawing all over you. It makes me sick to my