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I located a pen in the glove compartment and tore off a piece of the Vermont state map. I’d considered just calling Luther and having Orson cancel our meeting, but I had misgivings about my brother’s current ability to mask the atrophy in his voice. So stuffing the pen, paper, and Glock into my jeans pocket and pulling on a gray wool sweater, I locked the car and walked across the dirt parking lot toward the bar.

Above the door, a neon sign displayed RICKI’S in blue cursive. I walked under the humming sign and entered the deserted bar, which was smaller than my living room. Its ceiling was obtrusively low, booths lined the walls, and with only two windows, one on either side of the door, I felt as though I were stepping into a smoky closet.

The sole patron, I sat down at a bar stool on the corner. The bar was constructed of unsanded railroad ties that still smelled of tar. Names, oaths, and declarations of love and enmity had been carved into the black wood.

As I pulled out the pen and scrap of paper, a woman emerged from the kitchen.

"We ain’t serving yet," she said. She wore tight jeans shorts and a black turtleneck with BEARCATS: ’94 STATE CHAMPS across the chest. Her black hair was wiry and stiff, and she’d have benefited from orthodontic care.

"Your door was open," I said.

"Well shit. What do you want?"

"Whatever you have on tap is fine."

While she grabbed a glass out of the freezer and commenced filling it with bronze ale, I started what would be Orson’s note to Luther.

L - I made a

She set the glass down on the railroad tie. "Dollar fifty."

I handed her two of Orson’s dollar bills and told her to keep the change. Foam spilled down the sides of the glass. I took a sip, tasted flecks of ice in the draft, and continued scrawling on the scrap:

friend this morning--you know how that goes. In fact, she composed this letter before I… Anyhow, I though it prudent to leave town asap. Sorry we couldn’t meet tonight. Have fun in Sas. O.

I folded the torn map into a neat little square, wrote "Luther" across the town of Burlington, and set it on the bar. Then I sat there, drinking my beer, thinking, So people actually leave notes with bartenders. How many times have I written this scene? It doesn’t feel real.

Sipping the beer, I surveyed the empty bar — unadorned concrete walls, no jukebox or neon beer signs. There weren’t even cute cowboy slogans to fake the prairie culture for transient easterners like me. Just a drab, hopeless place for hopeless westerners to get drunk.

I finished the beer, and as though her ears were attuned to the sound of empty glasses clinking the wood, she came back through the door from the kitchen and stood in front of me.

"You want another one?" she asked.

"No thanks. Where is everyone?"

She looked at her watch. "It’s only six," she said. "They don’t start getting here till seven."

A car pulled up outside. I heard its tires lock up in the dirt.

"Where’s Ricki?" I asked.

"That son of a bitch is dead."

She took my empty glass and set it in a brown plastic container.

"Would you do something for me?" I asked.

"What?" she said joylessly. She was possibly the most indifferent person I’d ever met. I wondered why she didn’t just go slice her wrists. I pushed the square of paper across the ties.

"I’m supposed to meet a friend here at nine, but I can’t. Will you give this to him?"

She looked suspiciously at the square of paper, then picked it up and jammed it in her back pocket.

A car door slammed outside.

"What’s he look like?" she asked.

"Shoulder-length black, black hair. Even darker than yours. Very white. Late twenties. Fairly tall. Dark eyes."

At the same instant I heard footsteps approaching the door, she said, "Well hell, ain’t that him?"

I glanced over my shoulder and watched Luther Kite walk through the door. Sliding off the stool, I slipped my hand into my pocket and withdrew the Glock. By the time I’d chambered a bullet, he was standing in my face, looking down on me.

I took it in piecemeal.