She took the barstool on the end and she decided to keep her black leather jacket on. Sheila had long, brown hair and she sat reading On The Road while Matt Burke carried on four barstools down. Forty years old, Matt was a non-stop talker and he always talked with his hands, looking from from person to person. Sheila never rolled her eyes at people but, when Matt Burke talked in her direction, somewhere inside she was rolling her eyes. She'd read the same paragraph four or five times.

The seventies sitcom, All In the Family, was on the television high up in the corner.

Her plans were to travel the world when she got out out of college in two years. She knew she belonged in Paris or in Dublin, but she was sitting in this tavern, in the neighborhood, with autographed pictures of Rocky Marciano and John F. Kennedy up over the bar. Decades worth of Celtics teams and Bruins teams stared back at her through the cigarette haze and, from the high windows, you could see the nighttime Boston skyline. She needed to be near Paul and it was the only reason she came in. She wouldn't believe he'd turn into one of the red, jowly barflies who'd been here forever.

When he was on his own turf, Paul wore a self-indulgent grin that took it for granted people would return it. He was handsome and square-jawed at twenty-one. His height was just short of medium, instilling in him a boyish mix of cockiness and deference. He kept a hand in the pocket of his athletic jacket when he talked and he held a bottle of beer in the other. He and Sheila left the neighborhood for college two years ago. Paul had scored surprisingly high marks on his college admissions tests. But he missed the neighborhood and came home. He hung dry-wall all day and came in here almost every night. He was garrulous and content and he had a glad word for everyone who came in. He was happy Sheila was back from college on summer vacation and he didn't mind when she stayed down at the end of the bar while he joked with his friends.

She thought she'd get him out of here one day and there was no reason to believe she'd fail at anything because she was twenty, and smart, and there was a whole world to see.

On TV, Archie was talking to Meathead. "You, know..your jungle-bunnies." Roaring laughter from the bar. "..spearchuckers." Old Mr. Mulcahey's chest heaved up and down, wheezing in toothless laughter. He was the milkman when Sheila was a little girl, when they still had milkmen. Smoke curled from the cigarette in his thick fingers, up past his thin red face.

The Salvation Army man came in the door on his nightly sweep. His round and kindly face bobbed from barstool to barstool as the tambourine filled with quarters and dollar bills. Some of the older men tossed in their dollars hoping God Himself would notice or at least the other old men. Money given, of course, in proportion to the volume of whiskey and beer in the giver. Sheila knew most of them since she was a little girl and imagined the scolding wives, later on, demanding to know where all the money went.

She looked up from her book to throw in two quarters and noticed a newcomer entering the bar. Unsteady from drink, he was a youngish forty-five, with a corduroy sportcoat over a blue polo shirt. She couldn't see his eyes closely but she suspected they were light blue like the shirt. Around here, anyone with long, wavy brown hair and horn-rimmed glasses like that had the look of a collegiate, someone the regulars at the bar would call a smart-aleck, a liberal. A liberal was anyone from outside. Sheila was an outsider here too and she stared for a moment. At first glance, there was a gentle insouciance to him. He took his Scotch on the rocks toward the back and put two quarters in the pool table. It was easy to see he'd been drinking too much.

She caught herself staring, shifted her weight self-consciously, and looked back to her book.

Then everyone's attention shifted to Jay Cummings.

Jay threw his head way back and drained the beer bottle. The bottle pointed straight up at the ceiling while gravity pulled long, blond hair from the back of his head, in a straight line down to the floor. He stepped backward and smashed his elbow into the wall panel with almost all his might. His eyes were narrow and his mouth opened slightly and he looked to the floor for an instant and then his elbow slammed the wall again. CRACK. Again. CRACK. "Sex and drugs and rock and roll," he whooped. Long hair was just coming into the neighborhoods. Before this, it was for rich kids and college protesters. Just a few years ago, someone coming in to the bar with hair like that could get hurt. But it was the early seventies and the young men were buying into the rebellious, androgynous force that the Beatles and the Stones and The Doors were selling. But it was long hair and muscle shirts around here, not long hair and tai-dai.

"For Christ's sake, Jay," yelled Joanie, the bartender. "Paul, he listens to you. Go talk to him."

"Jay, you mental case." Paul walked up from behind and he put Jay in a bear hug and swung him around.

Jay said, "Paulie, I'm feeling crazy tonight. I'm gonna wreck somebody."

"Not me. You're not going to wreck me, are you Jay?" Paul held him from behind, pinning his elbows to his side, which Jay allowed. He could have broken Paul's grip in an instant.

"Not you, Paulie." Paul calmed him down and when he looked over to the bar, Joanie puckered up in a grateful kiss.

In Sheila's vision, the stranger at the pool table stood out in front of the rest of them like a vibrant 3-D figure. He didn't belong here and she was afraid what could happen if he said the wrong thing.

Raucous laughter was the life-force of the bar. It was why they came. Joanie turned to Matt Burke, who hadn't worked in a year and who always told funny stories. When she talked she put her forearms up on the bar. She primed Matt's pump. "So, when you left here last night you were three sheets to the wind."

Matt leaned forward. "So when I leave here I go home and I'm tip-toeing up the stairs and I'm bouncing wall to wall so then I get my mother up."

"You're forty years old, Matt," she laughed.

"Yeh, but you never stop loving your mother, do you? And she's against drinking so I try to be - how do you say it - discreet."

"You ever try to sneak a girl in?" Joanie lighted a cigarette, waved the match side to side to put it out, squinted at the smoke in her eyes.

"No."

"Well, where do you do it?"

"In the car, mostly."

Joanie reached across the bar and tousled his hair. "I heard Moynihan lost his house-painting job. What happened this time?"

When he talked he looked from Joanie to Sheila to Paul, who was standing next to Matt's barstool. He was a master storyteller, everyone knew, but no good at carpentry or housepainting or driving a forklift or selling cold drinks at Fenway Park.

"He's out in Newton," explained Matt, "Moynihan's boss has him finishing the inside of this brand new house. But he's been out drinking all night so he gets a case of the runs and he runs up to this beautiful bathroom, probably no-one's even used it yet. He's all alone in the house. Then he hears a lady's voice coming up the stairs. It's a real-estate lady showing the house. Moynihan panics. He can't reach the lock on the door from the throne. To get rid of the smell in there he decides to light up a match. Then he has two, then three matches going. I swear to God, this real-estate lady swings the bathroom door open with her arm and she's saying something like 'all ceramic' and this old couple is staring in when they see Moynihan sitting on the throne holding three matches, burning the hell out of his fingers. So he smiles and he gives this little wave to the real-estate lady. She slams the door and he swears you could hear the three of them running down the stairs and out the front door and down the front walk. Billy Collins was the boss. He drove out to the job site so he could fire him personally. Told him, 'I got black dudes waiting to take your job.'" Joanie pulled her head back and roared and walked the length of the bar, seeing who needed a refill.

At the pool table, the wavy-haired stranger was preoccupied and drunk - content to let the rest of the place exist without him. He mumbled and circled the pool table and the flourescent light caught a tightness around the mouth that hinted to Sheila of some fierce promise betrayed.

Sheila looked away. She thought how she hated going over to Paul's house. He was the first in his family to go to college. His father worked in the shipyard most of the time and when Paul was in high-school his mother bought the entire set of Funk and Wagnall's Encyclopedia in the A&P. Ninety-nine cents for the first volume, two-forty-nine for each one after that with a purchase of five dollars or more. She didn't know whether to put the whole set in the boys' room or out in the living room. "She was afraid the rest of the family would think she was putting on airs if she put it in the living room," Paul had told Sheila, sardonically drunk and staring close at his bottle of Budweiser. "For Christ's sake in my family, they thought books out in the open was putting on airs."

Once, at a family party at Paul's house, Sheila corrected Aunt Margaret. "Margaret, being an epileptic doesn't mean someone's nuts." Aunt Margaret was the matriarch. The other aunts pursed their lips as discomfort and silence flurried around the room. After that Aunt Margaret always said that Sheila was the college girl who was too good for everybody else. Paul chuckled when he told the story. Sometimes Sheila pretended to laugh along with him. Other times, she liked to remind him that Aunt Margaret was an idiot.

"We'll only stay for a few more beers, OK?" Paul appeared behind her scratching her back lightly.

"Do you need this place that bad?" She hooked her arm around his waist.

"It's the first time I've been here this week. Any other night we'll go where you want."

"Do you want to spend your whole life here?" Her lips compressed in a hopeful, querelous grin.

"I don't want to spend my whole life here. I told you, I want to go back to college next year. I want to coach. I won't be here every night and you know I want you around. I love you."

His head turned as Jay gestured for him to come over to one of the empty pool tables. He kissed her while she relaxed her hold.

She knew if he stayed late enough tonight his eyes would get distant and his face would soften with song and drink. He could sing Beatles songs and Motown songs and, although he had never been out of the country, he could sing all the rebel songs his uncles taught him. He hated school, but at night in a bar he could recite bits of Kipling and Poe and Shakespeare. When he sang, his eyes were sad and they said it doesn't matter what we do here on earth, we all have to sing until we can stare into eternity. She worried that their romance tied him to this senseless earth, something he'd never fully accept.

He left college. She stayed. Typing was said to be important and the neighborhood admired a girl's luck and her pluck if she got a good job with the Telephone or the Edison after high-school but she went off to the state university instead. She knew she'd never leave the neighborhood completely behind. Never lose the chip on her shoulder that came standard issue in the two and three-deckers. And she hated phony liberals like the ones who wrote All In the Family, claiming to expose racism. Dumping on the kind of people who came in here. They knew racism sells. Piety too. They had something for everyone. They sold racist jokes and chest-heaving guffaws to the people at this bar and then claimed to be better than them. She was torn between these neighborhood loyalties and the recent, frank assessment that the people in here were morons.

Major waddled over so Sheila could scratch the side of his head. Major was the half-Shepherd that belonged to the bar and the story went that Major drank at least a bowl of beer every morning. "Major," she cooed, "if you drink I wouldn't blame you."

She knew the place was her rival mistress and her lips curled up in an indulgent grin, elbow on the bar, her chin cupped in the palm of her hand. She thought of the real-estate lady and the old couple running down the stairs and out the front door. She thought of this preposterous bar that smelled like piss and Lysol, with Salvation Army men and drunken dogs. This place that somehow kept them from all going crazy. And Paulie. Somehow she'd get Paulie out of there.

He said he wanted to go back to college but she knew that he signed up for the civil service exam and when he talked to his uncles he talked about getting on the fire department. A fireman's wife, she'd end up a school teacher in the city, resented by his family because she was educated. And she didn't want to watch Paul's belly grow, his jowls fall in an uncomprehending march to middle-age while he spent half his time in a place like this.

It was the first time love touched her and it struck her that she understood books better than she understood any of this. Freedom was what people didn't want, she'd read in Dostievski. And the characters in this squalid, dark-panelled, ridiculous hole knew the same thing in their own way. They needed beer every day. And scolding wives. That sense of sin and escape they got when they came home late for supper every night. The far-off - someday I'll do better - hope. Sin and redemption and, for those too far over the line, the holy communion of the AA meeting.

Jay walked by the pool tables. "Maybe I'll shoot pool with the old guy," he said, nodding toward the stranger. He lifted his arms in a muscular stretch. He was big, with a blond, baby-fat face and he spoke as much with his body as with words and he slapped his palms on the green felt.

"Let's shoot for drinks, Pops."

Twice since he came in, the newcomer had retrieved Scotch on the rocks from the bar, weaving more each time. Nobody ever got shut off. Only if you started a fight or if you made a grab at Joannie.

He braced himself against the pool table, flat-footed and fumbled for the quarters in his pants pocket and came up empty and he fumbled in a pocket of his sport coat. His fist came out loaded with crumpled tens and twenties. Coins dropped to the floor and rolled away.

Jay circled like a shark.

She put the book down and sat, both elbows on the bar, twisting a red plastic straw in her two hands and she saw danger for the handsome, drunk, inept stranger at the pool table whom she thought carried secrets worth knowing.

She got her first beer of the night and left the bar stool and leaned against an empty pool table, drinking straight from the bottle. She'd been right; the stranger had blue eyes. The Stones were on the juke box singing "I Can't Get No Satisfaction," and Jay kept time by bouncing the butt end of his cue stick on the floor. She leaned against the table with the cockiness of a girl who drinks her beer out of a bottle and the wariness of someone who doesn't belong. She tried and failed to make eye contact with the stranger.

Jay beat him every time. Until now the man barely acknowledged their existence. But when attention was directed at him, it energized him and he held his head up and his speech grew sarcastic and wisecracking. By now he seemed drunk to the point where he didn't know where he was. He beamed and said something that chilled Sheila's scalp.

"Introibo ad altare Dei."

Jay was stymied. "What are you saying, mister?"

"Introibo, I repeat, ad altare Dei. I go to the altar of God."

"What's this shit, Spanish?" Jay turned to Paul.

"It's Latin," Paul said slowly, wonderingly, staring very closely at the stranger. "Hey, mister, you were an altar boy?"

"Indeed, and grew to be an altar man."

"There ain't no altar men, only altar boys," insisted Jay. "What's this liberal trying to pull?"

"Altar man. I am an altar man by profession."

Paul held his gaze on the stranger and for a moment he was the older of the two. "You saying you're a priest?"

"There you have it. Introibo ad altare Dei." His eyes looked clearer to Sheila, if just for a moment. Like he'd brought them back in focus long enough to issue a kind of self-destructive challenge to all of them.

Paul responded, as if from a distance, "Ad Deum qui laetificat, juventutem meam. To the God who gives joy to my youth." Ten years ago, back in Paul's day, altar-boy class was in Latin. He backed up slightly as he recited.

"He's a fucking priest?" said Jay, wide-eyed, like the world made no sense at all. Sheila made a quieting, palms-down gesture, though she shared Jay's consternation.
Except for Joanie, she was the only female in the place.

Careless aggression grew in the stranger's grin. Sheila sensed that he had no idea where he was - or even that there were people around him. He lurched forward to Jay and, in a move that made Sheila back up a foot and let out a gasp, he grabbed Jay between the legs. Paul froze. The stranger barely took the trouble to whisper. "That's right," he slurred, "come out back with me, I'll give you twenty bucks." At his touch, Jay leapt back reflexively. Sheila could see that the older man was killing himself, trying, somehow, to kill them all, trying to bring the whole miserable bar down in a last, despairing act of self-hatred.

Then Jay stepped back another foot - this time slowly, taking time to think things over. His eyes went narrow. He said, "sure, I could do that for twenty bucks." He said it quietly, almost reverently. It went quiet in the bar. Jay pulled Paul back "Did you see the tens and twenties he's throwing around?"

"Paul, don't let him do this." Sheila grabbed Paul by the back of his sleeve and took him to a corner and stared in his glassy eyes. Laughing and smirking, Jay and the priest headed for the back door.

"That Jay is a lunatic." Her voice was raspy and frantic. "Why do you have anything to do with him? Why are we even in a dump like this? What am I doing here with you and the rest of these morons?"

"Jay's having a little joke with the guy is all." Paul put his hands on her shoulders, their faces up close.

"Jay could kill someone like that," she sputtered. "What am I getting into with someone like you?"

The rear entrance of the bar smelled like the alley and the dumpster and the fuel oil stored down cellar. She took long, angry strides. She looked up and down the alley. Her nostrils were wide. Jay staggered forward and back, laughing uncontrollably.

"You shoulda seen him," he snorted.

"What did you do to him?"

"I slapped him around and took all his money and he took off down the alley." Jay's words dissolved in waves of laughter. "I have a hunch we won't see him around here again."

There was no trace of him.

She had thought she could control this place. Paul was behind her with both hands on her shoulders. "There, there, baby, take it easy." He thought it was funny. For a few days the incident would be hush-hush until Joanie was sure there wouldn't be any cops coming around asking about a mugging in her back alley. Then the story would live forever in the inner circle at the bar. Better than a Matt Burke story. Sheila could see Paul telling it. Perfecting it - still trying it out years later as a middle-aged fireman.

Earlier, Jay had said he was going to wreck somebody and it was the only straight talk she'd heard all night. She remembered that she'd left her purse unguarded back at the bar. She thought to put a bookmark in On The Road on her way out the door.

On the street she hoped her face wasn't streaked. She was afraid she'd never wash the smell of the place out of her hair. Paul shouted after her, "I'll give you a call tomorrow, is that OK?"

She walked faster - shook her hair from side to side - let black night air blow through it.

^