My first inclination was to head for the graveyard, but I knocked that idea down as soon as it appeared. That was something I would have done. I had to think like Mickey. He wasn’t exactly enamored with graveyards. He still had a child-like fear of those places, as evidenced by the way he superstitiously held his breath whenever we drove past them.

My biggest fear was that Cal had stuck around and led him away from the store to mine his brain for more of whatever it was he was looking for. Mickey was easily led; the perfect victim for someone as adept at intimidation as Cal.

I headed to my house, thinking Mickey might be out on the front porch waiting for me to appear and rescue him from himself. I only got about halfway there when I noticed a bundled figure sitting on the curb across the parking lot from The Hive. Even with his back to the road, I knew it was Mickey. The parka hood, fur-trimmed, pulled to a tight ‘o’ and the slow rhythmic rocking forward and back; it had to be him. I threw my left signal on and pulled into the Hive lot.

As I inched the car up to where he was rocking, the ‘o’ of his hood slowly rose… but I could not see the darkness inside. I only knew that he was seeing me.

His hand slowly lifted to a wave as I put the car in park-leaving it running-and jumped out into the cold.

“Hey, Am,” Mickey said. His voice came out with a muffled gush of air that dangled in front of him a moment before dissipating in the cold. He loosened his hood and revealed his face to the headlights’ glare.

He had been crying.

“Hey, Mick. We’re not at work now,” I said, patting his shoulder and taking a seat on the curb beside him. “You don’t have to call me Am. We’re friends now.”

“Well, yeah. But not really. I’m on the clock still, Duncan. I’m sorry I didn’t stay.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m just relieved to see Cal didn’t trap you somewhere and give you what for for not telling him whatever it is he imagines we know.”

“Well he didn’t. I came here on my own. I was just thinking, that’s all.”

I put my hand on his arm and gave it a squeeze. This seemed to slow the pendulum motion his body had locked itself into. I only let go when his rocking had come to a complete stop.

Not sure what to say, I chose to go with nothing. We sat in the glare of the headlights for a few minutes just watching the white tunnels of breath escaping with our exhalations.

“Why don’t we go inside for a drink before we head back to work?” I suggested. Mickey startled back to himself, giving his head a shake to clear the fog. “We will have to get back soon, though… but we can stay a few more minutes anyway. Dean’s taking care of things for now, but you know how he gets.”

“Sure, Dunc,” he said. “Sounds good. I like being inside. It’s like we’re closer to her in there.”

“Yeah. I know what you mean, bud.” But I didn’t. Not really. To me it felt like we were walking in a ghost house whenever we entered The Hive. Roni was everywhere. I wondered if she had touched the glass that held my beer, wiped down the stool I perched myself on, lingered in the hallway I walked to reach the men’s room. The whole Hive experience had become excruciatingly painful for me. For Mickey, it was like coming home. For him, The Hive was the true final resting place for Rhonda Eastwood; somewhere he could go to pay his respects.

I got up and killed the engine on the car and locked it up. As we walked to the front door, I noticed for the first time just how bone-cold it was outside. “You can’t sit on pavement like that when it’s this cold, Mickey. You’re libel to get piles doing that.”

Mickey held the door open for me, ignoring the comment I had hoped would serve to lighten his mood.

The darkness of the Hive reached out and pulled us in. Never did a bar have a more apt name. The Hive was dark and hectic. I always had the sense there was so much going on I wasn’t quite privy to and I was acutely aware of its manic insect hum. I was not comfortable there when Roni was present and I hadn’t warmed up to it at all in her absence. There was also the distinct impression that such good friends of Rhonda’s were not welcome.

I followed Mickey to where I knew he would go. Our table was in the corner behind the pool table. We spent many hours there watching patrons shooting pool while waiting for Roni’s shift to end.

Mickey slipped into the chair against the wall. This was his normal chair too. In the corner he could watch for Roni to make her appearance. I pulled out the chair across the table from him and sat down.

“We’ll have one quick drink,” I said. “Then it’s back to the grindstone.”

“Sure, Duncan.”

I took my coat off and hung it on the pool cue rack beside the table. This was a signal for Mickey, who seemed to be operating on auto-pilot. He chose only to toss his hood back off of his head, though. He was only half-willing to leave the cocoon and join me in the Hive. The coat would stay on.

It was extremely rare that nobody was shooting pool and I had half a mind to just take up a cue and start playing myself. It would have lifted Mickey from his funk, but the fact that Dean was left in charge at the store niggled my thoughts like a canker. I stared into the two pools of light shining on the table’s purple felt surface instead, waiting for Mickey to make sense of whatever it was he was worrying on and spit it out.

Tate himself came over to take our order. Tate was the owner, a pessimistic piece of misery who looked the same as long as I’ve known him. When we were growing up together, he was Ryan. Somewhere in high school Ryan slipped away and he has been stuck with his last name ever since.

“What can I get ya?” he asked, not even attempting to hide his contempt. He carried a germ laden J-Cloth and swiped a single swath through the center of the table with it, dropping down two cardboard coasters along the way.

“Two draughts, Tate,” I said. I snipped a smile short when he turned abruptly and headed back to the bar.

“He’s a fat fuck, Duncan.”

I pulled my head back and raised my eyebrows, taking Mickey’s unexpected comment in. He smiled and unzipped his parka.

“Yeah. No kiddin’. I never did like that guy.”

“Roni used to call him a pencil dicked hellcat,” he said. “Said he was always hitting on her and causing her grief. Said he was so fat he couldn’t find it to pee.”

I laughed and looked back toward the pool table. It was calling out to us… getting louder as Mickey’s mood improved.

“I suppose she’s probably right about that,” I said. Tate was grossly overweight. With his graying hair and climbing widow’s peak he looked easily ten years older than us. He was three days younger than me. It used to piss him off that my birthday was celebrated first in school. “I certainly wouldn’t wanna go looking for anything under that pile of rubble he calls a gut.”

Despite the fact that his eyes were darting around the bar scanning longingly for the ghost of a girl who would never show, all was finally right with the world. Mickey laughed. It seemed he finally shook the cloud that Cal had dropped on him.

“Howsabout a game of pool?” I asked, forgetting myself. It was sink or swim time. Every day the manager in me struggled against my natural inclination towards mediocrity and slackerdom.

“We have to get back to the store after this beer. This place’ll be closing soon anyway.”

“You’re right,” I said. “Maybe you should be the manager. God knows my heart ain’t in it.”

Tate pressed in between our conversation and plopped two mugs of beer on the previously dropped coasters, spilling foam from each with the force of their landings.

“Two draughts. That’ll be six, eighty-five.”

The beer at The Hive was no longer free for Rhonda’s freeloading friends. I reached into my pocket and paid the man, smiling at the ridiculous vision Mickey had just gifted me. I hoped Tate wouldn’t mistake the smile for a kindness.

“Maybe I’ll just shoot a few into the corner pocket while you’re drinking your beer, Duncan,” Mickey said. He slid out of his chair, grabbed a cue and the triangle and began his short journey around the table emptying its pockets of balls. The noise of balls being dropped and rolled and dragged across the surface of the table followed.

I took comfort in the tap of the cue on the white ball and the clack of the break. Sipping my beer, I felt lulled and sated by Mickey’s noisemaking. It was easy for me to slip back into a time when we did this every night. We’d come and have a beer on our lunch-hour, maybe a plate of the Hive’s piss-poor fries on the side, get a few words in with Roni as she’d move through the bar like a queen on a mission.

Roni did do the books for the Hive, but she really did so much more. It was as though she ran the place. Tate wouldn’t know his arse from a cupcake. Roni was the best thing that ever happened to him. I could not figure out what went wrong. It was like all the pieces were sitting right in front of me, but I had no way of knowing how they fit together.

I certainly felt the hatred oozing out of Tate’s pores whenever Mickey and I slipped into the bar, but I couldn’t tell Mickey we weren’t going back. He loved being in the place where Roni had spent most of her time. It gave him peace. Taking that away from him would have destroyed him. Besides, her conscience had already warned me in no uncertain terms that she’d hide me if I ever stopped him from going to the Hive.

Another sip, another clink of ball against ball and the soft thunk of a pocket being filled was all it took for me to slip back completely.

***

There was something disarming in the way Rhonda acted while I was packing a few things at my place. I tried to imagine that it was simply the adrenaline of flight, her excitement in busting away from a town she always hated, but it was more than that. Her sudden impatience with me, and her insistence that Mickey wait in the car out of the way, made it feel like it was her journey. Not ours. She dismissed all my questions about things we would need with a quick, “It doesn’t matter”.

“Okay, Roni,” I said once we were back on the road. “What’s this really about?”

“What do you mean? Adventure. Escape. Getting out of this little town before it sucks us under. Before we disappear. Can’t you feel it happening, Duncan? Can’t you feel the fading?”

I wasn’t buying it. The look of desperation that crept into her face earlier was now holding court over the landscape of her features. The panic in her heart was visibly recognizable in her near panting, and the shimmer of sweat covering her forehead and arms. There was more to this thing than adventure.

“Bullshit,” I said.

“What? Can’t a girl have fun? It’s not just a man’s world, you know. We can break out every now and again too.” Her smile, with the dashboard lights illuminating her manic face, was more frightening than convincing.

“I don’t have anything,” Mickey said from the backseat. “Why don’t I have anything?”

“What, sweetie?” Roni asked, pleased by the intrusion. She turned to face him, offering him another of her shocking new smiles.

“Well, we didn’t go to my place. I didn’t pack any clothes. I’ll need stuff too.”

She swung around to look at me, looking for help getting out of the corner she had put herself in. I averted my eyes to the road, pretending I hadn’t seen her shift.

“I have money, Mickey,” she said. “Enough to buy you a couple of things. We have to get to the train station or we’ll miss the next train. Miss that, and we may not leave.”

“Why not take the car?”

“Yeah, Roni? Why not the car? What’s with taking the train? Whenever we get to wherever it is it’ll take us, how the hell are we gonna get anywhere? We’ll need a car.”

“The train’ll take us further. And we can sleep. It makes sense if you think about it.”

She interrupted Mickey’s next question with a blast from the radio. CCR took us the rest of the way to the station while my attention oscillated between the road and the nervous foot tapping and fidgeting going on in the seat beside me.

We pulled into the station and parked next to the main building. It was all I could do to beat Roni to the trunk.

When the trunk popped open and I reached in to grab my bag, Roni clenched my wrist. I stopped what I was doing and looked at her, knowing the other shoe was about to drop.

“Wait,” she said.

I tried to yank my wrist free, but she held firm forcing me to look at her.

“What’s going on here, Roni?”

“Drunk courage.”

“What-”

“I needed to play you and Mickey into the mix to get me this far. I was scared, Duncan. I needed you to think you were coming with me.”

“We are coming with you.”

“No. No you’re not.” She finally released her grip and reached in to grab her own bulging suitcase.

Mickey had joined us at the back of the car but remained quiet. He often watched the two of us like a hawk to see how tense situations would play out before adding his own two cents. Not being one to take sides, I think he was always quietly hopeful our arguments would never come to the point where he would have to.

“I’m not going to let you leave here without us, Roni.”

“Come on, Duncan. You want to leave here as much as you want a turkey on Tuesday. You were just playing along to hear the sound of your own voice.”

“This isn’t about seeing the world, is it Roni?”

She dropped her suitcase to the ground with a thud. Before I knew what was happening, she had me in a panicked embrace. Her hands then grabbed my head and her mouth found my nose, my cheeks… my mouth.

When she finally found my ears she held me closer and whispered, “Don’t make a scene, Duncan. You’ll only upset Mickey. You have to let me go. I have no choice. You have to.”

My eyes roamed and locked on Mickey. He was watching us like someone on the verge of a breakdown. I didn’t think it was possible for him to be more upset than he already appeared, but I had to listen to her. She had once again manipulated me into a corner; something Rhonda Eastwood was incredibly good at accomplishing.

Her mouth came back to mine and she whispered the same warning again, her hot breath filling my lungs as she spoke the words.

“You guys are scaring me,” Mickey finally said.

She released me and opened her arms to Mickey. As he fell in, I picked up her suitcase and headed for the front doors of the station. I had already relented to her will. She was getting on the train and we were staying behind. She would tell me what was going on in her own sweet time. And like a puppy lost, I would wait for that time to arrive.

***

“Hey, idiot,” Tate said, startling me from my reverie. “I think it’s time you let somebody else use that table. You’re only fooling around. These boys want to have a real game.”

He was flanked by the Martin brothers, Robbie and David. They were regulars at the Hive. Roni called them Trouble and More Trouble. They were a couple of muscle-bound simpletons I never gave the time of day. They smiled at Mickey, arms folded, waiting for him to cower under and walk away from the pool table.

“There aren’t any idiots here, Tate,” I said, rising out of my chair. “No need to speak to him like that.”

“And there’s really no need for the two of you to keep haunting this place now that Roni ain’t in it, either, Duncan. How’s about the two of you call it a night now? I’ve been a good host. I brought your beer. I let the thin genius there scratch up just about as much of my table as I can take. How about you just get your asses on back to the IGA and stock some shelves now.”

I moved toward him, balled fists at my sides. He took a step back at the same time the brothers Martin took a step forward, smirking their ill will in my direction.

“It’s okay, Dunc,” Mickey said, sliding the pool cue across the surface of the table. “I was finished anyway. We’ll go, Tate.”

“That’s very good of you, moron,” Tate replied. “I’ll tell Roni you stopped by.”

Mickey gasped and a dark anger crossed his features. I thought he would pounce on Tate, but he seemed to recompose himself on the spot. He grabbed his coat.

“Come on, Duncan,” he said, ignoring the three of them completely. He put his parka on and started walking towards the door. “We better get back to the IGA like he says.”

The Martins stopped their posturing and began to set the pool table up for a game, not once opening their mouths to speak.

“I don’t like you, Tate,” I said, making sure I was quiet enough so that Mickey couldn’t hear me. “And Roni didn’t like you either. She didn’t like you a lot, Tate. She warned me about you. I wouldn’t even come to this rat trap if it wasn’t for Mickey. He wants to be close to where Roni used to spend her time, but he doesn’t know how much she loathed the time she spent here.”

“Well don’t do me any favors, Duncan,” he replied. “Tell him not to come back and we’ll all be happy.”

“We’ll be back as long as Mickey wants to keep coming. And you are not going to stop us.” I leaned in close enough to smell his stale breath. “I’ll tell Roni you said hi. How’s that?”

He flinched. I saw it just before he regained his composure. He was just as uncomfortable with ghosts as I was. It made me wonder what it was Roni was keeping from me the night she boarded that train. The Hive was involved in that night. I sensed it like you sense someone watching you. You just know where to look… and when you do, there they are… looking like the cat that ate the rat. And as soon as I mentioned Roni’s name, it sure looked like a rat that Tate choked to swallow.