Chapter 6: The Debt

The bar was a narrow brick room on Atwells Avenue with a pressed-tin ceiling and a pool table nobody had leveled since 1994.

My crew drank there every Friday.

I had celebrated my yard's first profitable year at the third stool from the end.

Rosalia parked the Buick in a fire lane and cut the engine.

"Test two," she said. "A man owes money and cannot pay it. Papa wants to see what you do."

"What's the right answer?"

"If I told you, it wouldn't be a test."

"Then what's your guess?"

She looked at the bar's front door.

A red sign hung on it that read CLOSED, though it was one in the afternoon.

"My guess is you're about to find out," she said.

I got out of the car.

I could hear the noise before I reached the door, wood splintering and a man yelling.

I pushed it open.

The owner, a gray-haired man of sixty with a towel over his shoulder, stood behind the bar with both hands up.

In front of him, three men were taking the room apart.

One swung a baseball bat into the liquor shelf, and bottles broke in a gold and green rain.

One held a regular by the collar, a retired postman who came every day for a single beer.

The third was the square bald man from the gas station, with tape across the bridge of his nose and two black eyes.

"I told you it's due today," he said to the owner. "Forty thousand. Where is it?"

"I told you, I don't have it."

"Then we take what you've got."

"It's my father's bar. I've kept it open thirty years."

"You should've thought of that before you borrowed from the wrong people."

The bald man looked up and saw me.

He went very still.

His men turned too.

Even the regular stopped squirming.

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