The barmaid was in her twenties, and she was gorgeous in a way that suggested maybe she hadn’t been fully apprised of just how gorgeous she was. She had eyes darker than the delicious Maker’s Mark chocolates Barry had found in Jeff Park’s fridge, and her skin was as olive as Barry’s. “So who are you voting for?” Jeff Park asked her, his shiny Rolex Sky-Dweller lighting up a patch of bar around him.
The barmaid opened her gorgeous mouth. Barry thought he knew what her answer would be. But he was wrong. “I despise Hillary Clinton,” she said. “I just don’t trust her.”
“But, come on!” Jeff Park said. “Trump?”
“Socially I’m a bit more liberal,” she said. “But Trump’s going to rebuild the economy to where it should be. The condos around here aren’t being built fast enough under Obama.”
Barry thought that was an odd thing to say. It wasn’t like she was going to Emory or anything. She was a bartender at a lousy bar. Barry was as trickle-down as any guy, but what did the building of Buckhead condos have to do with her lot in life?
A filthy old homeless guy walked into the bar and said something in Spanish to the barmaid. He gave her a pair of sunglasses he had apparently found in the parking lot. “You want water or a Coke?” she asked him.
“Coke,” he rasped, and then made a smoking motion with his hand. She produced a handful of cigarettes. He stood there for a good five minutes savoring his free Coke, each sip punctuated by a burp that made his eyeballs tremble, then lit up a cigarette with a wet book of matches that took another five minutes to spark.
“That was very nice of you,” Jeff Park said to the barmaid.
“Eduardo comes in here all the time,” she said. “He used to sweep up all the bars in Buckhead and people took care of him. Now it’s just me.”
“See,” Barry said to Jeff Park, “this is the thing about America. You can never guess who’s going to turn out to be a nice person.”
They asked if there was anything to eat, and the barmaid gave them a Domino’s pizza menu. “You got to try the Philly-cheese-steak pizza,” she said. “I could eat it every night.”
Most of the young people in the bar were talking about sports and their own bygone athleticism, but then a trio of pink shirts came in from the heat and clustered around Barry and Jeff Park. “Can you believe this election?” Jeff Park asked them. He wasn’t shy in talking to people at all. Did that come naturally or had he spent his childhood practicing his friend moves? A Chinese dude in the South. It must have been hard.
“Trump’s going to win by a landslide,” the leader of the pink shirts said. He was the kind of guy Barry had gone to college with, only Georgian. “Everyone knows Hillary’s a liar. The folks up in Ohio and Pennsylvania, they sure know.”
“I agree completely,” Barry said. “Lower taxes and less regulation, that’s my middle name. I’ve voted only Republican since I was eighteen. I think Obama’s been a nightmare for this country. But I’m from New York, and, honestly, Trump scares me.”
As soon as Barry had said the last sentence, the pink shirts turned around in unison and left the bar. They just walked right out of the place without a word. “Nice going,” Jeff Park said. “You scared away the Trump Youth.”
“I’ve never had people walk out on me,” Barry said. “They say I’m the friendliest guy on the Street.”
“Maybe don’t announce that you’re from New York and scared of Trump all in one go.” Jeff Park looked flirtatiously at the barmaid, who slapped them with two more Miller Lites. The Domino’s Philly-cheese-steak pizza arrived via a gray-haired black gentleman who had difficulty breathing. Barry dug into it with the same insatiable hunger he now brought to the rest of his life. His mouth these days was mostly about salt.
Trump came on the screen. “I humbly and gratefully accept,” he said. A bunch of college-age Republican boy hipsters had gathered around Barry and Jeff Park to cheer on their nominee. They all had thick beards and were going bald. Barry was scared to say anything, lest they, too, walked out on him. “I’m not voting for Hillary,” one of them said to Jeff Park, who was gently teasing their opinions out of them. “It has nothing to do with her being a woman, it’s that she’s proven she can’t run the country.”
“That sounds like it has a lot to do with her being a woman,” Jeff Park said.
When Trump mentioned his support of “our greatest ally in the region, the State of Israel,” the most bearded of the Trump boys said, sarcastically, “Well, that just got you some votes,” and the rest of his cohort laughed. Who were these people, Barry wondered. These barmaids who gave free Cokes to itinerant Mexicans but wanted to vote for a man who would make fun of his disabled Indian son?
The convention ended and the hipster Trump supporters left to “turn it up a notch” elsewhere. Barry drank, feeling sad. The bar was now filled with guys in cargo shirts holding their beers at weird angles and girls in Daisy Dukes. A giant roach crawled by. This part of Buckhead was somehow at once wealthy and down at the heels. The band looked like the two hairy white guys from ZZ Top. They were singing a rocked-out version of “Ms. Jackson.” “First Melania cribs Michelle Obama’s speech,” Jeff Park said, “now this.”
Once again, Barry felt a generalized boredom around him, the boredom of a martial country without a proper war. Wasn’t that what Trump was promising his followers? An all-out conflict of their own choosing?
“I’m depressed,” Barry admitted.
“Let’s go back to my place and get some drink on,” Jeff Park said.
They walked out into the night, which smelled of pizza and gasoline. When they got to the Ferrari, a drunken bro in a backward cap stumbled up to them. “I’ll give you forty dollars for a spin around the block,” he said to Jeff Park. His Southern-belle girlfriend made pigeonlike noises behind him.
The guy actually took out two twenties. Jeff Park smiled sadly and shook his head. “I don’t need it,” he said.
“I can see that,” the drunk bro said, nodding at the Ferrari.
Barry and Jeff Park revved off toward midtown. Jeff Park was silent. “You O.K.?” Barry asked.
“That guy didn’t even care about ogling my car in front of his girlfriend. I wasn’t a threat to him, because I’m an Asian man.”
It took a while for Barry to unpack that statement.
“In this town, you’re either black or you’re white,” Jeff Park said.
Barry said some positive things about the inherent masculinity of Jeff Park and his automobile. He didn’t get a response for a while. “The top on this thing used to go down in fourteen seconds,” Jeff Park finally said, “but now it takes eighteen. Everything’s a scam.”
Barry burped some Domino’s and beer and then reached over and put his hand on Jeff Park’s shoulder. He wanted to add, “It’s going to be O.K.,” but decided to let the gesture speak for itself. Jeff Park’s shoulder moved unsubtly beneath his hand, the linen of his shirt slipping out of Barry’s grasp. Barry should have tried to give a friendly athletic shoulder massage, just like his guys at the office used to do, partly for laughs and partly because it felt good, but now it was too late. They drove the rest of the way in silence.
Back in the apartment, Barry pulled out some glasses and whiskey at the alcohol station to make them both “something to wash out that Miller Lite taste.”
“You go ahead,” Jeff Park said. “I think I’m going to turn in for the night.”
“You sure?”
“Gentex announces premarket. My biggest position. Been long all month.”
In his bed, Barry breathed hard, sniffing up the sweet alcohol of the Yamazaki in front of him. Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it. What had he done? But maybe it wasn’t the hand-on-shoulder gesture. Maybe it was the earlier stuff about the guy in the baseball cap trying to get a spin in his Ferrari for forty bucks. Barry kept reconstructing the time line over and over again. Ahmed had put his hand on his shoulder so many times. It really didn’t mean anything. It really didn’t. Nothing at all. He just liked being close to his friend.
It was early morning. Raining. The spires and crenellations of the midtown buildings had taken on a Gothic cast in the gloom. Barry carried his sorrow before him. “So I think it’s time for me to shove off,” he said. “It’s time to get back on the Hound.”
Jeff Park was eating nuts for breakfast and sipping on a macchiato. “O.K.,” he said.
Barry sat himself up on the counter. “This is going to sound embarrassing,” he said. Jeff Park audibly swallowed a nut. “I’m going to need a tiny bridge loan. I don’t have access to my funds at the moment. Maybe two thousand.”
“I can’t do that, Barry,” Jeff Park said.
That hurt Barry right away. “Why not? You’ve accommodated me for this long. This is just a loan.”
“You’re welcome to my house. Always. But I can’t stake you.”
“Who’s talking ‘stake’? Two thousand dollars. That’s four per cent of the cost of your Sky-Dweller. I feel like I’m getting mixed signals from you.”
Jeff Park looked down at his lap. “You fired me, Barry,” he said.
Ah, so there it was, finally.
“It wasn’t me,” Barry said. “It was Akash Singh. Everything at that place happens because of fucking Akash Singh.”
“You were there. You invited me out to breakfast at Casa Lever. And when I got there it was just you and the lawyer. What did the lawyer say? I’m afraid we’re going to have to part ways.”
“But that’s how it’s done. That’s just—the legal way.”
“You didn’t say one word.”
“I wasn’t allowed to say one word.”
“And I thought of you as something like a mentor almost.”
Barry sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It was nothing personal. I wanted to be a mentor.”
“I know,” Jeff Park said. “I fucked up. I still have dreams about that Excel sheet. I’m not making excuses. And this is nothing personal, either. I like you, Barry.” Their eyes locked, until Barry had to look away.
“I’m in genuine pain,” Barry said. “So much of the time. Doesn’t that deserve something?”
“Attention must be paid,” Jeff Park said.
“What?”
“ ‘Death of a Salesman.’ ”
“Not right now,” Barry said.
“I wish you had been straight with me,” Jeff Park said.
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t have any credit cards. You don’t have a cell phone. You travel on a bus where you can pay for the tickets in cash. Is it that GastroLux trade? I mean, have you been subpoenaed? Did you get your Wells notice yet?”
“That’s not why.” Barry wanted to cry. “I didn’t do anything wrong.” He thought briefly, angrily, about that yacht off Sardinia. The nebbish. The fucking nebbish from Valupro. It all led back to him. But even if the nebbish had said something and then Barry’s fund had traded on that “material nonpublic information,” where was the proof? So many funds had shorted GastroLux. It was the most shortable stock ever.
“It’s a witch hunt,” Barry said. “They’re after anyone who makes money. Anyone who has friends.”
“I’m not blameless,” Jeff Park said. “But I have my limits. And I know who I am.”
“See,” Barry said, “that’s what I’m trying to find out on this journey.”
“Sure,” Jeff Park said. “And then when it’s over you can tell people about it.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You can tell them the story of how you once took a bus across the country. You can tell them about your ‘journey.’ ”
The Bentley entered the exciting world of Atlanta’s downtown. They passed Red Eye Bail Bonds and the Atlanta DUI Academy. A group of men had gathered outside the bus station. “Be careful,” Jeff Park said. “This bus station has a bit of a reputation.”
The men outside were whooping it up about the car. “Bentley!” they shouted.
“I hope you find your Southern belle,” Barry said.
Jeff Park stuck out his hand and Barry shook it. “You’re going to turn out better than me,” Barry said. He grabbed his Rollaboard and got out of the car before Jeff Park could say goodbye.
~~完~~
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