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Victor's Rage

Victor's head fell limply forward hitting the bar with a hollow thump. "He's
out again," the bartender yelled to anyone listening. He pulled Victor's head back
by his hair, and let it fall again to the bar. Thump. "Ah, he'll be okay."

Victor was just another broken fixture at eh Babb bar. Nobody gave much
notice, save for the usual joke, "Like father like son." But, no one had any jokes
for his today. There were a few old men playing pool on a tattered table; cigarette
scars marred its plastic wood finish. A ball of dried sage smoldered in an ashtray
at the end of the bar; remnants of a dead heritage. The bartender kicked beer cans
out of the front door; "cleaning up" from the night before. He liked to make a
game out of it; giving himself a shot of whiskey for every can landing in the gravel
parking lot out front. He never could get them out with one shot.

A large man stepped into the doorway, dodging a can. "Cleaning up, Tony?"
he said jokingly.

"Yup," grunted the bartender. "Wha-da-ya want, Ben?"
"The special; nothing like beer for lunch."
Victor looked up through his jet black bangs. His head wavered as if too
heavy to lift. He knew Ben well. But then, everyone knew everyone well on the
reservation. Ben lived next to his mother in the housing. Victor remembered
walking into his house on occasion, mistaking it for his mother's. Government
housing all looks the same.
"Like father, like son," Ben laughed as he passed, patting him on the head
like a dog and sitting a few seats down the bar. Victor hated that: "Like father, like
son." He never could remember his father. He had died years ago. Victor was
only six, too young to feel his father's pain.
Victor murmured an incoherent, "Fuck you," and swung his head again to
the bar. Thump.
"Ah, he'll be okay," Tony said.

The evening sun moved down slowly behind the mountains, just beyond the
reservation. Victor now sat gazing out a window to the peaks from his bar stool.
Ben was reliving his first and only year of college while slurring through another
old basketball story. "I had a scholarship. 1 coulda been great." Victor shook his
head as if Ben were asking a question.

The bar began to fill; some just getting off work, most just getting bored of
drinking at home. Two kids unknowingly walked in, and moved carefully to the

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