The Man Who Lost His Temper

Bernie Kaminski had kept the Bitterroot for twenty-two years and had arrived at one rule, which was that a man's second drink is where the truth gets warm and a man's fourth drink is where it gets loud, and that his job was to be somewhere between the two of them with a rag.

Dale Sedgwick was at his fourth on the Thursday, and he had come in at four, and by six he had told the room everything he knew and had not told it once, which is a distinction Bernie understood better than anybody in the county.

He had told them about the man from Seattle. He had told them about the clearing work. He had told them about the F-250's injector and about the Simplot place and about the price of diesel, and he had told them in the particular way of a man who has an answer ready for every question and has spent three days getting the answers ready, and every answer was right and none of it was true, and Bernie Kaminski poured him a fifth and did not pour it large.

It was Wes Corliss who came in at twenty past six and did it.

Corliss had spent his whole day being the man who had seen it first, and there is no worse job in a small town in a bad week than being the one who saw it first, because everybody wants you to have seen something more than you saw. He came in and stood at the end of the bar and did not take his coat off and did not order, and he said, in a voice that carried the whole length of the room because it was meant to: "Dale."

Sedgwick looked at his glass.

"Dale. When you were at the store Tuesday."

"I paid you for the coffee."

"Did you pay me out of an envelope."

The room did a thing then that Bernie Kaminski had seen exactly twice in twenty-two years and had never been able to describe to anybody, and the thing was that it got quieter while every single person in it continued to talk. There was no silence. There was a low noise with no words in it and twenty men in it, and every one of them was now facing the same direction without appearing to have moved.

Dale Sedgwick said, "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Eleven thousand four hundred dollars of God's building fund went out of the rectory last Thursday," Wes Corliss said, "in new twenties, and I have had four people in my store this week who got paid in new twenties by a man in bandages, and on Tuesday I had one who wasn't a man in bandages and who bought a can of coffee like he was buying a candy bar and whose hands were doing a thing I've seen before in this valley and it's a thing that men's hands do when they've got somebody else's money in their truck."

"That's a hell of a thing to say."

"It would be. I'd rather you told me I was wrong."

Bernie Kaminski put the rag down and came around the end of the bar, because this was the moment, this was the exact moment, and he had a speech he had used for twenty-two years and the speech was four words long and the four words were "take it outside, boys," and he got as far as "take it" when the door of the Bitterroot opened and nobody came in.

Bernie saw the door open. He was looking straight at it. It opened inward about thirty inches, the way it does when a man comes in fast, and there was nobody in the doorway, and a sheet of snow came in flat and low around the gap and lay down on the black mat, and then the door shut.

The noise in the room did not stop. That was the thing Bernie could never get anybody to believe.

The door opened and shut and nobody came in, and the room went on with its low wordless noise, and Bernie Kaminski stood behind his own bar with the rag in his hand and watched a spatter of slush come off a boot he could not see and land on the floor in front of him in the wet outline of a boot — sole, heel, the whole print — with no boot in it, and the whole of him went cold from the top of the head down.

"Dale," said a voice from the middle of the room, from a place between the bar and the tables where nothing was standing.

Dale Sedgwick put both hands flat on the bar.

"Get your coat," the voice said. "You're going home."

And Wes Corliss, who was fifty years old and who had been in the store behind his counter for twenty of them and was not a brave man and was not a coward either, and who had spent four days thinking about an envelope and a window he had not seen, turned around and looked at the room and said, "All right. All right. I don't care what you are. I want to see what you've got in that truck."

The matchbox came off the bar.

That was how it started — a box of matches, a little cardboard box with a hinge on it, standing on the bar by the register, and it went up out of Bernie Kaminski's line of sight on its own and crossed nine feet of air and hit Wes Corliss on the cheekbone, and it was not thrown hard and it was not thrown soft, it was thrown the way you'd throw a stone at a dog you wanted to move and did not want to hurt, and Corliss put a hand up to his face and turned, and behind him four men came off their stools at once.

What happened in the next ninety seconds Bernie Kaminski put in a statement for the county, and the statement was two pages long and did not contain a single sentence of what he actually saw, because what he actually saw was furniture. What he actually saw was the chair at the corner table go up in the air and come down on the pool table, and a bottle come off the shelf behind him and go past his ear and break in the well, and the front window — the big front window with the neon in it that Bernie had paid nine hundred dollars for in 2011 — take a shape and come in, in a single piece, off its whole frame, all at once, the way a window comes in when something heavy and armless goes through it at a dead run.

And under all of it, all through it, the thing that made the room insane, was that the room never stopped swinging at nothing. That was what the men did. Four men, and then six, and then every man in that room except Dale Sedgwick, swung at the air in front of them, at chairs and bottles and the place where the voice had come from, and connected with each other, and went down on the floor in the broken glass with their hands out in front of them like the blind.

It lasted a minute and a half and left Wes Corliss with a broken orbital bone and two men with stitches and a third with three ribs, and it left Bernie Kaminski's insurance policy a thing that would never again be worth what he paid for it.

And it left Dale Sedgwick standing in the middle of the floor of the Bitterroot with his hands at his sides, not fighting anybody, not being hit by anybody, because — this was the part that finished Bernie, this was the part he did put in the statement because he could not make a version of it that left it out — because twice in that ninety seconds, a man crossed that room and got within four feet of Dale Sedgwick from behind with something in his hand, and both times the man went over backward before he got there, hard, from a blow that had no source and came from the wrong direction, and both times Sedgwick had not moved and had not turned around.

Bernie Kaminski had stood at the end of his own bar for twenty-two years and had broken up four hundred fights, and what he did at the end of that ninety seconds was the only thing he could do, and he never once felt bad about it and he never once felt good about it either: he got down behind the bar with the register and the shotgun and stayed there while the whole room went to pieces over his head, and when it stopped he stayed there another count of ten, and then he stood up, and the door was open, and the cold was coming in, and outside in the street, in the middle of the road, in the headlights of Augie Dieter's truck, there was a long line of prints in the fresh snow going up the hill with the prints of Dale Sedgwick's boots beside them and the two sets running, and Augie Dieter standing in the road beside his truck with his hands at his sides shouting something Bernie could not hear.