Henry swears he can use anything in Sharkey’s as a weapon. Every bottle and stool and pool cue. “These break easier with a little liquid in ‘em,” he says, waving around a Budweiser with the label peeled off. He’d pull the aluminum High Life girl from the wall, moon and all, and use her like a riot shield if The Wrong Motherfucker walked in.
“The Wrong Motherfucker walks in?” Henry says, nightly, “I’ll put him in the goddamn earth.” Henry’s head snaps to the door whenever it opens. He twirls a switchblade between his fingers like a pencil. He once told me about orbiting satellites packed with tungsten rods that can obliterate whole cities. All the pictures on his phone are of guns he plans to buy or cabins in the Adirondacks where he’ll make his last stand when society finally goes tits-up.
Henry’s awfully harmless for someone so full of violence. Nothing about him intimidates. His hair is so blonde that his eyebrows are just the whispers of eyebrows. His skin is always bright red, like he just stepped out of a hot shower. After four beers, he can hardly sit up straight. He’s so small, it takes just one of us to carry him to the back booth and let him sleep it off.
The bartender, Chris, wants a reason to 86 him. He came close when Henry tried to fight a guy who talked shit about Bruce Springsteen, and another time when some college kid leapfrogged songs on the TouchTunes and Henry chucked a shot glass at his head. But Chris can’t work up the nerve, knowing Henry’d just find some other place to haunt. And who knows how they’d treat him there?
Henry lives on my mail route. I deliver his disability checks and payments from a class action lawsuit, the result of improperly stored chemicals at an Army base. Sometimes he joins me in front of Sharkey’s for a cigarette and the way he coughs makes his chest sound like a metal barrel. Sometimes, I look at him and remember my family dog in the days before she crawled under the porch one last time.
Part of me hopes The Wrong Motherfucker comes in soon, that Henry finds it in him to be heroic, saves us all. Afterward, we’ll buy him a round. We’ll lift him on our shoulders. It’ll be easy. He weighs hardly anything.
