The Deaths of Sybil Bolton by Dennis Mcauliffe Jr

Author:Dennis Mcauliffe Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2021-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

I met my first Indian a few beers into the evening when I returned from the men’s room. She was sitting at my place at the bar, and drinking my beer. (I would learn this was almost an area tradition, part of the local flavor.)

“I should have known it wasn’t mine,” she said, after a round of apologies and nodding at my beer. “I never drink imported.”

I ordered another round.

She was Cherokee. My first question, of course, was how much (old habits, etc.). Half, she said. I told her my Osage percentage.

Tonight was her first night out after her longtime boyfriend’s slow and painful death by heart disease, many agonizing details of which I sat through. Streaks of gray in her hair highlighted a sickly pallor to her face. Her hands were skeletal, and shook as she poured the remainder of my former beer into a glass and lifted it to her lips. She said she didn’t feel comfortable going out so close to the funeral, many months ago, but her girlfriend, the bartender, had insisted.

“What’s a Harvey Wallbanger?” she asked, cheerfulness abruptly appearing. She ordered one after her bartender friend listed the ingredients.

“Wanna see pictures of my granddaughter?”

Soon I was matching hers, snapshot for snapshot, with photos of Kevin, and there at the bar, flipping through our wallets, a new generation of Indians unfolded before us—children with strawberry-blond hair.

Then came the inevitable wherefores, wherefroms, and wheretos.

“Pawhuska? God, I feel sorry for you.” Then she yelled across the bar to a friend, “Hey, this guy’s going to live in Pawhuska.” She added a string of condolences that startled me in their sincerity. When the bartender joined in with such words as “run-down,” “god-awful,” “hellhole,” “deserted,” and “dump,” I grew disconcerted. This wasn’t your ordinary bar razzing I was being subjected to.

What was I getting myself into?

“My first husband was an Osage,” the Cherokee woman said, “and we lived in Pawhuska when we first got married. We finally had to move, because he was an alcoholic. He couldn’t stay out of the bars there.”

“There are bars there?” I asked. My spirits strangely revived.

“Oh, there were bars there, all right. He knew where each and every one of them was, what time they opened …”

“Any good places to go?”

“None,” she said with authority. Then she smiled knowingly.

“You’ll be back in here in no time.”

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