Sanctuary

When all the letters had worked, they spelled FRED’S PLACE. Nobody seemed to know who Fred was. Some said he died but hung around still. Others claimed he watched from a hole in the ceiling and would bring out his shotgun if things got too rowdy. I didn’t care who Fred was. I called the bartender Fred just in case. He didn’t seem to mind.

Don’t bother looking for the place. By now it’s abandoned, except for the ghosts of forgotten losers who used to hide from life there.

Nobody with money ever went to that dump. Dim lights and heavy makeup paved over the strippers’ wrinkles but couldn’t disguise the soft bellies that flapped over their G-strings when they gyrated. A sound system, too worn or too old, did its best to pulse out the pounding beat the dancers tried to lose themselves in. Instead, the speakers warbled and the bass hissed like angry snakes. No one cared. Not even the strippers. I figured the powder they sucked up their noses and the liquor they nursed carried them somewhere this world couldn’t follow.

The building, furniture, and equipment were old long before I was born. Stains decorated the walls. No one remembered who made them or what they were. A big brown one near the restrooms may have been blood at one time.

Maybe it was barbeque sauce.

The grungy floor had been mopped in some hazy past. Now it wore a coat of spilled liquor, cigarette ash, and a milky film I didn’t want to identify. It grabbed the soles of shoes and held on, sometimes so hard people had to yank themselves loose. The smacking of shoes seeking independence was loud enough to hear over the ancient speakers.

The floor clutched men’s shoes. The working girls clutched men’s souls. Hollow men who either didn’t want to pull free or didn’t have the strength left to try.

That night I sat at the bar with my back to the stage. A heavyset working girl leaned in close to my stool. She smiled the way she’d been trained to. “Would the gentleman care to buy a lady a drink?”

“No,” I said. “Not now. Not ever.”

She called me a name I’d earned and blustered away, the floor sucking at her shoes.

I came for the beer, not the girls. It was cheap. And cold. In better bars I drank vodka, the hundred-proof kind, the stuff that does its job fast. In filthy places like this I drank beer from the bottle. I could have saved money buying liquor from a store and guzzling alone, but when people were around me as I drank, I didn’t sob.

At least not as much.

And usually not as loud.

When I’d drained my fifth or sixth bottle, maybe halfway to my goal, a guy startled me when he settled onto the stool to my right. I didn’t like that. Without acknowledging my new neighbor, I asked Fred for a fresh cold one. You get used to sitting next to people and staying alone. That’s what the place was for. But something about this one bothered me. Something didn’t add up.

He didn’t fit here.

He didn’t look hopeless like the rest of us.

He had no hair. Not on his head, not anywhere the dim light reached. His pale skin took on a faint glow under the bar lights. His clothes were good ones, not the faded shirts and dingy boots the rest of us wore. He’d done well somewhere. It made me wonder how he’d wound up in a place this desperate. I figured he must have stumbled in by mistake and, for whatever reason, rather than turning around and escaping this pit of despair, he made his way to the bar.

And sat next to me.

He ordered a beer. When it came, he shifted so I could see most of his face. Young. Twenty-five, maybe thirty. My first guess was right; he was in the wrong world. I wanted him to realize that and go away. If he wouldn’t, I would. Before I could collect my beer and move to another stool, he cleared his throat, nodded at me, and smiled. The smile didn’t reach his eyes. They were narrowed and focused directly on me. I felt something in my chest go still.

He said, “You’re the best preacher I ever heard.”

I said nothing.

I swallowed. Hard.

I didn’t move. I stared at the bottles behind the bar, and for a moment everything in me stopped. No one in that place knew anything about me except that I came to drink myself blind. Not even my name. The guys where I worked as a minimum-wage laborer never asked questions, and I never offered anything. No social life. No church. No girlfriend. No friends at all. Nothing.

No one knew my past.

This man did.

Sometime during my haze, he dropped a bill on the counter and touched my shoulder. I looked up at him. The intensity drained from his eyes. They misted over, still locked on mine. I tried to look away but couldn’t. One last squeeze on my arm, and he turned and walked away, leaving his beer untouched. I watched him all the way to the door.

The floor let him go without a sound.

I don’t know whether seconds, minutes, or even an hour passed before I pushed my nearly full bottle away. When I drank, I sometimes wept, but I never allowed myself to think of what hurt or why I sobbed. That changed that night. Little by little, every memory I’d evaded for two years trickled into my mind. They came one at a time and sat down in my chest. A room that wasn’t mine, a door I’d sworn was locked. The look on my wife’s face in that doorway, her hand still on the knob. The gasp next to me. A congregation that learned on a Wednesday night what their preacher really was. The slam of the door behind me as the only world I’d known ended.

I’d been running from that doorway ever since.

I stood, took a moment for my head to stop spinning, then with the little focus I could gather, lurched across the gummed-up floor. Pull, stick, pull. The sound followed me like judgment.

The woman I’d cruelly rejected earlier scowled as I passed. She’d apparently told a couple of others, and they impaled me with the kind of condemning stare only fallen women can give. “There goes the gentleman,” one of them said. Then she spat.

If they had done that the night before, it wouldn’t have touched me. But the armor was gone now, and I stood there with nothing protecting the raw places. My head throbbed. I felt I was suffocating. My hands shook as I pushed open the door.

For the first time, I cared that these women might know who I had been.

I stumbled to my car, cursing the stranger. Somehow, he knew. Why had he come to a god-forsaken place like this? Men like him never did. And why did he say that cruel thing to me? Had I hurt him somehow? How could I have? I didn’t even know him.

I cursed him again. Louder. Vile oaths.

Reaching my tired Chevy, I looked back to see if anyone had watched me run.

The stranger stood at the edge of the woods, staring.

My temper exploded. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath to get control. I wanted to hit him, to make him pay for dragging my pain out from where I had bound it. I opened my eyes, clenched my fists, and started toward him.

He wasn’t there.

I looked in every direction. He had been there one moment and was gone the next. For a few seconds, my horrified mind whirled through possible reasons. Then it came to me. My thoughts slowed, turning circles in my mind. The floor never grabbed him. Not when he came. Not when he left. His shoes had made no sound.

I stood on the gravel a long while.

If my realization was true, then I had to face my greatest pain. It waited for me at my door, in her face, on a road I hadn’t driven in two years.

Home.

Maybe God did find this place.