Last Call for the Knees

All characters are 18 or older. Fiction.

Last call is a thing you say to a room, and when the room is empty it is a thing you say to the chairs. I said it anyway at half past one, out of habit, and then I stood behind the bar drying glasses that were already dry and listening to the rain on the awning.

I am twenty four. I have worked at that bar in La Candelaria for eleven months, since I dropped out of accounting, and I was three weeks from being the longest serving barman the place had ever had, which tells you something about the place. Don Vergel, who owns it, had gone home at midnight with the takings and the keys and a look on his face I did not like. The look was not about me. It was about the man in the corner with a glass of rum and a briefcase on the chair beside him, who had bought the bar's paper from a supplier in June and had come, on a Tuesday, to collect.

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He had come in at eleven and ordered one rum and not drunk it. Late thirties, heavy through the chest, a gold band, the kind of stillness that makes a room feel smaller. The other barman, who had left at ten, called him the angel of Bogota and told me not to take his money. When I wiped down the far end of the bar he said, without looking up, "You are closing."

"In twenty minutes."

"Then I will say it now." He pushed the glass an inch away from himself. "Vergel owes me two hundred and forty thousand. He has owed it since April. This afternoon he offered me the lease instead, and I do not want a bar, so we made a different arrangement. He told me to speak to the boy who closes."

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I put the glass down. My hands were wet and I dried them on the towel and thought about the rent, and my mother's telephone calls, and how long eleven months of my life would take to replace.

"What arrangement," I said.

He opened the briefcase. There was money in it, and a phone on a gimbal, and a folder with the lease in it. "Cash first, always. Two hundred and forty for the debt, and eighty on top for you, because I am asking you to work after closing. Filmed, forty more. I lock the door. I am not in the film. I stay until I am finished and then I go, and Vergel keeps his bar." He looked at me properly for the first time. "Or I go now and tomorrow the lease is mine and you are looking for work. Nobody will be angry with you either way. I do not do angry."

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The thing I want to explain is that I did not feel cornered. That is the part that frightens me, looking back. I felt seen, which is different, and much more dangerous.

"Show me the money," I said.

He turned the case around. It was all there.

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After the shutter

I locked the front and pulled the shutter halfway, which is what we do when we are cashing up, and the street could see a strip of light and nothing else. He took the phone off the gimbal and stood it on the bar among the glasses, and the little red light came on, and I felt it on the back of my neck like a hand.

He came around behind the bar. There is not much room there and he used all of it. He put his hands on my waist and turned me to face him and looked at me for a moment, and then he kissed me, and there was cardamom and rum and the whole of him, and I put my hands on his chest and then in his shirt because I had been wondering all evening what he was like under it.

"On the bar," he said.

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I got up on the bar, which I have wiped a thousand times, and lay back with my shirt open. He stood between my knees and pulled my trousers off one leg at a time and dropped them on the floor, and then he bent down and took me in his mouth with no ceremony at all, and I put one hand out and knocked over a glass and it rolled off and broke somewhere behind the counter and neither of us cared.

He is thorough. He got me close and then stopped, and when I protested he laughed against my hip, a low sound, and stood up and took himself out. Thick and uncut and curved up towards his stomach, and I reached for it and he let me, and I worked it while he watched my face, and then he took my ankles and put them on his shoulders.

"Tell me you want it," he said.

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"I want it."

He used his fingers first, wet from a bottle he took out of the case, and he was careful in a way that did not match the size of him, and then he pushed in and I heard myself make a sound like the air going out of something. He held still. He let me get used to it. Then he started to move, slow and deep, and the bar was cold under my back and his hand was flat on my chest holding me down, and I stopped thinking about the lease, or Vergel, or the broken glass.

He turned me over eventually, which took some doing on a bar top, and took me from behind with my cheek on the wood and one of his hands in my hair, not pulling, just there, and the other on my hip. That was the one that finished me. I came on the bar top with my eyes shut and my hand flat in a puddle of something, and he kept going through it, and then pulled out and finished across the small of my back with a sound that was almost a word.

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He cleaned up with the towel. That is the detail I cannot get over: he used the good towel and folded it and put it in the laundry bag like a man who has worked in a bar.

"Two hundred and forty to Vergel, eighty to you, forty for the film," he said, counting it onto the bar in three piles. "The lease stays with him. He will not mention it and neither will you."

At the door, with the shutter up to his waist, he stopped. "You are good at this," he said. "The closing. Not the other thing, though that also." Then he was gone and the shutter came down and I was alone with the chairs.

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I have the eighty in an envelope behind the till with the word TUESDAY on it, because that is when the debt would have been paid, and I have started to be very careful about who I let in after last call. Every bar in this city has a story about the angel of Bogota. Ours is that he paid his bill and left a tip.