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Chain of Events

Posted on October 21, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

It was like a bomb exploded in the street right outside the bar and one person was thrown through the front door. Several people had their mouths open at the exact moment that Neville Bunton flew through the front door around half past one. That there were so many people in the bar at that time should have been fair indication of what people were doing during their lunch hour to be able to better deal with the drudgery of the second half of the work day.

Some of the open mouths were preparing to receive food or drink. A couple of them were in the middle of banal sentences about traffic in the morning and the state of their kid’s progress at school. Alice West’s mouth however, was open for a completely different reason. Not entirely unpleasant to her but definitely more pleasurable for Franco the sous chef who had his pants around his ankles and his closed eyes raised towards the heavens as he waited for the ‘best head in Barry’s’ to work her magic on him. Alice liked Franco, in the way girls liked foreign guys enough to part with sex but nowhere near enough to invest the time and effort it would take to make the foreign guy a legitimate citizen.

When Neville landed on the recently waxed floor and skidded to a halt by bumping the counter, Alice was so surprised she forgot the ‘no teeth’ rule and slammed her jaw shut like her mama once told her to. Mama West had said, “If you see the grim reaper coming girl, don’t you die with your mouth open. You shut that trap.” Sure Mama West had an interesting perspective on raising children and sure it was silly of Alice to think she was going to die because she heard a loud noise but that’s human nature for you – they think it’s a terrorist attack when everybody who died in a terrorist attack would have told you that you don’t see the attack coming.

When Alice’s jaws slammed shut, Franco’s eyes flew open and he crossed the thin line between pleasure and pain like the cat in one of those Tom and Jerry cartoons after Jerry got Tom’s tail (or fingertips or nose or who knows what) caught in some trap. He screamed so loud Neville’s testicles tightened up and everybody in the bar thought their drinks had gone sour because this was altogether too much drama for a quiet afternoon’s drink before returning to a quieter second half of being chained to a desk that got messier with every passing day.

In all the excitement surrounding Franco’s trip to the hospital before his armed escort to the border, nobody thought to check up on the guy who flew through the front door of the bar and started it all. In the commotion that upset several people’s appetites and turned two guys off oral sex Neville Bunton collected his wits, gathered his courage and walked out the door he had flown through not so long ago. He slipped past the cordon of bemused onlookers who wondered how the sous chef’s spotless white tunic got so bloody in the below-the-belt area and very few understood why he was swearing at the profusely apologetic waitress who had called for an ambulance.

It was only when Franco was identified as Mexican rather than Spanish and sent packing to the land of tequila and Gael García Bernal (not necessarily in that order because Alice didn’t want to seem shallow or reductive) she realised why Franco was so much more upset with her for calling an ambulance than he had been for her sinking her teeth into his happy place.

Nobody gave Neville Bunton another thought so nobody realised that the guy who flew through the front door of the bar was the one who might have exacted his revenge on the giant bruiser with the fists like hams who turned up very dead in the dumpster behind Barry’s the following morning. Fortunately for Alice, she was not the waitress who discovered Bruno the Eastern European Eclipse face down in leftover calamari and fries while getting rid of the previous nights garbage. That would have been altogether too much excitement for one humble waitress to take.

Because nobody connected Neville Bunton with the guy who flew through the front door of Barry’s like he had been punched by a wrecking ball, they did not see him as being responsible for Alice losing the whispered title of ‘best head in Barry’s’, or Franco losing his right to earn less than minimum wage, or Bruno the Eastern European eclipse losing his life. Because nobody connected Neville Bunton with any of the abovementioned events they didn’t connect him to the gun whose mouth was encrusted with blood, saliva and some of Bruno’s mouth and tongue when it was found at the bottom of the East River by sport diving enthusiasts with little value for their lives.

It became just another unsolved mystery that would feed the imagination of future storytellers and conspiracy theorists about the safest big city in the world.

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