Last Night in Thunder Bay

A Story by capmango

This is a short story I wrote a while back. It may not be my best work, but it gives you an idea of my wrting style.

If you were to glide in a sailboat along the shore of Lake Superior, northeast into Canadian waters from the border at Pigeon River, all you would see is trees, thick as you please, right up to the water’s edge. Occasionally there might be a few feet of pebbly beach, but usually you’d only see the pines, beeches, birches, and poplars, so thick that no sign of civilization could peek through.

A few hours into your journey you would sense that around the next corner, civilization is going to impose itself. The rusty, creaky shore of a big lakeside city will appear: Several miles of docks, paper mills, ore boats, warehouses. There will be no more trees for quite a while.

But as you rounded that bend, what would be the very first thing you would see that wasn’t a tree? What marked the border between the wild North Woods and the paper-mill town of Thunder Bay?

That line is marked by a haphazard group of old wooden pilings, some on land, most marching out a few yards into the water, all well-worn, most broken. If you sailed in among them, you could see that they must have once supported a building. The building disappeared in November of 1975. But that is another story. Our story takes place in 1971.

The pilings once supported a rugged wooden building with a high-pitched roof, about half on land, and half jutting out over the water. There was a balcony that ran along the outside; if the weather was good there were wooden picnic tables on the balcony. There were many picture windows that looked out over Lake Superior. There were neon signs in all the windows. This was the first bar, or else the last bar, in Thunder Bay, and it belonged to an Ojibwa man named Simon Bear.

On a typical evening, you could find Simon behind the bar, his long black hair shining in the light from the neon signs, his large frame somehow not intimidating even though it ought to have been (he was built more like a bouncer than a bartender). His deep-set, sad eyes always seemed to look on you with sympathy, regardless of his actual mood " a good feature in a bartender. At the bar, you could count on Simon Bear to listen to your story, whatever it was, and to respond with a small, closed-mouth smile and a nod. He was quiet, but you knew he had listened to you.

Each night after the last customer left, Simon Bear would have his first drink of the day. Then he’d lock up, and climb up the stairs behind the bar to his small attic bedroom, and serve himself one drink after another until blessed sleep finally took him.

It was never a pretty sight, but he always managed to rouse himself the next afternoon before it was time to open. Living this way he managed to hang on to his bar, though not his wife.

Getting to Bear’s Bar by land involved a long bumpy drive on a dirt road, but plenty of customers found that it was worth the journey. The lumberjacks and the sailors would come out to hear the live music, and their girlfriends would come along to see the majestic view from the balcony.

The view from Bear’s Bar was something worth seeing. Stretching off to the right were the tall green trees of the Great North Woods. Looking left on a clear day, you could see every lakefront building in all of Thunder Bay. Straight ahead, glittering brightly in the summer, leaden and foreboding in the fall, a translucent shelf of ice in the winter, was the lake. Always different, always worth seeing.

Perhaps an even bigger draw than the scenery was the music. Simon had a knack for recognizing musical talent. Up-and-coming musicians from miles around would try out for a spot at Bear’s Bar. If Simon liked your act, chances were that you were pretty darn good and you were going to make it big. If you were a folk singer from Ontario, Bear’s Bar was a necessary stop on the road to fame.

Well, at least it had been that way. By 1971, when our story takes place, Simon Bear’s talent and influence were both fading. But it was a long, slow fade. A reputation takes a long time to ruin, and Simon was able to live on his for many years. In truth, it had been quite a while since he had a chance to incubate a budding new folk talent.

But the stage at Bear’s Bar would occasionally get a return visit from someone who had made it big. Maybe for the view, maybe for the memories.

For the last two years, Simon Bear’s only full-time employee was a man who called himself Bill Flagstaff, who lived with his dog in a shack in the woods not far from the Bar. Bill took care of the sound engineering for the live music, and he washed dishes, mopped floors, and moved the tables out to the balcony and back. He liked working for Simon Bear because Simon paid him cash and didn’t care that he always came to work stoned.

For his part, Simon Bear had figured Bill Flagstaff to be from the States, and to be on the run from something. Given the times and Bill’s apparent age, it wasn’t hard to figure what, but Simon was not the sort to ask a lot of questions.

Simon and Bill were both good listeners but poor talkers, so they rarely spoke to one another at all. But they were both very lonely men, and they were secretly glad of each other’s company.

Bill set up before the customers arrived and cleaned up after they left, but he kept to the back room when the customers were there. Bill liked the back room of the bar, though it’s hard to say why. There was barely room to turn around in it. It was crowded with the following items: kegs of beer and cases of wine and liquor, large burlap sacks of peanuts, a sink, a dishwasher, racks of mugs and shot glasses, the stairway to the attic, a tattered recliner, about a dozen drums and drumsticks of various kinds (whose presence Simon had never explained, and Bill had never asked about), and one old guitar that Simon always kept tuned, in case something went wrong with the performer’s guitar, which had happened on more than one occasion.

From that back room, Bill could watch the bands on the bar’s small stage. He always watched the guitarists with some intensity, his left hand unconsciously mirroring the chords they formed, though Bill himself had not touched a guitar in almost six years.

On this particular night, the skies were clear, the lake was quiet, the stars were bright, and the bar was full of young men and women. Everyone had come out to hear Gordon Lightfoot, one of those acts who returned to Bear’s after making it big. He was playing at Bear’s one night only, sandwiched between much bigger gigs in Toronto and Detroit.

Well, that had been the plan anyway. But Mr. Lightfoot’s flight from London, Ontario got cancelled, and now there would be no time to make the side trip to Thunder Bay and still get to Detroit in time. Simon did not find out early enough to stop the crowd from coming, so there they were.

Simon got up on the stage and made the disappointing announcement, offering one free round of drinks as compensation. The crowd groaned, but no one actually got up and left. Bear’s Bar was remote enough that there was really no place else for them to get to tonight.

The bar was awfully quiet for a bit, but soon there was a song playing on the jukebox and conversations had started up. Bill Flagstaff sat in the recliner in the back room, and stared through the doorway at the empty stage.

The jukebox played three more songs, then was silent for a spell. Simon Bear was serving drinks at the other end of the bar when he saw Bill step onto the stage and turn on the microphones, the old guitar in his hand. “What the hell is he doing?” the bartender wondered. Without a word of introduction, Bill’s fingers brought music out of the guitar, and a song emerged from his lips. And now it was too late to stop him without causing a big scene. Bill, you idiot, Simon thought, not only are you playing to a crowd that was expecting to hear Gordon Lightfoot, but you are starting right in with “If You Could Read my Mind”. You’re just going to look stupid.

But by the time Simon had formulated that thought, he already realized he was wrong. Bill Flagstaff was playing and singing Gordon Lightfoot’s hit song as well as Gordon could have done it.

Bill was unsure himself how he was doing it. The guitar felt as familiar as an old friend, he could feel just how to get the sound he wanted. The chords were all there in his mind, though he’d never played the song before. He ended the song to a healthy round of applause, and he had already started in to a folky version of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” before the applause died out.

From there he moved straight into “Tangled Up In Blue,” another song he had never played before. The audience was impressed, but Simon was transfixed. Simon was the only one there who knew the man on stage, or who thought he knew him anyway. In two years he had never seen the man so much as hum a tune, and now he listened as Bill’s sweet tenor voice hit every note, he watched as Bill’s fingers brought sounds out of that cheap old guitar that it had never made before.

After he finished the Dylan tune, Bill talked to the audience for the first time, offering standard between-the-songs patter. He went on to play the Stone’s “Salt of the Earth”, and then James Taylor’s “Rainy Day Man”, chatting with the audience in between like they were all old friends. People started asking Simon who this guy was and where he came from, and Simon just said “I dunno”.

As Bill finished each song, it just came into his mind what the next one ought to be. He reached back into the ‘fifties for “Travelin’ Man”, then moved on to “Visions of Johanna,” then “Sweet Baby James,” then “Sound of Silence”, then “Forever Young”. He followed those with “Captain America” and “Truckstop Salvation,” two songs from a guy the audience had never heard of, named Jimmy Buffet. Bill had found a Jimmy Buffet tape on the side of the road one day, that’s where he’d heard the songs.

On stage, Bill took a deep breath. “This next song I’m going to play for you is one of my favorites. It went to number one in the States a few years back, maybe some of you remember it.” His fingers began to play -- the first song of the evening that he had actually played before. As he listened to the intro that he was playing, something stuck in his throat and he quickly realized that he was not going to be able to sing the song. He worked hard to stifle the sob that suddenly shuddered through him. His mind raced to think of a different song with the same chord progression. He couldn’t think of one, but finally he hit upon a song he could segue into pretty naturally.

So he finished off his set with John Prine’s “Illegal Smile”, which had not been a hit back in the States, but the audience thoroughly enjoyed it anyhow. In the midst of their applause, he turned off the mics and disappeared without a word back into the room from which he had come.

The audience was calling for an encore, but Bill Flagstaff was shaking so badly he barely managed to get the guitar back onto its stand in the back room. He staggered out the back door and breathed in the fresh summer air, trying to regain his composure. He wandered into a thick stand of pine trees, fumbled in his pocket for a joint, and lit up. Slowly the drug began to calm him down and numb him out again.

Simon, meanwhile, was too busy with the bar to wonder about what had become of his friend. But everyone was asking when they could come hear Bill Flagstaff again. Simon assured them all that Bill would become a regular feature and they’d have lots of chances to hear him.

Hidden amongst the trees, Bill watched the last car pull out of the dirt parking lot, then he headed back in to Bear’s Bar to do his real job, cleaning the tables and washing the dishes. Simon was pouring himself his first glass of whiskey. “Hey, Bill, you’re a hit, yeah! How come you never told me you were a musician?”

Bill shrugged in response. Instead of answering Simon’s question, he answered a question that no one had asked: “It’s just that all those people came out here to hear some live music. I didn’t want them to go away disappointed.”

“Well, no problem there, eh?” Simon responded. He finished his whiskey and poured himself another. “Hey, you can play here any time, man. You should really pursue your music. You could definitely be a professional.”

“Yeah,” said Bill, “I could.” And he finished wiping down the last table and walked into the back room and started loading mugs and glasses into the dishwasher.

Simon wasn’t sure what to make of that response, but at this point his brain was getting fuzzy anyhow so he didn’t worry about it. He grabbed the bottle of whiskey and headed upstairs to his room. “You’ll lock up, eh?” he called down to Bill.

“Sure, no problem,” Bill called back up.

Then Bill headed back to his shack, not knowing what he was going to do. But when he got there, he found himself shoving his few belongings into his backpack, whistling for his little dog, and hiking through the moonlight towards the highway.

Simon was alone above the saloon, almost done drinking for the night. He lay down on his bed and looked up through his skylight at the moon and stars. “Thank you for showing me the moon,” he said to his skylight. When you are all alone, and you are drunk, you are allowed to talk to your skylight. “Hey, Bill did good tonight, yeah?” The skylight didn’t say anything out loud, but it seemed to agree. “Well, good night skylight. I love you.” It’s good to be able to say I love you before you go to sleep, even if it is just to your skylight. And maybe in this case it wasn’t quite so strange, because there would come a day when this skylight would save Simon Bear’s life. But that’s another story.

© 2013 capmango

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STurner

Once long ago there was a country boy. He loved the country but when he got older moved to the city and lost his way... well not exactly but close enough. Then later in life he moved back to the woods and it was a peaceful place. Then he read a short story that reminded him of the people he knew and he thought "Damn good writing... damned good." Thanks for the touch of life. You reminded me of the people I once knew, gone now but in memory. I like your style. In today's world, it is refreshing. I do hope if this is the story you share for the style... you'll share more for those of us who once felt home, a place like Thunder Bay.