Snow Day: a Novella by Dan Maurer

American Legion’s club bar; the Columbia was a different animal.
    It was a single room, thick with the smell of tobacco ash, stale pretzels, beer, and human sweat, and something else. I couldn’t place it then, but I know it now. It was the smell of decay, perhaps even desperation. The atmosphere was humid, musty and almost cave-like. The accordion-shaped iron radiators against the walls were working overtime and the plate glass window with the faded, chipped lettering that looked out on Columbia Avenue was partially clouded with condensation. The room felt close, an expression my mother sometimes used, but which I hadn’t understood until that moment.
    A collection of small tables littered the floor and the bar stood along the far wall. One look at the place and you’d think it hadn’t been cleaned since the 1920s when it served as a Pharmacy and Notions shop, complete with a soda fountain and ice cream counter. The pharmacy’s checkered linoleum floor still remained, though cracked and yellowed, as did the tin embossed ceiling panels, now stained to almost black from the cigarette and cigar smoke; only now the shelves behind the counter held the likes of Johnny Walker and Dewar’s instead of soft drink syrups, ice cream and candy bars.
    The patrons, only about a half-dozen, were huddled over their drinks; a couple in the corner, and a few solo drinkers. These were people who had braved the State Police warning to stay off the roads and stay inside, just so they could... what? So they could grease the wheels of their own decline? These were not the kind of people I knew, or ever expected to know, or ever wanted to know. I had made a mistake thinking I’d be welcome at the Columbia. There was no Mr. Gower in here.
    I must have pushed on the door a little too hard as I entered because everyone in the place turned to look at me. I took a second to collect my breath, and then walked over to the phone booth in the corner. All eyes followed me and mine followed theirs right back, as if to say: What, you never seen a guy making a phone call before?
    It was an old wooden phone booth, old even by mid-seventies standards, maybe from the ‘20s, like the rest of the place. I slipped into the booth, folded the door shut behind me and sat on the bench opposite the phone. The overhead light in the booth was out, no surprise there, so only a thin band of light bled in from the room’s lamps and the glowing beer signs behind the bar. I picked up the receiver, pressed it to my ear and pretended to make a call while glancing out the window of the phone booth. Ol’ George must have seen me duck into the Columbia. But he wouldn’t come in here, and if he did, he wouldn’t try anything with people watching.
    A bald man with a lined face and tattooed forearms wore a filthy white apron and stood behind the bar pouring a beer from the tap. He eyed me suspiciously as he slid the full and foamy pilsner glass across the counter to a patron, a large man in a plaid sport coat sitting on a stool at the bar. The patron leaned forward on the bar sipping the foam from the lip of his glass, then he casually looked over his shoulder in my direction. When he did, he cocked his head, not unlike a hunting dog when it looks curious about something it’s found in the field.
    I quickly leaned back in the bench, hiding again in the shadows, still doing a lousy job of pretending to make a phone call from a pay phone into which I hadn’t fed so much as a dime. After a moment, I leaned forward for another look at the man with the tattooed forearms and his large, ill-dressed patron. They were talking now, likely talking about me. The big man looked familiar, but he no longer looked in my direction. Instead, he peered past the bartender into the mirror, which cast a reflection of the room and the phone booth. He was watching me in the mirror, watching to see when I would come out.
    It was clear that coming here was a mistake, now the trick was not only