Hey, come on in. What do you think of the place? I inherited it from my father. Take a look. It’s like a war museum. My father was 88 when he died and he owned this bar since 1950, named it Bar Iwo Jima after the World War II battle. He made it through the war all right, but he never got over it.
Look around all you like. This place was his life, and that’s the truth. He got up every morning and came over here early to open for the breakfast drinkers, and he wouldn’t leave till after midnight. “It’s a bar,” he’d say, “and people expect a bar to be open at night.” So, now he’s dead and I’m putting it up for sale. It’s lucky you caught me. I’m almost never here. I ran over today to get some personal stuff. If you’re not in a hurry, I could fix us something to eat. The place was famous for its burgers. He called them “K-burgers.” That’s a military joke. You want a drink, or something? I’m going to have one.
*
How was that burger? My old man always made them simple like that, just the toasted bun, good meat, fresh tomato and onion, and homemade mayo. “None of that fast food crap,” he used to say. I’ll be glad when I’m rid of this place. Look at this stuff! Those are real guns, you know, the hand grenades are empty, of course, but they’re real too. Look at this bayonet. Did you ever see anything scary as that? Imagine some guy coming at you with that on the end of a rifle. Are you sure you won’t have a drink? I come in here and I see all this war junk, and I’ve got to have a drink.
A lot of the old soldiers used to come in here and drink. I’d hear them talking. They would start out all cheerful, but after a while, after they’d been drinking who knows how many double-shots of Corby’s with beer back, it’d get louder and sadder. They’d complain how they couldn’t sleep, how the doctors understood nothing, how they gave up their lives, and nobody even cared. It got to where I just couldn’t be around them; the stories were too depressing.
Look at this helmet. Somebody got his brains blown out wearing this, look at those dents and that hole right through it. What’s this doing in a bar? I need just one more drink to help me calm down. I hate to come in here. And would you look at this damn thing! It’s a land mine, some kind of sick booby trap “Oh, here, darling, sit down, sweetie, don’t worry. It’s just a fucking land mine.”
I learned to drink from my old man. I need the old crutch sometimes, to keep me going. You’re wondering what kind of man was he, really. Oh, it’s hard to say. He was mostly angry. He seemed to be angry all the time. He’d spend the day and night down here with his buddies and by the time he got home late he was looking to take it out on someone. I tried, but I couldn’t love him, you know, he was too damn mean.
*
Drunk now, the ex-Marine’s son’s movements had become deliberate, and his words were getting slower and blurred. We stood up as if to leave and he was suddenly alert. “Oh, you can’t go yet,” he said. “I haven’t shown you the trophies.” He opened a drawer under the bar, rummaged in it for a minute, and came up with an old photo album. He dropped it on the bar and wiped the dust off the cover with the bar rag. “Check this out,” he said, and flipped the album open.
The old photos had turned a sort of sand color, but you could still see young American Marines standing around, laughing into the camera. Everyone has seen pictures of Americans soldiers in Germany, GIs sitting on tanks, waving from a fighter plane with the canopy open, pointing at the bullet holes, and on Pacific islands, after a battle, exhausted but smiling, many of them shirtless in the heat, their dog tags around their necks, a couple here and there still wearing helmets. And you’ve seen pictures of the Japanese prisoners, I’m sure, sitting on the ground, fear and defeat in their faces.
“Just wait,” he said. “It gets better,” and flipped the page. Marines were using long bamboo poles to torment some prisoners whose eyes were wide open and fearful. Then he turned several pages at once and stood back so we could see. “Here is my old man,” he said, “in a nutshell.”
There was a sequence of eight aging snapshots pasted on the page. The first one was of a terrified young Japanese sitting on the ground and tied to a palm tree. His legs were spread wide and each ankle tied to a stake. There were a couple of pictures of laughing Marines showing hand grenades to the camera. Another showed a Marine posing in a comically exaggerated bowling pose, a hand grenade held like a bowling ball. The fifth snapshot was taken from behind a row of laughing Marines with the Japanese soldier visible in the background between them. The sixth photo showed a grenade being tossed at the soldier tied to the tree and then, in the very next, how it had exploded and blown him to bloody bits. The eighth picture showed Marines laughing into the camera and the other Japanese soldiers staring terrified in the background.
Charles D. Tarlton is a retired university politic professor now writing poetry and flash fiction. He has published poetry and flash fiction over the last 10 years in a variety of print and online journals.
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