Chapter Four: Monday Night at the Barefoot Inn

A fifty caliber machine gun hangs over the pool table. It’s once smooth finish is corroded and pocked marked and the barrel is bent. Chris found it on the beach. He’s the bartender and the owner of the Barefoot Inn, the only bar in “town”. He has other souvenirs, displayed safely behind the horseshoe shaped bar. He picks them up, turning them over in his hand, as he shows them. A rusty hand grenade. A fifty cal bullet. He tells me of his friend who, while out hunting discovered a torpedo washed ashore not far from here. His friend circled it once from a dozen paces and then walked back off the beach about a hundred yards, hunkered down and shot it in the nose. Chris asked his friend if he had been far enough away and his friend just shook his head, “No”.

Many Battles were fought out here among these islands and the landscape still bares the scars some 65 years later. There is the wreckage of a crashed bomber just a few miles up the beach and Quonset huts from the original airbase still stand. And all along the chain, down for a thousand miles, and peppered amongst hundreds of volcano’s, you can find landing strips and bunkers and in many places just ancient concrete foundations, the eternal wind having long ago erased any trace of structure.

The bar is only open three days a week. Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. It’s a Monday and the aircrew have a ‘Drink Waver” because the Plane is broken and parts wont be in until 10am tomorrow. This means they are allowed 2 drinks that must be finished no later than 10PM tonight. Everyone will be done by 9:20 and wanting more. I sit at the bar and nurse mine more than I’d like. My own 2 drink minimum is self imposed out of respect for the crew. There are a few other locals hunched over drinks in the dim light. The air is thick from a half dozen cigarettes and the smell of fish and diesel fuel. It’s a large but sparse room. A couple neon signs in the window are turned off and the wood panel walls are decorated with a few posters and banners from different beer company’s. There’s the pool and foosball and shuffleboard table. The aircrew keeps them busy. In the far corners are a couple battered speakers pumping out current top 40 hits. I’ve been in a hundred bars like this and it feels like home.

I met Chris a week or so ago. He lives in King Cove with his wife Connie. They come over 3 times a week to open the bar and check on their store. He’s about as salty as they come. More than 300 days a year at sea for over 20 years. Fishing for Crab and, Salmon and Halibut. You name it. Now his brother runs the boat and he runs the Lodge here. You could take his picture and hang it on the wall. A full salt and pepper beard and piercing eyes. He’s gruff and makes his points in few words, but there’s a warmth underneath and I can tell he’s a good man. I liked him instantly. He wasn’t shy about stating his disapproval of my work or the program I’m involved with but he also didn’t hold it against me. We share easy conversation as he pours beers and shots and bakes small frozen pizzas in a toaster oven behind the bar.

There’s a man in the corner getting louder and people are inching away from him. Except the woman at his side. One eye is fixated on her drink and the other at the wall. I recognize her as the housekeeper where I’m staying. She sways and mumbles incoherently as her retinas orbit on independent axis.

The mans own eyes are sharper, more focused. Black pupils in a pool of bloodshot rimmed, yellow. Skin like sandpaper in the bottom of an ashtray, stretched taut over an angry skull. He’s a sinewy skeleton under Carharts and Ductape patched Goretex and I bet he’s been knocked down a few times but I bet it would be hard to keep him down. I bet somewhere under the bar he has a big knife. His eyes are darting left and right now for new target. I know they will find me and before long they do.

“Where you from?”

The emphasis is on you.

The woman’s head turns away. Somehow both her eyes fixate on a poster at the back of the bar. The man sways on his perch, not unlike a cobra, and clutches his beer with grease lined white knuckled fingers.

“Brother, I was born here” I say.

He pauses only for a second.

“Where, Anchorage?”

Anchorage lands like nicotine stained phlegm on my lapel. From this guys point of view Anchorage ain’t good enough, ain’t Alaska enough. There’s a lot of guys like this. Guys who feel this way. I’m not surprised and I saw it coming way out. He’s been sitting over at that end of the bar for a half an hour, ranting and raving about this island and that island and all the guiding he’s done and this and that and the other thing and I’ve heard it all before more times than I can count. Little boys do the same thing when they talk about their fathers. We don’t change much as we get older. I figure this guys been out here a good while and he’s seen a few things and done a few more and he stood tall with his face into the wind when most men woulda crawled on back home and it didn’t really get him anywhere in life and now he’s just another drunk asshole at the bar who thinks there’s only one way to measure a man. Like I said, I’ve seen it before. Too many times.

“I grew up, up near Glennallen”

He looks at me like he doesn’t believe it. Then he grunts something that sounds like “Oghh” and never looks my way again. About 10 minutes later he staggers out with the cross-eyed woman and I can’t tell who is holding who up.

The Coasties start filing out soon after and I’m on my way too when a local woman shyly asks me to play shuffleboard with her. She’s wider than she is tall in her big parka, with a perfectly round face. It’s impossible to tell her age under the dim lights. I figure this is a good excuse to have one more beer so I agree to a game. Five minutes in and I can tell she’s either drunk or insane and since I haven’t seen her drink anything it must be the latter. Chris gives me a “shoulda warned ya" raised eyebrow from behind the bar. After another 5 minutes she accuses me of cheating so I call it quits and finish my beer at the bar.

Then I bid Chris farewell and head out into the dark and the wind and the rain.