Colorado had gotten weird since I'd been there last.
Not bad-weird, just
weird
. When I'd served along the Front Range close to twenty years earlier, it'd still been a state full of snow-bunnies, ranchers, and mountain men sprinkled around all of the military bases. Don't get me wrong, the state was the same in a lot of ways: the plains east of the mountains still just felt like western Kansas, and you didn't have to travel far west into the mountains to feel like you were utterly alone in the universe. But the Front Range had blown up, changed. Gotten weird.
Good weird.
I'd only spent a week there, talking to my old Army buddy's estate lawyer, driving around town to rouse old memories instead of dwelling on new ones. George -- Georgie -- had never had any kids and had left a string of broken marriages like burning tank hulks in the desert. I guess the only person for him to leave his property to was old Army buddies like me. Hell, I'd been through a lot of the same shit in my personal life, but I'd managed to leave 22 years in uniform with
only
two failed marriages, bad knees, sleep problems, endless migraines, and a few fractured vertebrae in my lower back and neck. Poor Georgie had gotten some rare cancer from burning oil drums full of human shit and God knows what else downrange.
The funeral had been small. The local Division sent out an honor detail, with the flag and the bugle. I mostly managed to keep it together when the Captain knelt and offered me the flag on behalf of a grateful nation. Mostly. As many of the old group of us that came up together and could make it were there, all of us looking ten years older than we should've. A few were already missing -- Georgie hadn't been the first -- and a handful were still wearing the uniform. We'd all grabbed a beer, some steaks, and, like so many times over the years, scattered back into the four corners of the Earth.
Except for me.
Fresh out of uniform, fresh out of another bitter divorce, left with a storage unit full of sentimental knick-knacks from a life working for Uncle Sam, a nice retirement check, and an even nicer disability check from the VA. All that and the old house and bar Georgie had bought when he'd gotten out a decade before me.
But enough about that sad shit. In the week I'd been back on the Front Range, living on a folding chair and an air mattress in Georgie's empty house while I waited for my meager possessions to arrive, I'd noticed just how weird everything was. The cowboys and the hippy backwoods adventurers, the high-country hunters and the service members, they were all still there. Joining them, though, was a clusterfuck of others that reminded me of the absolute grab-bag of Americans I'd served with. Hipsters that wouldn't look out of place in Brooklyn. Potheads from everywhere else in the country that had moved to the 'promised land' when the state legalized recreational use. Every flavor from Southern California, from nu-hippy to valley girl. The Hispanic population had grown, too, and with the bases getting bigger, the eclectic population of retirees and discharges from the military added even more diversity.
Like I said, good weird.
Georgie's house and the bar were in a commercial district that had obviously once been on the edge of town. The house was old -- like, 1920's farmhouse old -- but Georgie had been good with his hands before the cancer made him too weak. The essential parts had been repaired or replaced, but enough remained to give it the old feel. There was probably some silly HGTV word for the style, but I didn't care much. It was a house, and it had fallen into my old lap, right as my entire previous life unraveled like the cheap boot socks I'd been issued at basic.
"Thanks, Georgie," I chuckled and toasted with the cold Coors in my hand.
Joints popping, I struggled out of the folding chair and over to the window. His old bar was maybe a half-mile away, with only a few cars in the huge dirt parking lot. It had probably been built around the same time as the house, which gave it the look of an old Honky-Tonk. However, some of the fading signs and the decades-old lighting made it look like it was trying to be a dance club. Beyond that, big signs for craft beers and hatchet throwing betrayed some weird hipster vibe that meshed even less with the other aesthetics.
Weird. New Colorado weird.
I hadn't been over there yet, too busy dealing with Georgie's estate, closing the last few chapters of my life back...well, home wasn't the right word. Where home was supposed to have been. Hell, I thought to myself, home was the Army, with guys like Georgie, but that was gone now, too.
I banged my first against my chest, feeling that familiar emptiness open up and clamp down on my throat. "Enough of that sad shit, old man," I grumbled to myself, finishing the beer. My mood had been high when I saw the old crew, but it'd just been a brief light in the gloom of my absolutely bungled transition to civilian life.
"Fuck this feeling sorry for myself," I made my mind up to finally visit the place. I plodded around the creaking hardwood floors, pulling on old jeans and one of my few T-shirts without Army logos or unit crests all over it. The sun was still up over Pikes Peak, but winter was right around the corner, so I pulled on a nice black wool peacoat I'd bought while stationed in Korea.
Shoving copies of some of the legal documents in my coat pocket, I set out into the bright mountain afternoon. I'd forgotten how much the high-altitude sun hurt my light blue eyes, and I knew I'd be needing to buy some sunscreen for the short buzz-cut that only partially hid a receding hairline and a head more than half silver. A yawn hit me suddenly, and I rubbed my jaw and scratched at my beard. Another bright spot in all of this was the fact that I didn't have to shave for the first time in two decades. I'd let my beard grow out more than the scraggly Christmas beards of years past. It'd come in half silver and half red, even though my hair had always been brown. The strange combination came from my Danish ancestry, genetics that had also given me 6'8" of height and the shoulders of a professional strongman.
The ground along the edge of the road crunched loud in the crisp air under my old Tiger sneakers. Like I said, this area used to be out on the edge of town, where strip malls met prairie, but the city had grown past it. A confused mixture of cheap apartments, self-storage places, and small commercial lots surrounded my new house and business in a tangled, unplanned mess of access roads and parking lots. That only made the eclectic bar and its huge dirt lot stand out even more.
"Probably going to get an offer to buy the land right away," I grumbled to myself as I walked. Would I sell? How important was this place to Georgie? I didn't know a damn thing about running a bar.
There was a guy at the door lazily sweeping the small covered area for checking IDs. He had that ex-college football player look you see at places where bouncing is serious business. That perked me up a bit; maybe, despite the schizophrenic theme of the place, it had a booming client base?
