To Start...
Let's put up something I have already written
Conquest
While he loved it, he rarely wound his 1956 Longines Conquest anymore. He had grown accustomed to measuring time in other ways.
His 1967 Dodge Polara, chocolate brown and resplendent in its singularity, whisked past the mile-markers on US 50 as an endless Missouri… or maybe Kansas… horizon expanded to envelop him.
Other times he measured time by the blips of civilization… a rickety bar or gas station that was as much an anachronism as the car and watch. Towns that barely had any right to the name… one streetlight… a few faceless patrons.
As the man thought of this, another blip formed on the horizon, some 10 miles ahead, stark and almost foreboding thanks to the jarringly flat landscape. It was a bleached, stained, and speckled wood-sided shack, decimated and sagging against the ravages of unrelenting sun interspersed with the tornados and severe thunderstorms common in these parts. The sign, likely constructed in the 1930s and repainted several times with ownership changes, said Ray’s. The man decided that, whatever the time, it was time for a bourbon… maybe a smoke. Little bar like that probably still allowed smoking.
As he pushed through the door, his suspicions were confirmed. Cigarette smoke clung around the ceiling like a halo, dispersing light through a fog nature never intended. A lone pool table was set up to the right. Forlorn drunkards, one half asleep on his hands, sat at the only two of the four tables in the joint that looked like they might hold the weight of a pint without giving up the ghost to gravity. A ten-foot solid wood bar was battered and bruised enough; it was almost assuredly the original.
The Longines glinted as the man set at the bar and nodded his head to the barman. The stumpy man, sporting overalls from at least one season ago and a beard with seemingly every color of the rainbow, continued to polish a glass like he did it in his sleep as he ambled over. “Passing through?”
“It’s either that or passing on, I wager,” said the man, a slight smile creeping along his face.
All the bartender said in response was, “Whataya drinkin’?”
“Bourbon, neat,” the man replied.
The Jim Beam burned down his throat as he studied the Longines. He remembered the first time he put it on. Strangely, he didn’t remember finding it… it felt like it had always been a part of him.
The man slipped a Marlboro from the gold cigarette case he kept in his inside coat pocket and laid it lightly, almost absentmindedly, against his lower lip.
The bartender’s baritone cut the distance between them, sounding more like a shotgun chambering than a string of words, “You ever felt like you were stuck?”
He took a long drag of his bourbon and smiled, lighting the Marlboro with the other hand as he set his glass down. “I asked a man that once,” he said, the smile growing and almost wicked, almost sad….
The bartender cocked his head to the right and raised his eyebrows.
“He taught me how to fix it,”
“Can you teach me?”
“Shake my hand,” he said. The bartender clasped it like a life preserver to a drowning man. He swallowed his bourbon and took an impossibly long pull on the cigarette, reducing the length to ash.
When the handshake ended, it was the bartender who blew out a plume of smoke. They nodded to each other. The bartender wordlessly turned to leave, making a beeline for the Polara and the open road.
He shifted in the overalls and toyed with the straps, getting used to them. Then, he sloughed some dry skin from his multicolored beard, snagged the dishcloth, and set to polish the glasses.
Just before he began, he looked down at the old watch on his wrist. He decided that, maybe now, it was time to set the time on the Longines.