Riot at Legion No. 9

A Saturday Short by Sarah Mintz

Since its founding in 1956, Legion No. 9 has run Chase the Ace on Friday nights, meat draws on Saturday nights, darts on Sundays, bridge on Mondays, crib on Tuesdays, “fun pool” on Wednesdays, and pool league on Thursdays. Chase the Ace Friday is also Steak Night Friday. The big night. Sold out. Everyone who wants to Chase the Ace buys a ticket, then waits for their steak, well done. The tickets are drawn—and have been drawn since 1956—from a spinning, gold-coloured cylinder, metal and of vaguely atomic design.

“Last four digits 5829—5-8-2-9,” Ferdy calls out, as Ron once did before him, and Ebby before that. A patron walks to the front, draws a card. If the card is an ace, the patron gets the jackpot, and if not, the money rolls over—and over and over weekly until the ace is drawn.

In the early days at Legion No. 9, there were a handful of members who were veterans, mainly out of Red Deer or Cold Lake. Into the aughts, teens, and now twenties of the twenty-first century, occasionally present has been a visiting veteran or an honorary contingent, but Legion No. 9 has no regular veteran members.

There were a few miners too, in the beginning, who could be counted among those who paid yearly dues at Legion No. 9. Men who’d been mining in the area since the mines had been established in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century. The Leish Mines, the Whitecrest Mines, the Jack Pine Mines.

All five townships in the Rocky Pass were built on those three mines. All three mines have since closed. Shuttered by disasters, unions, wartime shortages, environmental regulations. There are still mines, but none in the Rocky Pass. And the remaining mines just outside the Pass are no longer run by families, like the Leish family, the patriarchs of whom had risen through the ranks of mining: digger to foreman to oven operator to oven mechanic to general manager to mine owner—able to draw on their experience in the pits, though unable to reach any understanding about how a life could amount to anything other than their own. Such mines are now run by multinational conglomerates, who have the money to lobby the government for regulatory leniency, who have the money to pay the lawyers to represent them during lawsuits, who have the money to run safety workshops that consist of HR-approved, diversity-friendly strategies that offer up PowerPoints and safety cards so each man may, and is encouraged to, make a point of stopping work, holding up his card, and instructing his fellow miners on a safety point.

“Men, men, men,” he might say. “Gather ‘round young Kevin here, so we may look upon his untied laces, his rickety ladder, his clumsy manoeuvring.” And the men, without good reason to disobey, obey.

So the mines that can afford to operate at all don’t operate in the Rocky Pass. The towns of the Pass are dead or dying, and the streets are filled with beautifully built empty buildings, art deco gas stations brimming with broken porta potties, theatres with caved-in roofs, grocery stores bought to be closed and replaced with one singular SuperPlus in the centre of the five towns. The folks from White Hill, Belvium, Pinewood, Coburg, and Coal Flats drive back and forth. Where there were once butcher shops and bakeries, there’s either a brick nothing with a historical plaque affixed, or there’s a painter’s studio, or a potter’s studio, wherein a wealthy woman from the city finds her creative outlet and spends her husband’s money on a storefront of which the local people pass and rarely, if ever, enter into and opine upon, never mind purchase a fluid acrylic painting for well over a thousand dollars.

“How’s the gallery going?” her friends ask.

“Fabulous,” she lies before changing the subject, careful not to think about it, happy that the rent money comes out of her and her husband’s joint bank account automatically and she need not think about it, relieved that she posted that sign on the door that says, in an elaborate invented font:

ARTIST HOURS

CALL FOR APPOINTMENT

Which allows the “gallery” to exist as an entity independent of her; allows her to live her dream, build her brand, and derive confidence from ventures of which she needn’t pay a conscious thought.

But an empty street in a palliative town is hardly empty if it doesn’t have a bar edged with video lottery machines, coloured in with heavy wooden tables covered up with thin plastic tablecloths.

The Belvium Legion, Legion No. 9, is such a bar. A brick building with bricked over windows, No. 9 lets in no light. Each night of the week, a pack of overlapping regulars come for their events, come for their beer, come to complain. The topic of late has been the recent renovations to the main drag.

The municipal council, a pack of fastidious, bookish, white-haired women who know what’s good for whom, hired a firm from the semi-nearby small city of Trevyn to revitalize Belvium’s downtown. Main Street was under construction for nearly a year. The results of which were a courtyard, an abstract sheet-metal sculpture, several oversized cement planters of irregular shape, and six cherry blossom trees. Signs in the windows of the old buildings had been popping up for the past three weeks:

“Future home of Moose on Main” where the Belvium cafe once sat.

“Limber Pine Yoga Collective Coming Soon!” where the Motordrome—one-time garage, one-time live theatre—once operated.

“May 2025: Blue Mist Pottery Studio” where Hardwood’s Hardware, owned and operated by Clancy Hardwood, then his son Finnegan, then his son Jesse, stood for nearly eighty-five years.

“Your one-stop shop for artisanal cheese and local flowers: Rhubarb + Roses. Opening in September 2028” where the former home of Lee’s Butchery used to be.

*

Eighty-six-year-old Sebastien Yarrow opens the large wooden doors to Legion No. 9 every day at 4:00 p.m., rain or shine, whether it’s pool night or not.

“What in God’s name is Moosey Man supposed to be?” he hollers across the empty box.

“Moose on Main? I think it’ll be a souvenir store!” shouts back Elizabeth Little, twenty-four-year-old frail blond bartender, known around town as a sweet sad sack with a glassy-eyed, oblong-headed bastard child.

“Pretty stupid if you ask me. A souvenir store? What are they selling, rocks? There’s one grocery store, and it’s twenty-five kilometres away. Can hardly drive there in the winter on these roads.”

“SuperPlus closed today,” Barry Willoughby says, sitting down and taking off his jacket.

“Why’s that?” Sebastien shouts needlessly.

“Electrical fire. Place’ll be down for a few days at least,” Barry shakes his head. “You know what I heard?” he continues in a giddy whisper. “I heard that SuperPlus goes out of their way to keep other grocery stores out of the Pass. They got the council people.”

“Not surprised,” Sebastien scoffs, spits. “Everybody rather have a whole, whole, a whole. . . control of it—”

“A monopoly?” Elizabeth suggests.

Barry nods.

Sebastien mumbles, “Yeah, yeah . . . Control over the whole thing rather than open a store anybody needs. Who needs a butcher or a baker when you got a SuperPlus?” He brays, “Whole area’s gone to shit. It’s a damn shame.”

“It’s been a steady decline,” Barry says, chuckling slowly, revealing tight yellow teeth. “And you know,” he cocks his head, “since they amalgamated the townships back in, well, you know, seventy-eight, seventy-nine, thereabouts, this municipality don’t understand Belvium—”

“They don’t give a shit,” Sebastien says caustically.

Barry continues slowly, softly, measured, “Well, I know Carole and Colleen and the likes of them on the municipal council there, they try, but they just aren’t paying attention. They don’t always listen, you know? They don’t always hear the people who live here. And this here’s a perfect example.” Barry gestures toward Main Street, and Sebastien knows just what he means, or assumes he knows because Sebastien knows what he wants to say next.

“Someone’s got to tear that statue down,” he says, spraying spit.

Elizabeth laughs.

“I’m serious!” Sebastien says, his eyes shining with the young girl’s attention. “That hunk of metal is a goddamn eyesore.”

“Okay, guys,” Elizabeth breaks in, “I’m gonna have to move you. We’re expecting over two hundred people tonight. Every single spot is booked.”

“Chase the Ace?” Barry asks.

“The last card in the deck,” Elizabeth says, eyes wide.

“I reserved my spot!” Sebastien says. “Got a spot for me and Barry last Friday.”

“Oh, you did?” Elizabeth asks. “’Course you did, sure, it’s probably on my sheet.”

Sebastien snorts, “Pot’s over ten grand now, but what with everybody coming out tonight, must go over twelve K, you think?”

Barry nods slowly.

Elizabeth races around the room, dragging wooden tables and putting reserved signs with names and numbers on every available surface.

*

When Eileen starts her shift at 6:00 p.m., all the tables are full. They’re over capacity by twenty-two people. The lineup for Chase the Ace tickets intersects midway with the lineup for drinks.

“Hi, Elizabeth!” Eileen barks.

Elizabeth looks to acknowledge her, but someone’s just asked for a Caesar and she’s flustered.

“Where’s Dolly?” Eileen asks.

“Rear-ended in the A&W drive-thru. Gonna be late.” Elizabeth puts the ice in the glass before rimming the drink, sighs, dumps the ice, and starts over.

“Well that’s nice!” Eileen says. “And is that why the cooler door is open?”

“What?” Baffled, Elizabeth shoots Eileen an irritated look.

“I’m only joking, only joking!” Eileen says with a limp mouth and cold eyes, laughing hard, shutting the cooler door, and shouting, “What can I get for ye?” to old Ricky O’Hannah, who’s standing second in line with his money held out in his fist like a child who’s been given a task.

“Ugh,” Elizabeth grunted over Eileen and shook her head. If Dolly had been there, Elizabeth and her would’ve shared a look. Eileen never makes any goddamn sense, it would have said. Or Eileen can find an insult in an empty bar. Or Eileen’s fucking batshit, eh? And Dolly, who’d been bartending at Legion No. 9 since 1994, would pat Elizabeth on the arm and give Eileen a squeeze, laugh, and say, “Ohhhhh girls, girls, girls, girls.”

Elizabeth wished that Dolly would come, that Eileen would shut up, and that someone would get her Chase the Ace tickets, because it was looking like she wouldn’t be leaving the bar for a while.

*

“Christ on a crutch, look at this place!” shouts Dolly as the wooden doors slam shut behind her. The bar goes up in cheers and hollers. Everyone at No. 9 knows Dolly. Everyone at No. 9 has bought a drink from Dolly, talked to Dolly about her husband, Jack, talked to Dolly about her three St. Bernard dogs, her two children, her six grandchildren, and how the wind took out her new fence during the last good storm.

It’s only 8 p.m. and Dolly can see that the crowd’s been overserved.

Eileen had an idea earlier to try and control the line and lessen her trips around the room: “Honey, get a pitcher,” she said to everyone that asked for a drink. A pitcher of beer, a pitcher of Paralyzer, a pitcher of Lemonhart rum and Coke—didn’t matter. “Get a pitcher, and sit down.” She gave out plastic cups. The lineup reached a manageable size. Four, five people at any given time. Dolly walked around and picked up glasses, pitchers, plastic cups, empty dishes, silverware, condiments.

Bob Donkers spilled a drink on Loretta Silbert, and Loretta shouted “Oh shit!” but laughed wildly, stood up suddenly, and nearly knocked over Darla Newton, who gasped, held Loretta by the shoulders, and hollered into her ear, “Settle down there, Loretta!”

Now John and Wanda Lannigan at Bob and Loretta’s table laugh boisterously alongside everyone watching from Darla’s table: her husband, Dorf; her long-term friends Ben Ostrom and Ben Davis; her former employer Robert Finley; his girlfriend, Ellen Rickard; and Ellen’s girlfriend, Constance McDonally. Over by the pool tables, three Newfoundlanders on a fishing trip line up empty shot glasses. In the middle of the room, Carlyn and Ted Crickets, two sets of in-laws, and four children are questioning, moaning, and crying respectively that their extra order of garlic bread isn’t coming quickly enough. Everyone in the bar from the dartboards to the smoke-pit door is questioning, moaning, crying that their steak, Caesar salad, garlic bread, potato salad, and veggie side isn’t coming quickly enough. Candy and Olive stand and sweat over a makeshift grill in the corner of the room and laugh like banshees whenever a bartender comes over saying that a customer has sent them to ask about their order.

“Can’t cook ‘em any faster,” Candy laughs.

“Can’t bring ‘em out any faster than she can cook ‘em,” Olive giggles.

“They just wanted me to check,” a beleaguered Elizabeth or a dutiful Dolly might say. Eileen never checks. She growls at the patron, “It’s on the way!”

*

Sweat- and coffee-stained Barry Willoughby asks the ladies at the bar if anyone would like him to stand in line for Chase the Ace tickets. They give him a complimentary coffee and load him up with requests.

“Thirty dollars’ worth,” Dolly orders perfunctorily. “Equal numbers of red tickets, orange, and green. Ten each.”

“Sure thing,” Barry says.

“Same, here’s thirty dollars, but I don’t care about colour!” Eileen laughs.

“Sure thing,” Barry says.

“Actually, make them red.” Eileen puts her finger on her mouth thoughtfully. “Red is lucky. It’s always a lucky colour for me.”

“Okay,” Barry says.

“Five tickets, please, Barry, any colour,” Elizabeth says smiling and topping up Barry’s coffee.

Barry smiles, “Sure thing.”

*

Ferdy Balzac is still selling Chase the Ace tickets well past 9:00 p.m.—standard time of the draw. There’s a whisper, a grumble, then someone hollers (it’s Dorf Newton), “Past 9:00 o’clock, there, Ferdy!” and Ferdy with a flushed face hollers back, “Okay, okay, okay!” and then to the lineup, “Folks, we’re late on the draw . . .” Grumbling comes from the line, then a drunken white-haired woman no one has ever seen before calls out, “What’s it at?” To which Ferdy’s wife, Celeste, shouts, “Just over sixteen K. Roughly.” And the crowd is silent for a millisecond before exploding into cheers and slamming drinks.

Ferdy spins the metal cylinder. He starts slow, like it’s heavy. It isn’t, but something weighs him down. Ferdy’s been laughing and joking all evening with everyone, he’s been in good spirits, but the mood changes when the cylinder spins. The people are quiet. Tensions run high. Someone turns off the radio. With his eyes closed, Ferdy plucks a ticket from a door on the top of the cylinder. He holds it up, opens his eyes and reads, “Last four digits, 5-8-2-9—5-8-2-9.”

There’s a shuffle, a few people repeat the number, then a hush, some disappointed shouts, and chair skirting as people prepare to leave. No one goes forward. “5-8-2-9,” Ferdy repeats.

“Check your tickets,” Dolly urges Elizabeth, who’s pulling clean dishes from a steamy dishwasher. “Oh!” Elizabeth shouts, having become distracted, then “Oh!” again when she reads out over the room, “5-8-2-9! 5829! I got it, Ferdy! I got it!”

Elizabeth runs over to Ferdy not noticing that people are clapping, whooping, weeping, that their eyes are watering. They all want her to have it. Their hands are held together in precious sentiment. They like her, everyone likes Elizabeth. She’s a hard worker, a sweet server, and she has that poor boy. Everyone in the bar knows just about everyone in the bar, and they all know Elizabeth’s life: pregnant at fifteen, boyfriend dead in a highway accident, a child who didn’t speak till he was six years old, coke-bottle glasses, and the slackest mouth anyone ever dragged around. The boy would always need care. Elizabeth lives without real complaint, without resentment or guile. She has a naive quality. Not in action, but in eyes. She takes everyone at their word. She never catches an innuendo (and is better off for it), and she always smiles sincerely.

Everyone wants her to win. But she pulls a joker. “It’s a joker, Ferdy,” she says, looking up at him confused.

Ferdy looks caught. His urgent smile shrivels before the crowd. He’s made a mistake. He’s fucked up badly. “It’s a joke,” he says weakly.

People look around, growing whispers, “It’s a joker? Who put the joker in there? Is there an ace? Does she still get the money?” Confusion bubbles up; the people standing to leave find themselves stunned and disgusted; they look at Ferdy.

“It’s a joke!” Eileen shouts from the bar—and with that drawing suspicion that it was her joke, the kind of joke she’d make, and Ferdy, the kind of man to receive it.

“You idiots!” shouts Sebastian Yarrow, usually out of line but now channeling the crowd’s resentment. “You goddamn fools!”

“It’s a joke!” Ferdy wails.

“It’s a joke!” Eileen screams with umbrage.

Barry Willoughby gets up to leave and accidentally knocks over his chair. Sebestian Yarrow hears it fall and knocks over his own—like stamping his foot, takin’ a stand, makin’ a scene, causing Dolly to shout, “Calm down!” which makes everyone angry, and pushes Sebestian Yarrow to throw down another chair. The Newfs in the corner stand up on the pool table and shout, “Give her the money! Give her the money!”

Dorf and Darla Newton try to leave but find the entrance blocked with people shouting, “Give her the money!” in broken refrain, and the floor strewn with glass, chairs, and pool balls. As they push their way out, the wooden doors catch on the magnets, staying open. Light from the Legion brightens the lampless street. But not enough light that Dorf can see the buttons on the his keys and he inadvertently sets off his car alarm, then drops his keys down the drain and screams, “For fuck sake!” as the car alarm rings out and legions of legionnaires pour from the bar in a mood of violent frenzy. Three other car alarms go off and that’s when the first window gets smashed. Another, another—cars with shattered windows, Blue Mist, Moose on Main, Limber Pine, busted up, broken windows, kicked in doors. Bob Donkers and John Lanigan gather a small mob together to tip one of the irregularly shaped planters, while Barry and Sebastien cheer. Loretta and six of her girlfriends set sights on the abstract metal statue but find it immovable. Sebastien screams shrilly, inhumanly, “Toppled it! Bring it down!” and tries to add his weight but finds it well beyond him.

Raging along Main Street, the mob turns on another planter, on another window, on one of their own cars. Elderly people, eyes bugging, swinging on lampposts, spray paint in hand, screeching in the wind, mad at something, at everything.

Ferdy’s inside No. 9, sitting at a table weeping. Elizabeth begins the cleanup. Ferdy hands her the ace. She falls into weeping alongside Ferdy, hugs him, and makes for home. She goes out the back way, past the overflowing employee ashtray, past the red dumpster, and down a gravel road. The sound of shattering glass and spalling concrete punctuated with hoots of human hysteria winds round the corners, echoes up the alley. The crumbling red brick school house on the corner looks taller than usual; black windows like mirrors reflecting distant chaos and distorted bartenders. The jack-o’-lantern spray-painted on the abandoned Texaco Station at the end of Elizabeth’s block grins like the Cheshire Cat when she speeds past. Elizabeth sees her house and chokes under the small orange bulb that hangs over her door, welling with love for those who left her light on, for the peeling paint on her house, for the piecemeal state of her town.

Her mother, minding her child, asks about the evening, to which Elizabeth shakes her head and says, “Don’t ask. But stay here tonight, Mum. Don’t walk home.” Elizabeth cries softly, comforted by her baffled mother, then makes for her child’s room. Elias is in bed asleep, his red mouth open, drool from his lips soaking the pillow. She lays down next to him and smiles, slipping the ace under his pillow.

*

When Elizabeth walks to work the next day, she passes and nods at Darla Newton on the street sweeping up dirt spilled from the planters. She nods again at Ferdy cleaning horseshit from the side of the Legion. The large metal statue has been dented and dinged but stands tall, hard, though somehow still humbled. Inside No. 9, Dolly has already piled all the broken chairs into a heap in the corner, then tidied everything else. “Need to resurface the pool table and get a couple of chairs from the basement, but nothing too bad.”

“Jesus Christ, Dolly. What was that?”

Dolly shakes her head, wipes the counter.

*

The people in town pretend it never happened. No one called the police, and the police never came. No one filed a report. The town was cleaned: plastic over broken windows, cement wreckage of the irregular planters stacked neatly next to other planters, streets swept, graffiti stripped, buildings repainted, signs replaced. Elizabeth passed the remnants and tidied carnage twice a day, most days. She loved it secretly, dearly. The bent metal statue a monument to the night the town rioted, the night they all showed up to make something happen, but in the absence of ideas or collective use for their skills or smarts, and fuelled by an aimless and simmering rage, they performed their frustration: ineffectual, redundant, out of step with whatever the world was becoming; they performed their love: where else could they put hope but in each other? Who else could they forgive but each other? They had their say.

---

Sarah Mintz is the author of NORMA and Handwringers. Her work has been published by Radiant Press, Invisible Publishing, The Feathertale Review, JackPine, Agnes and True, Book*Hug, Apocalypse Confidential, and a few others. She’s a graduate of the English MA program at the University of Regina and lives a rootless life of tiresome wandering.