Sippin’ Suds at the Single-Wide

Anyone who’s traveled the back roads of western Wisconsin has probably spotted the bait shops, pole barns, and even semi-trailers that serve as watering holes. On my many passes through the area, en route to a friend’s cabin or a visit with family, I’ve happened upon bars made from substandard shacks and, in one instance, a trailer home. For years now, I’ve been driving past Kappus Bud’s Place, a bar situated inside a dilapidated singe-wide just up the road from an uncle’s cabin. Recently, I ventured inside.
Located on a glistening lakefront near the resort town of Minong, in the northwesterly part of the state, Kappus Bud’s hardly appeared ominous or even out of the ordinary on a recent sunny Sunday afternoon, when my brother and I finally pulled off the road and into its dirt parking lot. Miller Lite banners flapped in the wind, tied between the trailer, with its tan, peeling paint and some nearby saplings. An illuminated signpost, bearing the establishment’s name and an illustration of a heavy-duty truck, towered above the squat building. A new ramp made the front entry handicap accessible.
Stepping inside, however, was like entering the Twilight Zone. Kappus Bud’s Place is outfitted with accoutrements common to Wisconsin’s countryside barrooms: plenty of Green Bay Packers pennants, a cloud of secondhand smoke thick enough to slice, and a crusted-over toaster oven for warming bar snacks. Add to these a couple of inoperable arcade games shoved in the corners and a pool table made unsteady by the buckled laminate floor.
All of three people were sitting at the trailer’s long, narrow particle-board bar. On the far right end, an old man in a Packers cap and baseball jacket sat across from a large TV broadcasting the Jacksonville Jaguars/Philadelphia Eagles game at a deafening volume. At the other end of the bar, a disheveled but attractive fifty-ish man with a long, black beard and Panama hat prodded a video-poker game with his left hand while a cigarette dangled from the fingers of his right. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” he said, looking up. His voice was clear and warm—a counterpoint to the ghostly-quiet environs. At the center of the bar, the mousy bartender, bespectacled and slight of build, dispensed cans of Miller Lite for a buck apiece. On a shelf above him, the bar’s second television played War of the Worlds, the 2005 version starring Tom Cruise, at a volume rivaling that of the football game thirty feet away. During a sparse and rather eerie movement in the film’s score, sudden crashes of strings were interspersed with bolts of timpani, and long silences in between. Together with the cheering crowds and yipping sportscasters, these dissonant sounds formed the perfect soundtrack to that afternoon’s excursion.
As for bar chat, old-timer football fan muttered indecipherable comments about the game as well as the occasional question. “You hunt?” he rumbled to us, turning his attention from the game for a few seconds and revealing a cleft lip and chlorine-blue eyes. Awaiting an answer, he seemed to chew the air, which set his jowls rippling. “No, I do not,” said my brother, sounding embarrassed. I smiled but remained silent. I knew that the man knew damn well I didn’t hunt. There was no breeze to be shot with the bartender. His deep-set, ferret-like eyes were too melancholic to hold comfortably in a gaze, and he obviously wasn’t interested in idle conversation, let alone eye contact. After collecting our dollar bills and murmuring just enough to betray a nasally speech impediment, he resumed his position on his stool: slumped over, hands hanging limp between the knees, head hung slightly.
I sipped my Miller and bided time by examining items on the shelves behind the bar: dead batteries, defunct fuse boxes, and all manner of metallic junk. Seemingly well-adjusted teenagers appeared in portraits, now yellowed and curled at the edges, taped to a 70s-era fridge. Later it appeared that the bearded man had departed without our noticing, leaving my brother and me alone with these two curious characters. The bartender glanced up at the movie, and then snuck a peek in our direction. The old man chewed air. But mostly everyone sat in silence, waiting out the trespass.