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“To a good day,” Dan Grinolds said, swallowing half his drink.

Outside, scraps of police tape roll down the torn concrete road, floating from the Owl Bar a block away.

The roads are quiet Saturday afternoon. Cars and trucks slow as they pass the Owl and its neighboring two houses, still roped off.

The lights are out. Bundles of pink, yellow and purple flowers sit at the feet of the Owl’s street sign, the corner of Washington and 3rd Street.

No one speaks outside. No one is seen outside.

But inside JFK, people talk.

“There was always something about him,” Dave Jarabek said.

“Too many tears last night,” Grinolds said.

At 10:30 a.m. Aug. 1, 45-year-old Michael Paul Brown left his home next to the Owl Bar and fatally shot four — a bartender and three patrons, authorities said.

He escaped in a white Ford F-150 pickup. Hours later, authorities found the pickup but not Brown. He’s still at large.

Brown was an Owl regular, Jill Rowles said.

In a town like Anaconda, 9,800 people strong, everyone feels everything. You have an untied shoe, in 30 minutes, half the town has heard, JFK owner Keith Wilkins said.

All that to say, as a fellow Owl regular, Rowles knew Brown, too. She knew everyone who died. One was a close friend. Sitting in that bar, Rowles was waiting for an Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco official to find her.

They want to know what she knows. She didn’t know what to say.

Friday night, Anaconda was numb and under lockdown, Rowles said. Saturday afternoon, the lockdown is lifted, but the town still clings to its breath.

“He’s somewhere,” Rowles said.

Knowing Mike Brown

Dan Oberweiser, 67, was Brown’s high school football coach in Deer Lodge in the ‘90s. He doesn’t drink, but he walked into JFK looking for something to fill the silence throughout Anaconda.

“Mike always had a big smile on his face as a kid,” he said, resting his arms on a high-top table next to the bar. “Yesterday, I saw him race by me on 3rd street in the white pickup. And I saw cop car after cop car chase after him.”

Oberweiser’s eyes became glassy as he gazed out the bar door into the afternoon sun.

“What he did, that’s not the Mikey I knew 30 years ago.”

As the town waited on official word, people took to social media. Threads of comments and speculation wondered who died, how it happened, where the shooter could have gone.

“There was so much hatred on Facebook,” Oberweiser said. “Understandably so. There’s hatred, fear, grief. What they don’t understand is that this is a mental health issue. His family are victims of this. I know they tried to help him the best he could, to get him mental help and to keep him on his medication. But he’s a victim in his own way too. I’m not taking away from the deaths, the friends we’ve lost,” he said. “But we all knew Mike was a victim of illness.”

The neighborhood

Homes scattered around the Owl had their curtains pulled back to display “Anaconda Strong” signs.

Julie Fanyak, 67, has lived next to the Owl for 25 years. She and her husband played pool there. It was a place of friendship, she said.

“The shots sounded like this,” Fanyak said, knocking her knuckles on her living room window. She couldn’t hear the pops, but the recoil rattled the walls. They came rapid fire, quick succession. Then, silence.

“I thought they were firecrackers at first. They light off firecrackers outside the bar all the time. I didn’t know something was up until I saw an ambulance zoom past my window 15 minutes later.”

As she looked down the street, fire officials commanded her back inside. Lock the doors and avoid windows.

Like their neighbors, Fanyak and her husband own firearms. It wasn’t the guns that scared her, but the fact that it was someone just a few doors down from her who did this.

“My husband and I have walked past his house often and saw him on the porch. We’d say 'hello,' but we’d never get a response.” Fanyak said. “Our whole sense of safety is gone. My bedroom door doesn’t lock. I’m going to buy a deadbolt today.”

Another neighbor heard the gunfire. She asked not to be named.

“We heard the voices. Then the screams, and then the gunshots. And my chest immediately felt heavy,” she said.

The neighbor met Brown once while moving in three years ago. As she and her husband struggled to carry a couch into their living room, Brown was walking by and offered a hand, then introduced himself.

“I’ve never felt unsafe here, and still I don’t feel unsafe here. I know that sounds odd, but I’m hoping this is just an isolated case,” she said. “We pull together, support each other and love each other. They call us Anaconda Strong for a reason.”

Lockdown

Town Pump employee Michael Fischer is grateful he doesn’t have to clean anything up.

The gas station’s crew was in a meeting Friday morning when a lockdown was called. They knew there was an active shooter, but not much else. Customers were shooed out with a vague explanation — “We need to close early” — and employees were told to go home or stay in place.

That was fine to Fischer. He didn’t have any place to be. He avoided windows as he was told and stayed at work until 8 p.m., just two hours longer than usual for him.

He didn’t know anyone injured. He knew that in a small town, that was unique.

As he restocked the gas station’s fridge, he listened to a coworker make a tough decision. They knew someone who was shot. At the same time, they had a teenager at home panicking.

Fischer kept to his own business, and he didn’t see any updates on the shooter until Saturday morning. He checked into work, because the world kept turning.

Throughout it all, he thought of a 2022 murder-suicide that took place in an Anaconda casino.

Someone had to clean that, he thought. Someone will have to clean the Owl Bar, too.

Despite standing just a block away from the bullets, the JFK Bar felt like the safest place in the world to Rowles on Friday.

By half an hour in, the streets were packed with law enforcement, vehicles crawling up and down the streets, armed officials honed-in on Brown's residence.

For a while, patrons watched from the sidewalk. Rowles told stories about the last vacation she’d gone on with one of the four dead.

As stores and restaurants closed early, the people of Anaconda needed a place to be. Wall-to-wall, visitors filled the JFK bar floor. Rowles started serving drinks.

Wilkins knows the usual folks, rivalries and friendships. Typical relationships took a back seat. Packed and quiet don’t often go together at JFK, he said.

There was a sense of disbelief, Jarabek said. In hindsight, that felt stupid.

Jarabek is from Chicago. He spent nine years in the Navy. He traveled all over the world, he served in the Middle East, and yet he’d never been in a situation like this.

Mass shootings are a reality, he said. But Montana is also small. Faceless people commit murder. These are his neighbors.

All of Friday night, he kept shaking his head, waiting to be told it wasn’t really happening. The next morning, he’s still waiting for that news.

“It happens everywhere,” Jarabek said. “It doesn’t happen here. I don’t know why I didn’t think it would happen here.”

“'Anaconda Strong,'” Rowles asked. “What does that mean?”