Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille (2 page)

Jamie thought this very funny. So did Rose. Actually Libby and Fred chuckled, too. There’s no accounting for taste.

Speaking of taste, we were all eating gyros and saganaki with baby peas in vinegar when Rich and Eve came back in, wrapped around each other as usual. We turned and stared at them. Eve was smiling and Rich had that glow in his face that he gets after a wild motorcycle ride.

“Well?” I said. “What’s it like?”

They sat down at the table with us, and Rich said, “What can I say? I laughed. I cried. I fell down. It changed my life. It was good. The end.”

“Thanks,” said Jamie.

“Does that mean we’re at the end of the universe?” asked Tom.

“What’s the place like?” I said.

Rich smiled happily. “I don’t think we’re in the same solar system anymore,” he said.

There was a great deal of quiet all of a sudden. Tom said, “Well, really, what’s a star or two among friends?”

I said, “Did you get funny looks, riding the bike around?”

“A few,” he said. “Not many.”

Jamie said, “How odd is it?”

“The bike?” said Tom.

“The sky’s funny,” said Rich. “It’s great. You should go look at it.”

Jamie gave an exaggerated shudder, which he did well. He was very big, and much too handsome for his own good.

Tom said, “What kind of movies do they have here?”

Rich ignored him. I said, “Man, you’re weird.”

“That’s Jamie’s line,” said Tom.

“
Man
,” said Jamie.

Rich said, “The big news is that I didn’t see any signs of nuclear warnings, or alerts, or anything. We might be here for a while.”

“Good,” I said, and meant it. “I’ve been needing to be somewhere solid for more than—however long we were in Jerrysport.”

“I know,” said Rich and Libby together.

“About this sky,” said Rose.

“Yeah,” said Rich, his eyes shining. “It’s like, really high, and sort of pale, and there’s a kind of white-looking sun in it. It might be a white dwarf, I don’t know anything about astronomy. But it makes the ground look—”

“What are the buildings like?” asked Jamie.

“Go and look,” said Rich.

Eve broke her customary silence long enough to say, in an almost inaudible voice, “There’s one that looks like a giant golden arch, and we were going to ask if we could get hamburgers there, but it turned out to be too far away.”

Rich smiled a Mephistophelian smile within his beard and sat down at the table next to Eve. Fred went back to get him some food. Libby said, “I could see looking around myself, if you macho types aren’t going to wimp out.”

“Oh,” said Jamie. “A challenge. I think I hear a challenge.”

“A touch,” said Tom. “I do confess—”

“Come on,” said Rich. “Let’s do some exploring.”

“If we stay here, will we be
in
ploring?” asked Tom.

At which point the first customers of the new location walked in, wearing that first-time-at-a-new-restaurant look. The guy’s hair was done in that puffy-in-front style that we’d just left in Jerrysport, and he had orthopedic clogs on his feet and tight straight-legged dark pants with a loose dark shirt. His companion had a miniskirt and high black boots that made me think of the Beatles. I decided I was going to like this place.

They took a corner booth. Libby got up to go back to the bar in case they ordered drinks. A few surreptitious glances at the customers told me that they weren’t making surreptitious glances at us, which meant we didn’t look too out of place, so that was good.

Jamie, keeping his voice low, said, “Well, Rich, did you find out the name of the city?”

“No. I get the impression that it’s a colony world, though. There seems to be quite a bit of off-planet export.”

“That doesn’t prove anything,” said Jamie. “Why didn’t you get the name?”

Rich blinked. “Can you imagine walking up to someone and—”

“Yeah, I see your point. Did you find out what year it is?”

“Local year sixty-one,” he said.

“Did you find out when the colony was founded?”

“No.”

“Or how long the local year is?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s real useful,” said Jamie.

Rich said something not very nice to Jamie, and I cut in before things could get worse, saying, “You didn’t get any indication of when we are compared to where we were? Um, when we were. I mean, you know what I mean.”

He shrugged. “Transportation technology hasn’t changed much. Like I said, my bike didn’t get too many stares. They do have one thing I haven’t seen before, though.” He got the I’ve-found-a-new-toy gleam in his eye, reached into his back pocket, and pulled out what looked like a socket wrench.

I sighed. “All right. Where’d you find it?”

“A sale in a hardware store. I traded the electric ratchet press for it.”

“The one that got you so excited you couldn’t stop talking about it?”

“I never got it to press evenly. The guy up the street likes playing with broken things even more than I do.”

I sighed and nodded. “Okay.” I looked at the object in his hand again. “What does it do?”

He told me.

I said, “What?”

He tried again.

I said, “Never mind. I’m sure it’s important. Is it for the bike?”

“Hmmm,” he said. “I hadn’t thought of that. I could probably use it to—”

“I don’t want to hear about it.”

He sighed. “Nobody speaks electronics, nobody speaks motorcycle.”

Which reminded me of something. I said, “Do they speak English here?”

“Some. Most people speak French.”

“It’s Canadian French,” said Eve quietly.

“Great,” I said. “Do any of us speak it? Except Eve, of course.”

“Fred speaks some French,” said Jamie.

“Good,” I said. “He can take orders, at least.” I gave a listen to Fred and the couple who’d come in, and, yeah, it did seem like French. They were pointing at the menu and Fred seemed to be smiling and nodding. Maybe they thought a menu in English was an affectation.

“Should we practice?”

“Speaking French?” asked Tom.

“Sure,” said Jamie, ignoring Tom.

Rose said, “I don’t believe I could do that right now.”

“Why not?” I asked, trying to keep irritation out of my voice.

“I don’t think I feel quite like playing, just at the moment.”

I caught Tom’s eye. He shrugged. “All right,” I said. I got up and went into the back room, opened up the case, and put my banjo into double-C tuning. While I was doing that, Tom came in and picked up Jamie’s Gibson six-string. His movements were quick and precise. Tom was built tall and thin; something like Fred only more so—he always looked a bit emaciated, whereas Fred just looked skinny. Tom’s hair and beard were light, whereas Fred’s hair was dark, and he had the sort of fine skin that made one think he would be unable to grow a beard.

While we were checking our tunings, Tom said, “Do you know that all of our instruments are antiques now?”

“Scary,” I said. “‘Arkansas Traveler’?”

“All right. Start it.”

Then we were lost for a while in melody and countermelody and variations, and the sweet sound of strings. Every time we came back to the start, I moved further up the neck, and Tom made his part more Baroque, throwing in frills and rolls that ranged from old-timey to rock ’n’ roll. At one point I heard someone give a “whoop” and I wondered who it was, but my eyes were closed by then and I couldn’t spare the concentration to open them. I started double-thumbing and Tom starting doing tremolo like he was playing mandolin and we blew it out the top, came all the way back, and ran through it once in its simplest, most basic form, and ended together on a bluegrass lick that I don’t think either of us had planned.

When I opened my eyes, Libby was there, grinning at us and practically emitting sparks. She laughed and shook her head. “You guys were really plugged.”

“It felt all right,” I said. God, aren’t we modest?

Tom was doing his down-home hick smile.

Jamie came in and joined us, along with Rose. Apparently Jamie had spoken to her, because she picked up her fiddle, looking only a little sullen. We practiced until about three in the morning, then crashed on the floor in back, as we had every night for the past—how long? Two weeks, maybe? Several hundred years? Depends how you count it.

The first jump had been to London, and we’d stayed there about five months, during the war. That was when Fred had started letting us live right in Feng’s. Then we’d been hit again and found ourselves on a lunar colony that hadn’t existed when we were hit—we’d gone about six years into the future and landed in the middle of another atomic war. We were only there a few days, three, I think, before we were hit, and we found ourselves another twenty years in the future, on Mars, and there was a nuclear alert in the city. Two days later,
kerblam
, and here we were.

Before I fell asleep, Jamie rolled over and said, “Hey, bror?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you have any idea what this is about?”

“The wars?”

“Well, no. Yes. I don’t know. We walk into a restaurant, get hit by a bomb, and—”

“Get thrown through time and space?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It could never happen.”

“Yeah.” He turned over. Tom started snoring. Rose, between Jamie and me, shifted. Jamie said, “Do you believe in God?”

“No,” I said.

“I don’t mean necessarily the—”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“But, look, I don’t mean to sound all mystical, but why were we spared?”

“Maybe we were in the right place at the right time, is all.”

“But what is it about this place—”

“Ah-ha,” I said. “Now,
that
is just the question I’ve been trying to figure out. I do not believe that a supreme being or a primal life force or a great energy pool has singled us out to play Irish music to the cosmos. But there is
something
about this place that makes it bounce when nuclear weapons hit it.”

“Yeah,” said Jamie. “I want to know what it is.”

“When you find out,” I said, yawning, “tell me.”

“I will,” he said.

I wanted to ask him if he meant he’d tell me, or that he’d find out, but I don’t remember doing so, so I must have fallen asleep.

“How did I end up with this job?”

“Via linguistics, same as I did. We don’t need translators for any of this stuff.”

“You sure about that? What, by the Grand Banana,
is
all this shit, anyway?”

“Look at it.”

“I
am
looking at it.
The Godfather. Potempkin. Mutiny on the Bounty. Star Wars. Magic Incorporated. Chinatown. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Who Framed—
”

“They’re motion pictures. Entertainment. Just like—”

“I know that. But—”

“And the ones over there were reproduced from audio discs. Music that was popular at the time. Those, under the table, were from written works. Novels, newspapers, magazines, that sort of thing.”

“It can’t be all we have from the period.”

“Not quite, but damn close.”

“And we have to go through all of it?”

“There will be twelve of us by the time everyone gets here. We have to go through as much as we can in twenty hours. Then we rest for eight, and meet and try to put together a passable facade, for which we have forty hours.”

“What’s the hurry?”

“Got me. It’s supposed to be something important, though.”

“I don’t believe that, in twenty hours, we can absorb enough about a vanished culture to fool those who live there.”

“I’ll bet we can come close, and Feng will probably be able to deal with any gaps after—”

“Why don’t we just get some people to have overlays? That way—”

“Are you volunteering?”

“Umm, no—”

“Besides, it takes more than fifty hours to prepare, plus eight or nine to recover. That wouldn’t give us anywhere near enough time.”

“It’s crazy, isn’t it? Twelve of us are supposed to create a building that will pass for Old Earth of half a millennium ago, right down to pictures on the wall, construction, technology, with no anachronisms, in sixty-eight hours? We don’t even know what kind of place it should be. A business? A house? What?”

“We’d better get started, hadn’t we?”

“This is crazy.”

“You might enjoy it. What I’m doing here is one of the best ways to learn about the culture, and I’m enjoying it.”

“You would. All right. I might as well. Hit Play for me, would ya? Thanks. Hmmm. Who the hell was Clint Eastwood, anyway?”

“Got me. What’s a five-letter word for ‘Dr. George, or city north of Bismarck?’”

“Maps and bios are in the cupboard. Hand me some popcorn, would ya?”

Feng’s always opened for business within a few hours, subjectively, after a bombing, and no one on the outside seemed surprised. It was as if, well, imagine that you’re riding your bicycle or whatever down some street that you’ve been going down for years and years, and all of sudden you go, “Hey, that looks like an interesting place. I wonder why I’ve never noticed it before. Maybe I’ll stop in and see how the food is.” Well, that’s what it was like, it seems, for everyone who went by. For those of us on the inside, you understand, it was a bit different. When we were in London we hired some locals to help out, but, until New Quebec, we didn’t stay anywhere else long enough to do any more than minimum business; three days is insufficient to build up a base of regulars. Some of the locals were pretty decent people, too; there was a real nice guy named Willie whom we picked up in London and left in Jerrysport. This was one of the things that made me so skittish about leaving Feng’s.

Electrical service was probably the trickiest part. Rich took care of that. Back in the States, we used 110/120-volt AC outlets. Then, in London, it was 220. In Ibrium City they’d gone to a reverse-ground switched-current arrangement, and in Jerrysport they used Broadcast Variable Direct from solar collectors. Our band quickly gave up trying to get any of our electronic equipment to work, but Feng’s just kept right on going, with hardly a pause to get the lights on.

You want to know how it ran? Well, Fred and Eve switched off doing the cooking and waiting tables, mostly Fred. Tom and Jamie and Rose and I pitched in when and as we were needed, in exchange for our accommodations, and because Fred didn’t want to hire outside help. It was a pretty small place, too, and with Libby running the bar herself, it wasn’t much of a problem most of the time. In fact, by the time we had a few regulars, which took a few days, we were all into the routine pretty well. We were still short on supplies, but had begun to get ideas on where to get them. The hardest thing was adjusting to it being Monday again when we were all set for Friday. But that sort of thing, too, we were pretty used to.

“Business,” Rich remarked when Friday finally rolled around, “seems pretty good.”

The two of us were in the pantry cleaning up blankets and making a list of things to find a local supplier for quickly. “Good,” I said. “Lightbulbs. I think our fixtures will hold what they’re using.”

“They will; I’ve checked. And we should find out if humanity has yet devised a good way of cleaning a grill.”

“Yep. Local whiskey, brandy, and beer.”

“Not wine?”

“Have you seen the wine cellar? After the way Fred stocked up in London, we don’t have room for anything else.”

“Got it. I’m going to look for hard cider, though.”

“That makes sense.”

“You guys playing tonight?”

“If anyone shows up to listen,” I said.

“Eve and I put up a bunch of posters.”

“That was nice of you. In English?”

“No. We found a printer and Eve—”

“Paper towels. What did you use for currency?”

“I pawned my spare helmet.”

“Well, thanks,” I said. “Yeah, that could bring some people in.”

“You should look around.”

“I intend to. Vegetable oil.”

“The name of the sun is Chaucer, by the way.”

“Really?” I said. “I like that. What’s the planet?”

“Laurier.”

“Cool. Bean sprouts, or the local equivalent, and hot peppers. That should do it for the stuff that can’t wait.”

“Good. Thanks. The mysterious Mr. Feng almost certainly appreciates your help.”

“The mysterious Mr. Feng can kiss my ruddy bum, as someone or other would say.”

“Think you guys will do okay tonight?”

“I guess. I’ve got a few other things on my mind, to tell you the truth. Although don’t mention that to the rest of my band.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t.”

“I think they’re all pretty hot to go on. Shit, we’ve only been waiting to play for, what, a few hundred years, maybe? And I was always nervous about playing Irish music in London, anyway, with all the real Irish bands floating around. This’ll be fun.”

“I hope so.”

We didn’t often get called back for a second encore, so I was pretty happy when we came down off the stage. Happy, exhausted, exhilarated, all of that. It’s funny how you never get used to the highs and lows of performing, no matter how much you play.

Even Rich seemed pleased, like he might almost admit we’d sounded okay if he wasn’t careful. A young guy in a brown fur coat that looked too hot and his apparent girlfriend with perfect bangs had been sitting in the front row drinking in every song. They came up and pumped my hand while chattering away in French. I smiled and tried to indicate that I was glad they’d liked it, until Fred appeared to usher them out of the bar. I was pleased as well as surprised by the turnout, which was pretty spectacular considering that we hadn’t even been in the solar system the week before.

Jamie had found a short, pretty woman with a whiny voice and chestnut hair—or, rather, she’d found him. I watched the courtship ritual for a while, then I shrugged and started putting my instrument away. I go through occasional fits of jealousy about the way women flock around Jamie, but I know it’s stupid. This time I just shook my head and smiled while I tucked my banjo strap behind the head.

“
Man
.” It was Jamie’s line, but Tom said it. I turned, saw him staring, and followed his gaze to a small, thin, blond-haired woman with big, bright blue eyes, and a very pretty, round face.

“Good luck,” I told him.

“What do you mean?”

“Go for it.”

“You crazy? What am I supposed to do? Walk up to her and say, ‘Hi there, you’re the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen’?”

“There are worse lines.”

“Shit.”

I shrugged and turned back to my banjo case. The flap that lets you get to the inner pocket of the thing has been broken for a few centuries now, so it takes major work to get to it. When I had the tuner stored, she was gone.

“Her friend was giving you the eye,” said Tom.

“Who?”

“A redhead she was sitting with during the show.”

“Hmmm. Point her out to me if they show up again.”

“I will.”

“You should have said hello to the blonde.”

“Next time.”

Rose was watching Jamie leave with his new friend. “Watching” may be too mild a word. Rose and Jamie have nothing going on between them, Rose has no shred of jealousy in her, and she isn’t bothered at all by Jamie’s attentions to other women; except when they do and she does and she is. I saw the look on her face and knew what came next in this script, so I went over to her to help her with the Jameson, since she was too small to be expected to finish the whole bottle herself. And besides, it was Jameson.

Presently Fred shut out the lights. Rose talked, I listened, and we drank.

I don’t get hangovers.

I keep telling myself that. I figure that if I can convince myself it’s true, maybe I won’t feel quite so bloated, shrunk, dehydrated, sweaty, achy, numb, stretched, and tender the next morning. Tom has been growing gradually less sympathetic to the morning-after conditions of those around him. He said, “Are you going to be able to play tonight?”

I nodded, while trying to pick burrs out of my tongue with my teeth—which was hard because my teeth had turned to foam rubber during the night. “Water,” I said. “Water would be a good thing. Water. Then coffee. That’s what I’m going to accomplish today. Great. I have a plan. Ambition. A goal in life. Yeah. Water, then coffee. But first, the bathroom. Good. We’re getting organized now.” Tom smiled, hooked his hands behind his head, and leaned back in his pile of odds and ends that passed for a bed. He lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and let it out slow, probably to tell me how nice it felt not to have a hangover. But I was going through one of my periodic fits of not smoking, so it just made me feel superior.

I got up and stumbled to the bathroom, going through the kitchen so I didn’t have to look at the breakfast crowd, whose sounds I was hearing through my fog. I tried to remember what time Feng’s opened, but couldn’t, and it annoyed me that I didn’t know if I couldn’t remember because of aftereffects of the jump or of drinking.

I made it to the bathroom, where I splashed water on my eyes, cheeks, and the back of my neck, while making sounds that were not unlike a tin can and a smoke detector achieving simultaneous orgasm.

I was about to leave, still dripping water from my face, when I heard a noise like someone was setting off a firecracker just outside the bathroom door. It was sharp, though dulled by the door, and had a particular echo that my memory must be exaggerating. Or maybe not; the echo still haunts me.

Then there was another one, and another, and I think another but I’m not certain. I started to open the door to find out what was going on when it suddenly swung open toward me, jamming my middle finger. I cursed and looked for someone to be snide to. The someone fell into me and continued on toward the floor. I caught him. His face, which I’d never seen before, was branded with shock. His mouth worked like a fish’s. He was breathing in gasps. I held him for just a moment, then he got his feet under him. He pushed away from me as if panicking and crashed into the nearest sink, then turned around and faced me. My right hand felt wet and sticky, and I glanced down, and knew that it was blood and I forgot about my jammed finger.

There was a big ugly red splotch on his chest, burnt around the edges, and I could see muscle tissue and, I think, bone. Then I noticed a red stain on the stomach of the pale yellow sports shirt he wore, and two more high on the left leg of his dark knit pants. One of his leg wounds was pumping blood.

His face, which was long, mustached, and dark, had a fresh scratch along one cheek. His hair was nearly as long as mine. For a second he stood upright, leaning against the wall. He looked right at me, and said, quite clearly and distinctly, “Sugar Bear.” Then he slumped to the floor and seemed to concentrate all of his energy on breathing and blinking.

I did the only thing I could, which was to stand there, unable to move or even think about anything except how ugly the guy’s wounds looked, feel my heart pound, and say the words
gunshots gunshots gunshots
over and over in my mind.

Presently I realized that things were quiet, which was how I realized that I’d been hearing screams from the next room. I stood there, heroically paralyzed and staring at the guy who was probably dying or something. Then I heard Tom calling my name from the other side of the men’s room door.

“I’m in here,” I said. “There’s someone hurt.” I somehow couldn’t say “shot.”

When the door opened it was Libby and Fred. Libby glanced at the guy, who was still bleeding and all like that. She knelt down next to him. I said, “Is there anything I can—”

She looked at me, shook her head, and said, “Just go sit down.”

“Right. Sit down,” I said. “Good idea.”

She said, “Fred, make sure no one comes in.”

“Will do,” he said, as if he’d done this sort of thing thousands of times. Then I saw that he was holding a small, flat, silvery grey automatic pistol in his hand. Something about the way he held it told me he knew how to use it. I said, “Did you—” My voice caught.

“No,” he said. “I’m being careful.”

I heard Libby say, “Can you hear me? I’m a paramedic. I’m going to…” as I walked out. I made my way through what was rapidly becoming a large group of curious people. I sat down in one of the booths and had coffee. I think Rose brought it to me, but I’m not certain. There were a lot of people gathered there, and I knew several of them, but I’m not exactly sure, in retrospect, who they were.

Someone sat down next to three or four gunshots, Mr. Kevely, kay-ee-vee-ee-ell of a way to start to get an idea of where he was standing when did you first hear you play sometime, sir, but why is it that your band lives within the township of New Quebec Municipal Police Force, Criminal Investigation Division of labor makes sense, Officer, so we work here as part-time employees when we’re not playing in the band of raggle-taggle gypsies—oh, sure, I’m fine, thanks, Officer, except this is the first time I’ve seen or heard the phrase sugar bear sugar bear sugar bear up under this kind of questioning for three fucking hours and that is yours so those must have been his orders to investigate the shooting death of a male Caucasian height of idiocy to just let him stay here when we aren’t sure if he knows more or less everything we can get from Billy take this and some water, you should lie down and rest of the time between now and then we just have to guess that should be enough help him or her is that you Libby thanks for being here or therefore I may as well sleep for a while.

My last conscious thought was, How the hell am I supposed to play tonight?

The answer was: in a fog, and I’m not sure the others were doing much better. I remember none of our usual arguing over the set list, nor do I remember any details of the performance itself, except that at one point I had trouble with my jammed finger, but I don’t even know what song we were doing. I kept getting the shakes in the middle of tunes and almost losing it. I tried to lose myself in the music, but then I’d remember why I was trying to do so and I’d get the shakes again.