Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille (3 page)

During the first break, Tom started talking to the woman we’d noticed the night before. During the second break, he introduced me to her and her friend. I promptly forgot both of their names, but, then, I might not have been able to come up with my own if I needed to in a hurry.

When the show was over, I noticed Tom rushing to put his instruments away, I guess to go talk to his new friend. I took some time putting mine away. I sat on the stage and took two deep breaths.

“There were police here,” someone said.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m wondering why there were police here, earlier today.”

A redheaded woman with bright green eyes that were probably tinted contacts sat at the table near the stage, drinking something clear out of a Tom Collins glass. There was fruit in it. After a moment, I placed her as the woman who’d arrived with Tom’s friend.

I said, “Someone was shot in the bathroom this morning.”

Her eyes widened. “Shot, dead?”

“Yes.”

“That’s pretty scary.” Her English had the barest trace of a French accent, but was otherwise faintly Oxford.

I said, “I was right there when it happened. Scared hell out of me.”

“I would imagine.”

I realized that I wanted her to keep talking, because I liked her accent, so I contrived to do so. She gave me her name, and I forgot it, and she gave it to me again. Souci. Pronounced “Sue” as in taking someone to court, with the accent on the “cee.”

I got us coffee, and we covered a variety of subjects, but always came back to the dead man.

I said, “It’s one thing to know you’re going to die someday. It’s another to see it happen so suddenly like that. You can’t help identifying with him.”

“I know,” she said.

“But think about it. Your whole life, all your plans, everything you’re going to do tomorrow and next year, and the things you want to see, and then,
blam
, it’s over.”

“I know.”

“It’s how
fast
it happened, that’s what gets to me.”

“I don’t think you should think about it anymore right now,” she said.

“I guess.” I shuddered. “Let’s get some food. They’ll still serve if we hurry.”

“I could eat a little,” she said.

Feng’s always served food until at least three-thirty, and we were picking at the remains of French onion soup and Cajun blackened chicken until something like four o’clock. I learned that Souci was local, didn’t really care for Irish music, but her friend, the blonde, did, and Souci allowed that we were all-right. She said she was a dancer. I raised an eyebrow, and she shook her head.

“No. I dance for clubs like Montague’s,” as if that should explain things. She added, “I do not strip,” as if it were perfectly reasonable for me to wonder.

“Okay,” I said, and we went on from there.

I can no more remember that conversation in detail than I can remember playing that evening, but it went on for a long time. When the day finally caught up with me, and each eyelid acquired a ten-pound weight, I asked Souci if she’d like to crash in the corner of the storage area where I kept my futon. It didn’t seem odd at the time, and she said yes, and I fell asleep almost at once. Souci, curled up in my arms, was soft and warm.

She was still asleep when I woke up. It was only when I saw her there, asleep, that I realized just how beautiful she was—which was odd, because I’m not normally that slow to notice, and mornings aren’t kind to anyone. She had a few freckles, and her hair may have been dyed, but she had the complexion to match it. Her cheekbones were high and quite pronounced, and the line of her jaw was emphatic, almost West Indian, ending in a very strong chin. Her eyes were deeply set, the brows fine, and there was a permanent, very slight pout to her lips. Her skin looked like fine silk. Her face, taken as a whole, was almost otherworldly, with an odd sort of perfection that hit me very hard.

It was impossible to see what the rest of her looked like under the blankets, but from what I recalled from the night before she had no excess weight and all of the right curves. I wondered how in the world I’d been able to fall asleep so easily with her next to me.

She woke up and caught me staring at her. I quickly looked away and said, “Good morning. Want some coffee?”

“Ummmm.” She stretched. “Cream.”

“What? Oh. Uh, right.”

When I went to get the coffee, I found Tom sitting in a booth with the blonde. They were on the same side of the booth, Tom was leaning forward with his hands on the table in front of him, she was leaning back, her hands folded over her stomach. I could tell right away that neither of them had had any sleep. There was a coffee decanter on the table in front of them. “Good morning, folks,” I said.

“Don’t say that,” said Tom, screwing his face into a grimace.

“Sorry.”

“This is Carrie. Carrie, that’s Billy.” He blinked several times, rapidly.

“Nice to meet you,” I said. She nodded. Tom said, “What time is it?”

“I don’t know. Do you really want me to find out?”

“Well, no,” said Tom.

When I came back that way with coffee, his friend was leaning forward, her head next to his in that position that always gives me the impression that people are exchanging thoughts directly through their foreheads. I left them alone. I set the coffee down, ran off to use the men’s room.

When I got back I sipped at my coffee. I told Souci, “The police markings are still on the floor in there.” I licked my lips. “It was a strange thing for me.”

She nodded. “I suppose you pretty much hated it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Pretty much. Not half as much as he did, though. You ever been there when someone was killed?”

“No.” She tilted her head to the side and pursed her lips and said, “I almost killed someone once, though.”

I said, “Oh?”

“I threw a desk chair at him, down three flights of stairs.”

“You’re kidding.”

“He was my boyfriend. We were at a party at our own house, and he was, what is the phrase? Coming on to his ex-girlfriend.”

“What happened to him?”

“He stopped coming on to her.”

“No, I mean—”

“Oh. It missed his head, but broke his collarbone. I used to have a nasty temper,” she added judiciously.

“I guess. But now you’re a pussycat, right?”

She smiled. Then she said, “You were pretty tired last night.”

I nodded. “And upset.”

“I could tell.”

“How?” I asked, intending the question to be sarcastic.

“You didn’t make a pass at me.”

This took me aback a bit. I wondered if it was the norm in this society to be that direct. I suspected it wasn’t. I almost asked if she expected every man she hung around with to make a pass at her, but I didn’t because, on reflection, it would have been a pretty stupid question. So I said, “Did you want me to?” I wanted my tone to be light and bantering, but it didn’t come out that way.

“Yes,” she said.

I sat there for the length of a couple of breaths while I checked with my short-term memory to make sure I’d heard that correctly, and checked with my facial expression interpreters to make sure I wasn’t being laughed at. I felt my heart pounding. “You could make a pass at
me
,” I heard myself saying.

“Want to make love?” she said.

“Yes.” I was surprised at how even my voice was.

One nice thing about mornings is how much energy I have. Her, too.

“Hi there.”

“Mmmmm.”

“Move over this way just a bit.”

“Mmmmm.”

“I liked that.”

“Mmmmm. Me, too.”

“I just changed my mind about something.”

“What?”

“I think I want to get an apartment, after all.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’d been thinking about just staying here for a while, but—”

“Why would you do that?”

“It’s cheap.”

“But—all right.”

“I changed my mind.”

“Mmmmm.”

“Do you think you might be able to help me find a place?”

“Let me go home and change first.”

“I’ll buy you breakfast when you get back.”

“Okay.”

When she came back, about an hour later, she was wearing a loose-fitting black sweater, low black boots with high heels, and baggy black pants. I almost jumped her again, but instead bought her hash brown potatoes made with green peppers, red peppers, mushrooms, and onions; a soft-boiled egg; and English muffins. I had the same except I had a bagel. We both had a great deal of Feng’s Roast coffee, then we attacked the outdoors. It took me a moment to work up the courage to step outside, but I did at last—and stopped, cold.

“What is it, Billy?”

“It’s just—nothing. I’m just enjoying the morning.”

“Afternoon.”

“Whatever.”

I’d gotten a look out the window before, but I hadn’t been outside. Think of a high, deep blue, the air rippling like it does off the pavement on hot days, and no clouds, and a small, pale yellow sun set in the middle of it, like it was lost. That was my first view of New Quebec on Laurier around Chaucer. Across the street, yes, it was certainly a bakery. To my left was a square little shop whose sign read, “
Salon de Coiffure Pour les Chiens
.” To my right was a very tall building that could have been a grocer or a drugstore.

Streets—at least the three I could see from the door—were wide and very clean, as if they’d been scrubbed, and buildings were widely spaced and quite varied. There was a Victorian mansion with five towers and three chimneys and a bright red door just down the way, and next to it what seemed to be an underground bunker, and what could have been a church but wasn’t was to our left. What
was
a church was to our right across the street and next to it was a small storefront, looking naked with nothing touching it, and just beyond that a tall businessy-looking place with lots of reflective windows. I made a note to see what it looked like at sunset, after establishing which direction could be considered west. It was, for the record, left as we stepped outside, so the old west wall was the north wall, if you chose to look at it that way.

There were a few people on the street: one elderly couple leaving the store, a man carrying an infant across his chest, two girls looking in the bakery window. They looked like people, with nothing to distinguish them from anyone on the streets of Ibrium City or Jerrysport, and it seemed that, for how far we’d come in time and space, there should have been more.

But what really got to me was a little thing—the street signs looked just about the same as they had back home, where I call home, before London. I hadn’t consciously expected anything else, I hadn’t thought about it, but I was startled. We were standing on LaVelle, with Valois running just to our left.

There was a breeze from my left to my right that brought the temperature down to where I almost get goose bumps, and when the wind stilled, the back of my neck felt hot where the sun struck it. I tried to remember if people here seemed exceptionally pale or unusually tanned, but I couldn’t remember so I guessed not. The breeze brought me a smell that might have been cinnamon, but might not have been.

I held out my hand and Souci took it and we walked that way and a bird made a funny low whistling sound as we crossed a wide street called LeDuc, and as we looked for apartments we didn’t say much that stays in my memory, but I think we learned a great deal about each other. She found a third-floor place in a six-unit house built of grey bricks. It was right up against the street and both taller than the houses around it and set apart from them, as if it were looming over the street to pounce on pedestrians. It was only half a mile from Feng’s. It was clean, affordable, and the landlord or caretaker or whatever, spoke passable English—a big plus as far as I was concerned. The apartment was much larger than I was going to need, and included a view that looked out over the Quebec, the local river.

Rent was extremely cheap, but that was usually the case with colonies—lodging and food are cheap, clothing and entertainment cost. Anyway, it turned out I could pay a month’s rent (fortunately this colony didn’t have such customs as forced marriages, trial by ordeal, or damage deposits) with what we’d gotten for the last two nights of playing. It left me with nothing for food, but I could pile up debts at Feng’s, or, local customs permitting, earn some extra money playing in the street with Tom. I asked Souci about it, and she said that local customs would, indeed, permit, and she indicated that if I chose to do this, I should warn her in time for her to be well away from the area. I was beginning to realize that, in some ways, she was not a nice person.

I paid, got the key, and asked if it was possible to rent furniture. Well, yes, but it was expensive. I shrugged. I had my blanket and futon, and the floor of the place was carpeted. What else did I need?

Before going back to Feng’s, Souci and I made love on the carpet and it was a very fine thing, indeed. We rested, then, and I wondered about many things.

Define “center” as the place where time turns to ice. Chip chip, you go, and a chunk breaks off. You’ll look at it later, and say, “That was it” a chunk of the ice of life, so to speak. Then it will be the apex, or the center point, or the deepest part of the valley, or however you wish to consider a series of events viewed as a two-dimensional array of the data points we call “incidents.”

We’re picking one, and we’re calling it pivotal because, among other reasons, it is. But remember, please, that you can’t have any sort of perspective about it while it’s in the process of happening, and if you try you’ll just confuse yourself. Perspective is for then, occurrence is for now.

Now, then:

Rich said, “What happened?”

Linda said, “None of your fucking business.”

The exchange took a little less than ten seconds, and can be seen as the moment to which everything had been building, and the instant from which the change occurred.

Rich’s immediate reaction was,
I wonder if it would bother me as much if she didn’t seem to like it? Well, yes, but in a different way. Maybe a cleaner way
. But he shook his head at that. The last year, with his wife’s succession of lovers, had taught him to view his own reactions with a little more cynicism than that.

Why am I putting up with this?

Rich had been, among other things, a crisis counselor, and was thus operating under the impression that he ought to be able to figure out what, for example, he was getting out of his relationship with his wife of five years that made it worth going through this. He was wrong, of course.

Three nights ago she’d come home with welts on her thighs and he’d been too stunned to say anything.
Maybe I’m not quite as blasé as I’d like to think
, had been his reaction then. And, over the next three days, he’d given himself hell for that reaction, and for not confronting her about it directly.

So, tonight, when she was undressing and he saw bruise marks on her breasts, he gathered his courage and asked about them directly, and been told, “None of your fucking business,” which left him asking himself why he put up with any of it. For another timeless three seconds of ice he stood there, then—

“I’m going for a walk,” he said suddenly. And, because he was feeling nasty, added, “I might be back.”

She didn’t answer, and this caught him for a moment, and that moment was filled with changes and rearrangements in thinking and feeling that wouldn’t settle in fully for years. In brief:
Why is she that certain I can’t be serious?
and then:
Aren’t I?
He stopped, half in and half out of the door, and realized, with the feeling of a weight lifting from his shoulders and a simultaneous pang, that, in fact, he wouldn’t be back.

He wondered how Linda would react. But the scary thing was that, as near as he could tell, he really, honestly, couldn’t care less.

An end, a beginning, and a center point.

The door closed behind him with a hollow sound.