Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille (5 page)

“And now you are back?” said Danielle. “It is wonderful. How many days will you play?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “This weekend for sure, after that we’ll see. And speaking of performances, anyone want to go to see Souci tonight?”

The three locals said they were busy. Tom said he’d like to come along. I said, “We probably don’t want to stay out too late, since I want to move tomorrow.”

“Are you going to move it to yesterday, or to today?”

“
Man
” said Jamie.

“That almost isn’t funny,” I said.

La Violette turned out to be only a few blocks away. One thing I’ve noticed about colonies is that most businesses seem unwilling to pay the expense of neon. I’ve about come to the conclusion that this is good. The outside of the place was covered in bright fluorescent paint with scenes of people dancing, and, well, it seemed both fun and inviting. We went in.

I wonder how far back in human history the concept of “bouncer” goes, and if it has always been easy to pick them out. This one had red curly hair, a wide face with a square chin, and he wore a sleeveless grey sweatshirt. He probably took steroids. We yelled at him over the music, discovered he didn’t speak English, but when I told him my name, he found it and Rose’s on the pass list. After a brief discussion with Eve, the rest of our group was waved through.

It was the sort of club that seems as if it could have existed in any place at any time. Too dark, too crowded even on a Sunday night, air that was too stale and too full of smoke. The band was a five-piece called Les Sons Magiques. I couldn’t hear anything except the bass drum and the electric bass, with the exception of occasional notes from a Strat copy set to armor piercing. There were two rooms full of people trying to drink enough to distract themselves from how crowded and stuffy the place was, and I was very glad we weren’t there on a weekend.

“This is great,” shouted Rich into my ear. There’s no accounting for taste.

I shouted into his, “I’d like it more if they’d mix the vocals higher.”

“Why?” he shouted back. “You don’t speak French, anyway.”

A point. We found a table that was big enough for two. The six of us stood around it for a moment, then Rich and Jamie wandered off, and eventually came back with three chairs each. I don’t know how they do these things. By that time I’d begun to enjoy the swing quality to the beat and to appreciate some of the honky-tonk piano licks the keyboard player was throwing in. From the lead guitarist’s expression, he wasn’t taking things too seriously, which I liked as well. After watching him for a while, I decided he was sharing some sort of inside joke with the keyboard player; at least, they’d look at each other and laugh whenever they played a C-major seventh. I still wished I could hear the vocals.

Rich and Jamie set off once more, this time on a quest for drinks. By the time they returned, the band had taken a break, and there was canned music coming over the PA at just about the same volume. I didn’t recognize any of it—which was interesting. We’d left behind most of what was popular when we left London and arrived at Ibrium City—but then there’d been a whole style of music influenced by the bop of the 1950s that had followed us as far as Jerrysport, and it seemed we’d finally left it behind in exchange for an approach based on Classical European harmonies, Baroque melody lines, and Middle Eastern rhythms, the whole overlaid with some of the twisted minor-key changes I recognized from French Canadian fiddle tunes.

The vocals were still mixed too low.

Souci came on at the beginning of the next set, and, yeah, she was a good dancer. She and another were positioned at either side of the stage, and they got a high proportion of the total lighting in the room, and, from what I could see, the attention of the assembled hordes. She was wearing all black, and either makeup or the lighting was making her face even more pale than I’d remembered it. Someone, I don’t remember who, told me redheads aren’t supposed to wear black. Whoever said it was nuts.

It looked like we made eye contact and there was a flicker of recognition on her face, but I might have imagined that. I went back to watching the show. The other girl danced all right, but seemed a bit lackluster. The dancing involved wandering around the stage in a kind of shuffling walk, all but ignoring the music, then, at irregular intervals that must have had their own internal logic, they would break into hyperactive ballet movements. It really did fit quite well. The dancing taking place on the floor involved keeping one’s feet motionless, or else moving very little, while undulating one’s shoulders and neck. It looked unhealthy. Eventually Jamie and Rose got up and danced, and then I danced with Rose. They said it was more fun than it looked. We all drank some more. Tom drank nonalcoholic beer. I didn’t smoke. There you have it.

When the set ended, I had the bouncer send a message to Souci that we were here. She didn’t appear right away, but I bought a drink for the lead guitarist, who was a pleasant fellow with very long brown hair and a shaggy beard. His name was Christian, and it turned out he spoke English and had a collection of old discs that included the Neville Brothers, Merle Travis, and B. B. King, as well as some that I probably should have known but didn’t. I drank some more and Tom started making jokes but Christian didn’t seem too put off.

Then there was another set, which was much like the first, then the night was over. Christian stopped over to say goodbye, and we suggested he swing by Feng’s next weekend, and he said he might. I had another gin and tonic while we waited for Souci, and I decided that I wouldn’t ask her whether I’d imagined her jumping at “sugar bear” yesterday; she could tell me or not. I also decided that I didn’t really want to let her know how hard I seemed to be falling for her; I had the impression that knowing about it might frighten her.

After about half an hour I asked about her and was told that she’d left for the night. Then we went home.

The next day we moved into the apartment that what’s-her-name had helped me find. It was a much smaller production that you might think. We brought Rose’s fiddle, my banjo, Tom’s mandolin, and Jamie’s six-string, one bundle of bedding each, a coffee maker, coffee, and cocoa powder. Tom’s new friend Carrie came along, and whenever nothing else was happening they were looking soulfully into each other’s eyes. It was to fwow up.

We sat on the floor and did a few tunes and drank coffee. I was feeling a sort of pleasant melancholy, and it was one of those rare, wonderful evenings where everyone is glowing with each other’s company, and you’re not talking about anything important, except that you are, and we didn’t laugh much, but smiled a great deal.

Later Jamie, Rose and I drifted back to Feng’s and I had spaghetti with white wine sauce which Rose refused to touch because it had mushrooms in it and Jamie pretended to be surprised about because it wasn’t spicy and he thinks I can’t eat anything that isn’t spicy. Rose went off to practice her scales, and Jamie said, “What’s the plan for tomorrow?”

“Nothing in particular,” I said. “You?”

He dropped his voice and leaned toward me, conspiratorially. “I’m going to start trying to figure out about this place.”

It was a moment before I realized that he wasn’t joking, then I remembered what he’d said before. “How are you going to do that?”

“I don’t know. I was hoping you might have some ideas.”

“Exactly what are you trying to find out?”

“Why it is that we keep landing places that are about to have nuclear weapons dropped on them, and why we keep bouncing out of them. Haven’t you ever wondered?” I think this last was irony.

I said, “There hasn’t been much chance to wonder since we, um, departed London. And when we arrived there, I think we were all pretty much in shock.”

“That’s true. Do you see any reason not to try to find out what I can?”

“Not offhand.”

“Okay. Any ideas on how to go about it?”

“I don’t know. Start with asking Fred and Libby. Maybe they’d know something.”

“Good idea. Want to help?”

“No, I’m going to find a library. I want to find out what’s happened in the universe since we’ve been away. For all I know, we’ve jumped a few hundred years.”

“I doubt it,” said Jamie. He looked around. “I haven’t seen anything really, you know, futuristic.”

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

“Shut up, asshole.”

After my morning coffee with cocoa I set out to find a local library. It was an interesting experience, which led to three different bookstores in three different parts of town before I figured out that “librairie” in French meant bookstore, and library was “bibliothèque.” After that I found a pretty big one, and I sat down and began digging, and kept digging until I lost track of time.

My diligence was rewarded. First of all, I discovered, in the English-language section, that New Quebec had been founded in what could be considered Earth year 2306. Then I turned to the section on galactic history, wondering how long there had actually been a need for such a section. It took a while, but I found out what I’d wanted to know.

I sat there until a librarian came along and threw me out. I’m not sure how I managed to find my way back to Feng’s, but I did, and I sat at the bar staring off into space. Libby wiped the bar in front of me and said, “What’s wrong, Billy?”

I shook my head.

She said, “Is it that redhead who was in here?”

I shook my head again.

She stared at me for a while, then said, “Is there something I can get for you?”

I thought about that, and its ramifications in a number of ways, and said, “Laphroaig.” She poured me a tumbler and gave me a glass of water along with it. The whiskey didn’t go down smooth; it never does. But the taste is strong, and to me it tastes more like scotch than any other. A bagpiper I knew in London insisted that it tasted like bagpipes. In point of fact, it tastes like I would imagine a peat bog to taste. I guess that was why I wanted it, just then. I enjoyed it not only for its flavor, and for its rarity on this planet, but for the fact that it was, essentially, irreplaceable, as was everything else produced on the radioactive ball that used to be the Earth.

Once upon a time there was a girl who lived in a house called fear. Every window was a place where strangers could look in, every door a means whereby they could enter. She stayed in her house as long as she could, and she kept the windows shut and the doors locked and only snuck a hand out every Tuesday and Thursday, early in the morning, to bring in the mail.

But she was not a foolish girl. In fact, she was very smart, and especially wise in the ways of the house of fear. While she knew that leaving the house was to invite strangers to poke and pry at her, and to Find Out about her, she also knew that she couldn’t stay there forever.

She made herself go out of the house. She never liked it, but she did it. She made herself act as comfortable as she could on the streets, because if she looked as frightened as she felt, it would attract the strangers.

Soon, she became skilled in blending into almost any crowd, any environment. She learned to speak foreign languages, and she made herself visit foreign countries, because she was frightened to. Each of her fears, in turn, she faced, and faced down, and defeated, because she knew that it was the only way she would be able to find someone strong enough to guard and protect her, so she could safely go back, and never emerge again from the house called fear.

I finally told Libby, of course. I had to. Oh, I briefly entertained thoughts of keeping it to myself, but she’d have found out, anyway, and I make a lousy martyr. So after my first glass, I took a deep breath and said, “I’ve just learned what the current condition of the Earth is.”

“Oh,” she said. “Yes. I know about it. Maybe I should have told you before.” She appeared unconcerned by the whole thing, except that she was wiping down an already clean bar, and pressing the cloth into the bar as if she wanted to take the polish off.

I accepted a second tumbler. “Do any of the others know?”

“Fred does.”

“How’d he take it?”

“Fred doesn’t worry about things he can’t help.”

“Yeah, I guess he doesn’t.” I took another sip. “I do.”

“I know. Pinhead.”

I was beginning to feel a bit woozy. I’ve always been a cheap drunk. I finished the scotch, which burned nicely all the way down, and Libby gave me another glass. I started to take an inventory of things that were forever gone from the universe, and I felt my eyes begin to fill with tears before I reached the third item.

“I’m getting maudlin, Libby. Distract me.”

“All right,” she said. “Want to go into the back room and screw?”

“Anytime.”

She laughed and so did I. I always wondered if she meant it. I had a little theory that she wondered, as well. I’d been tempted more than once to see what would happen if I called her bluff.

Libby said, “I want to buy some lights for this place.”

“Lights?”

“For the stage. Real lighting. Psychedelic stuff.”

“That’d be fun. Are you going to?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

“Go ahead and do it.”

She nodded, poured me another glass, focused on something behind me, and moved down to the other end of the bar.

I said, “Hi, Souci.”

She said, “Hi.”

There were several things I wanted to say to her, and several more things I wanted to ask her, but what came out was, “I’m drunk.”

“I can tell.” She sat down next to me and sipped some of my drink. She made a face.

“It’s a single malt whiskey,” I said. “It’s an acquired taste.”

“Why did you want to acquire it?”

I laughed, probably more than it deserved. Her eyes were either naturally narrowed or she kept them that way to make her look more feline. It was very effective, in any case. I leaned my head on her shoulder. She tensed, then relaxed. I touched her hair. I always think of red hair as being thin and stringy, but hers was not. It might have been whatever she used on it. Or maybe it was dyed. I rubbed it with my fingers and said, “Wanna take me home?”

“Okay,” she said, and helped me stand up.

On the stumble back to my apartment, I said, “Why didn’t you come out and see me, at the club?”

“Let’s not talk about it.”

“All right.”

There was silence, and I badly wished my head would clear, at least a little. I wanted to tell her about finding out that my home was destroyed, but I didn’t dare, because I didn’t want people knowing about Feng’s, and because, well, Souci didn’t seem like the sort of person you dump your troubles on.

We were at the apartment. Climbing the stairs was a lot harder than it should have been, and getting my key in the lock took all the concentration I had to spare. But we were finally inside, and I led the way to my room and collapsed on my futon, noted thankfully that the room wasn’t spinning, and stared up at Souci, who shook her head sadly.

“I’m drunk,” I explained again.

“I know,” she said. She sat down next to me and stroked my forehead. In my drunken stupor, it seemed like an uncharacteristically, I don’t know,
tender
gesture. I almost said Those Three Words, but retained enough rationality to know that would be a bad idea. Besides, what does it mean, coming from a drunk?

And, as we sat there, the thought came to me,
When did you start thinking you knew her so well that you can make all of these deductions about what she’s like?
I kept looking at her. The voice inside of my head whispered to me once more, in case I’d forgotten:
You’ve got it bad, son
.

She kissed me on the cheek, and I almost choked up. I stroked her hair and kissed her clumsily. I was too drunk to make love, but she kissed me back, and then she was lying across me, then I rolled over, and I heard myself make little whimpering sounds. Her skin was so soft.

I’m usually no good for sex when I’m wasted, but I guess there are exceptions to everything. We made love three times that night. At one point she said, “Are you always so horny?”

“No,” I said. In retrospect, I think that was the right answer.

Along toward morning, when the liquor had mostly been worked out of my body, I said, “That was pretty fine, Cupcake.”

“Cupcake?”

“You called me Pumpkin.”

“Cupcake sounds like something you’d name a horse.”

“I like horses.”

“Are there things you haven’t told me? Hmmmm?”

I said, “Anyway, Cupcake—”

“I could kill you in your sleep.”

“Probably. Just don’t wake me up, okay? Ouch.”

Sometime later I said, “Hey, babe?”

“Hmmmm?”

“I don’t think we ought to be serious about it. I mean, I like hanging around you—”

She smiled. “Uh-huh.”

“I just don’t think we should let it get serious.”

“I agree.”

I sighed. “I mean, I don’t know what my plans are for the future.”

“Me neither.”

“I’m not at a point where I can really make commitments.”

“Neither am I.”

“As long as we’re clear that, well—”

“We don’t owe each other anything, honey.”

I said, “Good. And Cuddles—”

“Hmmm?”

“Never leave me.”

“I won’t.”

I woke to Jamie’s blessed face. I say blessed because in his hands were two cups of coffee.

“You,” I told him, “are a saint.”

“Thank you, suh,” he said, doing his English butler. “Will that be all?”

“Yes. Thank you, James.”

I blew on my coffee and tasted it. Sugar, heavy cream, cinnamon, and cocoa. If you’re going to wake up at all after drinking heavily the night before, this is the way to do it.

Souci pulled the covers up around her chin and opened one eye. It was true; I only noticed her freckles in the morning. She sat up when I gave her her coffee, and she sipped at it, very delicately. My heart did a thing. Jamie left and I finished my coffee and crawled to the bathroom, which was mercifully not in use. I spent a good ten minutes brushing my teeth, then I showered and shaved. Souci used the bathroom after me, and when she came back she shut the door and starting kissing me.

At one point she said, “I love how horny you are in the morning.” I was going to make the same comment to her, but I got distracted.

When we finally dressed and walked out into the living room, Tom was sitting there with Rose and Jamie. “Morning,” I said.

Tom said, “Did you know that Chico Marx learned all of those accents so he could go anywhere in New York without getting beat up?”

“Is that true?” I said.

“Yep.”

“Cool. Did you know that you look funny sitting there without Carrie?”

“Already? That’s scary.”

“No, she isn’t here.”

“What?” Then he hit his forehead with his hand. “You’re doing it to me now.”

“I’m becoming infected.”

“What is this about?” asked Souci.

I said, “Tom is always making stupid puns, and—”

“No, about Carrie.”

“Oh. Right. Carrie and Tom have been being cute together.”

“Really?” she said. “Aren’t you a little old for her?”

Tom stared at her like she was a dead fish he’d just found in his bathwater. She didn’t seem to notice. “I have to go talk to my agent,” she said. “Are you going to be around for a while?”

“Yeah,” I said. “At least a few hours.”

“It won’t be more than two.”

“I’ll wait for you.”

She nodded and headed out the door.

When she was gone, Tom didn’t say anything, which I thought was nice of him. I had the impression that he and Souci weren’t going to be best of friends.

Jamie said, “Should we practice?”

“I’m supposed to work today,” said Tom.

“Wait a while,” I said, “I have some news.”

“Oh?”

I licked my lips. “I learned something yesterday.”

They all stared at me, waiting. I took a deep breath and told them.

Jamie just stared straight ahead. Rose cuddled up with him. Tom sat there shaking his head. I said, “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you.”

“No,” said Jamie. “We’d have found out.”

Then we sat in silence for a while longer. Tom reached for his mandolin and started noodling. Pretty soon Jamie got out his guitar and I borrowed his twelve-string, since this was not a banjo sort of mood. We were all pretty much in tune, and none of us cared about the difference right then. Eventually Rose joined us, and we went into a long, slow version of “I Know You Rider.”

Maybe that was a mistake, but I really don’t think anything we did would have been any different. Irish music (or, as it was called on Old Earth, folk music) is, by its nature, filled with
place
. Sure, the best songs transcend their time and place of origin—that’s why they keep being rewritten—but I sang the verse about the “sun gonna shine,” and thought about how I wouldn’t see it anymore, and tears started. Singing about “cool Colorado rain” was no better.

Stan Roger’s “Giant” was, if anything, worse, and “Jack Stewart” was maybe worst of all—we were all in tears by the time we were halfway through it. I kept wanting to break into something cheerful like “Darlin’ Corey,” but I couldn’t. We played nonstop for an hour and a half, and were just winding down when I noticed Jamie hammering on a slow finger-picked D minor, which could only mean one thing. I caught Tom’s eye and he nodded. Rose was already making banshee sounds from her fiddle.

We played “Tom O’Bedlam” as we’d never played it before. Every verse was a nail in the coffins of our private memories, a teardrop in our personal wake for a lost world. Where each of us went to find our grief doesn’t matter, it was there in Jamie’s voice and Rose’s fiddle and Tommy’s mandolin. My thoughts will remain my own, as the music remained within those walls on that world, so far in time and space from where we had come, and even further yet from where we were going, together or apart, as may be.

When Souci came back I asked her if she was hungry, and she was, and she didn’t mind eating at Feng’s since they had a pretty good variety, so we walked down there along some tree-lined side street that ran parallel to LeDuc, slow and quiet, and I was glad we were together. We didn’t say a word as we walked; she seemed to sense that I had a lot on my mind. Tell me this, my friend: Was what I was feeling at that moment real? Or was I just working very hard not to think about the Earth, and all the things I might have to do but didn’t want to, and investing all of that emotion into her just because she happened to be there and willing? And, for a chance at the big deal of the day, does it matter?

Rich was in the taproom, and was just finishing drinking something clear and bubbly. I said, “Sissy water?”

“Sissy water.”

“The local stuff?”

“Yeah.”

“How is it?”

He shrugged. “What can I say? I laughed. I cried. I fell down. It changed my life. It was good. The end. Yeah, it’s pretty good.”

“Right. Rich, this is Souci. Souci, Rich.”

“How do you do?”

“Hi.”

“So, Rich, you finished the pipes?”

“Yep.”

“Good. Where’s Eve?”

“The library.”

“Oh?”

“Libby was talking to us about what you learned yesterday.”

“Oh.”

Souci glanced at me, but Libby called for Fred from the back room just then.

I yelled back, “He just went into the men’s room. What is it?”

“Delivery.”

“I’ll get it,” I said.

“Want help?” asked Rich.

I shrugged, not knowing how big a delivery it was likely to be. Souci sat down to wait while Rich and I went back to the rear entrance. There was a neat stack of a dozen boxes just inside the door, each box about two feet by one by one. I hefted one and it weighed about fifteen pounds, which wasn’t bad. I looked at the label and smiled. “The local whiskey, I think.”

“We should sample it,” said Rich.

“After we move it in.”

“Like Jamie says, you’re no fun, you’re no fun, you’re no fun at all.”

“Right.”

We had about half of them moved, when Rich suddenly said, “That’s funny.”

“What?”

“The seal on this one.”

I looked. “I don’t see any difference.”

“The tape isn’t even.”

I looked again. “It probably came open, so some guy had to do it instead of a machine.”

He nodded, picked it up, stopped, and his brows knitted. He set it down again. “Look at this.”

“What?”

He pointed. There was the tiniest lump at one end of the box, near the seal. I said, “Don’t ask me. Open it up, if you’re that curious.”

“I think I will,” he said. “Have a knife on you?”

“No. Where’s your tool kit?”

“The other room. I’ll get it.”

I moved another box while he went for his tool kit. I saw him poised there for a moment, about to break the seal, then he stopped again. “Billy, does this look funny to you?”

“What now?”

He pointed again to the strip of tape sealing it shut. I looked closely. I said, “Yeah. It’s like there’s a wire or something below the tape.”

He nodded.

I shrugged. “If you stare at anything long enough it’ll look funny,” I said, but there was no conviction in my voice. My mouth felt dry, although, really, I hadn’t consciously thought of anything it could mean by that time. Rich’s movements suddenly became much more fluid, and, simultaneously, sharper, more precise. He kept his eyes on the box while his hand found something in his tool kit, which he switched on and pointed at various parts of the box. It beeped twice in different tones at different places.

He found something else, held it only a bit away from the top of the box, and pressed a stud, studied the display on the top. He did this again, then said, “Billy, get everyone out of the place.”