The old shopkeeper’s bell above the door clinked and Bill turned to see two men, one of them carrying a moderately sized cardboard box dotted with crudely carved perforations, walk into the tavern.
“A car that lacks four-wheel drive has no business out here,” said the man holding the box.
“A drink to wait it out doesn’t sound like the worst deal in the world,” said his companion. The first man grunted in response.
Bill was, at that moment, standing over a toaster oven at the corner of the bar, examining the slowly warming Pillsbury strudel. He abandoned the appliance to greet his new patrons.
“Welcome in, gentlemen,” Bill said. “What can I get you?”
“I’m wondering,” said the man holding the box, “how far are we from Wilkes-Barre?”
“Normally I’d say an hour. But in this weather—”
“And we don’t have four-wheel drive,” said the second man, who would have been completely ordinary looking to Bill except he sported an eye patch over his left socket.
“That’s correct,” the man with the box answered. “We don’t have four-wheel drive.”
“In that case, it would be a trek,” said Bill. “They’re expecting another eight inches tonight.”
The one-eyed man snorted. “Like I said, we’ll have to wait this out.”
That was a wise verdict. A terrible outburst of snow had fallen since the early afternoon, blanketing the hilly landscape in a thick white shroud. All the while the wind howled without remorse, coercing the leafless limbs of maples and oaks into a kind of warped dance. Six hours later, even the street signs were lost to a frosty alien world that shimmered under the moon’s glow.
The first man set the perforated box down on one of the stools and then took a seat next to it. “In that case,” he said, “have you got any Old Forester?”
“Only Michter’s, I’m afraid.”
“That’ll do the trick,” the man said. “Better make it a double. I’ll take a splash of water too, thanks.”
The eye-patched companion spoke up: “I’ll get the same. Keep it simple, you know?”
The toaster emitted a loud ping. “Just a second, boys,” Bill told them brusquely and bounced over to grab the strudel and plop it in front of its purchaser. “This one’s apple,” Bill said, sliding the plate across the linoleum. “And that’s strudel number two. Not that I’m counting.”
“Cathy is,” Marcus said, just before shoving a forkful of the pastry into his mouth.
“I’ve given up,” Cathy snorted. “Let him have his pastries, it’s a Nor’easter.”
Marcus’ lips twisted into a smirk and he lifted a can of beer in salute.
These two had been with Bill since he’d opened up shop two years ago, all debts having been issued and neon signage displayed (a yellow-and-blue placard that, typical of Bill, read: Bar). Bill crowned his castle The Cardinal Lounge, not out of any sort of fondness for the bunting, but because the word “cardinal” inferred piety and seriousness. It sounded to him like an operation that respected its clientele, even if they numbered in the single digits.
For Bill it was a lifelong dream: a chance to mould something in his own image, even if it exhaled a dubious, musty odour and drained his savings. For Marcus and Cathy, it was something far simpler—a place to go, in a county that lacked for such niceties.
Bill quite enjoyed running the place, too. He appreciated his regulars and cherished being someone who offered a real service, one that you could smell, taste, touch. Most of all, he liked the mornings, before he would open for business, when he would sit at his desk in the cramped office at the back of the premises, stirring his instant coffee, sifting through order forms and watching the sunbeams stream in through the room’s lone porthole. The closest to beatification Bill would ever get.
Marcus made quick work of the sweet treat and Bill swept up the paper plate in one graceful arc. In the far corner of the room, a trio of college students huddled in a booth, hooting like hyenas and pounding on the table. One of the youngsters called out to him: “All right, Bill, mind settling a bet for us?”
Bill delivered the bourbons to the two men and, after returning the cyclops’ smirk with a shrug, glided over to the students. Earlier, he’d been amazed to see how quickly they could toss them back; now, after a half-dozen pitchers, they’d morphed into a council of lushes, and these regular requests of his presence were quickly growing tedious.
“Do you remember my name?” asked the boy who’d called for him.
“Roger, was it?”
“Ramsey,” he said.
Ramsey reintroduced Bill to Emily and Jerry and told him once again that they had driven up from Philadelphia on a ski trip, though their vacation had to date been a letdown.
“Not exactly the Sierras here,” he said, “though it looks like tomorrow should finally deliver.”
Geographically, they referred to this region as the Endless Mountains, though more than a few itinerants would point out that the mountains were not, in fact, endless. Nor were they exactly the most imposing mountains. Every year, when the leaves dropped off and the skies lost any semblance of vibrancy, locals talked vaguely of seeking a better life. Florida, or maybe the Carolinas. Hell, Arizona might do the trick. Even Bill, a lifelong local who’d been born in these woods and knew in his stomach that he would die in them, would occasionally succumb to such fantasies. And yet on evenings like this one, when heavy, wet flakes descended without mercy from above, Bill would find himself asking anyone who’d listen, “Isn’t this a sight?”
But anyhow, Ramsey said, there was an argument to settle, about Timothy McVeigh. “He claims the OKC bombing can be traced back to the Buffalo Bills,” Ramsey said, pointing his thumb in Jerry’s direction.
“And what does she say?” Bill asked, nodding towards Emily.
“I have no interest in knowing whether Timothy McVeigh cared about the Buffalo Bills,” Emily said.
“We need a tiebreaker,” said Jerry. “The phone’s got no service.”
“Another pitcher in the meantime?”
“Always,” Jerry said, “and a tiebreaker too.”
Bill turned to refill their pitcher, and as he did, the man with the eye patch approached the students.
“You might be oversimplifying things,” he said. “But yeah, he put his money on Buffalo.”
“This was post–Gulf War, right?” said Jerry.
“If I remember right, yeah,” said the man. “A couple years after that.”
Jerry stuck out his hand and introduced himself. “You’ve got quite the memory for McVeigh.”
“P.J.,” the man answered. “As I remember it, he put a bad bet on Buffalo and was down in Waco not long after.”
By now P.J.’s companion had joined him, as had Marcus and Cathy. Bill watched the inchoate group, his irritation at their puckishness melting away—in its stead, curiosity.
“I might think it was his PTSD that had more to do with the Oklahoma City bombing,” Cathy said.
“And radicalism,” Emily said.
“I thought you didn’t care either way,” Jerry said.
P.J.’s companion chucked Marcus on the shoulder. “He got what was coming to him, huh?”
Bill slumped against the ice bin as the talk shifted to Waco, David Koresh, and conspiracies.
P.J., signalling in the air for another bourbon, yelled to the room: “I’m not saying what was happening over there in Texas was right, but I don’t see how that draws an ATF bomb squad.”
“It wasn’t the teenagers that did Koresh in,” said P.J.’s other half, who by now had introduced himself as Otto. “It was that he knew all about the shitstorm over in D.C.”
It was at this point another straggler wandered into the bar, her blond bob glistening with the melting flakes. The woman hastily removed her grey winter coat to reveal a crisp oxford shirt and trim khaki pants. She was a marked contrast in what was otherwise a room full of oversized flannels and well-worn Red Wings. A welcome bit of gentility.
“Come join the crowd,” Marcus called to the woman.
She introduced herself as Suzanne and requested a gin and soda.
Marcus beamed pleasantly and produced a cigar from inside the recesses of his jacket. “To unexpected acquaintances!”
***
The building itself was a retrofitted 1,500-square-foot cabin dating back to the Civil War. Pine from floor to ceiling, and with a big brick wood-fed hearth that functioned as the room’s centerpiece and was, once Bill took command of the ship, seldom hungry for fuel. His realtor had prattled on about how it’d been some sort of clandestine outpost for the Blues, but in truth, Bill had already been sold: there was a crispness to the place, a vestige of a quieter time. He pictured scenes of beautiful discordance, his laughter mixing with his customers’ to create a music that would illuminate the deathly still countryside. It was so far from the bank and its fabric cubicles, so far from his boredom.
Marcus guzzled an Irish coffee as Cathy interrogated the students, all of them math majors. Emily regaled the group with explanations of fractals and infinity paradoxes.
“Tell them about the deck of cards,” Ramsey said.
“You do it,” Emily answered.
“I wouldn’t know how.”
“It’s just that every time you shuffle, you’re getting an order that’s never existed before,” Emily explained. “There are more possible orders than there are atoms in our universe.”
“I’m verifying this,” Otto said but found that he couldn’t because whatever meagre cellular service eked by on that road had apparently fizzled.
“So what am I supposed to take from that?” Suzanne asked.
Emily shrugged. “Maybe just that we’re all full of surprises.”
“You can take it further,” said Jerry, “and get into the quantum stuff.”
“Go on, man,” said Otto.
“It’s just that, just like every deck is new, so is every person—”
“Christ, man,” said Otto.
“What I mean is, it’s all new territory. Nobody’s done it before, not like any one person has anyway. It’s the same in quantum physics. Tiny particles—small things you can’t even see. They don’t follow the same rules as we do; they can be multiple, opposite things at the same time.”
“So you’re telling me basically what she said before,” said Otto.
“Not at all, but we may as well leave it at that,” Jerry said.
“It’s a mystery, all the way down,” said Emily.
Bill wondered if maybe the answer was God, but he felt out of his depth. Owning a bar and fifteen prior years of risk management didn’t leave him feeling qualified to participate in such talk. Marcus and Cathy stood up to leave. “We’d better get home before it gets any worse,” Cathy said as she stuck an arm through a coat sleeve.
Suddenly Otto’s perforated box began to shake.
“Christ, Otto,” P.J. said.
“What is it?” Bill asked.
“I guess our dosage was off,” Otto mumbled.
“What is it?” Bill asked again.
“Fuck it,” Otto said, “it’s a monkey.”
“Oh,” Suzanne said.
The disclosure came as an old Jackson Browne song hit its crescendo on The Cardinal’s lone speaker. Bill knocked down the volume a few ticks and said, “I’ll ask you to elaborate.” Cathy and Marcus removed their jackets and sat back down.
It was simple: the two men were delivering the animal to a buyer in Wilkes-Barre. “Supposed to be there tonight,” Otto said, “but that’s not happening.” He placed his hand inside the box and removed a primate, nanoscopic in stature and trembling all over. With its tender oval head and dewy eyes, it couldn’t have been more than a month old.
“He’s a nice fellow,” said Otto. “We just had to keep him sleeping on the drive, or else he’d wail the whole way.” It was at this point Bill decided to break from his usual code and pour himself a generous glassful of gin.
“What happens is, we get a call saying where to drop the animals off,” said P.J. “and then voila, we deliver him. But we don’t ask questions.”
“We don’t get paid to ask questions,” Otto said. “In a sense we get paid not to ask questions.”
Cathy’s hand shot up.
Otto laughed. “Hell, this isn’t a classroom.”
“Would it be okay,” Cathy began, “if I—"
When it came to the animals, Otto hadn’t any experience with the actual caretaking business, but he knew how to read a room. “You want to have a pet?”
“So long as he won’t mind…”
Otto thrust the monkey square into her arms, and Cathy cradled it as if she’d done the act a hundred times before.
Suzanne peered around Cathy. “Does it have a name?” she asked.
“It’s got a little penis and everything,” said P.J. “I don’t know about a name, but I’ve been calling him Smiley.”
The drinks really began flowing after that. Jerry and Emily trotted out more mathematical idiosyncrasies. Bill described the drudgery of an actuary’s life. Marcus grew garrulous when talking about an estranged daughter, but nobody minded. The speaker was turned back up and Cathy sang along to “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now”; it was determined by unanimous decision that her vocal performance trumped Celine’s. It was also determined, after consulting with the local news station, that the roads were by this point undriveable. “This is long past what we’d call inclement weather,” the weatherman warned. “This is downright ineffable.”
“Isn’t it his job to be effable?” Bill whispered into his beer.
They took turns tickling Smiley’s belly and feeding it the dried apple slices that P.J. fished from a pocket.
“So, back to the monkey,” Ramsey said finally.
“Naturally,” said P.J., running his fingers indolently over his eye patch.
“Who’s buying it?”
“Couldn’t say. Picked the fella up in Syracuse, and then we head back home after delivery.”
“And where’s home?”
P.J. shook his head. “Nowhere interesting.”
“What happens to the monkey after you drop him off?”
P.J. chewed on his thumb. “Couldn’t say.”
Bill’s gut growled, a sign that it would be prudent to drop the matter. He waited for Ramsey’s next question with dread, but the kid just grinned sheepishly. Bill wondered whether the kid was displaying restraint or if, seeing Smiley climbing across his friends’ shoulders, he’d just lost interest.
There was an unopened bottle of 2005 Macallan, a gift from Bill’s ex to celebrate his opening the place. Even after they’d called it quits, she remained kind like that. Bill fetched the Scotch from the cabinet along with a round of fresh glasses. When presented with the brown spirit, Marcus rubbed his hands with glee.
“Down the hatch,” he hollered, and at once there was a tide of slurping, the drinkers’ excitement and anxieties hidden from all the world except for the poker-playing dogs whose framed visages bade good night to anyone on their way out the door. The croupier, a large terrier wearing a toupee, almost seemed amused.
***
Thirty minutes later the bar lost power. This was far from unprecedented; it went off a few times every winter, plus occasionally in the summer when a rainstorm proved too torrential. Bill used the light from his phone to walk to his back office and fetch a Tupperware full of battery-powered candles and shredded birch bark that he used as a fire starter. He spotted a boot next to the bin, then followed the phone’s luminance up the body all the way to Ramsey’s flushed face. The phone arced to the right and there was Emily, her cheeks stained a deep shade of scarlet.
Ramsey stepped forward. “Please,” he said, arms akimbo, “so that the universe might stay in order, don’t mention this to Jerry.”
Bill stared at Ramsey’s pores and thought the boy would do well to consider an astringent. There was an old trade secret he’d learned from a cousin of his ex’s who was a server at a hotel in Honesdale: avoid stirring any pot. “Mum’s the word,” Bill said. He left them to spark the birch bark and scatter the electric candles throughout the room.
“How long usually until power comes back?” Otto asked as Bill scurried about.
Bill couldn’t help but grin when he replied that they might be trapped for the night. The smile didn’t escape Otto, who said, “I don’t get much of a kick out of being trapped.”
Bill caught Jerry in his periphery, his voice an octave higher than before, owing most likely to the merriment, poking Marcus’ belly.
“Never in Christ would I imagine,” Jerry said.
“This is a highly unusual set of circumstances,” Marcus agreed.
“We don’t just get monkeys around here,” Cathy added as she fed Smiley an apple slice.
“What we mean is,” Marcus continued, “a long night with a monkey and present company is an opportunity that only comes around once in a person’s life. Maybe twice.”
Bill stuck to his own script and flicked on another candle. The speaker was rendered obsolete with the outage, but Bill dug up an old battery-operated boom box along with a stack of cassettes: Steely Dan, Duran Duran, other familiars. Emily and Ramsey rejoined their friends. Jerry showed no sign of clocking their absence, though Bill wasn’t watching too closely—an act of moral highway robbery, maybe, but what was depredation if not an escape from the mundane?
More stories poured forth in an errant game of one-upmanship: the students’ matching chicken suits last Halloween, and their collective epiphany, one urged on first by psilocybin mushrooms and then cocaine, that we’re all just recycling the same air. “When you’re on one of those nights,” Jerry declared, “you’re on the hunt mostly for good surfaces.”
And there was the time Marcus was trounced by a third-degree black belt at a cousin’s barbecue. “First degrees they give out like candy,” he told them. “Second degree, you have to go to Japan, and they’re strict about it. Third degree? Forget it.” Bill made sure the boom box went on cycling through the tapes: the Specials, Guns N’ Roses, the Boss.
P.J. turned to Suzanne. “What’s your story?” he slurred. “You are allowed to speak up. It’s encouraged, even.”
“Oh, leave it,” Otto cut in. “Nobody is under an obligation to entertain.”
P.J. wasn’t wrong though; the woman had mostly stayed quiet. “No chickens and no black belts in my life,” she said. “But now, a monkey.” And at that, they imbibed once more to Smiley’s good health.
“Is it a nice creature?” Suzanne asked.
“Oh, top-notch,” said P.J., pulling a small baby bottle from his back pocket.
“You’ve got a supermarket in there,” Suzanne said.
P.J. winked at her and asked, “How about having a go at the bottle?”
Two seconds ticked by, then four, and still Suzanne didn’t answer.
“Hell,” Marcus interjected, “if she won’t, I will.”
Suzanne sprang forth and grabbed the bottle. “Sorry, I was transfixed,” she said. “Is it the same for primates as it is for humans?”
P.J. chuckled. “That’s right, assuming you know how to feed a baby a bottle.”
A short time later, after the whisky had been polished off and all had been allowed to feed Smiley his bottle, Bill lay down on the floor and announced to the room: “I have been overserved,” but nobody paid much mind to the outburst. What a shame, Bill thought; he was, he felt certain then, some kind of superhero, possessed with an ability to cut through the music and the shouting and to discern the silence of the falling snow outside. He wanted to explain his powers to the others, but they were once again cooing at the monkey and debating whether Otto did, in fact, suffer from PTSD.
“I was in Marjah when things turned south,” he said.
“All I’m saying,” Ramsey countered, “is that when the DOD upped the budget for PTSD, it created this cottage industry. It’s not your fault, it’s everyone else who’s the problem.”
Even with his eyes closed, Bill could detect Otto’s sneer. “I’m not a liar,” he said. This was beauty on the order of a Christmas morning. He eventually drifted off to the boom of Suzanne’s laugh—a distinctive and sonorous noise that contradicted everything else about her. He wasn’t the only one to marvel at the asynchronicity.
“My sister in Christ,” P.J. squawked, “now that’s a laugh!”
***
Bill felt the sunbeam on his face and shot up. Cathy and Marcus were curled up near him, both softly snoring. He could make out other forms sprawled around the room. He got up and fed the hearth’s dying embers, then tiptoed to his office, where he languidly rummaged through the shelves in search of the instant brew. With the ersatz coffee in hand, he microwaved a mug of water and quickly crafted his concoction, all the while stealing glances out the small porthole window. The snow had stopped falling and the plowers were already at work, the crunch of their tires piercing the peaceful morning.
A knock at the door and Emily entered. She took a seat at the desk and he offered her a sip. She didn’t bother to respond, instead asking: “Have you been up?”
“Only just now,” he said, surprised both that she was sitting there and that her face carried a notably forlorn expression.
“That woman,” she said, “the quiet one—”
“Suzanne, you mean.”
“She arrested the two guys, and took the monkey.”
Bill’s skull was pulsating too loudly to process what she’d said. All he could muster was a slight grunt.
“I woke up and she was explaining to them what was happening.”
He still wasn’t understanding. “How much later were you all awake?”
“Are you hearing this? This is an unexpected twist of weirdness.”
“Sorry,” he said, adjusting in his seat, “let’s start over, and I’ll just assume it was a late night for everyone.”
“Fish and Wildlife was onto them for the monkey.”
“I wasn’t aware Fish and Wildlife had an undercover unit,” Bill said in total honesty, though he could tell he was not a satisfying audience. “And so she was—”
“She was with Fish and Wildlife, apparently, yes.”
“She told you that?”
“Well, not me. But I heard her getting them up and telling them everything.”
“That she was Fish and Wildlife?”
She sighed. “Christ, you’re slow.”
He sipped the bitter drink and apologized. “Go on,” he said, “I’ll keep up, maybe.”
“I went to the window and saw her put them in the back seat of her car. Handcuffed and the whole nine yards.”
“And the monkey?”
“The monkey went up front.”
“You don’t say,” said Bill. “It would have been easier to arrest them last night. She probably had to dig out her car this morning.”
“You’d think,” Emily agreed. “Maybe she was just having a good time?”
After a few seconds, Bill said, “I wonder what kind of monkey Smiley is.”
“Ramsey thinks a marmoset.”
Bill shook his head. “How would he know that?”
“He’s a zoology minor.”
Emily fidgeted in her chair and Bill again offered her some of his coffee. This time she accepted and, while reaching out for the mug, blurted, “I’m ashamed about what you saw.”
“It’s not my business,” he said.
“It’s not fair of me to do that,” she said, and he nodded. Finally, two weeks before his forty-fourth birthday, Fish and Wildlife and Marjah and Timothy McVeigh no longer appeared to Bill as abstractions. That day, the world felt much smaller to him. “No,” he admitted, “not a very fair thing at all.”
Inexplicably, Emily had started to sweat. She rubbed the back of her wrist on her forehead to sop up the perspiration. Then she was back on her feet and the mug was back in Bill’s hands. “We’d better be off to the resort,” she said.
Later, after the students had left and Marcus and Cathy had gawked through his explanation of the spectacle they’d all slept through, after he’d fielded calls from a newspaper reporter and a handful of curious friends, after some of those friends convinced him to take a long weekend, after he had taped a note to the window that read “Very short sabbatical—be back Monday,” after cycling through the Jackson Browne album once more as he mopped and scrubbed, Bill drove the network of pockmarked roads from The Cardinal back to his apartment. He drew his cotton window drapes and lay on his floral-patterned sofa. Peering vacantly at the popcorn ceiling, he extended a silent prayer. This was odd, given that he’d never been a particularly devout man, but there he was, gaze fixed on the ceiling, asking God for mercy for the smugglers and serenity for their pursuer. And please, he pleaded, grant protection for the monkey. Don’t we all deserve those small mercies? Bill wondered. Didn’t we all enjoy the snowfall?
He smiled. It had all been such fun.
