my birthday,” I announce.
“Oh oh,” she says, and here come the liquid minibonfires.
“The place looks like a convalescent hospital,” I remark. “What time does the bingo start?”
Mountain rolls his big shoulders and plucks at the knot on his tie. He’s still looking around as if he expects to recognize someone. The drinks arrive. Mountain lifts his glass. “To the great state of ecstasy.”
We toss them back, eyes clenched against the inferno.
I brush at my lapel. “Is my shirt on fire?”
“Siss-KWAH!” Mountain says to the waitress, who is staring at him with less-than-professional curiosity. “Two more, dear.” He seems suddenly content here. I don’t know why. The patrons are too old to fight.
The moment the waitress is out of earshot Mountain cocks his jaw and belches. He’s a gifted belcher, able to articulate phrases such as “Buick Riviera” or “George Washington Carver.” Through eructation this evening, with a few drinks under his belt, he’s ambitious and tries: “The Origin of Consciousness in The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.”
I congratulate him, even if he did run out of gas on the last syllable.
He drops his head in modesty and begins an impression of Paul “Bear” Bryant, the legendary Alabama football coach, which consists of little but the word “Alabama” mumbled over and over. Then he cries suddenly, grimacing in pain, clutching an imaginary wheel. “Action photo!”
“What is it?”
“Kamikaze pilot spill hot coffee in lap.”
“Here’s one,” I say, left hand behind my head, right arm extended. “Shot putter with loose toupee.”
“Forgot my chute,” he says, arms flailing.
“Watch out for those Girl Scouts!”
“Marilyn Monroe!” he says, lifting the tails of his jacket and clapping his eyelids.
“Forgot to shave your legs!”
“So, big fella,” he says, shoving at imaginary goldilocks with the heel of his hand. “What’s new in the development of thought and the analysis of ideas?”
My coaster is stuck to my arm and I finally manage to shake it free. “Why is there no practical philosophical application to the problem of happiness?”
“What’s the problem?”
“Happiness.”
“Life is sad,” he says, his gaze swinging over my shoulder as someone enters the door. “Have another drink.”
“Would that I had one.”
He fiddles with his cuff links. “Where is that dame?”
“Probably reloading the balls in the bingo machine,” I say, fluffing the curls on my perm. “So what are your plans after you get your degree, Mountain?”
“Don’t like to think about it,” he says, pushing his empty shot glass to the edge of the table with an index finger. “Cal Tech, eventually. Not really ready for the grindstone yet.”
“How about travel?”
“Sure,” he says, lips sealed, eyes rolling up. “Don’t know where I’d go, though. Maybe Arizona, New Mexico. Spanish hid a lot of gold out there.”
“I’d like to get out of America,” I say, watching a pillar of red light behind the bar holding in its electromagnetic prison tight coils and marbles of tobacco smoke.
“What’s wrong with America?” he says, his forehead ridging.
“I’ve never fit well here,” I say.
“Why not?” He seems offended.
“People come here for one thing,” I say, hammering my shot glass down for emphasis. “To be rich. And they’ll do anything to get it—lie, cheat, kill, steal, poison a river. You ever been to Canada?”
“Nope. Had real maple syrup once.”
“It’s clean there. The people are nice. You know why?”
“Maple syrup?”
“Because nobody goes there to get rich.”
He tongues his bottom lip, then scratches his big chin. “Rich ain’t all that terrible of an idea.”
“A dream about money is a dream about shit.”
“Who said that?”
“Sigmund Freud.”
“Don’t tell me you wanna live in Canada.”
“I was thinking more like the coast of India, or maybe Africa, someplace with decent surf and no crowded freeways.”
He crooks an index finger and scratches the part in his hair. “How about an island?”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’d be good too.”
“With nekkid girls,” he says.
“And parakeets.”
“And buried treasure.” His eyes suddenly light. “Let’s go.”
“It wouldn’t be bad.”
“An island,” he says, tapping his nose. “Yeah. Jesus, pirate gold. Hey, where’s Inga?”
“Here she comes. See the woman behind the flames?”
The drinks are placed flickering in front of us. Mountain says—the blue lambency of blazing liqueurs playing on his eyes—that on our uninhabited island not far from Tahiti we will probably need a generator, a compressor, milking goats, and two topless house servants who speak no English. I add some laying hens and a still, and install a sunken Spanish caravel full of gold doubloons in the cove nearby to please his treasure-hunting instincts.
“We should leave now,” Mountain says, tossing back his pot of fire.
As I raise my asshole to my lips, a consumptive- looking rake in a black evening dress and tattered stole is limping toward me, her hands so thin they appear to be bone, her face lizardwhite, her cheeks collapsed. If I believed in zombies I would get up and run. I’m terrified for a moment and when she leans down suddenly into my face, the flaming asshole barbecues my nose.
“Hello, Mom,” says Mountain.
“Hi, Sullie,” she says in the charred, cement-mixer voice of the inveterate smoker. I’ve forgotten until now that his real name is Sullivan. “Where you been, baby?”
With sangfroid slowness he lights a cigarette. He smokes leaned back with the cigarette between his second
