Schroder: A Novel (14 page)

I grinned. We both returned to staring at Vermont.

“You’re a sweet kid,” I said.

“I know that,” she said. “You tell me that all the time.”

The countryside receded and exchanged itself for a thicket of small houses, the outskirts of a town we soon discovered was North Hero. The town was, in essence, a barracks-style row of short retail spaces fronted with fluttering awnings. The parochial avenue was the same as in any small American town: a hardware store, a pet-grooming outfit, a coffee shop, an impossibly small public library. Meadow pointed out several eateries, but I kept driving. Just as we were on the verge of reentering endless Vermont countryside, I spied the neon glow I’d been looking for. The wheels whined as I pulled up to the curb.

“Wait here,” I said, walking up to the window to give the place a once-over. Through the wrinkled plastic tinting I saw a large man behind the bar pouring a coffee-brown pint of stout.

“Perfect,” I said to Meadow, throwing open her door and unsnapping her seat belt. “A cozy little pub. The perfect place for some local color.”

Meadow stepped from the car. Her purple velour sweatpants—the only other change of clothing she had in her overnight
bag—were flecked with sand, and the sides of her unwashed hair had slipped out from her headband. I straightened her glasses and swatted clean her pants.

“There,” I said. “You’re such a pretty girl. Do you know that?”

“Technically, I’m not so pretty. I’m pretty
ish
. Rapunzel is pretty.”

“Rapunzel? Are you serious? What about Maria Callas or Benazir Bhutto or somebody like that?”

“No. Rapunzel is prettiest. I’ll show you her in my fairy-tales book when we get back
home
home.”

No heads turned when we entered. There was only one grizzled man sitting below the television, staring at the bottles behind the bar, and a booth along the wall in which a single woman applied lipstick from behind a compact mirror. I was overjoyed to see a plastic red basket on the table in front of her. The joint served food.

“Up here, honey.” I patted the stool beside mine at the bar.

When the bartender approached, I stuck my hand out. “How’s it going?”

“Good.” The bartender shook my hand once, hard. “How are you?”

“Very good,” I said. “Excellent.”

“You’d have to be an asshole to be unhappy on a day like this,” said the bartender, flipping a coaster onto the bar. “What can I get you?”

“Canadian Club on the rocks. And my daughter here will have two hot dogs and a Shirley Temple. Isn’t that right, sweetheart? Did I get that right?”

The bartender looked at Meadow. “How many cherries
does the little lady want in her Shirley Temple?” he said, pouring me a generous drink. The ice cubes cracked like dry wood in a stove.

Meadow blushed and leaned her face against my arm.

“Come on now,” I said, “tell the nice man how many cherries you want. She can be sort of shy at first.”

“As many as you want,” said the bartender.

Meadow held up six fingers.

“Six!” the bartender bellowed. “That’s all?”

Meadow nodded.

“One for every year,” I said.

“You’re
six
?” The bartender leaned against the bar across from Meadow, his big maw exaggerated in the track lighting. “Well, then you probably already know how the world works, right? You know about gravity? You know about taxes?”

Again Meadow buried her face in my arm. The bartender chuckled and grabbed a pint glass. I gave her shoulder a squeeze, drinking deeply with my free arm. Canadian Club is sweet up front, but somehow I’ve gotten used to this and can’t stand anything drier.

“Isn’t this fun?” I said to Meadow. “Isn’t this place a riot?”

I turned and surveyed the pub. The lady in the booth had snapped shut her compact mirror and gave me what looked like a wink. I smiled back, but she got up to leave. I tried not to stare at her big blond dandelion hair as it sailed across the mirror behind the bar.

“You count those cherries, sweetheart,” the bartender was telling Meadow, sliding her Shirley Temple toward her. “You shouldn’t trust anyone over the age of twelve. After twelve, it’s lies, lies, lies. You know about Area 51? You know about Roswell?”

The bartender was leaning across the bar again, smiling gamely. He had a wide, ironic face. He looked like he was waiting for something unpredictable to happen.

There are moments—I hate to say it—when a parent’s loyalties jump ship, and he just wants to be liked by another grown-up. Even the best parents with excellent parenting styles can’t help, on rare occasion, but side with their own kind, those on the downslope of life, and in this process they get the urge to gang up on somebody young, since it’s impossible to banish this instinct altogether, this throwing around of one’s hard-won experience.

“Well?” the bartender barked at Meadow. “Did I cheat you?”

“Did he give you six cherries?” I prompted her. “Did he steal any?”

“Not that kind of cherry,” said the bartender. “You only get one of those.”

“Ha.” I nudged her with my elbow. “What do you say, Butterscotch?”

Meadow now stared into her drink, stirring it with a straw.

“Cat got your tongue?”

“Thank you,” she murmured.

“She speaks!” said the bartender.

“She’s shy at first,” I said.

“No, she’s smart. She knows she shouldn’t trust a guy like me. Here. I’ve got something that’ll make her smile.” The man reached under the bar and brought out a small windup frog with a silver key in its back. He turned the key and placed the toy on the bar. The frog flipped backwards and landed on its feet. Meadow watched it.

“You like it?”

“Answer the man, sweetheart,” I said, taking a draught.

“Do you? Here, it’s yours,” said the bartender. “My kids are all grown up and refuse to crack a fucking smile. Let me tell you, you’ve got about six more years and then she’ll barely talk to you. So. You folks staying here in North Hero?”

“Sadly, no. We’re just passing through. We’re on our way to Mount Washington.”

“Now, there’s a place worth seeing.”

“We’re making a road trip out of it. Stopping here and there. A father-and-daughter road trip.”

“No wife?”

“Sure I’ve got a wife,” I said. “For our last wedding anniversary she gave me a restraining order.”

The bartender snorted.

Grinning, I waved my hand. “But I don’t like to talk about it in front of the kid.”

The bartender shook his head, his laughter dwindling. He was looking ruefully at Meadow, who had finally picked up the frog and was turning its key.

“Kids,” the man said. “They ruin your life. Then they’re the best thing about what you have left.”

“
That
”—I raised my empty glass to him—“is the truth.”

We fell into a melancholy silence.

I looked down the bar toward where the old man sat. Hands around a can of Pabst, he studied the muted television. I looked up at the screen. The local news was beginning. I felt a pang of homesickness. For a moment, I missed Albany, its brutal winters, its amateurish politicians. The lead story out of St. Albans appeared to involve a bear attack.

“Funny,” I said.

The bartender raised his head. “What is?”

“Pabst beer. ‘Pabst’ means ‘pope’ in German. I just thought of it.”

“No shit. Pope beer?”

“Pope beer!”

“Maybe the pope blesses it. Holy beer.”

“It’s like kosher beer, but for Catholics.”

“Ha!”

“Ha-ha!”

“Ha! That’s the damnedest.” Chuckling, the bartender pointed to my glass. “Get you another?”

“You’d better.”

“You want a chaser of holy beer with that?”

“Let me think. What would Jesus do?”

The bartender bellowed. I felt a pluck at my arm.

Meadow look up at me. “
Können wir Mommy anrufen?
”

I swallowed. In my stupidity, I thought she had forgotten. No, I hoped she had forgotten.

“Sure. Sure, sweetheart. We can call Mommy.”

“I told you she was smart,” said the bartender. “What is that, German?”

Just then, someone hollered behind the swinging doors and the bartender went out and then came back with Meadow’s hot dogs in a red basket. Meadow perked up at the sight of food. She crawled onto the next stool and got a bottle of ketchup from where it sat with a caddy of miniature jellies between the old man and us. She opened the ketchup bottle and turned it over the basket, thumping the bottom until half the basket was filled with ketchup. I watched her eat. She was completely absorbed. I sipped my fresh drink. The first one had relaxed me, but the second was making me philosophical.

“You’re a good daughter,” I said. “You know that? You’re a good kid, and very responsible.”

She looked at me, cramming the end of her hot dog in her mouth.

I lifted my chin toward the bartender. “All right,” I said. “I promised the kid I’d call her mother. You’ve got a phone?”

“Right there next to the lavatory. But maybe you should finish your drink first.”

“Ha, right. Hey, throw some water on me if I burst into flames.”

I got up and went to the pay phone that hung from the wall. I searched the pocket of my khakis for quarters.

And that’s right about when I experienced one of my life’s greatest reversals.
¹⁰
Because there, in the television over the bar, was my face.

My face
. A snapshot taken just before the separation. And because this was an era of significantly better grooming, of my being a hell of a lot more
together
, my hair was cut cleanly, and I looked, to my eye, pretty decent and responsible. I squinted upward at the television. There was my name, my age, race, eye color, etc.

The dial tone roared in my ear.

I scanned the bar. The bartender was leaning against the bar with one elbow, staring out the window. Meadow was busy with her hot dogs. But the old barfly in the corner was staring straight at the television, where Meadow’s face now appeared, with her trademark red glasses, her hair nicely brushed—her kindergarten portrait, taken the previous fall. The receiver of the telephone slipped from my grip, crashing against the wall’s wood paneling.

The bartender turned to look. “She give you a hell of a time?”

“Jesus H.,” I said, smiling. “Did she ever. A hell of a time.”

I stooped to retrieve the swinging phone, not taking my eyes off the bartender.

“But everything’s fine now,” I said. “With her, it’s all dry lightning.”

Walking straight up to the bar, I willed myself not to look up at the television. Meadow watched me closely.

“How does this crazy thing
work
?” I said, picking up the frog.

“You turn the key,” Meadow said, tamping her second hot dog in the ketchup.

“Like this?” I placed the wound-up frog on his feet. I
glanced up at the television. Meadow’s face and mine were now sharing a split screen, a tip-line telephone number scrolling across us, and I noticed with a flash of remorse that there was no recent photograph of the two of us together, that separate ones had to be used, and that the reason there was no recent photograph of the two of us together was because in the scant time we had together, there was no third person to take such a picture anyway, no picture taker, just our banished lives, cruelly subpar to the life we’d shared before.

Cut to commercial. Laundry detergent. A talking teddy bear.

“Welp,” I said, releasing the frog, which immediately malfunctioned, falling to the side and kicking at the air. “Enough shit shooting. We’ve got to hit the road.”

The bartender raised his eyebrows. “So soon?”

“I’m not done with my hot dog,” said Meadow.

“No problem. We’ll just bring it in the car.”

I tossed a pile of money on the bar and grabbed Meadow’s arm, firmly. The butt of her hot dog in her hand, she looked up at me with alarm.

“You folks have a good trip,” the bartender said. “Come on back.”

“We will. We definitely will.”

As I backed out of the door, my eyes could not resist being drawn to the profile of the old man at the end of the bar. He stared forward into the glittering liquor bottles before him—a horizon of alcohol—his grizzled neck swallowing the melt from the ice cube he chewed. And with the jangle of the bell tied to the door, the man turned his head with awful slowness, as if just coming awake, and I tried to divine my fate in his buried eyes.

JOHN TORONTO

Butterscotch?” I said in the darkness. “You still awake?”

Meadow shifted beneath her sheets. “Yep. I’m awake.”

I propped myself up on one elbow and looked across at Meadow’s bed. “Are you having a nice trip?”

“Oh, yes. I liked playing Merman and I like our new car and I like having so much junk food. And I’m glad Mommy said yes to our vacation. I was worried she’d say no. She must be changing her mind about you. I’ve
told
her and I’ve
told
her. I guess it’s not hopeless.”

I winced in the dark. “No. It’s never hopeless.”