The devil walks into a bar, I said, and the man three stools down didn’t look up.
“Who, me?”
“Depends. Not everyone can hear the devil.”
That got me the eye. It always does. The line doesn’t ask a man to believe in anything — it asks whether he’s the type who’s tuned to it, and no man has ever once said no to that.
“So. The devil walks into a bar. What do you serve him?”
He thought about it seriously. That was the first thing I noticed about him. A man with anywhere to be doesn’t think about it seriously.
“I don’t know. A margarita?”
The bartender came down the rail with her rag. “What’re you two having?”
You two. She’d made us a pair out of nothing but proximity, the way they do, and all I had to do was not correct her.
“Margarita,” I said. To him. Not to her. Turning the word over like I’d never heard it before. “Nice.”
He sat up about an inch. “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll take a margarita.”
“Two margaritas,” she said, and went.
Understand: I did not order a drink. I never said one word to that woman. I have never in my life asked a man for a drink. I asked a question about a fictional individual, he answered it in his own free voice, and whatever happened next happened between him and the bartender and God.
It came with the salt laid on thick and it was cold in the way that hurts the front of your face, and I sat there with my eyes shut like a man in a pew.
A thief takes and goes. I stay. I have it so completely, so far past the way you’d have had it yourself, that you come out ahead. Watch a man watch me enjoy something he bought. Watch his face. He gets more than I do.
“Nico,” I said.
“Denny.”
I asked the bartender next, dead straight, like a survey.
“The devil walks in. What do you serve him?”
She didn’t stop wiping. “Beer and a shot.”
“Really.”
“He’s a guest. Guests don’t know what they want and they hate being asked.” She set them both down without being told. “Fastest thing that looks like generosity.”
It is a rare thing to be told exactly what you are by somebody who intends to keep serving you.
By ten there were five of us at that end of the bar, and I want to be accurate about what that was, because I was accurate about it at the time and then spent the rest of the night not being.
It was a Tuesday. Nobody was there with anybody. A heavyset guy was working a clementine open with a pocketknife and the care of a man making an evening out of it. The kid with the sleeve tattoo had been on his phone for forty minutes with the screen off. Marcy had taken the stool nearest the register, which is where you sit when you would like to be spoken to and cannot say so, and which I could have picked out of that room from the door.
Denny got funny around eleven.
That’s the part I’d take back, if it worked that way. He started in on the man he works under at the parts warehouse, a man named Pell who measures things twice out loud, and Denny does the voice, and the voice is good. The kid put the phone down. Marcy laughed with her whole chest and had to set her glass on the bar to do it. Denny stopped in the middle to check whether the laugh was real, which is the saddest thing a funny man can do, and it was real, and I watched him take it in.
He bought me a drink and I said thank you out loud so everyone could hear it.
He told two more. He got the clementine man handing pieces down the bar to strangers. Somebody’s fries came and got pushed to the middle without a word, because by then that end of the bar had a weather to it, and the weather was: get some.
And then me.
The kid took out his vape and my whole body turned toward it before I had a thought in my head.
“Can I hit that too?”
Too. Not can I have — too. I’m joining something in progress. The first man to want a thing is a beggar and the second man is company.
Blue raspberry. A stupid flavor for a grown man. I loved every particle of it and said so, and the kid grinned at his hands.
Later I stood out in the cold while Marcy smoked, and she gave me one and lit it off hers. She asked what I did and I told her something and she said, “Sure you do,” and let it go, and went on talking. She wanted to know if a person can put a dog on a plane. She has a sister in Tucson who hasn’t called since March and a dog she isn’t willing to leave, and she has clearly done the arithmetic on this more than once, and she wanted, that night, for somebody to hear the numbers out loud.
I heard them out loud. It cost me nothing and I’d do it again.
At one point I looked back through the window at the three of them and thought: this is the best night anybody here has had in a while.
Then last call, and the bartender put a check down in front of me. A beer and a shot. The only two things all night nobody had bought me.
I would like to tell you I don’t know why I did what I did next.
I know why.
It had been working all night. That’s the whole of it. The bit had put five people in a good mood and a clementine in four hands, and I had been right about every move for four hours, and a man who has been right for four hours reaches for the thing that made him right. I wasn’t frightened. I was pleased. There is no worse reason and I have never found a truer one.
I looked at Denny — who had bought me two, who had been happy about both — and I did the bit. The same one. The good one.
“The devil walks into a bar. Who picks up his tab?”
And it died.
It died the way they do, instantly and in public, and in that silence you could hear the whole night re-sort itself in four heads at once. Every drink. The clementine. The cigarette. The fries. And Denny’s face went through about four things and landed on the one I’d been outrunning since I was nineteen, which was not anger.
It was the look of a man being told he hadn’t been funny; he’d been managed. That the room had weather in it and the weather wasn’t him.
I paid it myself. I took a fold of bills out of my inside pocket — not thick, just enough, the way it had been enough all night — and laid them on the bar one at a time with a hand that wasn’t steady, and nobody said one word.
Denny left before I’d finished. Then the clementine man. Then Marcy. Then the kid.
The bartender took the money without counting it and went back to wiping. I finished what was in my glass, because it was paid for. I put the coat on the way I always put it on, one arm and then the other, and did the buttons, and turned up the collar, and took my time about it, because a man who hurries out of a room is agreeing with it. Then the door, and the cold, and the street empty in both directions, which I took for good news.
They took me at the mouth of the alley by the shuttered bakery. Close and clumsy and it smelled like breath. Somebody had my collar. Somebody apologized to somebody else about an elbow. One of them had citrus on his hands. I went down and the wet came through the knees of my trousers and I thought, with real feeling, this coat.
The knife I never saw. Twice low on the left, like a door closing in another room. Then higher, and that one arrived properly, and nothing in a lifetime of taking everything offered had readied me for a sensation that new.
Then they stopped. Men always stop sooner than they meant to.
Denny crouched down. Breathing like he’d run a mile. He hadn’t; he’d walked. It had cost him everything he had to do this, and badly.
“Where is he,” he said.
I looked up.
“Your friend.” His voice broke in the middle and he had to start over, and starting over ruined it, and knowing it was ruined made him louder. “You can hear the devil, right? So where is he now? Huh? Where’s he now?”
He spat. Most took the cheek. The rest, the lapel.
They went, out of step, one of them already saying no, listen, listen.
“There’s nobody,” I said.
Normal volume, to their backs. The only entirely true thing I said all night. The alley gave me their footsteps for a while and then quit.
I got up. Used the wall, then the shutter, which rattled, and I apologized to it.
I had it worked out by the corner. I have seen men bleed and this was not that. Two were low and left and had gone in at the angle a frightened man uses, which is the wrong one, and the high one had found a rib and stopped there, which is what a rib is for, and the stripe going along behind me was a stripe and not a spill. I put a hand inside the coat out of habit. The fold was where I’d left it.
I was going to be fine.
That was the first bad news of the night. A dying man at least gets to call it the end of something.
So I put it to God on the walk, since He wasn’t busy.
You gave me this. That is not in dispute. I didn’t apply. I came out of a woman in Passaic in 1970 with a thing in me that makes strangers reach into their coats, and by four I was eating off other children’s plates by invitation. There are men, they say, who run high on something in the blood and the fish come to them — they stand in a river all day and the trout will queue — and nobody calls that a sin. They call it luck and they buy the man a hat.
So rule on it. If it was a test, a test of what. You instrument a man to draw fish and then grade him on standing still? That’s a joke with a fifty-six-year setup, and I know jokes.
If it was a gift, a gift refused insults the giver, and every clementine was gratitude, and I said thank you out loud more times last night than most men manage in a year, and meant it, which is more than you’ll get out of a man who never takes a thing.
I’ve made worse cases to harder rooms.
And somewhere around the laundromat it came apart in my hands, because I’d said the fish come to them, and the trouble with that is I know what a fish is.
A fish is in the river anyway. A fish is going about its business. A fish is not sitting at the end of a bar on a Tuesday at ten o’clock with its whole face turned toward the door.
Those were not fish.
I have never made a single person hungry.
I got as far as that and stopped, the way you step over a place in the floor you know about, and I did not go back to it, and I went on down the block.
A car came up slow and my whole body organized itself around the sound and it went past without changing speed.
I sat down on the bench outside the flower shop, the wooden one with the iron gone the color of an old penny. Got the coat shut. Wiped my face with the handkerchief and folded it and put it back, because there’s no sense sitting out in public like that.
No verdict came.
Then a window went up somewhere above and behind me, three floors, and two people were laughing at something with the ease of people who have been laughing for a while, and a smell came down of onions in a pan at one in the morning, and it came on me from the sternum out, the way it does, the way it has on every street I have ever stood on when a door opened.
There was nobody. Nobody’s hand going to a pocket first, so that I could go second.
I opened my mouth on the empty block in front of the shut flower shop, and I heard my own voice, and it was small.
“Can I have some.”