Floating Staircase(16)

“Okay. So I’ll need a cocktail fork handy. Check.”

“And the Sandersons. They’re an odd duo. I’d bet a hundred bucks the husband’s gay. He runs an interior decorating company from the house, and his wife’s a mortgage broker or something. Point is, we’re not really friends with everyone here, but Beth wanted to invite the whole goddamn neighborhood. She said it makes for good karma, and, anyway, you should know all your immediate neighbors.” Adam clucked his tongue. “Ever the strategist, my wife.”

The Escobars; the Sturgills; the Copelands; the Denaults; Poans; Lundgards; de Mortases; Father Gregory, the cherubic Catholic priest from Beth’s congregation; barrel-chested Douglas Cordova, my brother’s partner on the police force; Tooey Jones, the owner of Tequila Mockingbird, the tavern Jodie and I had passed while driving through town—my brother’s house magically unfolded into a veritable cornucopia of chambray work shirts and foresters’ boots, of Allegheny colloquialisms packaged in alpine-scented skin.

Many of my new neighbors insisted on having a drink with me. Not wanting to be rude, I was half in the tank by the time most of the men cornered me in Adam’s kitchen. They were all good-natured, overly friendly in a small-town way, and the excessive alcohol made it so I didn’t mind the bombardment. Jodie was occupied in the den with the women, their voices loud and screechy as they filtered down the hallway and into the kitchen nook.

Tooey poured shots into half-pint glasses from a dark-colored, label-less bottle. At first I thought it was liquor—bourbon, maybe—but as it poured I could see a foamy head forming at the surface. A few of the men laughed in unison at something Tooey said, and one even clapped him on the back. Someone tried to pinch one of the glasses, but Tooey playfully slapped him away.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Tooey said, shoving a half-pint glass in my free hand. “Make sure everyone’s got a glass first.”

“How come you didn’t play bartender at my Christmas party, Jones?” one of the men wanted to know.

“Maybe I should have. It certainly would have livened things up.”

Some bullish laughter.

“Come on. Come on,” said another man.

I turned to Adam, who had also been burdened with a glass of the dark, foamy liquid, and whispered, “What is this stuff?”

“Tooey’s Tonic,” he said.

“But what is it?”

“Beer.”

“For real?” I held it up to the light. It was greenish in color, and I could see pebbly particles swimming around near the bottom of the glass. I thought of witches cackling about toil and trouble while stirring a cauldron.

“He changes the recipe almost weekly,” Adam said close to my ear. “Been trying to get a distributor for the stuff for years. His bar’s the only place you can actually buy it.”

“It looks like it should be outlawed,” I said and perhaps a bit too loud, as a few of the men chuckled.

“Green,” Tooey responded, “is the cure for cancer. Green is what makes the world go round-round-round. Green is gold.”

“It’s not easy being green,” I added.

Tooey’s mouth burst open, and a fireball of laughter burst out. It looked forced but wasn’t. He had a wide mouth, with narrow, sunken cheeks, and I could see the landmarks of his fillings from across the kitchen. His clothes—a flannel shirt, suede vest, faded blue jeans—hung off him like clothes draped over a fence post. The only remotely handsome feature was his eyes—small, faded blue, genuine, somber, humane.

“Good one, Shakespeare,” Tooey said. Anyone else calling me Shakespeare would have irritated the hell out of me, but there was an easiness to Tooey Jones—in his eyes, perhaps—that made it sound comfortable and almost endearing, the way old army buddies had nicknames for one another. “But—but— but taste it. Taste it.”

I brought the glass to my lips and took a small swallow. Fought back a wince. “Uh . . .”

Tooey laughed again. “Well?”

“It’s delicious,” I said.

“Come on. Be honest.”

“I’m new here,” I reminded him. “I don’t know if I can. I’m trying to win friends tonight—”

“Come out with it!”

Still grimacing, I said, “It’s horrible. It tastes like motor oil mixed with cough syrup.”

“Ahhhh! So you’re saying I used too much cough syrup?”

“Or too much motor oil,” I suggested.

Following my lead, a few of the braver men tasted Tooey’s Tonic. Mutual grimaces abounded.

“Drink it all, man,” Adam said at my side. He was looking forlornly at his own beverage. “It’s tradition.”

I imagined crazy little Tooey Jones mad-scientisting away in the supplies cellar beneath Tequila Mockingbird, bubbly test tubes and smoking vials suspended by a network of clamps, pulleys, and hooks over his head, concocting his latest brew.

A handful of men who had previously been in the den with the women appeared in the kitchen doorway, strategically after the last of Tooey’s Tonic had been choked down.

Mitchell Denault nodded at me and took a step in my direction. “I don’t want to embarrass you,” he said, a few hometown minions at his back, “but I wanted to get your John Hancock on this.” Like a Vegas mogul displaying a royal flush, he slapped a paperback copy of my latest novel, Water View, on the kitchen counter.