“Charmed,” MacCleary said, returning and emboldening Beatrice’s smile as he politely shook her hand, then turned to the bartender. “A pleasure, Madam.”
“Call me Reli.”
He smiled, bemused, as many did at her nickname. “Really Trooley. Wonderful. Are you the proprietor?”
“Family heirloom, but my pop’s still alive in Florida. He hates New York in winter.”
“Your sign says you’ve been here since 1866,” MacCleary noted.
“Yeah, and it feels like it on slow nights,” Reli replied.
“It used to be a brothel,” Beatrice said pleasantly.
“Well, thank God it stopped, or I’d never meet you two lovely ladies. And smart, too. What are you reading, Miss Baxter?”
“A biography on Alexander Hamilton. It’s for school.”
“Hamilton was an intriguing American . . . even though he lost that duel?”
Beatrice laughed shyly. “I’ve read about it. In fact, my thesis concerns whether Burr murdered Hamilton in cold blood.”
“He wrote the night before that he intended to waste his first shot, perhaps even the second, and that afterward he warned the doctor that the gun was still loaded. We also know now that their Wogdon and Barton guns had secret hair triggers. In other words, Burr could have aimed, changed his mind, then shot Hamilton by accident. Did you know that Hamilton’s brother-in-law had shot a button off Burr’s coat with the exact same weapons in an earlier duel?”
This time Beatrice was serious. “Yes, I’m familiar with the facts surrounding the duel, but your observations are pretty deep for the casual reader. Are you a practicing historian.”
MacCleary grinned. “I’m in finance—I get good tips from the best sources.”
Reli already had a bottle in hand—more top-shelf Irish whiskey—with which to refill MacCleary’s glass.
He took a languorous sip. “Ah, superlative spirits. Where did you ever find a bottle of this?”
Reli sipped gracefully while she answered. “My great-grandfather Arthur Trooley started it and ran the place from when he came here from Ireland. He beat out all the other New York bars because he had the best whiskey, which he distilled himself in the subbasement. But there was a massive raid on the place during Prohibition thanks to the Pussycat Pleasure Palace ratting them out, and the feds smashed the stills . . . obviously we’ve never been able to hook those stills back up. Anyway, we stocked a lot of the good stuff to make up for it.”
“So what was the secret ingredient that made it sell?”
Reli shrugged. “The fact that it was fifty cents a bottle? Maybe they put cocaine in it? Who knows?”
“Hmmm . . . fascinating. Two lovely ladies with a thirst for knowledge, and a knowledge of thirst.”
The jukebox began to play the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
“Nice,” said Beatrice. “I love this song.”
“Who’s singing it?” MacCleary inquired.
“This is a joke?” Reli asked.
He shook his head.
“The Rolling Stones,” Reli near-snarled.
“Do you like them?” MacCleary asked Beatrice.
“I’m more the Bob Dylan fan—especially his early folk music,” Beatrice said. “You know his stuff?”
“I do, and I now like this Rolling Stones song as well,” said MacCleary, pausing to listen to the song’s lyrics. “Speaking of getting what I want, however, may I smoke in here, Reli?”
Reli shook her head. “Nah, dude, it’s not the same bar as the 1860s. You gotta go outside.”
“Indeed,” said MacCleary. “Miss Baxter, would you care to join me?” He removed two scrupulously hand-rolled cigarettes from a silver case in his shirt pocket.
Beatrice seldom smoked. She decided not to tell Devin MacCleary that. She donned her plaid scarf, black peacoat, took a deck of the bar’s “TTT” logo matches from a jar on the bar, and followed MacCleary out the door.
Reli plucked a condom from a cookie jar on the bar and threw it at Beatrice, snickering.
Outside the street was tranquil and dark. MacCleary lit both cigarettes with an antique-looking silver lighter and handed Beatrice one. They smoked in silence.
“May I ask you a silly question?” MacCleary asked after a minute. “What’s a seen-esther? The newspaper said the bar may be full of them if there was a music show.”
Beatrice giggled. “It’s pronounced ‘scene-ster.’ It’s a person . . . usually a younger person . . . who will hang out at a bar just because they heard the bar was cool, not knowing anybody there, not knowing the band’s music, not dressing up at all, not ordering anything interesting or expensive, and . . . well, basically just lurking. Putting in face time.”
“I see. But what about just coming to the bar to be there because you like it?”
“That makes you a regular. Scenesters are the type of people who will call friends just to say, ‘Oh, I’m at this bar,’ just to sound important or cool, then not come back, even if they had fun, because ‘the scene’ is somewhere else.”
“And this is one of those bars?”
“Well, it sometimes is, when there’s a band or something.”
“I see. See and be seen at the scene. Scenester.” MacCleary pondered. “On a more solemn note, there is a scene down the street that I feel I must visit, but I’m unsure if I want to go there alone. Would you walk with me for a few blocks?”
“Yeah, sure.” They began to walk. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
“No, no, I am not. I’m from Montreal originally,” MacCleary said.
Canadian. That explains a lot, Beatrice thought.
She knew instantly to where they were walking.
“So . . . your degree is in American history?”
“It is,” Beatrice said.
“Why?”
“History to me is like this endless riddle—I’m fascinated by why and how great events actually happened and who were the players who made them happen . . . what they were really like.”
“You then plan on writing great books?”
“If I could just teach history, that would be enough.”
“Noble idea, that. Not enough good ones around anymore.” MacCleary dragged deeply and contemplated. “I got this tobacco from George Washington’s farm, you know, speaking of history.”
“Oh, did you?” Beatrice giggled, playing along. “Well, that’s very nice. I don’t like supporting slave labor, though, so maybe I should stop smoking.”
“Ah, it’s all right, I picked it myself . . . though, I suppose, they planted and tended to it. Enjoy.”
They walked by steel gates shuttering pizzerias, sneaker stores, a few chic delis. They strolled past the ornate art deco front of the post office.
“So which historical figures do you admire—other than Mr. Hamilton?” MacCleary inquired. “Adventurers? Warriors? Artists?”
“Well, I just saw a brilliant movie about one artist . . . well, I guess he’s an adventure artist . . . this guy Philippe Petit. Have you heard of him?”
MacCleary shook his head.
“He was a French guy—just a kid, really—who sneaked into the World Trade Center in the 1970s and strung up a tightrope between the two building tops with his buddies. When dawn broke, he walked from one building to the other on the wire.”
“Perhaps he thought it safer than dodging the traffic below.”
“That seemed to be his attitude. He was an adventure-artist.”
“What happened to him?”
“He went back and forth between the buildings for a long time, and then the police arrested him. A lot of people, however—myself included—thought it was cool.”
“Doubtless.”
They reached their destination. Before them was a chain-link fence surrounding the gaping pit that had been the World Trade Center.
MacCleary removed a slim, shiny personal data organizer from his pocket and tapped the screen a few times, presum
ably to an Internet search engine.
“Yes, here it is,” he said. “Frenchman Philippe Petit wirewalks over New York City, August 7, 1974.”
He looked up into the abyss before him, his eyes suddenly hard. Beatrice had seen this look on many other tourists who were faced with the tragic reality of the barren Trade Center site. He lowered his head and tapped at the screen again, sternly.
“Beatrice, would you like to go to a date with me?” MacCleary finally said.
Beatrice raised an eyebrow. Maybe the Canadian’s English wasn’t as perfect as he tried for. “Don’t you mean on a date, Devin?”
He didn’t miss a beat. “Is that a yes?”
“I guess,” she said, somewhat nervous.
MacCleary returned her smile. “Wonderful.” He offered her his hand. She took it and began to turn, to walk back to the bar, but MacCleary remained rooted to the spot. With a mysterious smile, he said, “Close your eyes.”
She did so. MacCleary pulled her close, touching their lips together in a gentle, chaste kiss.
Beatrice could have sworn she had been hit by lightning, so great was the flash and the jolt through her body.
She was staring into his forest-green eyes when she opened hers. Nor did she break her gaze—not even to notice that the bright morning sun glinted in all its splendor off the Twin Towers.
Three guys and a girl entered Reli’s bar. Two of the guys and the girl held guitar cases. The guys with the guitars looked like college professors in glasses, black dress shirts, and clean, pressed jeans. In contrast, the girl and the other guy looked like rock ’n’ roll ruffians.
“Hey, guys,” Reli said brightly. “Get ya some drinks?”
“Four Jameson shots,” the girl said.
The rocker-looking asshole gave a low whistle. “Damn,” he said, “this place is Death Valley.”
“Where are the tumbleweeds?” the girl asked.
“That’s us,” the guy said.
“Goddamn ghost town,” the girl said.
Reli hated cooler-than-thou musicians who sneered at her place, implying it wasn’t chill enough for their genius talents and superstar extravaganzas. She especially hated condescending rockers who didn’t enter with fans in tow. When Beatrice came back in a few minutes, she’d probably give last call.
“Too bad ghosts don’t pay cover charges,” the taller of the guitar-toting prof-types noted.
“Don’t suppose you have a few fans who could change all that?” Reli asked.
“Maybe,” the rocker girl said with a supercilious smirk, “but right now we’re on recon.”
“It’s all cool,” the other prof said, looking around.
Reli placed the shots in front of the band, including one for herself. “Okay, Recon Patrol, here’s the deal. You wanna play here, cover is ten bucks a head. We keep the first ten fans’ cash for the sound guy. You can keep anything after that, but don’t expect to get a second date if you ain’t making me at least three bills in the bar till. No pyro, no security issues, and we got no stage lights, green room, or backline amps to speak of.”
“Drinks?” the lanky long-haired guy asked.
“Half off,” Reli said. “Still cool?”
The band looked at Reli, each other, the shots, and the ornately empty room.
“Let’s start with some drinks,” the rocker guy said.
Reli wondered absently if they had enough cash for the tab or whether she should charge them per round.
A cop car passed on the street behind Beatrice and Devin, finally distracting her gaze. The car was dark green and cream-colored, with a single red domed light on top.
“Is someone shooting a seventies movie?” Beatrice asked. “Wait—what time is it?”
All around them, Tribeca’s pedestrians ebbed and flowed. A woman with a huge, halolike Afro brushed past in tight brown leather bell-bottoms on platform heels. Two shaggy-haired businessmen in bright blue plaid suits and large dark sunglasses checked her out as they strode by from the opposite direction. The street was full of cars—Cadillac Coupe de Villes, Buick Rivieras, a Triumph TR6. A girl in a flowery hippy dress with flat long hair rode by on a chromed chopped hog behind a biker guy with a very serious pair of muttonchop whiskers and a Pancho Villa mustache. An open car radio was jamming Led Zeppelin’s “Communication Breakdown.”
“It’s not a movie,” MacCleary whispered. “Turn around.”
Beatrice turned. Her entire field of vision was overwhelmed by the Twin Towers.
“But . . . but . . .”
“I told you I was taking you to a date,” MacCleary whispered.
“What kind of joke is this?”
“Most assuredly not, my dear. Come now, you’re well-versed in history. Does anything here look like a joke?”
Beatrice took a long look around. A checkered cab grumbled by.
They disappeared decades ago.
“Does that look like a joke?” Devin asked, pointing straight up.
A small, barely visible figure was stepping out onto a thin, taut line, strung between the two towers, supported by two cavalettis—guy lines—that kept the cable taut. He’d planned the feat well.
He held a long thin pole for balance. And, wide-eyed far below, Beatrice and Devin watched him in silence.
Three or four minutes passed before another pedestrian spotted the man and pointed him out. Soon a crowd of onlookers stared up at the man on the line.
“Oh, my God!” gasped a black businessman in a dark, three-piece, pin-striped business suit. A cigarette fell unnoticed from his hand. Instantly, all heads tilted upward.
“Who is that man?” a woman shrieked. “He’ll kill himself!”
Beatrice shook her head, entranced. “No . . . no, he won’t . . . he’ll be okay.” She broke her upward gaze momentarily to stare incredulously at MacCleary. “It happens the same way? The exact same way?”
Devin MacCleary nodded, smiling. “Unless you think you can change his mind from down here.”
MacCleary’s gorgeous green eyes smiled right along with him. This was for real. Strangely assured, Beatrice craned her neck up again. Eyes on the sky, the pair’s hands met without even needing to glance back down.
With her free hand, Beatrice waved at the sky. “Go, Philippe! Yeah! You can make it!”
A few cheers went up in the crowd.
“If that ain’t the damnedest . . .” the businessman in the three-piece pinstripe chuckled. “Hell, yeah! Break the law of gravity, man!”
More cheers went up. Petit was almost across.
So he turned, and returned back the other way across the wire.
“I like the idea of those buildings,” the businessman mentioned, to no one in particular. “The reality is a lot uglier.” A few people around gave a still-dumbstruck laugh in agreement.
“I still don’t see them as the tristate center of commerce,” another Wall Street exec in a six-hundred-dollar suit said.
The street was almost completely stopped. Horns honked either in anger at the human gridlock or in support of the man on the wire, as cabbies leaned out windows for a better look upwards. A policeman with an almost impossibly bushy mustache was speaking into his radio with slow, deliberate words, his eyes also fixed upward.
“I got an unidentified guy walkin’ on a tightrope at One World Trade Center,” the cop stated, sounding like he barely believed his own words even as he spoke them. “On top of One World Trade Center. Goddamn.”
“Come on, Philippe!” Beatrice enthused, clutching Devin’s hand. Even though she knew what happened, it detracted nothing from the situation.
“Don’t mention him by name,” Devin whispered. “The cops might think you’re an accomplice and take you in. The fun part is being incognito.”
“This is incredible,” Beatrice whispered. “All of this.”
“I thought you’d like it.” MacCleary gave her a quick sideways grin. “Even though I’m not a practicing historian.”
A quarter of a mile in t
he air above them, Philippe Petit paused on his wire in the middle of the void and slowly, reverentially, knelt down.
After the squad cars, paddy wagon, and NYPD helicopter had all descended on the scene, a full forty minutes later, Petit was arrested. Beatrice and Devin watched as the sweet-faced, mischievously grinning young Frenchman was thrown, handcuffed, into a police cruiser and carted away, amid cheers from the vicariously invigorated crowd. Devin turned amiably to Beatrice.
“All this action makes me hungry. May I buy you dinner?”
“But it’s morning!” Beatrice pointed out.
“It’s whenever we want it to be,” Devin responded. “Besides, when we left the bar, it was night, and your body probably still thinks it is. You can only reset so many clocks.”
He had a point. Beatrice hadn’t eaten since lunch that day, which was now over thirty years in the future. She wasn’t thirty years’ worth of hungry, but she was hungry.
“I know a great place in the Village,” continued MacCleary. “Shall we?”
This sort of thing could get addictive, thought Beatrice, who replied, “Definitely.” She put out her hand for a cab.
“No need for that,” smiled Devin. “Follow me.”
Devin took her arm in his, led her around a vacant street corner, and pulled out the shiny device. A few taps of his finger later, and they were standing beneath the gnarled limbs of an ancient oak tree in Washington Square Park.
Beatrice looked around furtively. No one had noticed them. It was dark out, but the street traffic was still active. Not removing her arm from his, they began to walk.
Almost instantly, Beatrice realized they were farther from more than the Twin Towers site. The cars on the street had fins and lots of chrome. Almost every woman passing by wore a skirt or dress; nearly every man wore a hat. Devin noticed her noticing as they walked.
“Guess,” he cajoled.
Beatrice was amusedly awestruck. “I . . . I can’t say!” she stammered. “The fifties?”
“Close! It’s 1960. Forgive me, I just find it much more charming.”
Beatrice could not even begin to tell him how charming she found all of it.
They strode smiling toward the neon and noise of Bleecker Street. “So you can travel though time and space,” Beatrice asked, more confidently than she had thought it would sound.
More Stories from the Twilight Zone Page 20
