American Interchange

It was just past three-thirty when the first customer pulled into Mo’s Irish Pub on the western outskirts of Omaha. Mo Murphy stood there behind the counter, listening to a Gaelic rock tape and plunging his damp gray washcloth into the bottoms of pint glasses when the bell tinkled. He looked up to see a man about twenty years his junior, mid-40s, wearing a cashmere sweater and leather boots and leading the November chill as the door slammed shut.

“Afternoon, fella,” Mo said, flipping the washcloth over his shoulder and turning a glass upright. “What’ll it be?”

The man pulled off his flat cap and wiped his brow. “Any Golden State brews?”

Mo shook his head, smiling a little. “Nothin’ you’ll find in Bev Hills, but you might like the Turbo Trippel.”

“Sure do. Pour me up.”

Mo tilted the glass and started the tap, a sharp glint in the corner of his wire frame glasses. He turned to see the man’s car in the lot, a silver Mercedes-Benz coupe, sunlight twinkling through clear patches in the dusty chrome hubcaps. Its tires were well-worn, the California plate loose on its hinges.

“So what brings you this far east?” Mo asked, handing the man his beer.

He shrugged. “I don’t have much want for this sun.”

Mo chuckled. “It finds everyone no matter where they’re at.”

“Not where I’m going.”

“Where’s that?”

“Maine.”

Mo raised his eyebrows. “Long summer days up there.”

“Summer’s over,” the man said, taking a drink.

“I ain’t dissuading. I tended in Ashland the better part of a decade.”

The man didn’t respond, staring outside at the Nebraskan fall. A breeze picked up a pile of dry leaves and whirled them across the curb.

Mo grabbed the washcloth and went back to the glasses. He figured the man had some obligation that needed him badly enough to draw him out of his Pacific paradise for a fortnight. There wasn’t much to a northeast winter besides the rustic beauty of colonial architecture as it withstood its thousandth snow. Nothing that held Mo for very long, anyhow.

The tape ran through, sending a static clicking through the speakers behind the bar. Mo turned around to switch it when the bell tinkled once more.

A young guy, 25 perhaps, pushed inside and took the barstool next to the older man. Mo snapped the tape player shut, another Gaelic hit warding off the chill that surrounded the doorway.

“Afternoon, fella,” Mo said, glass in hand. “What’ll it be?”

“I’ll have that Bay Porter or whatever it’s called,” the kid said, unzipping his leather jacket and hanging a pair of Aviators on his shirt collar. It was stained with oil and grease and God knows what.

Mo started pouring.

“Aren’t you gonna ask for ID?”

Mo turned and placed down his beer. “You’re sure enough of yourself. I expect you’ve ordered that a couple times since no one around here takes to it.”

The older man turned on his stool. “You from Boston?”

“Easy, Columbo. How’d you figure that?” the kid said.

The man smiled for the first time, the lines in his forehead mellowing out. “What’s your name, son?”

“Teddy LaFleur.”

“Ben Masters.”

They shook hands. Mo finished drying the glasses and hung all of them up but one, which he filled with Four-Leaf Lager to sip on through what he expected would be a slow evening.

“You a mechanic, Teddy?” Mo asked, swirling the beer.

“By trade.” He nodded out the window. “She’s been giving me hell all day.”

A late 70s Trans Am rested beside the Mercedes, engine heat warping the golden bird stenciled on its hood.

“Where you taking her?” Ben asked.

Teddy shrugged. “Someplace warm where we can both breathe. Southwest, maybe.”

“The air isn’t anything but stuffy down there,” Ben said. “She’ll be fine, but you might choke if you’re not careful.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He’s taking the piss out of you,” Mo said. “I tended in Flagstaff the better part of a decade and it wasn’t so bad.” He figured the kid was running from something as far and as fast as he could. Feelings, maybe. He didn’t mention his destination, which gave Mo a twinge of nostalgia for fleeting times. He couldn’t remember any of the roads on which he blew into Omaha twenty years ago, back when he didn’t know where he was headed.

“What about you, bartender? What’s your story?” Ben asked.

“I came here in ‘95 and bought the place in ‘01. Used to be called Paul’s Sports Club, mostly a daytime joint for older folks. But I gave her the Celtic once-over and doubled the taps.” He pointed to the neon sign behind the bar that read ‘BEER FROM COASTER TO COASTER’.

“Not a bad living,” Ben said.

“Swell place, Mo,” Teddy added.

For a while they drank in silence, Mo switching tapes as the sun’s rays crept across the polished floor. Theirs were the only three cars in the lot, and Mo was okay with that. Between the beer and the door being shut it was the warmest he’d felt all day.

“So,” Mo asked Teddy after the pint, “where do you want to end up?”

Teddy slid his glass across the counter. “I have a friend in LA. He works a shop that doesn’t have enough hands for their repair bays. If I make it in the next day or two he thinks he can sort something out.”

Mo filled the glass. “Won’t Boston miss you?”

“Not anymore, she won’t.”

Mo handed him the beer. He wasn’t one to press. Teddy drank, staring into the Guinness mirror behind the bar.

“Nothing but smog and shame out west, kid,” Ben said. “I should know.”

Teddy turned. “I saw your plates. How long have you lived there?”

“All my life,” he said. “I was an executive producer before I left. Everything starts to feel the same after a while. Same heat, same trees, same clouds in the sky. Same congestion, same filth. A real beacon, LA.”

Teddy scoffed. “How could you ever get tired of that sun?”

“Most days I wished it would rain.”

Mo looked out at their cars, thinking about the roads they had seen and the ones they were going to see, how their tires had kissed different oceans. He wondered what remained after reaching the sand, staring across the water at a sun that was coming or going, thinking about what had changed.

“What’s in Maine?” Mo asked.

“Solitude and escape,” Ben replied. “I want to write a book about my life.”

“That’s real sentimental, writing about sunburns during a blizzard,” Teddy said.

Ben smiled and passed Mo his empty glass. “You don’t know the half of it, Casper.”

Teddy snorted and took a drink. “You think we’re important enough to make an appearance in Ben’s book, Mo?”

“I don’t know,” Mo said, giving Ben his beer. “He may relegate me to ‘the kindly Nebraskan bar owner’.”

“Hard to forget a man named Mo,” Ben said. “I happened upon this stand-up place outside Omaha called Mo’s Irish Pub, which sold Turbo Trippel further east than I’d seen. I’d even go so far as to call it America’s bullseye bar, right smack dab in the middle with beers from coaster to coaster.”

“Nice touch,” Mo said.

“There I met a guy named Teddy,” Ben continued, “who was traveling in the opposite direction. I can’t understand why someone would drive through the smoldering gates of hell on purpose, but with a car like his you could outrun the devil.”

“I plan on it,” said Teddy.

“And me, I’m about halfway, hoping I’ll feel different when I make it and that the rest will write itself,” Ben finished, taking a long drink and leaning back against the counter with misty eyes.

They were silent for a moment. Mo turned and thumbed through his cassette tapes and found one with a worn label, placing it into the player and walking over to the front window as a bagpipe melody flowed through the bar. He gazed at the trees in the nearby neighborhood, vivid reds and oranges in the evening sun, as the words wrapped around him like they always had.

“O Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling

From glen to glen and down the mountainside

The summer's gone and all the roses falling

'Tis you, 'tis you must go and I must bide

But come ye back when summer's in the meadow

Or all the valley's hushed and white with snow

'Tis I'll be here in sunshine or in shadow

O Danny boy, O Danny boy, I love you so.”

Mo recalled the frayed memories of the little house in Brooklyn, the record spinning endlessly, filling the world with that song. He could almost smell the shepherd’s pie wafting through the front window.

“My mother used to play this for me all the time,” he said. “The vinyl, of course. Her name was Mo, too. She had her own pub in Ireland called the very same before coming to the States and having a family. I wanted to open my own pub likewise. Now, people call me Mo. Didn’t take me long to stop correcting them. In a way it keeps her dream alive.”

The song played through as the trees rustled with the autumn breeze, the three men locked into their own atavistic trances with the turn of the spool.

“So what’s your real name?” Teddy finally asked as the song ended.

Mo only smiled and ejected the tape.

It was getting dark when the men had sobered up, finishing the plates of bangers and mash that Mo had prepared for them, on the house. They closed their tabs and shook hands for the last time, cheeks rosy in the fading light. The door opened and shut and the V8s sped off, one chasing the sun and one fleeing it. Two storybook denouements in the making.

Mo stood behind the bar, cold air pooling at his ankles while he wiped down the taps. He finished up and slung the washcloth over his shoulder when a pair of headlights turned into the parking lot. The door opened and shut once more, and Mo reached for a dry glass.

“Evening, fella,” he said. “What’ll it be?”