The Wishbone

Moogle’s Hi-Tow is not anyone’s favorite bar. They have a shallow selection of drinks, they don’t decorate for any holidays, the jukebox is a cache of 60’s folk hits, and the bartender (Burt Moogle himself) is at the age where work has become more of a hobby, a place to grump and snicker and scare away all but the most loyal of patrons.

Tonight is Christmas Eve, however, and he breaks one of his rules. The store bell tings as Burt finishes draping up a set of multi-colored string lights across the ceiling. He pivots, alone and high on the ladder. It wouldn’t take much to send ol’ Burt down and off towards a hip replacement. He knows he should be more careful, and yet he knows he will not.

Two figures whisk in, the black tails of their coats gnawed off by the dry southern wind. One of them Burt recognizes, and one he doesn't.

“Happy holidays, Eugene.” Burt says, down the ladder now. “You’re aware what day it is, right?”

“Burt,” Eugene says, “fetch us some champagne. We’re celebrating.”

Burt nods his head. He’s already weaseled a few shots of Rumple from his personal collection, and he’s been feeling guilty about it. Drinking alone on Christmas is a common symptom of a life spent erroneously, and if previous experience has been taken into consideration, he would’ve been doing the same tonight. The man lurches to the kitchen, his gray-haired sniffer out and searching for the backhouse stuff. The two others find a booth near the darkened windows.

Martin shivers and rubs his arms up against his triceps.

“Why’d you have to lie to him?” Martin says.

“Ah,” Eugene says. “If we told him the truth, he would’ve found a way to get involved.” He points to the string lights, which blink and droop like drunk constellations. “Christmas spirit, and all that.”

“Maybe that’s not so bad,” Martin says. “We wouldn’t need that much. Half a grand and we could sleep with the heat on.”

Eugene smiles. Martin has seen this smile many times. It comes out when his eyes disagree with his lips. It is both motherly and fatherly and pitiful. “Can’t do it, buddy. We’d be taking advantage of him.”

Martin motions towards the kitchen. “Isn’t that kind of what we’re doing now?”

Burt comes wheeling back towards them, a green bottle in one hand, three glasses in the other. He walks fast because he feels fast. A slurry of blood occupies his face, making him glow like an ornament. He places them on the table and spreads them out. Then, he offers the bottle.

“2008 Piper Sonoma Brut,” he says. “It’s a California white. All I got on short notice. But it’ll taste the same after half a glass.” He flashes something wild in his teeth. “Who’s doing the honors?”

“Martin will,” Eugene says. “My boy is graduating.”

“Congratulations,” Burt says, pushing the bottle in the boy’s hands. “From college?”

Martin rolls the neck over, inspecting the cold weight and the wire contraption near the cork. It is foreign to him because he is still in high school, only in his second year.

“College,” Martin says, holding his lips like Eugene. His hair comes down in a thick black swoop. “University of Miami.”

“Better than me, son,” Burt says. “Four years under a gin snorkel is how I spent my twenties.” The tip of the bartender’s tongue sticks out between his stubble. “Let’s drink!”

It is not difficult for him to pop the bottle, and when all three glasses are full, they extend them. “To Martin,” Eugene says.

“And Jesus!” Burt follows.

Martin sips the alcohol. It is what he imagines spark fluid to taste like. He lets it burn sweet around his gums, then swallows it away. The surface of his drink is gold, like his mother’s eyes, and the string lights flash atop them, as if making her blink. He takes another larger sip and grunts.

“Oh!” Burt says, filling his already empty glass. “I have another present in the back. Been saving it for a special night.” He waddles back towards the kitchen.

“See?” Eugene says. “Christmas spirit.”

“It’s more like a graduation gift,” Martin says. “Apparently.”

Eugene coughs, his yellow skin stiffening around his chin. “Sorry for the extra fib. I’ve always wanted to say those words. ‘My boy is graduating.’” He lifts the drink up, and polishes off the final drops. “You’re the closest thing I got.”

“You can say it when I walk,” Martin says. “It’s only two years away.” He touches his hand to his face. He feels like a bubble in a tonic glass.

“Of course,” Eugene says. “I’ll be there. But sometimes it’s nice to jump the gun a little bit.” Eugene points to the bottle. “Another?”

Martin pushes his glass forward. “Jumping the gun ain’t too bad.”

Eugene smiles and lifts the bottle. His fingers shake like leaves fearing winter. Underneath his black coat is little skin and little bone. Martin saw him earlier, dressing in the dark to come here, and he had stood so tall and thin that Martin believed him to be a loose shadow, separated from its muse. Well, Martin thought, that held some truth, in a way.

Bob Dylan’s harmonica loads up the room as Burt rushes back into it, his steps uneven. In his right hand he holds something grizzly and beige.

At the table, he drops it between them. The bone bounces once, then stills, dried meat attached to the prongs.

“Can’t have Christmas without a wishbone,” Burt says. “Saved it from Thanksgiving.” He’d spent that, too, at the bar- the bone was plucked from the gullet of a Walmart rotisserie chicken.

Eugene claps a hand on Burt’s forearm. “Remember the last time we had one of these, Martin?”

Martin does. Four years ago, when things hadn’t been as tight, the three of them- Martin and Eugene and his mother Lisa- hauled a whole turkey three hours away to a beach off the panhandle. Eugene found a way to fry it right on the sand, and after parking the truck bed in front of the sunset, they all sat together and picked it apart with their fingers. He remembers how the fat coated his teeth, the salt water gone bronze, the chapped bark of the seagulls. His mother broke that wishbone with him, and Martin got the skinny end. He was happy then - and he was happy when her wish came true. His mother and Eugene walked their way down the aisle at the same beach one year later.

“A little,” Martin says, then turns to Burt, jabbing the bone. “Do you believe in these things?”

“Absolutely,” Burt says. “Thirty years ago I was betting pink slips with this rat Ralph Banitoro to see who could pull the winning side. We yanked, and I came up with the fat end, but Ralph couldn’t pay. Loved his Camaro in an… unhealthy way, if you can imagine.”

Martin blushes, finishing his second glass. His muscles twitch with heat, and for a moment he craves the dark, cold eternity of their living space.

“Anyways,” Burt says, lifting his hands. “A little negotiating commenced, and twenty minutes later, I was the proud new owner of a little dive named Moogle’s Hi-Tow.”

“No kidding,” says Eugene. His words stick to his molars. “Maybe you should bet a million right now and break this one on the table.”

Burt pushes his palms out. “I’m done with that. Everyone gets a single lucky break in life, and if you’re smart enough, that’s exactly when you stop hoping for another.” He smiles, taking a swig straight from the bottle, then burps, a little streak dotting his torn dishwasher shirt. “This one’s for the two of you.”

“Thanks, Burt,” Martin says. A strange wave of gratitude floods his being. Dylan mumbles something about doves through the half-torn stereos.

“Make it a good one,” Burt says, turning back towards the kitchen and dragging the bottle with him.

Eugene picks up the bone. It holds the light well, morphing from green to red and back again.

“Well, let’s hear it,” he says.

“I wish she were here.” Martin says it without thought, his tongue loosened by this damn electric feeling. He looks to Eugene, then past him, floating over the torn red cushions and the beer-splattered Elvis poster.

Eugene laughs, but with ease, as if rubbing Martin’s back after a spill. “I’d like that too.” Then that whispery smile comes back to his face. “But I’d hate for you to waste a wish. Think harder.”

Martin listens. He thinks of his first baseball game and strange, winding algebra equations and his crush’s Bam-Blam lip gloss and the unnerving appetite of black holes. He imagines that cosmic hunger, visualizes all that gas and soil and loose turkeys and human lives being sucked up and stretched into nothing, so laser tight that it could be coiled up and calligraphed in a Dylan song, his motorcycle voice meaning more than can be imagined at an age like Martin’s. Meaning the most, Martin believes, to a little bar like this, empty on Christmas except for two men and a boy escaping some darkness of their own. He thinks of all that and then he answers.

“I wish this place never closes,” Martin says, extending his hand and grasping onto the opposite end of the bone.

“Let’s see, then,” Eugene says, and without giving Martin any warning, yanks his side hard towards his chest. It is so quick that the crack isn’t even audible.

Martin blinks. The strength from Eugene is more than unusual- simply incomprehensible. When Martin looks down at his own hand, a mere toothpick stares back at him. He drops it, letting the sliver rattle on the table.

Eugene laughs. “I win,” he says.

“What was your wish?” Martin asks.

“I can’t tell you now,” he says, pulling his coat tight on his shoulders. “That would ruin the fun.”

Martin shrugs, lacking the energy to prod. His eyes are heavy and suddenly they don’t want to stay open. Martin begins to urge them with his fingers, but then his fingers begin to fail him, too. His mind, he thinks. His mind and the alcohol have waged war. The rest of the night comes to him in frames.

Eugene slips his last twenty dollars under a ketchup bottle. The two of them wobble out of Moogle’s and into the slurry. Streetlamps. A raccoon. One million stars. Two million stairs. And their apartment mat, the one Lisa picked out, stained dusty over the years. Good things, it reads in burlap ink, come in threes.

Martin flops on his bed, drifting off, his back floating up and far away from him. He is asleep too quickly to realize that their radiator has grunted back into existence, as have the lights, the oven, the fridge, and the electric squeal of their apartment.

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Cha Cha Lola’s is the favorite bar of many. It is full of tight air, with dark velvet paint on the walls and chairs that stretch so high they are practically bedrooms. Jazz music leaks from hidden speakers, and sometimes a lone saxophonist drops in to provide accompaniment. The Roosevelt Inquirer describes the experience as “walking into a den of secrets.” Burt Moogle laughs while reading this. What else would anyone expect from a bar named Cha Cha Lola’s?

The two developers, a serial restaurateur and a hedge fund kid from Birmingham, made Burt a generous offer on the plot. He thought it was a scam at first- the zeroes went on and on, down the checkline, until they curved around and started all over again. Burt looked the suits in the eye, twitching his wide nostrils, the purple clots near his temples surging with adrenaline.

“What’s the catch?” he asked them.

“None,” the kid said. “You inherited what the real estate business calls ‘paydirt.’ Lotta foot traffic in this area.” He slipped Burt a business card- perforated beige with just a name and a number. “Shop it around if you want to confirm it.”

Burt wasn’t drunk that day, but that night he hit it hard, drowning himself in a half keg of Heineken. The Moogle’s bar room spun around him. He balled himself up on the pool table, hands and feet and apron all twisted together. When he heard “Like a Rollin’ Stone” blasted off the empty walls, he felt tears drip onto the felt. Then, at two in the morning, he made the call, and by eleven that afternoon, Moogle’s Hi-Tow was under new management.

His only ask was an addition to the contract. He wanted to work the floor on holidays. Nothing fancy, he told them- simple bartending would be enough. The men, high off their purchase, had agreed, and now Burt stands in his old bar room with a black dress shirt buttoned irregularly to his turkey neck.

The door opens, and Burt moves to it, passing in front of the “Please Wait to Be Seated” sign. He is sober tonight and that’s what makes him nervous.

“Hi there,” Burt says. “Welcome to Cha Cha Lola’s. Would you like a booth?”

“Certainly,” the man says. Then he stops. “Burt?”

Burt stares at him. The man wears expensive things, as all their guests typically do, but his eyes are a warmer blue, oiled over as if interacting with a found object. It is only when he smiles that Burt can place the young man.

“Eugene’s kid,” he says. “Marshall?”

“Martin,” the man says, and before Burt can extend his hand, Martin pulls him towards his chest. Burt is strangled beneath his mass, but he does not panic. He thinks of those eyes and finds a strange peace within them, like old birthday cards or children’s toys. Martin holds him for half a second longer, then lets him go.

“You gave me my first drink,” Martin says.

“Not the first time I’ve heard that. I say, better me than the postman, right?” Burt laughs, and Martin can hear the wheeze as he sucks air through his collar. “Can’t get away with that anymore. This place is stricter than a third-date virgin.”

Martin chuckles. “Figured someone’s got you hostage here if there ain’t some Dylan playing.” He gazes across the room, then back to Burt. “Think you can sneak a drink with me?”

“Go on down to that booth,” Burt says, pointing to a corner section with a wilting red candle in the middle. “I’ll grab three glasses. I assume Eugene will be joining us.”

Martin grins an inherited smile. “Moving as we speak.”

Burt hobbles to the back. A patron at the other end of the bar asks for extra olives. Burt ignores him. As he searches through red and white bottles, he wonders where he heard that piece about lucky streaks, or if it was something he made up. Either way, it was bullshit. His hand wraps around a 2017 Pavillon Blanc. Holding it, turning it in his wrist, the white fluid so clean and medical, he realizes his whole life was one hot hand on the table. One long chain of sevens when the rest of the world was busting. He smiles and kicks the door outwards, prepared to ride it all the way through.

Martin has his hands tucked into his lap as Burt reapproaches. There is no need to explain the bottle, the luxury of it- they simply open it and pour three glasses full. Martin smiles again, but doesn’t look away from the seat between them. He hates how easy it is to lie to Burt. He hates how he’s done it again.

Martin takes a sip, and then makes a noise as he lowers his glass.

“Remember that gift you gave us? All those years ago?”

Burt nods, and Martin reaches into his coat pocket. In it is another wishbone, except this one is polished clean, as if made of ceramic. It casts shadows in front of the candle. Burt watches them dance on the table.

“I was going to break it myself, but I reckon this is much better.”

“Ha!” Burt says. “Guess I’ll have to go back on my word.”

“So will I,” Martin says. “Know what you’re wishing for?”

“Yes,” Burt says, holding onto the thin bone. “Exactly. You?”

Martin nods. “Never had a doubt.”

“Perfect, then.” Burt says. “Let’s do it on three.”