ONE FOR THE ROAD
It was quarter past ten and Herb Tooklander was thinking of closing for the night when the man in the fancy overcoat and the white, staring face burst into Tookey's Bar, which lies in the northern part of Falmouth. It was the tenth of January, just about the time most folks are learning to live comfortably with all the New Year's resolutions they broke, and there was one hell of a north-easter blowing outside. Six inches had come down before dark and it had been going hard and heavy since then. Twice we had seen Billy Larribee go by high in the cab of the town plough, and the second time Tookey ran him out a beer - an act of pure charity my mother would have called it, and my God knows she put down enough of Tookey's beer in her time. Billy told him they were keeping ahead of it on the main road, but the side ones were closed and apt to stay that way until next morning. The radio in Portland was forecasting another foot and a forty-mile-an-hour wind to pile up the drifts.
There was just Tookey and me in the bar, listening to the wind howl around the eaves and watching it dance the fire around on the hearth. 'Have one for the road, Booth,' Tookey says, 'I'm gonna shut her down.'
He poured me one and himself one and that's when the door cracked open and this stranger staggered in, snow up to his shoulders and in his hair, like he had rolled around in confectioner's sugar. The wind billowed a sand-fine sheet of snow in after him.
'Close the door!' Tookey roars at him. 'Was you born in a barn?'
I've never seen a man who looked that scared. He was like a horse that's spent an afternoon eating fire nettles. His eyes rolled towards Tookey and he said, 'My wife - my daughter -' and he collapsed on the floor in a dead faint.
'Holy Joe,' Tookey says. 'Close the door, Booth, would you?'
I went and shut it, and pushing it against the wind was something of a chore. Tookey was down on one knee holding the fellow's head up and patting his cheeks. I got over to him and saw right off that it was nasty. His face was fiery red, but there were grey blotches here and there, and when you've lived through winters in Maine since the time Woodrow Wilson was President, as I have, you know those grey blotches mean frostbite.
'Fainted,' Tookey said. 'Get the brandy off the backbar, will you?'
I got it and came back. Tookey had opened the fellow's coat. He had come around a little; his eyes were half open and he was muttering something too low to catch.
'Pour a capful,' Tookey says.
'Just a cap?' I asks him.
'That stuff's dy***ite,' Tookey says. 'No sense overloading his carb.'
I poured out a capful and looked at Tookey. He nodded. 'Straight down the -'
I poured it down. It was a remarkable thing to watch. The man trembled all over and began to cough. His face got redder. His eyelids, which had been at half-mast, flew up like window shades. I was a bit alarmed, but Tookey only sat him up like a big baby and clapped him on the back.
The man started to retch, and Tookey clapped him again.
'Hold on to it,' he says, 'that brandy comes dear.'
The man coughed some more, but it was diminishing now. I got my first good look at him. City fellow, all right, and from somewhere south of Boston, at a guess. He was wearing kid gloves, expensive but thin. There were probably some more of those greyish-white patches on his hands, and he would be lucky not to lose a finger or two. His coat was fancy, all right; a three-hundred-dollar job if ever I'd seen one. He was wearing tiny little boots that hardly came up over his ankles, and I began to wonder about his toes.
'Better,' he said.
'All right,' Tookey said. 'Can you come over to the fire?'
'My wife and my daughter,' he said. 'They're out there ... in the storm.'
'From the way you came in, I didn't figure they were at home watching the TV,' Tookey said. 'You can tell us by the fire as easy as here on the floor. Hook on, Booth.'