“Yeah sure,” Malcolm said. He couldn’t remember exactly how he’d left the place, but knew it was in a state, the floors unwashed, glasses grouped here and there.
“Might be a bit of a mess,” Malcolm said as he unlocked the door. Just as he feared, he pushed open the door and the first thing he saw was a napkin on the floor, stained with hot sauce. In bright daylight, brighter than usual because of the reflection off the snow, he could see rings on the high-tops. He set his stuff down and listened for the sound of water. He went into the kitchen, opened the mop closet, got down on his knees, and gripped the old pipe. Cold but intact. He walked over to the sink and flipped it on, got the water moving just in case it was icing up in there, ready to bust. It was a good building. Ugly but strong. Sound construction. Hugh wasn’t wrong about that. But it felt colder in there than it had been in his house.
“So anyway,” Malcolm said when he returned to the dining room. “Tripp or Charles or whatever we’re calling him—your dad—was sitting over there.” He pointed.
“And then like I said we took him into the kitchen to put a little distance between him and the group of younger guys he got into it with.” He led Rob through the kitchen door, showed him the chair where Tripp had rested. “The guys moved on. I don’t know where they went.”
“Okay.” Rob looked around. “And then?”
“Then he was just gone. I was in and out, my staff was busy. He must have gone out this door because he didn’t come through the main room. I would have seen him.”
Rob pushed open the door that led from the kitchen to the alley. Malcolm saw his snow shovel leaning up against the dumpster, exactly where he knew it was. Both men leaned as far as they could out the door and looked left and right. If they were in a movie, this would be when they spotted him, sitting against the far side of the dumpster, frozen solid, icicles hanging from his nose.
“The commuter lot is right there,” Malcolm said, pointing over the flimsy chain-link fence that separated the back of the Half Moon from Metro-North property. He scanned for a body over there, too, and the blinking seriousness of Rob Waggoner’s face told Malcolm he was doing the same. But the snow was thinner there because of the trees, and Malcolm could already tell there was nothing there but the same empty soda bottles and torn cardboard boxes that had littered that spot for years. Rob knew where the commuter lot was, of course. The point was that Tripp could have gone either way. He could have cut left from the kitchen door and walked to the sidewalk around front, or he could have turned right and walked through the parking lot, away from town.
Malcolm noticed Rob looking up at the motion-activated light in the alley. There was a small canister underneath that looked like a camera, but the only real camera was on the front door, trained over the bouncer’s shoulder. To install a working camera at both doors was double the price, and Malcolm figured a fake would be good enough. He told Rob that, and apologized, a real security camera would have helped. Together they took a few tentative steps outside, testing the frozen surface of the snow to discover whether it would hold them. Malcolm broke through first, and then Rob. One after another they stamped a path down the alley to the sidewalk. Nothing. They retraced their footsteps, and circled around the back of the building. Malcolm had left his gloves on the bar and his hands felt so cold he was starting to feel pins and needles in his fingertips.
“You should probably check his route home. Just in case.”
“I already have.” Rob squinted up at the trees, the lacework of frozen branches. After a moment he said he was heading out but he’d come by later to see if Malcolm needed a lift back home.
“Nah, don’t worry about me. I’ll crash here.”
“Yeah? Okay.”
“Don’t forget to barricade the hill on Overlook.”
“Oh yeah.”
* * *
Once Rob left, Malcolm sat at the bar and ate an entire bag of party mix, pouring it into his mouth directly from the plastic pouch. He found two oranges, which he peeled and ate. He checked his phone but all he’d gotten were dumb memes of people wiping out on ice and two from Toby complaining that he was in his third hour of family Monopoly. Nothing from Jess.
He used the landline to call his mother—thank goodness he kept the old, corded phone—but it rang and rang. He walked through the bar and flipped chairs over on tables. He swept. Nearly forty-eight hours after losing power the water in the slop sink still ran warm, so he filled a bucket, cleaned every corner of the floor. It was good to be moving, doing something productive. He scrubbed the bar, the back bar. He wiped down the bottles. He got down on the hex mat and cleaned under the rack. He got so warm while he worked that he took off his coat. He imagined Emma walking in, surprised to find him there. He imagined what he’d say, and then what she’d say, and what might happen. He imagined Jess walking in and his body locked up. He wouldn’t make it any easier for her. He’d just stare at her until she spoke, and then he’d tell her it didn’t matter to him in the least what she did with her life. He cleaned the bathroom, emptied all the garbage cans, brought the bags outside, and since he was out there anyway he shimmied his shovel loose from the spot where it had frozen, and then walked around front to clear the sidewalk. He purposely left his phone inside, but after a few minutes he let himself check. Nothing.
The water in the tank wouldn’t stay warm forever, so he went to the men’s bathroom and splashed his face, not caring about the puddle growing on the floor. He used the hidden key to open the supply cabinet where the spare hand towels were kept, and he found three fresh undershirts, plain white, still with cardboard inserts. He slowly unfolded the top shirt, held it against himself. “Well okay,” he said, taking off the T-shirt he was wearing and pulling the new one over his head. He used his stale undershirt to wipe down the sinks, wipe up the water on the floor. He wiped down the urinals. Then he dropped his old undershirt into the garbage can and scoured his hands.
Fully dressed once again, he went down to the storage room to get the generator he bought in a panic after a freak hurricane, not long after the bar became his. The generator was on the cheap end, not meant to keep the place running, and Jess had argued at the time that they’d be better off spending more on a good one than any money at all on one that would prove near useless in a crisis. The guy who was helping them piped up that he agreed with Jess, that the one Malcolm picked was barely better than a camp generator. Malcolm wanted to ask the guy what business it was of his, but instead of engaging, instead of making his case, he heaved the thing up to the register without using the hand truck, and slapped their credit card down. Jess went silent, staring dead-eyed out the window the whole ride home. Now, two years later, looking at it as if for the first time, he knew Jess was right: the old 1980s space heater he’d inherited from Hugh’s day would pull all of the power. He shook the canister of gasoline he’d grabbed from his shed and wondered how long the gas would last.
He found a bottle of engine oil that had never been opened, carried the oil and generator outside, and knelt down in the snow. The air was pale, cold-blasted, and hung more thinly than it did out front. “Come on,” he said as he pulled the start cord once, twice, and then finally the engine kicked on, as loud as a small airplane.