Hey, Granddad, I called, swinging the batwing doors addorsed, I’ll have one of yours—neat.
My own back was turned against the outgoing gust: lager vapor, and the lingering tar of the nineties. The outside door of Olaf’s was hung out of plumb, and took practiced maneuvers to pull to—which you had to do, lest it spring back to smack against aluminum louvers on the shuttered front of the shoestore next door. So inside, and in so doing—the practiced maneuvers, I mean—I was always falling backward through the batwings. And that night was no exception.
Even with the time it took to catch my fall, I caught Granddad’s scowl when I turned around.
And to what: turned out, to new stars fixed in the glittering firmament, the heaven of bottles behind the bar. Granddad was cowled in glory, stuck up at the head of an incandescent choir of brighter angels. A constellation of startling colors: Aperol orange, Bombay sapphire and the brilliant blue of curaçao. I spotted Campari’s limpid crimson, the same red as broached the vermouth’s viridian throat: blazoned a plate charged with a tart, or else the roundel sun, set within the inner Oort cloud of an argent annulet, and rising on either side of its horizon—the label sable over all. Or just, let’s say, the red of impressed wax on Tanqueray. I was impressed, anyway. All these glowed within the warm well whiskey golds of Early Times and the Olds—Forester, Granddad, Overholt—and also, through thick and faceted glass, the pale algal green of gin, the colorless clearness of cereal vodkas.
Granddad had been a couple of classes below me at Willard. I didn’t remember his first name, but everyone knew his family: he was Olaf Aldinger’s kid, and born to the establishment. Although you wouldn’t know it from his aptitude. His attitude, maybe—Olaf never cared for me, either. When first the younger Aldinger started behind the bar, I’d fall through the doors, and call, Well whiskey, neat—and he always wanted to know, Well, which. Whereas, if you can palm off the bottom of the bottom shelf to someone who doesn’t care, like I don’t, don’t you just. I would call out, Well, Granddad. So I call him Granddad—called him that.
Hey, Merry, said Granddad—but still scowling—Merry Christmas, huh.
He never talked much to me—nor looked at me, for that matter—and although his dark look was about me, he wasn’t looking at me now. His eyes were fixed on a twist of terrycloth mop he was wringing out, which was wound in a seething ring around his fist, and on the soap suds that ran in runnels past his wrist. On the other hand, I was the only one there. I was the only one staring over the bar at his battery of new bottles, like so many antique ornaments: baubles and Victorian tumblers, strawberry bulbs, bubble lights. And all perfused with gold in luminous filaments, in wires and molten lances. Gold shot through Crown Royal’s diamond quilt, and gold hobnail in the cob of Nixta corn liquor, gold hoop nails banding the Peerless glass barrel. Gold the peerless shooting stars that all these bottles threw back on the bar, with the flash and glint of tinsel. I glanced at Granddad.
It is pretty cool for August, I said, but I can’t afford to drink at Christmas, so—
It’s very cool, said Granddad, very cool of them—it’s all a gift.
Oh, um—them, I said.
Granddad gave an exasperated sigh. He jerked his thumb to indicate far down the bar, and—with the white rag flapping by flexions of his whiter knuckles—he said, The Cookie Company. Kind of disgusted with me, like I should know.
And there was someone else there.
#
Now, all that past winter, I had gone around town in this colorblock toque—either Aldinger would have called it a shipple—which my mother had dyed and knit. Whereas now, by August, she had just died.
The hat had been a Christmas gift. A watch cap, my mother had said, because I’m watching out for you. Or, if she had caught me coming in late from Olaf’s Outer Space—particularly, if I had fallen backward through her undeniably level, plumb, and square front door—Because I’m watching you. And then I would say—if saying was something I was doing—Oh, you mean a stalking cap. And she would say, Yes, deer—or, No shit, Sherlock. It was a whole routine, which said something about my drinking—which she didn’t want to have to say. Which I didn’t want to hear.
The hat was knit of wool dyed in cochineal extract carmine—with an alum premordant, and warmed with cream of tartar—and was lined with a pale pink cotton cambric. She had colored the cloth in the yarn’s dyebath, but the depth of red didn’t take. She said I could learn from her mistakes. She said, Sometimes, madder is gladder. Probably, she’s why I am this way. Anyway, for Christmas at Olaf’s, I was wearing that—it was very cool for August.
Far down the bar, that someone else—the Cookie Company, I understood, or its avatar—had just cocked back her head to drop a shock blue shot. Cocked farther back was her own—frankly, unreasonable—hat. Hers was a kettlebrim, and uncanny kin to my own in color: carmine in the deep concavity, and carnation pink where the edges curled up. Seasonable for summer—it was knit of paper raffia, in a knotted openwork stitch—but no more reasonable, for that. The upcurve in the brim was steep, and gave the lip to a libation bowl, with the shallow crown its omphalos—a resurgent dome in the caldera of all of it. Or just, there’s a mushroom, sarcoscypha coccinea—scarlet elf cup, I’d call it. And the Cookie Company, she was wearing that.
No shit, she exclaimed, cutting her eyes sidewise across the rim of her shot. Reversing the glass, she balanced it—at points of parallel tangency—upon the false pontil marks of two already taken. These were the founding stones of a transparent rampart, footed in rings and pools of blue drink on the bar. Kicking off from the round rung, the Company spun her seat to face me. Gesturing between us with one hand—and wiping her upper lip with the other—she specified, The hats. This, in answer to my unvoiced—but plainly, apparent—Huh, what. And she tipped hers.
The Company was otherwise swimming in a fractal camouflage chamois, with overlong sleeves fairly frayed at the cuffs, and duffled shorts in a drab green gabardine or duck. These fell to half calf, covering the upper shaft of her buckskin boots through the scoop in the scallop. So, no, the hat didn’t go. Did mine, though.
She said, Want a cookie.
And suddenly, I did—so much.
#
The Company brought forth a quart bag from somewhere under her shirt, of slightly shattered shortbread biscuits. Around the decorative stamping of its upper surface, an intact biscuit—ideal, but increate—displayed a dentillated cornice of four embattled edges, invected at a single pair of adjacent vertices. The underside was set in a fundament of black fudge. The Company upended the bag, and began sorting shards on the bar, puzzling pieces together into resemblance of this unrealized ideal. Shortly, she turned back to me, to display a complete cookie in her open palm. She jogged her hand, as she might under the heft of a halfdollar.
Solemnly, she said, A veritable and paramount shortbread.
Then she indicated the dentition, the pair of protruding corners—obround as fingertips, or frogseyes. And she did say, Eight teeth to a side—and two eyes.
I raised my eyebrows at that, but I took the veritable shortbread, when it was proffered by the Company. I put it in my mouth.
I made them myself, she said, and winked.
I stopped my jaw, crumbs of shortbread sanding my molars.
Wait, I said, they’re not—
She let my eyes widen a long moment, and laughed.
No, no, it’s my job. I work at the Cookie Company—or worked, she said.
No, I said, you are the Cookie Company, and cocked my head toward behind the bar.
She laughed again. The cookie was very good.
How do you get that job, I said.
Pull up a seat, she said.
#
So I say to him, Look, Mac—
Look, Mac, I said.
Her eyes went teary, at that, and she looked beyond me—maybe to Granddad, I thought.
Yeah, she said, Mac. My momma used to call me that.
Beyond the bartender, then.
Is that short for Mackenzie, I said.
McIntosh, she said. Anyway, I say to him, Look, Mac—
Wait, sorry—your name is Macintosh.
No, not my name, she said. Mac, like McIntosh Red—
The apple, I said. Why.
The apple, she said, because I was the apple of her eye.
The castle of glasses was growing before her—stacked taller, I thought, than we had been poured. She ordered up two more: well whiskey for me, and the blue thing for her. What did she call it—errlight, I think. Neutral spirits and curaçao, as far as I could tell—mostly curaçao, by the color. But mostly spirits, by the smell.
She told me the rest of the story: August—
Last August?
Oh, no, she said, this is years—it’s a couple of years ago.
And it’s August, and she meets Mac at the intersection of State Route 99 and Egypt Road. She’s passing through, and she’s just waiting for another ride. And this man wanders out of the trees, and into the lee of the oneroom Egypt School of 1898. Within the shadows of pitch, and white, and pitlolly pine, he’s gathering ramp seeds—nevermind that under pines isn’t anywhere ramps should grow. He looks ridiculous, in a peagreen trench, and the red hat—her hat, the scarlet elf cap. But also, he looks a part of the landscape: his coat is the color of the late summer lawns, and the parching boughs of pine. And irregularly redded with flat barn and fence latex—an uneven coat of their own—the lap planks of the schoolhouse match his hat.
He wanders out of the trees—out of the branches of the trees—the scorched lawns—the spotty red siding. He wanders out of the landscape, with his coat and his hat, and his good afternoon, and would she care for a cookie.
And so she says to him, Look, Mac—
Like the apple—
If you’re gonna try to pick me up, you’re gonna need to have a truck.
But Mac didn’t, wasn’t trying to pick her up—he said there was shortly a bus for that. Mac wanted to hook her up, and with a good job. These cookies, right. His family made these—they ran the factory. Mac told her that the bus that was coming was the company bus, bringing in the night shift. And could she smell that, in among the dung, and hay, and heat—the smell of cookies, brung in on the night breeze. And she could, so much—and it smelled good. And she got—and now, she could get me—the job.
What kind of hours.
Nights, of course, and the other workers—
They’re nice, I said.
They’re nice, she said, they’re just like me.
Nice, I said, that’s nice.
The Company put more blue back, and spun her seat to turn one, two, three complete circuits. Her eyes were focused somewhere over my head all the while—she was spotting a point in space. That was how I used to look up at the stars, riding my bicycle in circles in the dark. It was how I looked at the bottles behind the bar. When her seat stopped spinning, the Company blew a stray black bang from her nose, and levelled her gaze. Her eyes were the acid blue of the errlight, and burning into mine.
So you want the job, she said.
Granddad snorted. They won’t stick with it, he said, and shook his head.
Maybe Granddad was right. I had six years at Bowling Green, but nonconsecutive—two, and one, and then three—and which never did sum to any intact degree. Where, my mom used to say, is your will to get out of Willard.
The Company looked up.
They won’t, she said, repeating the words slowly. I didn’t know that was an option.
I don’t know that it is, I said.
Her eyes swivelled back to me, and she smiled.
You want the job, she said.
For a moment, I didn’t say anything, and Granddad said, I want the job.
Shut up, Granddad, I said.
Sorry, she said, without shifting her gaze from mine, they’ve got right of first refusal. You want the job.
Okay, sure, I said.
You want the job, she said again—now my want was drawn out in her wording, so that it had two syllables. She was showing me the backs of her hands, and pinching the air in her fingers, all mafioso.
Sure, I said, yes.
You want the job, she said. This third time, most of the words were polysyllabic, rung round with vowel daisy chains that should garland the page.
I could see that she wanted me to shake her hand. I could see that she had rather long nails, thick and lead blue. The color of deadman’s fingers, when they’re heaving through the earth in the spring. Only these were probably sharp, too. But I did want the job, and I said, Yes. I said, I want the job, with all the extra syllables, and I gave her my hand, although she took it strange, and her nails were sharp, and pressed crescent moons into the inside of my wrist.
She put back another shot, and then, I’d have sworn she palmed the glass—I mean shuffled it under her cuff, and up her sleeve—except that directly, I saw her balance it at the center of the enceinte, in pride of place. Her castle’s keep.
Come on, she said, you can catch the bus that’s coming.
Now, I said, I mean—tonight. And stammered, although somewhere in my head, cash hammers rang already from register drawers.
Sure, she said, tonight. I’ll walk you to the stop.
Well, you know—I wanted the job. What could I do.
#
Granddad had gone around the corner, into the kitchen. He was muttering something about red hats and ringing bells—but I couldn’t hear clearly, and it didn’t register. When the Company got up to leave, I looked doubtfully at our crystal castle on the bar. But she just waved her hand.
On me, she said, and I’ll pay when I come back. I’ve got—I’ll have plenty of time.
Outside, the Company eased the door effortlessly into its frame. The only noise she made was the grind of one bootheel in the gravel border, barely off balance. After all those errlights. Old Granddad—I mean the whiskey—had me swishing from side to side, entirely off the path and in the gravel—and having stepped, I believe, on a paddle of the Aldingers’s prized eastern prickly pear. I sighed, and cast a guilty glance back into Olaf’s Outer Space. Granddad—I mean the Aldinger—had reappeared behind the bar. His arms were at his side, and there was an unreadable expression on his face: the fur trim of his father’s Santa Claus cap completely obscured his eyes.
#
Once, my mother and I attended the Aldinger Christmas party—an annual event, which we would never again. Granddad’s older sister must have invited everyone in our class, and also—I remember, because thence the presence of my mother—everyone’s plus one.
I was going through a medieval phase—and my mother, a daring early middle age—so our party dress was in heraldic particolor. My dress was an actual doublet—very oversize, in velour and velvet offcuts—which Mom had stitched to coordinate with the colorblock on her secondhand skirt set. Which was Westwood Gold Label, and way too cool for Willard: Oh, Westwood, another parent at the party said, my mother-in-law has their tea set.
Also apparently by Westwood was Mrs. Aldinger’s punch ladle. A valuable antique, her husband said, in ironstone transferware, and dating from the turn of the century. The bonewhite handle—a very curved and hammerheaded affair—was presently swanning through the slot in the Salvation Army kettle, which Olaf had expropriated for a punch bowl. My mother wondered whether that was becoming of the Worshipful Master, who turned, in turn, red as the kettle. Or red as his Santa Claus cap—Goddamned shipple, he said—which was rapidly slipping down over his forehead. The Aldingers haven’t got much of that, so he was all red toque, muttering that it was something he did for the kids.
As a kid, I didn’t care about the kettle—come to that, I didn’t care about the other kids. As a kid, I cared about the punch, which—under the crackle of conversation—I lifted the lid to see. The hinges gave an untuneful complaint, a screech of disuse proper to the sally port, the postern gate. But just then, Olaf was loudly expounding on ironstone, and its inventors the Masons—that was, the other Masons, namely Miles and Charles James. So no parent noticed—or none who cared.
On a moat the color of cranberry glass—a cocktail of clear pop and inscrutable juices—our hosts had floated brilliant bergs of sherbet. There were rainbow floes, and also, those in the tuliptree tones of triple citrus: pollen yellow, pith green, and the orange of nectaries, or nectarines. Everywhere, the ice exuded an opalescent foam, billows and conflows that made their milky way over the red waters, and up the red concave of the cauldron wall.
I had already been given a glass—I had, already, an unmistakable sherbet moustache. But the first punch poured for me had been a slurry, only sparsely strewn with the seed pearls of pink and saffron frost, the glassy beads of green corn snow. I wanted a rainbow berg—an intact and entire floe. And I had my empty cup, and no one’s attention. Since the ladle was a valuable antique, I stood on tiptoe, and put my arm into the kettle up to my elbow.
#
My mother found me in the Aldinger’s yard, making a rigorous and very red angel in the snow.
Now she is total gules, she said, horribly tricked.
Or intoned, really—and then collapsed beside me in the snow. Between streams of psychic tears as yet unfrozen, involuntary laughter crinkled my nose—and then the effort of recalling Macbeth, my forehead.
Yet, I said, who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him.
She giggled, and punched my shoulder.
To have had, she said.
Even through my doublet, her skin was cold—the Westwood suit had shortsleeves. She set her shoulders in the snow, and turned her eyes to the northern sky.
Are we wishing on a star, she said.
Sure, I said.
Well, which, she said.
Mrs. Aldinger’s little dipper, I said.
Ah, she said, and are we having black and deep desires?
I punched her shoulder. Her skin was really cold.
Come on, Mom, I said, let’s get you home.
Sure, she said, and standing first, she hoisted me out of the snow. Then she crinkled her nose.
Honestly, what kind of fruit is that, she said.
#
When Granddad took the Company’s castle to the sink, I bet he swore. I bet that for every glass that sunk under the water and struck the steel basin, another dispersed as soon as it met the surface, foaming into soap spume, and flowing up in fumes of steam. But then, in the intervening years, I’ve held—and not—Cookie Company money. It’s all the money I have to bet.
#
The Company was shadowboxing under a sturgeon moon, weaving to and fro, and bobbing up and down between sidewalk and street. At the bus stop—a bench and awning, just without the edge of town—she dropped into a crouch, and then exploded out, flourishing two of Granddad’s glasses in her splayed right hand, and a flask in her left fist.
She filled each glass, the color of the dram indistinguishable by moonlight—which flashed off the silver finish of the flask, and gave the liquor a mercurial cast. She passed mine, and raised hers.
You got the job, she said.
I drank, and felt funny.
We sprawled out on the bench of the bus stop, under Welcome to Willard, and sundry arms. I stared up at the sign, at the emblems and ensigns, for a long time. There was the quatrefoil, the K, the cogs and spokes, and the fleur-de-lys. There was the Girl Scout triplicate Hecate, and the medallion of the American Legion, corroded by corner bolts into a Canterbury cross. There was the Free and Accepted square and joined set, the Geometer encompassed in the fading blades of unpinioned wings.
You a joiner, the Company said.
Hardly, I said, although I spend enough time around Granddad in an apron.
Apron, she said.
Oh, just—a bib, I said, gesturing toward the sign, I think the Masons wear them.
Weird, she said. And what are those triple links.
In the chainlink evenweave, there was a chain—a short but actual chain—clipped to an upper corner, and in union colors. Odd Fellows, I think.
What about you, I said.
Oh, none of those, she said. I’m following another order.
Back then, I heard Order—I mean Loyal, or Benevolent and Protective, or Eastern Star. Star of the West would have been a better guess. Back then, I thought, if we were Elk, we’d elect her Exalted Ruler. I thought, imagine having that many friends. But also, imagine having them for friends. No, I didn’t think she would—and not me: I was not Aldinger, nor was meant to be. But odd fellows, in any case—in lowercase—we were that, at least.
We should swap numbers, I said.
She grinned, and with long fingers, she plucked the cap from my head, and replaced it with the kettlebrim. She turned her new hat inside out, then pulled it down over her head, so that the red was hidden on the underside, and the unfolded brim hooded her eyes.
#
The bus was white and halfsize, and noiseless, when it arrived.
The Cookie Company nudged me aboard before her, crowding in some whispered words to the driver, which I couldn’t catch. And then she was backing off, and the bus was beginning to go. I made my way to the back, to take an empty seat beside the window—to wave.
The workers on the bus didn’t look anything like her. But then, in the street grinning back at me, neither did she.