ONE COLD NIGHT AT THE QUADRILLE

 

Snow was beginning to pile up around the gas pumps and in the parking lot.  The one car in front of the restaurant—a tan Buick with Sheridan County plates—had dirty ice hanging along the undersides, but the snow was still melting on the windshield and back window.  Sam imagined the car had pulled in in the last little while, just as he was doing, in obedience to the long arm with the “Road Closed” sign that lay across the southbound lane of the highway right outside the restaurant.  Depending on when the highway further north got closed, there might be a few more travelers obliged to stop at the Quadrille.

Sam parked on the right side of the Buick and shut off the engine.  “Well, I guess we’ll be here for a while,” he said. 

T.J. nodded.  “There are worse places.”

Sam pursed his lips.  “I can think of a few.”  He glanced at the rifles hanging in the rack.  “I suppose we should lock up.”

T.J. took his sheath knife off the dashboard and set it on the seat next to a box of .30-06 shells.  “Probably not a bad idea.”

Inside the Quadrille, Sam renewed his familiarity with the place.  The front door led into the center of the dining area, which consisted of half a dozen tables and a counter with stools.  Behind the counter, a wall with a pass-through window divided the service area from the kitchen.  To the right of the restaurant, a door led into the bar.  As Sam recalled, a person had to go through the bar to get to the rest rooms.

A waitress probably in her late twenties, with dark hair pulled back and held with a barrette, stood in back of the counter, smiling.  As Sam waited for T.J. to close the door, he felt the cold air following them into the warm restaurant.  He heard the door close, and then the waitress asked if they would like to be seated.

T.J.’s voice came up at Sam’s right.  “Is the bar open?”

The waitress nodded.  “Yes, it is.  I’ll tell Morris.”  She turned and went into the kitchen.

Sam noticed an older couple, the man wearing a tan short-brimmed hat, sitting at a table to his left.  He saw that they had nothing more than coffee in front of them.  That was good, he thought.  No one should feel an obligation to order a meal right away, as there had been no choice about where to stop.  They would all end up ordering meals anyway, he imagined.  He glanced at the dark interior beyond the open doorway, then gave a tiny frown as he turned to T.J.  “I guess we wait, huh?”

T.J. pushed out his lower lip and nodded.

A man who looked as if he could be Morris came out of the kitchen, walked around in front of the counter, smiled and nodded, and led the way to the bar.  As he flicked a light switch inside the doorway, a hanging Budweiser sign lit up and shed light over a pool table.  The man turned to his left and flipped another switch, then took his place behind the bar. 

Sam and T.J. took stools at the bar, which ran parallel with the wall blocking off the kitchen.  From where he sat, Sam could see into the dining area, and with a slight turn to the left he could see through a window that looked west onto the parking lot.

“Well, what’ll it be, boys?”

“Bottle of Coors,” said T.J.  “Are you Morris?”

“Sure am.  And you?”

“I’m T.J., and this is Sam.”

Morris nodded.  “My pleasure.”  He looked at Sam.  “And you, another Coors?”

“Sure.”  As Morris moved away, Sam turned on his stool and looked around.  The bar and pool room had the look of having been added on to the restaurant.  The dining room had a wood floor, while this part had a painted cement floor.  In the back of the room, to the south, a small window looked out upon drab grassland, blurred now in driving snow.

Morris set the two beers in front of his patrons.  “Been hunting?” 

“Uh-huh.”  Sam took out a five-dollar bill and set it on the bar.

“Weather shut you down?”

“Nope.  Not really.  We got our two antelope this morning, and we were headed back when we saw that the road was closed.”

“Oh, uh-huh.”  Morris stood there, in no apparent hurry to pick up the money.  “Goin’ south?”

Sam lifted his beer.  “Yeah.  We’re from Linton.”

Morris nodded and moved away with the money.

A movement at Sam’s left caught his eye.  He looked out the window and saw a maroon-colored Oldsmobile settling to a stop.  The county number on the license plate was twenty-one.

“Looks like someone else just pulled in,” he said, as Morris laid the change on the bar, a dollar and two quarters. 

“Uh-huh.  Must be from Newcastle.”

Sam looked at Morris.  The man had a full head of hair, greying and combed back; his brown were eyes set in a middle-aged face that had begun to fill out.  He was clean-shaven, with light-colored sideburns that came halfway down the ear.

Sam looked out the window and saw two grey-haired ladies getting out of the car.  Then he turned back to the bar at the sound of T.J.’s voice. 

“What’s ‘Quadrille’ mean?”

Morris reached into the pocket of his brown flannel shirt and pulled out a pack of Marlboros.  “Two things.”  He shook out a cigarette and lit it with a lighter he picked up from below the bar.  After he blew away a cloud of smoke he said, “It could be a four-handed game of cards, or it could be a square dance.”

Sam had the impression that Morris had answered the question a hundred times but hadn’t gotten tired of it.

“That makes sense,” said T.J.  “Quadrilateral.  Square.  Did they have square dances at this place at one time?”

Morris shrugged.  “I don’t know.  I’ve had the place for four years, but the name goes way back.”  He set his cigarette in the ashtray and turned away to go back to the restaurant.

Sam looked at the front door as it opened.  The two ladies, both of them wearing glasses, stepped inside.  He looked back at T.J.  “This place might start filling up.”

T.J. gave a backward wave with his left hand.  “As long as he doesn’t run out of beer.”

“So far, the others don’t look like much of a threat in that way.”

T.J. was quiet for a moment and then said, “You learn something every day.”

“Uh-huh.  About what?”

“Well, like the name of this place.  I mean, I’d been here before and all that, but I never knew what it meant.  I thought it had something to do with squares, but I didn’t know, and I never took the trouble to ask, much less look it up.”

“Same here.”

“But you know, it would be a good word to describe a month like this one, that begins on a Sunday.”

“Oh, uh-huh.” 

“Sure.  When you see it on the calendar, the first four weeks of it, anyway, are as square as can be.  And a February that starts on a Sunday would be perfectly square.”

“Yeah, and except on a leap year, February and March always look the same for the first four weeks.”

“Uh-huh.  And as far as that’s concerned, April and July are always the same, for the first thirty days, just like September and December are.”

“Is that right?”

“Sure is.  Look on the calendar for any year.  I checked it out on the perpetual calendar.  If April has a Friday the thirteenth, then July does.  If September does, December does.”

“Hmm.”  Sam recalled that T.J. had made a comment or two the day before, on their drive up, about Friday the thirteenth.  If he had any superstitions, they had gone away when Sam and T.J. got settled into the barn at the Castlemon Ranch.  Two T-bones in a skillet on the Coleman stove, plus a bottle of Jim Beam, did a pretty good job of pushing the rest of the world off at a distance.  And then this morning, when they went out into the teeth of the storm that was just blowing in, it was all seriousness—cloud and wind and snow, sagebrush, grass, and antelope, then dark blood on the pale grass, steam from the carcasses, and cold water to wash the blood from their hands.  Now in the warm comfort of a barroom, maybe T.J. was thinking again about bad luck.  Or maybe he was just talking up a clever idea, which he liked to do.

“Don’t you think so?”

“Think what?”

“That it would be a good word to describe a month that starts on a Sunday.”

Sam shrugged.  “I guess so.  I don’t know if you could get it into the dictionary.”

“Well, it’s a start.  Every new word has to start somewhere.  I mean, even a bogus word like ‘groovy’—how do you think it got started?  Probably it started with one person, and then it spread out, and then the next thing you knew, every mush-head in the country was using it.”

Sam laughed.  “You want the mush-heads to use your word?”

“Not necessarily.  I just think it’s a good word.”

“You could ask Morris.”

T.J. turned down the corners of his mouth.  “Maybe not right away.  He might think we were making light of his place.”

Sam made a motion as if he was zipping his lips closed.  A movement outside the west window made him look at the parking lot again.  A two-toned Suburban, blue and grey, pulled in next to the maroon Oldsmobile.  Sam did not recognize the vehicle even though it had county seven plates.

“More company?” T.J. asked.

“Looks like it.”  Two men in orange caps and camouflage jackets got out of the front.  “I don’t know if I recognize them, but they’ve got the same plates as we do.”

T.J.’s voice didn’t have much fun in it now.  “I think I know who they are.”

Sam paused as two more men got out of the back seat of the Suburban.  “I’ve seen a couple of them around, I think.”

“Yeah, I have, too.  They’ll be a lot of fun to get snowed in with.”

Sam looked at T.J.  “Not friends, I take it?”

T.J. shook his head.  “Not by a stretch.”  Then he smiled.  “I don’t think there’ll be any trouble, though.”

The four men took a table in the dining area, not far from the doorway that led into the bar.  Sam had a sense of who they were—business men of sorts, all of them in their late thirties or so, maybe a few years older than Sam and T.J.  They were the smug type, sure of themselves and likely to keep their distance from wage-working beer drinkers.

T.J. went to the juke box, fed in four quarters that clanked into the machine, and began punching in songs.  Sam picked his two quarters off the bar and walked to the other end of the pool table.  As he got closer to the juke box, he could see it was an old one—not the new kind that had rows of CD’s and took dollar bills, but the old kind that had numbers like A8, J9, and so forth, and swallowed quarters in the way he had just heard.

Sam put two quarters in the coin tray of the pool table and pushed the plunger; with a clunk the balls dropped into the chute that ran down to the end of the table.  As he looked up and around, he saw that the other four men had settled into a game of cards and that Morris was pouring four mixed drinks at the bar.  The juke box was blaring “Squaws Along the Yukon” when T.J., beer in hand, sauntered over to Sam’s end of the pool table.

“You know all four of them?” Sam asked as he set the rack up onto the table.

“Uh-huh.  Wheeler-dealers.  Or think they are.”

“That guy with his back to the door, who is he?  I know I’ve seen him.”  Sam was crouched now and was lifting the pool balls, two with each hand, up onto the table and into the rack.

“That’s Keith Arnett.  He’s got the insurance agency.  And the one on his left, that you can barely see, is Dale Burroughs.”

“He does real estate, right?”  Sam arranged the balls in alternating order of solid/stripe, solid/stripe.

“Uh-huh.  They’re natural buddies.”

“And the one lookin’ at us?” 

“That’s Stan Cundall.  Building contractor.”

“Seems like he’s given us a couple of looks so far.”

“Probably has.”  T.J. had picked a cue stick off the wall rack and was sighting along its length.

Sam lifted the rack from the table and set it back into its slot.  “And the one with his back to the counter?”

“That’s Duane Dickinson.  He’s got the Wagon Wheel steak house.”

“Oh, uh-huh.  Now I place him.”  Sam turned to the wall rack to get himself a cue stick.  “You want to break?”

T.J. nodded, went to the bar to set his beer there, and leaned down to break the rack.  “Straight eight?”

“Uh-huh.”

Morris came back in and stood behind the bar, so Sam and T.J. gravitated back to their stools whenever they weren’t taking a shot.  Morris made a comment about the other hunters also being from Linton, and from the short answers he got in response, he seemed to get the idea that they weren’t all brothers of the same cloth.  After he took the next round of highballs and gin-and-tonics to the card players, he came back to the bar and lit a cigarette.

“Well, I talked to my wife in the kitchen, and she heard on the radio that the road is closed south from Newcastle, and both south and north from Mule Creek Junction.  So unless someone wants to take a gravel road out through the cow country, I don’t think anyone is goin’ anywhere till tomorrow morning.”

Sam looked at him and said, “So there’s ten of us here that you’ve got on your hands.”

Morris smiled as he motioned with his head toward the dining room.  “That’s what they said, too.”

T.J. set his empty Coors bottle on the bar.  “Too bad you don’t have a hotel.”

Morris laughed.  “It seems like I’ve got somethin’, one way or the other.  But we’ve managed before.”

Sam finished his beer and set the empty next to T.J.’s, then nodded for Morris to set up two Coors while he was at it.  “Have you got a plan, then?”

“Oh, we’ll wait a little while, till everyone gets used to the idea.  Then we’ll see who-all wants to sleep in the trailer houses and who wants to sleep here in the restaurant.”

Sam gave a short laugh.  “Well, I guess we’ve got all day and night to talk about it.  No hurry.”

Morris laughed again as he set out the two beers.  “None at all.  Just drink up.”

And so they did.  Sam and T.J. each got a couple of dollars’ worth of change and set it on the rail of the pool table.  They drank their second beer and then a third, all the while listening to the juke box and taking their shots at pool.  Nothing moved in a hurry.  The quartet playing cards inside the restaurant did not come in to challenge the pool table, and with the exception of an occasional person passing through to use the rest room, the bar crowd stayed the same. 

The juke box had a number of old-time honky-tonk songs,  which Morris said came from “back when ‘E.T.’ meant Ernest Tubb.”  T.J. playing a few of them over and over again, especially one called “Squaws Along the Yukon.”  After it had played a few times, and with the help of the beer, Sam liked the song well enough to join in with Morris and T.J.

She makes her underwear

From the hide of a grizzly bear

And bathes in ice-cold water every day.

Her skin I love to touch,

But I sure can’t touch it much,

Because her fur-lined parka’s in the way.

T.J. danced, rocking from one foot to the other, tossing the slender end of his cue stick back and forth from one hand to another as the thick end rested on the floor between his feet.  Morris moved his head from one side to the other as he sang along.  Sam held up his beer bottle and waved it back and forth.

Oo-ga, oo-ga, moosh-gah,

Which means that I love you,

If you will be my baby,

I’ll oo-ga, oo-ga, moosh-gah you.

As I take her hand in mine

And put her on my knee,

The squaws along the Yukon

Are good enough for me.

The wind blew and the snow came down at a slant, piling up on the windshields of the vehicles parked outside.  The rest of the world, including bills and work and Monday morning, was all far away.  The Quadrille was like Castlemon’s barn, except that here they had a juke box, a pool table, and cold beer—plus a few people in the next room, which they had been doing pretty well at ignoring.

Morris brought in a dish of crackers and two bowls of chili beans, which he said were on the house.  Sam and T.J. let the pool table sit as it was, with half the game yet to play, and they dug into the chili. 

“You don’t see many of these any more.”

Sam looked up and saw that Morris was holding between thumb and forefinger a coin that had a red splotch on it.  “What is it?”

“A red quarter.”

“Did someone paint it?”

“It’s the way they used to do it.  They usually did it with fingernail polish.”

T.J. paused with his spoon on the edge of the bowl.  “What did they do that for?”

Morris took on his air of the fellow who liked to know the answer.  “In a place like this, the owner or manager or whoever would keep a bunch of ‘em in a cup, to get people to play the jukebox.  If the bartender or barmaid lost rollin’ the dice, or if they wanted to play a few songs just to liven things up, they’d use the red quarters.  Then when the guy came to empty the jukebox, he’d give all the red quarters back to the bar owner.”

“Is that right?” said T.J.  “Sort of like primin’ the pump.”

“Uh-huh.  And the owners always complained that the red quarters showed up everywhere—in the cash register, in the cigarette machine, in the candy machine.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.”  T.J. went back to eating his chili.

“They don’t do it as much as they used to.  For one thing, they don’t shake for the music as much in this part of the country.  Fact is, you don’t really see dice in the bars as much as you do in some places.”

Sam shrugged.  “Never really thought about it.”

Morris lit a cigarette.  “It’s what I’ve noticed.  They can play pitch or gin rummy till hell won’t have it, and for quite a little money, but they won’t play poker or roll dice, where they’d have to have the money out in plain view.”

Sam shook his head.  “I guess it’s what you’re used to.”

“Uh-huh.”

Morris smoked his cigarette while the other two ate. When they finished, he took their bowls to the kitchen and brought back another serving.  He said the people in the other room had all made their phone calls.  The old couple from Sheridan and the two ladies from Newcastle had used the restaurant phone, and the other four had used the insurance agent’s cell phone.  Morris explained that he and his wife, Marilyn, who was the cook, lived in one of the trailer houses, and the waitress, whose name was Jackie, lived in the other trailer with Scott, the dishwasher.  The couple from Sheridan, the Andersons, had agreed to stay in Morris and Marilyn’s trailer, and the ladies from Newcastle, Shirley and Dorothy, had said they weren’t afraid to sleep in the other trailer. 

Morris asked if the boys wanted to make any phone calls.  Sam said no, he was divorced and didn’t have anyone to call, and no one expected them back until Sunday anyway.  Morris looked at T.J., who shook his head.

Morris said he didn’t know what they thought about sleeping arrangements.  Sam said he didn’t care where he slept that night.  They had their sleeping bags, and if they could sleep in a barn, they could sleep in a bar. 

T.J. said he didn’t care either. 

Morris said that was good.  They could sleep in here if they wanted, and the other gentlemen could sleep on the floor of the restaurant.  They didn’t have sleeping bags, but he thought he could dig up enough bedding for everyone.

Sam and T.J. called for another round, and when Morris set it up, Sam noticed the clock.  It was only 4:30 in the afternoon.

They went back to shooting pool and feeding the juke box.  The good-time feeling started to flow again.  Sam began to take a liking to another song, “Pick Me Up On Your Way Down.”  Now that it had played a few times, he could sing a couple of the lines he had learned.

And you’ve never once looked back

At your home across the track.

           T.J. was singing, too.  He seemed to know all the songs, all the old beer-drinking, shit-kicking songs.  He sang a verse that Sam hadn’t learned yet.

They have changed your attitude,

Made you haughty and so rude—

Then when the refrain came around a second time, Sam was able to join in.

Pick me up on your way down,

When you’re blue and all alone—

When their glamor starts to bore you,

Come on back where you belong.

Sam looked at Morris, who was singing along as well.  The man sure had a fondness for these old songs.  They would be part of a world he held dear—a world of red quarters, leather dice cups, and brave cheer.

Morris came to the south end of the pool table and stood by the window.  “There’s a couple now,” he said.  “That’s what you need.”

Sam looked out and saw two antelope, a buck and a doe, moving at an angle away from the highway, not two hundred yards from the window.  They had their white rumps to the wind, and their tan-and-white bodies looked pale in the white world outside.  After a few beers and a feed of beans in a warm barroom, Sam was glad not to be out in the storm.  “We’ve used up our permits,” he said.

Morris nodded.  “Those other four guys say they don’t have any antelope licenses.  Just deer.”  He was chewing on a toothpick.  “Too bad.  I’d cook some just for the hell of it.”

T.J. perked up.  “Hell,” he said.  “We’ve got meat chillin’ in the back of the pickup. If you want, I’ll go cut off enough so everyone can have a steak.”

Morris’s face took on a broad smile.  “That sounds like fun.”

T.J. gave him a steady look.  “That won’t cut into any of your business, will it?”

Morris shook his head.  “Nah.  I’m gonna sell plenty of food and drinks anyway, and I feel kinda funny as it is, with people stuck here without much choice of where they get their meal.”

“Well, let me know how many want a steak.  Could be they don’t all care for wild meat.  Then I’ll go cut off a hunk.”

Morris went into the restaurant and came back in a little while.  “We don’t have that many takers,” he said.  “All these other folks said they’d just as soon order off the menu, and none of the kitchen help seemed much interested, so it’d just be you two and me.  It’s probably not worth the trouble.  But I’ll tell you, if they don’t open that road up tomorrow, we’ll think on it again.”

“Good enough,” said T.J.  “It’s not goin’ anywhere.”

The boys went back to their pool game.  A little while later, Sam noticed the waitress taking orders from the customers in the restaurant.  Her name was Jackie, as he recalled.  She stood at profile, talking to the couple from Sheridan.  She wasn’t too bad-looking, he thought, but there was something Morris had said about her and the dishwasher living in the same trailer.  What the hell, he thought, and he let his gaze drift.  As he did so, he caught what he thought was a dirty look from one of the men playing cards.  It was the one facing him, the building contractor named Cundall.  Well, if he was jealous, or if he had his own fantasy about sleeping with the waitress, that was his problem.  Sam turned and looked at the pool table, where T.J. was banking the six-ball into the side pocket.  When he looked again, Jackie was serving hamburgers and French fries to the table of four men.

Sam and T.J. played out the game, and Sam lost.  He had used up all of his pool table quarters, so he went to the bar.  With beer at a dollar-seventy-five a bottle, he got back a dollar bill and two quarters each time he bought a round, so he had a small stack of coins in front of his stool.  As he picked two quarters off the bar, he recalled an incident from several years back.

It was in a small town in Nevada, where he was stuck overnight.  He found a bar that seemed about right for his means, and he settled in for a few drinks.  Beer was a dollar-twenty-five a bottle, so his stack of quarters went up and down, and every once in a while he could drink one beer out of his change.  After he paid for his seventh beer, he had five quarters on the bar and expected to come out even.  Meanwhile, he had noticed the man on the stool to his right, a young sport in his mid-twenties, who wore a felt cowboy hat with a bandana hatband and a goose feather in it.  He was a good-looking fellow, with dark hair and mustache, but a low-class look to him nevertheless.  He was trying to sidle up to a young woman who was complaining about what a jerk her husband was.  When any of the other regulars would come up and ask the fellow how he was doing, he would go on about how crummy it was to be out of work, how the contractors brought in help from out of town, what a sonofabitch so-and-so was to get a job with thus-and-such a company, and so on.  Eventually, after nursing a beer for a long time, the guy asked for one on credit, which he got.  Sam figured he was hanging on in the bar to see if he could get somewhere with the woman.

When Sam was in the middle of the seventh beer, he got up to go to the can.  He had the habit of not going to the rest room if he was done with a beer, because someone could come along and take his stool—or, something that might make the difference between drinking another beer or not, the bartender could take his change, thinking it was a tip.  So, with five quarters on the bar, he slid off his stool and found the men’s room by the back door.  When he got back, his beer was still there, but the quarters were gone.  The fellow with the bandana hatband seemed surprised to see him again, and with a quarter-turn of his stool turned to the woman and began speaking in a louder voice about how he was thinking of living in his tent for a while.  Then he turned his stool so that he had his back to the bar.  Still speaking to the woman and calling out a comment now and then to one of the guys at the pool table, he sat like that for several minutes.  Then, as if it had taken him a while to nerve himself up to it, he reached his right arm toward Sam, rotated a little, and set the five quarters on the bar at Sam’s right.  “There you go, buddy,” he said, and swivelled back to talk to the woman.  It was a memorable incident, and sometimes Sam thought of it when he had quarters stacked on the bar and left them unattended.

Turning now with the two quarters in his right hand, he glanced again in the direction of the restaurant and caught a scowling look from Cundall.  There was no waitress around this time, so Sam wondered where the look was coming from.

Back at the pool table, as he was putting the balls on the table and racking them, he motioned with his head for T.J. to come closer.

“What the hell’s with that guy Cundall?  He’s given me a dirty look at least twice.”

“Ah, don’t pay any attention to him.”

“I guess I shouldn’t.  I don’t even know him.  But when someone gives me a look like that, it makes me wonder.”

“Ah, he’s a punk.”

Sam frowned.  “What do you mean?”

“He’s a half-assed crook, and he knows it.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, these guys all act like their ice is colder than anyone else’s, but there’s things to be known about ‘em.  This guy and Burroughs, the realtor, have done a shady deal or two, and they’re being investigated for it.”

“What’s that have to do with me?”

“Oh, I think he’s pissed at me.”

“What for?”

“I think he knows I know something about what he’s up to.”

“Oh.”  Sam gave T.J. a close look.  “Whose fault is that, if he did something and you know about it?”

T.J. shrugged.

“I mean, you weren’t in on it, were you?”

“Nah, hell, no.”

“Then what’s his problem?”

“I think maybe he thinks I ratted on him.”

“Why would you do that?  Or, why would he think you would do that?”

T.J. gave another shrug and a little toss of the head.  “I think he’s pissed because I heard it from his wife.”

“Oh, man.  That could be kind of tight.”  Sam didn’t want to ask if T.J. had done any informing, or why.  Instead, he looked at the table of four, who were all bent over their plates.  “And the other guys in their little clique, do you suppose they know?”

“About what?  About the crooked deal, or about her, or what?”

“Well, any of it.”

“Oh, I guess they probably all know something.  And I think she might have had something to do with Arnett at some time or another, too.”

Sam raised his eyebrows.  “Boy, they’re a fine bunch, aren’t they?”  He imagined what fun it would be to ride around in the Suburban with three or four of those fellows, every one of them having something on someone else.

T.J. gave what looked like a confidential smile.  “Yeah.  That’s why I was so happy to see ‘em pull in.”

Sam finished racking the balls and stood by to wait for T.J.’s break shot.  This was a fine kettle of fish, he thought, to be snowed in with this bunch, T.J. included.

They played through the game, with Sam scratching on the eight-ball.  “I think I’ve had enough pool for right now,” he said, sticking the cue stick back in the wall rack.

T.J. wrinkled his nose and nodded.  He walked over to the juke box, which had gone silent.  “What do you want to hear?”

“Hell, I don’t care.”

T.J. stood looking at the song titles, and after a long minute he glanced up.  “Have you seen this one?” he asked, pointing at one of the jokes pinned up on the wall over on the left side of the juke box.

Sam shook his head and walked over.  It was like hundreds of bar jokes a fellow saw plastered on the refrigerators, cigarette machines, and walls—a discolored photocopy, curling at the edges.  This one read, “When I die, I want to go like my grandfather did—in his sleep.  Not screaming, like the passengers in his car.”

It caught Sam just right, the absurdity and the surprise.  He laughed and then laughed again.

T.J. looked at him and said, “To hell with these guys.  Really.  Let’s just have a good time.”

Sam nodded and smiled.  A song came out of the juke box now, and Sam knew it well enough to sing along.

There’s a salmon-colored girl

Who sets my heart a-whirl,

Who lives along the Yukon far away.

To hell with it, he thought.  He didn’t have anything to do with those wheeler-dealers.  And they were keeping their distance.

Sam and T.J. went back to sit at the bar and kill time.  Morris asked if they thought they would like to watch television, and they said no.  He said the other fellows wanted to watch a football game, so he unplugged the set and carried it into the restaurant, where he set it on the counter.  The four men pulled their chairs around so that they were now all out of view.  Sam imagined that the old couple and the two old ladies were welcome to watch football whether they wanted to or not.

At about seven o’clock, Morris said they were going to shut down the kitchen in a little while, so if the boys wanted to order something they might be thinking about it.  Sam, having noticed that the pale-complexioned couple from Newcastle had ordered hot roast beef sandwiches covered with gravy, asked for that.  T.J. said he would have the same.  Morris went back to the kitchen and after a little while brought their order to the bar.

They drank coffee after the meal.  Sam figured he had drunk at least ten beers, and he thought that might be enough.  He didn’t feel drunk, but he knew he had plenty of alcohol in him.  Even if he didn’t have to drive anywhere, he didn’t want to get so bad off that he couldn’t watch out for himself.

All of the people in the restaurant had come through the bar at least once in the afternoon to get to the rest rooms.  Now, as the pale man from Sheridan gave a nod in passing, Sam thought it might be well to get away from the flow of traffic, so that the old ladies, who might be mortified enough at having to walk through a barroom at this time of night, would not have to walk right past the two patrons.  He suggested to T.J. that they go sit in the chairs on the south wall, which they did.

At about 8:00, Morris started ushering people to their sleeping quarters.  Sam and T.J. took that as their cue to go fetch their sleeping bags and overnight things from the pickup.  Sam thought the two pairs of older people had been pretty good-humored about the whole situation, and their voices were cheery as they said their good-nights and went out the front door.  By 8:30, Morris had the travelers settled in the trailer houses and had brought a heap of blankets to the restaurant. 

Sam and T.J. sat up until all the other men had been to the rest room; then they rolled out their sleeping bags by the pool table and turned out the lights.  Sam did not go to sleep right away, and it didn’t sound as if T.J. did, either, but a general silence settled upon the Quadrille.  Now with the lights out, the place seemed more isolated and cut off from the world than before. 

It was the type of setting a person saw in a movie—the roads closed, the place sealed off with snow and cold.  All they needed was for someone to cut the phone lines.  That was the way it happened in the movies.  Then something disastrous or terrifying took place—maybe one of the trailer houses burned down, or one of the old ladies got killed.  Morris would commandeer the insurance agent’s cell phone.  Everyone would get rounded up in the restaurant, where they would keep an eye on one another.  The stranded travelers would get a better look at one another and at the kitchen help; Sam would find out if Scott was Jackie’s legitimate partner or some sinister fugitive from justice.  There would be a red quarter playing in there somewhere as a clue.

Sam turned over in his sleeping bag.  The floor was hard already, and it was barely 9:00 o’clock.  The wind and snow had let up after sunset, but it was a cold night out there.  The two antelope carcasses would be good and chilly if not frozen solid in the morning.  If the storm had passed over, the snow plows would be out by mid-morning and the roads would open up.  There was no way to hurry the process.  Everyone knew that.  A person just waited, and it was good to have even this much.

Sam awoke from a half-sleep.  He had heard a voice.  A little while before that—he didn’t know how long—he had been aware of T.J. getting up to go the bathroom.  Now he was wide awake at the sound of a voice.

He had crawled into the sleeping bag wearing his jeans and flannel shirt, so he didn’t have to think about whether to get dressed.  He sat up and eased out of the bag, then turned and pulled on his hunting boots.  Without lacing them he walked toward the rest room, taking soft steps.

He heard a voice again, not T.J.’s, when he was a couple of steps away from the door.  Then he heard nothing.  He paused for a couple of seconds, wondering if he should wait to go in, and then he decided he did not want to overhear anything or give anyone a chance to do anything that could have been avoided.  He took two more steps and pushed open the rest room door.

The bright light made him squint, but he saw what he had expected.  Cundall had followed T.J. to the can.  They stood about eight feet apart—T.J. with his back to the urinal and facing the door, Cundall with his back to the door but now half-turned to see who had barged in.

It was a long moment there in the harsh light.  T.J.’s dark wavy hair and dark eyes matched the unflinching look on his face.  If someone had come to push him around, it hadn’t gone very far.  Cundall, who was taller than average, struck an overbearing pose as he stood with his right hand in the pocket of his camouflage hunting parka.  He had trim brown hair and went clean-shaven, but he had a dark beard that was well past the five-o’clock shadow.  It emphasized the heavy, sullen look he had put on, but the expression did not have as much force behind it as his earlier scowls had seemed to convey.  He was standing in the bright light of a men’s room, where he had stalked one man and had been caught at it by another.  Whatever bullying demeanor he may have worked himself up to had been diminished by the exposure.

  Sam felt it in the air.  The guy had lost some of his sense of power.  That was it.  When the intimidation wasn’t private, he couldn’t work it as well.  Sam waited, and it didn’t take much longer for things to change.

Cundall took his hand out of his coat pocket and let it hang by his side.  Then, after one last glowering look at T.J., he turned and walked right in front of Sam without looking at him, pulled the door open, and left.

Sam let out a long breath.  “What the hell was that all about?”

T.J. tipped a glance at the door.  “I don’t know.  I just came in here to take a leak.”

“He must have been waiting for you to get up.”

“I suppose so.”

“It sure seemed to me like he had a pistol in his pocket.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.  But I think he would have had a hell of a time using it.”

Sam wagged his eyebrows.  “You don’t know how a guy like that thinks.”

“No, but whatever he might have thought he could do, that’s gone.  He got caught with his dick hangin’ out.”

“Yeah, I suppose so.”  Sam looked in the direction of the door, then back at T.J.  He shook his head and walked out.

Back in his sleeping bag, Sam did not relax until T.J. was back.  Then, even when it sounded as if everyone else had settled down, Sam did not go to sleep right away.  It had been quite an encounter in the men’s room.  Cundall would have to remember it as a moment when two guys he looked down on had his number.  And T.J. would have to remember it as a moment in which things might not have worked out so well for him.  It occurred to Sam that T.J. was the type of fellow that things like that happened to.  For all of T.J.’s carefree attitude of hoisting a cool one and singing “Squaws Along the Yukon,” he would have to think about the danger of a fellow like Cundall every once in a while.