The Wheel

The bar with its door open had a wooden man on its sign in a white bucket hat, holding a coconut, between two palm trees, with a tiki torch burning on either side of him, and a hitching rail in front of the patio, which Theo looked at for a long moment and decided, after what had happened at the last one, not to mention.

“There,” said Jack.

“It’s open till three,” said Theo. He had it on his phone, and Lukas had read it over his shoulder and said three in the voice he used for the distances to stars.

The rest of Old Town was a block away and sounded like it. Here there was only the warm dark, and the misters on the patio hissing at nobody, and somewhere a sprinkler going tick, tick, tick across a lawn. It was ninety-three degrees. Theo had stopped noticing the temperature at about midnight, and now noticed it again, and wished he had not.

The doorman was sitting on a stool by the door with a small torch in one hand and a black marker pen behind his ear. He was a large man with a beard and the calm of somebody who had sat on that stool on every kind of night there was and expected nothing from this one.

“Evening, gentlemen,” he said. “ID.”

Theo went first. He had been going first all night, at every door, because it was his birthday, and because he was the only one of them who knew what he was doing.

The doorman put the torch on it.

“Nineteenth of August,” he said. He looked at Theo. “That’s yesterday.”

“It was today when I left the house.”

“Happy birthday.” The doorman handed it back. “Welcome in.”

Jack gave him the passport. The doorman put the torch on that too, turned it to see the cover, and looked up at Jack with interest.

“Long way from home.”

“Gloucestershire,” said Jack, with enormous dignity, and then, because he had had a long night, “It’s near Wales.”

“Sure it is,” said the doorman, and gave it back.

Alexander gave him the German passport. He gave it the way he gave everything, with both hands, slightly too formally, as if presenting credentials. The doorman held the torch on the page with the photograph for a while, and read the date, and did a small sum, and looked up at the very upright fair boy in front of him.

“Seventeen,” said the doorman.

“Yes.”

“Soft drinks, buddy.” He took the marker pen from behind his ear, uncapped it, said “Hand,” and when Alexander held out his hand, palm down, he drew a small neat black X on the back of it, and capped the pen. “Don’t wash it.”

“I won’t,” said Alexander, and looked at the X as though it had been conferred.

Lukas got the same, in silence, and looked at his with the expression he used for a planet that had turned out to be smaller than advertised.

Then it was Freddie.

The doorman put out his hand for the ID. Freddie looked at the hand. Theo had watched him do this four times since eight o’clock, and it had not got any easier to watch, and it had not got any less funny.

“I haven’t got any,” said Freddie.

“None at all?”

“None at all.”

The doorman looked at him with the torch held low. He saw what everybody had seen all night: a tall fair young man in a white shirt gone soft and grey at the collar with the heat, with a long sunburnt nose and a face that could have been sixteen or could have been twenty-two, and nothing in his pockets to settle which.

“Then you’re an X,” said the doorman, and uncapped the pen.

Freddie held out his hand.

He held it out, Theo thought, exactly the way he had held it out at the Tomb for the wreath, and at the door of the Abbey for whatever they had put in it, and on a hundred red carpets for the hands of mayors: level, still, palm down, the arm a little away from the body. The doorman drew the X. It took him under a second. He capped the pen.

“Welcome in,” he said. “Have a good night.”

“Thank you,” said the King of fourteen countries, and went in, looking at the back of his hand.

Jack, behind him, put a hand over his mouth.

“Hanover,” he said, through it. “You’ve been marked.”

---

It was the best bar Theo had ever been in, and he had been in four since eight o’clock, so he was in a position to judge.

It was long and low and dark and loud, with a wall of bottles behind the bar that went all the way up to the ceiling, and above the middle of the bar, lit from below, the Wheel: a great painted wheel like a fairground’s, with writing on every slice and a pointer at the top, the most beautiful object Theo had ever seen in his life.

There was bamboo on the walls, and fishing nets, and palm thatch over the bar, and a great many things that customers had left behind and the bar had nailed up. There were perhaps sixty people in the place, and none of them looked round when the five came in, because it was twenty-five to two and they had their own nights to finish.

Theo walked straight to the bar and stood under the Wheel with his head back.

“I want to spin it,” he said.

“It’s four pounds a spin,” said Lukas, who had read about it.

“I want five.”

The bartender came down the bar towards them, a woman with her hair up and a pencil through it and a cloth over her shoulder.

“What can I get you?”

“Five spins,” said Theo. “One each. It’s my birthday.”

“Happy birthday.” She looked at the five of them. She looked at the backs of three hands. She did not say anything about them. “Twenty.”

Theo got out his wallet. In the wallet, folded into four, was a card with a picture of a cake on it, and in the card, folded once, was a twenty-pound note, and on the inside of the card, in his grandmother’s careful hand, the hand she had learned at a school in Wisconsin where they still taught the old letters, it said Für Theo, zum Achtzehnten. Mach was Dummes. Oma.

He unfolded the note and put it on the bar.

“What’s it say?” said Jack, reading over his shoulder.

“For Theo, for his eighteenth,” said Freddie, who had learned that much at the Hartigans’ table. “Do something stupid.”

“Your gran said that?”

“She’s from Sheboygan,” said Theo, as if that explained it, which in his family it did.

---

The bartender reached up and took hold of the edge of the Wheel and pulled it down hard.

It went round with a noise like a bicycle going downhill, tick-tick-tick-tick-tick, the pointer clattering over the pegs, and the whole bar turned its head, the way a bar always turns its head for the Wheel, and slowed, and slowed, tick, tick, tick, and stopped.

The bartender leaned in and read it.

“Buy the bartender a shot,” she said.

There was a cheer from the end of the bar from people they did not know.

“Oh,” said Theo.

“I don’t drink on shift.” The bartender wrote something on a slip of paper and pinned it to a cork board covered in other slips. “I’ll have it at the end of the night. Thank you. Who’s next?”

Theo stood at the bar and thought about it. He had been bought things all his life. He had been bought, since he was twelve, by a boy who did not carry money and by the people around that boy, a great many things that he had not asked for, and some that he had. He had never in his life, he realised, bought anybody a drink.

“That’s the best thing that’s happened to me all night,” he said, and meant it, and Freddie looked at him sideways and did not say anything, which meant he understood.

Jack was next.

The Wheel went round, and the bar turned its head, and the pointer clattered and slowed and stopped on a slice that had a little gold crown painted on it, and the bartender said “Top shelf,” in the voice of somebody announcing a winner, and reached up the wall, a long way up, to a bottle of twelve-year Scotch, and poured.

Jack held the glass up to the light from the Wheel.

“To Gloucestershire,” he said.

“It’s near Wales,” said Lukas.

“Shut up,” said Jack, delighted, and drank it, and his face did a number of things one after another, and settled, and he put the glass down very carefully on the bar as though it might go off. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, that’s nice. That’s a nice one. That’s not the horrible kind.”

“There’s a not horrible kind?” said Freddie.

“Apparently,” said Jack, and looked at the bottle up on the wall with something like love.

Then Alexander.

The pointer stopped on another crown. The bartender looked up at it, and looked at the X on the back of the hand resting on the bar in front of her, and reached under the counter instead of up the wall, and came up with a tall glass of lemonade, and put a slice of lime on the rim, and set it down in front of the German Emperor with a small flourish.

“Top shelf lemonade,” she said.

“Thank you,” said Alexander, very formally, and looked at the slice of lime as though it were an order of chivalry.

Then Lukas.

The pointer stopped on a slice that had nothing on it but a large black question mark.

“Mystery shot,” said the bartender. She looked at the X. She poured a lemonade.

“What was the mystery?” said Lukas.

“It’s a mystery.”

Lukas looked at the lemonade, and up at the question mark, and at the bartender.

“I would like it noted,” said Lukas, “that I have been denied a mystery.”

“Noted,” said the bartender, and wrote nothing down, and Lukas seemed satisfied.

Then Freddie.

The Wheel went round, and the whole bar turned its head, and Theo found that he was holding his breath, which was stupid, because whatever it landed on the King was not going to get it.

It slowed. Tick. Tick. Tick.

It stopped on a green slice with a picture of a pickle on it.

“Pickle-juice chaser,” said the bartender.

Jack made a sound.

The bartender looked at the X on the back of Freddie’s hand. She looked at the slice on the Wheel. She considered, Theo could see, the problem honestly and in full, the way a good bartender considers anything. Then she took a shot glass and filled it to the brim from a jar under the counter, with something pale and green and cloudy, and set it down in front of him.

“Chaser,” she said. “Hold the shot.”

Freddie looked at it.

The bar was watching. Sixty strangers, at twenty to two in the morning, were watching a tall young man with a sunburnt nose consider a shot glass of pickle juice, and none of them had the faintest idea who he was, and Theo thought it was possible that this was the happiest he had ever seen him.

Freddie picked up the glass and drank it.

His face did nothing. It did nothing for a long time, with tremendous effort, the face he had used at the opening of Parliament and at the reading of the names, and then it gave way all at once, and his eyes watered, and he put the glass down and put the back of his marked hand over his mouth.

“Well?” said Jack.

Freddie took his hand away.

“It’s very good pickle juice,” he said.

The bartender nodded, as if this were the right answer and she had been waiting some time for somebody to give it, and turned to Theo.

“Anything for you, birthday? That wasn’t a drink. That was a debt.”

“A pint,” said Theo. “Of whatever’s local. Please.” He got out his wallet again, his own money this time, not Oma’s, and put it on the bar. “I’m buying it.”

“I know you are,” said the bartender, and pulled it.

---

Theo wanted the roof.

There was a roof. The bar had a roof with its own bar on it, called the Crow’s Nest, and there was a staircase to it from the plaza and another from the lounge next door, and Theo had seen the sign for it and had decided at once, the way he had decided about the Wheel, that he was going to stand on that roof on his birthday and look at the stars, or at what Phoenix had instead of stars, which was the glow of the whole Valley lit up against the dark.

They went round to the staircase in a line. At the bottom of it, on a stool, sat a second large calm man, who held up a hand as they came, quite kindly.

“Roof’s closed, guys,” he said. “Shuts at one.”

“At one?” said Theo. “The bar’s open till three.”

“Bar’s open till three. Roof shuts at one. Town’s rules. The neighbours.” He nodded upward, at the dark flats across the plaza, where somebody’s air conditioning was humming in a window. “We promised them.”

Theo stood at the bottom of the stairs and looked up them to where they turned into the dark.

“Of course you did,” he said.

“Shame,” said Jack, behind him, in the voice of a man who did not think it was a shame at all, and Theo looked round at him, and Jack was looking very hard at a fishing net on the wall.

“Lounge is open,” said the doorman. “Captain’s Quarters. Through there. There’s a mezzanine. You can see the plaza.”

“Can you see the stars?”

The doorman thought about it.

“You can see a torch,” he said.

So they went into the lounge, which was the same bar again with more room in it, and up a short staircase to the mezzanine, and sat in a row on a long seat by a window that looked down on the plaza and the tiki man and his two torches, with their drinks, two lemonades and the end of a Scotch and Theo’s pint, and Freddie with nothing, because he had had his pickle juice. Lukas sat at the end with his face against the glass, looking up past the edge of the roof opposite, at the one strip of sky the window had, and after a while he said:

“There is one star.”

“Which one?”

Lukas looked at it for some time.

“I think it is an aeroplane,” he said.

Jack laughed so hard that he had to put his glass down on the floor.

Theo sat with his back against the window and his pint on his knee and looked along the row: Jack wiping his eyes, Alexander with his lemonade in both hands and his X on show, Lukas still looking for a star that was not an aeroplane, and Freddie beside him, with his head back against the glass and his eyes shut and the X on his hand going grey where he had sweated on it.

“Freddie.”

“Mm.”

“Say it again.”

Freddie opened one eye.

“Say what?”

“That I’m eighteen.” Theo drank some of his pint. “Everybody’s said it. Mum on the phone. Oma in the card. Alexander on the sofa, because he’d been told to. Jack on the bus, asleep. You at Coach House, with the present. A doorman and about four bartenders.” He looked at his pint. “I want it again. Just said. Not serious. Not with a present.”

Freddie thought about this, with his head against the glass.

“You’re eighteen,” he said, in exactly the voice he would have used to tell Theo there was a bus coming.

“Again.”

“You’re eighteen.”

“Once more.”

“Theo,” said Freddie, “you are eighteen, and it is twenty to two in the morning, and I am sitting on a bench in Arizona with an X on my hand, and you are eighteen.”

Theo laughed, and that was it, that was what he had wanted, and he had not known until it happened.

---

At ten past two Jack stood up, and picked his glass up off the floor, and looked into it, and found it empty.

“Right,” said Jack. “I’m getting a mystery.”

“A what?” said Theo.

“She does mystery beers. I heard her tell the man next to us. One pound fifty. It’s a can, and the label’s covered, and you don’t know what it is till you’ve drunk it.” Jack looked down the stairs with the face of a man who has seen something he was born to do. “Five thousand miles I’ve come. I want a mystery.”

“I would also like a mystery,” said Lukas, from the window.

“You’re an X,” said Theo.

“I am aware that I am an X,” said Lukas, and got up anyway, and followed Jack down the stairs, and Alexander followed Lukas, because he always did, and Theo picked up his pint and followed Alexander, and at the top of the stairs he looked back.

Freddie was still sitting on the bench by the window, alone, with his head back against the glass and his eyes open now, looking at the back of his hand.

“Coming?” said Theo.

“Yes,” said Freddie, and put his hand in his pocket, where something clinked, and stood up.