Boondocks

There was a doorman, and he had wristbands.

He stood at the gate in the low wall round the patio, a big man in a black T-shirt with a torch on his belt and a roll of paper wristbands on a ring on his wrist, two colours, green and orange, and he was checking everybody who came in, cheerfully, the way a man checks tickets at a match, and saying have a good night to each of them as though he meant it.

Theo went first, because it was his birthday and he was the one who was supposed to know where they were.

“Evening,” said the doorman. “ID?”

Theo gave him the licence. The doorman shone the torch on it, and on Theo, and on the date, and stopped.

“Today?” he said.

“Today.”

“Second bar?”

“Third,” said Theo. “If you count Ahwatukee.”

“Nobody counts Ahwatukee,” said the doorman, and laughed, and put a green band round Theo’s wrist and fastened it, and said, “Happy birthday, man. Have a good one,” and waved him in.

Jack gave him the passport. The doorman held it under the torch and turned it over.

“Is this a real country?”

“Gloucestershire?”

“Britain.”

“Sometimes,” said Jack, and got a green band.

Alexander gave him his passport. The doorman read it, and did the arithmetic, and his face did the same kind thing the barman’s had done at Castaways.

“Seventeen,” he said. “You can come in, buddy. We do food till late. But you’re orange.” He held up an orange band. “Orange means nobody at the bar serves you anything that isn’t on the soft list. It’s not personal.”

“I understand,” said Alexander, and held out his wrist, and let a doorman in Scottsdale put an orange paper band on the wrist that had held the cushion with the orb on it in Berlin Cathedral, and looked at it afterwards with great interest, the way he looked at things through the telescope.

Lukas held out his wrist without being asked and got orange too.

Then Freddie.

“ID?” said the doorman.

Freddie put his hand in his pocket and took it out again.

“I haven’t got any,” he said.

“None?”

“None.”

“You look about eighteen.”

“I am eighteen.”

“Can you prove it?”

Freddie thought about it. Theo watched him think about it. He watched him consider, in about two seconds, the only proof he had, which was to say who he was, and which would mean the doorman’s face, and the patio turning round, and phones, and a car, and Kimura, and the end of Theo’s birthday at five to eleven at night on Seventy-Fifth Street.

“No,” said Freddie.

“Then you’re orange, buddy,” said the doorman, kindly. “Sorry. Rules.”

“Rules,” Freddie agreed, and held out his wrist, and the King of eighteen got an orange band put round it by a doorman in a black T-shirt, and said thank you, and went in under the strings of lights with his hand held a little out from his side, looking at the band, the way you look at something you have been given and did not expect to be given and are not sure where you are going to put.

Jack was waiting for him inside the gate.

Jack looked at the orange band. Then he looked at his own green one. Then he looked at Freddie.

“Orange,” said Jack.

“I know.”

“You’re the King.”

“Not on this patio,” said Freddie, and Jack put his hand over his face and laughed until he had to sit down on the low wall.

---

The patio was huge.

It went round three sides of a long low building, under strings of lights looped from poles, with tables and benches and big umbrellas folded down for the night, and fans on poles turning slowly, and all along the edge of the roof a line of thin pipes that breathed out a fine cold mist over everybody, so that the air under them was ten degrees cooler than the air outside the wall, and smelt of wet concrete and grilled onions.

Jack found the mist in about four seconds. He went and stood directly under one of the pipes with his face turned up and his eyes shut and his arms out and let it settle on him, on his red neck and his red face, and did not move for some time, and a woman going past with a tray of drinks looked at him and said, “First summer?” and Jack said, “Last,” and she laughed.

There was music. There was a DJ in a booth at the corner of the building where the patio turned, with headphones round his neck and two decks and a laptop, playing something with a beat you could feel in the bench, and inside, through big doors folded back, there was another bar, and a dance floor with lights going round, and people on it.

And there were games.

On the far side of the patio, on a strip of artificial grass under the lights, there were outdoor games, and the biggest crowd was round two pairs of slanted wooden boards with a hole in the top of each, set opposite each other on the grass about thirty feet apart, with people standing behind each one throwing small cloth bags at the other.

“What is that?” said Lukas.

“Cornhole,” said Theo.

Lukas looked at him for a long time.

“That cannot be the name,” said Lukas.

“It’s the name.”

“It is a very bad name.”

“Everybody says that. Then they play it.” Theo nodded at the boards. “You throw the bag. Three points in the hole, one on the board. First to twenty-one.”

Lukas watched a man throw a bag. It went high and long and came down on the grass a yard behind the far board, and the man’s friends cheered anyway.

Lukas watched another one.

He watched about six. He did not say anything. He watched the way he watched the sky from the floor of the dome in Potsdam, Theo thought, the way he had watched the moons of Jupiter on the Eleventh, with his whole attention and no expression, as though somebody had set him a sum.

Then he walked over to the boards.

---

Theo went to the bar.

The outside bar was a long counter under the edge of the roof, with taps and a cooler and two people behind it, a man and a woman, moving very fast, and the woman looked at Theo’s wrist before she looked at Theo’s face, because that was what the bands were for, and said, “What can I get you, green?”

“A pint,” said Theo. “Of something local.”

She pulled him one. It was amber and very cold, and she said it was from a brewery in Tempe, and he paid for it, and stood at the end of the counter with it, and did not drink it yet, because his father had said the second one was slow as well, and that in fact they were all slow, and that the people who did not know that were the people he picked up off the floor of the night bus at two in the morning.

“Three lemonades,” said Freddie, beside him, to the woman. “Please. For the orange ones.”

The woman looked at his wrist. She looked at his face. She looked at the wrist again.

“You don’t look seventeen,” she said.

“I’m not.”

“You’re orange.”

“I haven’t got any ID.”

“That’s rough,” she said, with real sympathy, and poured three lemonades with ice and lime, and gave him the lime for free because she said he looked like he needed something, and he thanked her, and paid with coins, and she put them in the till without looking at them, and he carried the three lemonades back across the patio held carefully in his two hands like a man carrying something at a ceremony, which he was very good at, and nobody on the whole patio looked at him twice.

Theo watched him go and thought: he has never in his life been nobody before. Not once. Not at school, not at the flat, not in England. There has always been somebody in the room who knew. And here he is in an orange wristband carrying lemonades, and nobody knows, and he’s happy.

He drank some of his pint.

It was very good.

---

Lukas did not miss.

That was the thing about it. That was the whole thing, and it took the patio about fifteen minutes to understand it.

He had asked a group of people at the near board if he could have a go, very politely, in his careful English, and they had said sure, because it was a Tuesday night in Scottsdale and people said sure. They were six friends, three couples about thirty, from Tempe, out for one of them’s promotion, and they gave him four bags and showed him how you stood, and where the line was, and told him not to worry if he missed, because everybody missed.

Lukas threw the first bag.

It went up in a long low curve under the strings of lights and came down on the far board, and slid, and dropped into the hole, without touching the sides.

“Hey,” said the man who had shown him. “Nice one. Beginner’s luck.”

Lukas threw the second bag. Same curve. Same board. Into the hole.

The man stopped saying anything.

Lukas threw the third and the fourth. Into the hole, and into the hole.

Twelve points. Four bags. He had not changed his expression. He had not said anything. He had stood at the line with the bags in his left hand and thrown each one with his right with a very small, very exact movement of the wrist, as if he were adjusting the fine focus on something, and then he had stood and watched them land the way he watched a star come into the eyepiece, and when the fourth one went in he simply turned round and held out his hand for more bags.

“Again,” said the woman whose promotion it was.

He did it again.

By a quarter past eleven there was a crowd. By half past eleven there was a queue of people wanting to play him, and a man had gone inside to tell the DJ, and the DJ had come out of the booth with his headphones still on to look, and gone back in, and started playing, very loudly, something that sounded like the music they play at the end of a film when the underdog wins, and the patio had started clapping every time a bag went in.

Lukas said nothing.

He did not say anything to anybody. He beat the woman whose promotion it was, twenty-one to four. He beat her husband. He beat a man in a cowboy hat who said he had played in a league in Mesa for six years. He beat a woman who said she had been the champion of a bar in Flagstaff two years running, and who, when she lost, shook his hand and asked him where he had learned, and Lukas looked at her for a moment and then pointed, without saying a word, straight up, at the sky.

“What does that mean?” said the woman.

“He’s an astronomer,” said Alexander, who was sitting on the end of a bench with his lemonade and his orange wristband, watching his friend with an expression of complete and private happiness. “He knows where things will land.”

“Is that true?”

Lukas threw another bag. It went in.

“He’s not saying,” said the woman.

“He has used up his things for tonight,” said Alexander. “He has had three. That is two more than usual. He will not say anything else until it is tomorrow.” He looked at his watch. “That is thirty-one minutes.”

The woman from Flagstaff looked at Lukas for a long time, and then at Alexander, and then at Lukas again.

“Where are you boys from?” she said.

“Potsdam,” said Alexander.

“Is that near Phoenix?”

“No,” said Alexander, and drank some of his lemonade, and did not explain, and the woman from Flagstaff went away to tell her friends that the cornhole kid was from somewhere called Potsdam and did not talk, and it went round the patio, and by midnight half of Boondocks believed that a silent German astronomer had come to Scottsdale on purpose to beat them at cornhole, which was, Theo thought, very nearly true.

---

The dance happened at twenty to twelve.

Theo saw the whole of it, because he had been looking for Freddie, because he always knew where Freddie was in a room and it was annoying not to, and he found him by the big folded-back doors to the inside bar, holding the last of a lemonade, with Jack, who was damp from the mist and had cooled down to the colour of an ordinary person, watching the dance floor.

The DJ had moved inside. The music had changed. It was something old now, something everybody knew, the kind of song that comes on at the end of a wedding when the old people get up, and the dance floor had filled up with people of every age doing it badly and not caring.

The woman whose promotion it was came off the dance floor, laughing, with her shoes in her hand, and saw Freddie standing in the doorway with his orange wristband and his lemonade.

“Hey,” she said. “Orange. Come on.”

“I don’t…” said Freddie.

“Nobody does. Come on. It’s my promotion.”

She took the lemonade out of his hand and gave it to Jack, and took his hand, and pulled.

Theo had known him six years. He had seen him do everything. He had seen him lay a wreath and walk twenty paces alone at the Tomb with three thousand people watching and not a hair out of place. He had seen him stand on a balcony in London with a flypast going over. He had seen him be crowned. He had never, in six years, seen him dance.

Neither had anybody else. That was clear within about five seconds.

Freddie danced the way a man assembles flat-pack furniture from instructions in a language he does not read. He danced with great seriousness and complete commitment and no idea at all. His arms did one thing and his feet did another and his head, which was a long way up, nodded along slightly behind the beat, like a man agreeing with something somebody had said a moment ago. He was very tall and he did not know where any of it went. He turned round once, on purpose, and nearly took out a man carrying two pints. The woman whose promotion it was laughed so hard she had to hold on to his arm, and he laughed too, and went on doing it, worse, and better, and worse.

It lasted the whole song. About three minutes.

Theo stood in the doorway with his pint and did not move.

Beside him, Jack had both lemonades and a look on his face that Theo had seen on it before, once, in a pub in Gloucestershire on a Sunday afternoon in November, and that Theo was not going to say anything about, ever.

“Nobody’s filming it,” said Jack, after a while.

Theo looked round. He was right. There were phones everywhere on that dance floor, and every one of them was pointed at the woman whose promotion it was, or at the DJ, or at a friend, or out through the doors at the patio, where Lukas was still throwing bags into holes. Not one of them was pointed at a tall fair boy in an orange wristband doing the worst dancing in Scottsdale.

“Somebody should,” said Jack. “He’s the most famous person in the country and he’s dancing like a heron and nobody’s filming it.”

“They don’t believe it,” said Theo.

“What?”

“They don’t believe it’s him.” Theo watched Freddie turn round again and miss the man with the pints by an inch. “If it was him, he wouldn’t be orange. If it was him he’d have people. If it was him he’d know how to dance. He’s got a whole palace, he’d have had lessons.” He drank some of his pint. “Look at him. He’s the only person in Scottsdale tonight who can’t be the King.”

The song ended.

Freddie came off the dance floor with his hair on end and his shirt stuck to his back and his face more alive than Theo had seen it since about May, and the woman whose promotion it was kissed him on the cheek and said, “Thanks, Orange,” and went back to her friends, and Freddie stood in the doorway in front of them and breathed.

“Was that all right?” he said.

“No,” said Jack and Theo together.

“Good,” said Freddie, and took his lemonade back from Jack, and drank all of it.

---

Theo’s phone was face down on the end of the table by the misting pipes, and at five to twelve it buzzed.

He did not pick it up. He knew who it was without turning it over. It had buzzed on and off since a quarter to eight, on the bus, at Castaways, in the bottom of the bag in Ahwatukee, in the back of Rita’s truck. It had buzzed under the table at the trivia every time the quizmaster read a question, as if it wanted to answer.

Freddie was looking at it.

“Is that her?” he said.

“Yes.”

“How many?”

Theo turned it over, just to see. The little red number in the corner said twenty-three. Under it, one message, which he had not opened, and which he could see the first line of without opening.

Theo. Just tell me if he’s

He turned it face down again.

Freddie did not say anything for a moment. Then he said, very quietly:

“When we’ve finished.”

“When’s that?”

“I’ll know it when I see it,” said Freddie, which was what Theo had said on the bus, and Theo looked at him, and Freddie looked back, and neither of them laughed, though both of them nearly did.

It was midnight.

Theo looked at his watch. It was midnight in Scottsdale. It had been midnight in New Westminster three hours ago, at about the moment the quizmaster at Castaways asked how old the King was, and he had stopped being eighteen today there while five people said eighteen too loud, and nobody had noticed, including him.

“That’s it,” he said. “It’s over. My birthday.”

“Not here,” said Freddie. “Here it’s midnight. It’s over now.” He put his empty glass down. “Here we’ve still got all the bars.”

On the strip of artificial grass under the lights, to a round of applause from what was by now most of the patio, Lukas Brandt threw his last bag of the night into the hole, turned round, held up one finger for silence, and said, clearly, for the first time in an hour, because it was tomorrow:

“Facts don’t count.”

And put the bag down, and walked back to Alexander, and sat down, and did not explain.