Tooey poured shots into half-pint glasses from a dark-colored, label-less bottle. At first I thought it was liquor—bourbon, maybe—but as it poured I could see a foamy head forming at the surface. A few of the men laughed in unison at something Tooey said, and one even clapped him on the back. Someone tried to pinch one of the glasses, but Tooey playfully slapped him away.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Tooey said, shoving a half-pint glass in my free hand. “Make sure everyone’s got a glass first.”
“How come you didn’t play bartender at my Christmas party, Jones?” one of the men wanted to know.
“Maybe I should have. It certainly would have livened things up.”
Some bullish laughter.
“Come on. Come on,” said another man.
I turned to Adam, who had also been burdened with a glass of the dark, foamy liquid, and whispered, “What is this stuff?”
“Tooey’s Tonic,” he said.
“But what is it?”
“Beer.”
“For real?” I held it up to the light. It was greenish in color, and I could see pebbly particles swimming around near the bottom of the glass. I thought of witches cackling about toil and trouble while stirring a cauldron.
“He changes the recipe almost weekly,” Adam said close to my ear. “Been trying to get a distributor for the stuff for years. His bar’s the only place you can actually buy it.”
“It looks like it should be outlawed,” I said and perhaps a bit too loud, as a few of the men chuckled.
“Green,” Tooey responded, “is the cure for cancer. Green is what makes the world go round-round-round. Green is gold.”
“It’s not easy being green,” I added.
Tooey’s mouth burst open, and a fireball of laughter burst out. It looked forced but wasn’t. He had a wide mouth, with narrow, sunken cheeks, and I could see the landmarks of his fillings from across the kitchen. His clothes—a flannel shirt, suede vest, faded blue jeans—hung off him like clothes draped over a fence post. The only remotely handsome feature was his eyes—small, faded blue, genuine, somber, humane.
“Good one, Shakespeare,” Tooey said. Anyone else calling me Shakespeare would have irritated the hell out of me, but there was an easiness to Tooey Jones—in his eyes, perhaps—that made it sound comfortable and almost endearing, the way old army buddies had nicknames for one another. “But—but— but taste it. Taste it.”
I brought the glass to my lips and took a small swallow. Fought back a wince. “Uh . . .”
Tooey laughed again. “Well?”
“It’s delicious,” I said.
“Come on. Be honest.”
“I’m new here,” I reminded him. “I don’t know if I can. I’m trying to win friends tonight—”
“Come out with it!”
Still grimacing, I said, “It’s horrible. It tastes like motor oil mixed with cough syrup.”
“Ahhhh! So you’re saying I used too much cough syrup?”
“Or too much motor oil,” I suggested.
Following my lead, a few of the braver men tasted Tooey’s Tonic. Mutual grimaces abounded.
“Drink it all, man,” Adam said at my side. He was looking forlornly at his own beverage. “It’s tradition.”
I imagined crazy little Tooey Jones mad-scientisting away in the supplies cellar beneath Tequila Mockingbird, bubbly test tubes and smoking vials suspended by a network of clamps, pulleys, and hooks over his head, concocting his latest brew.
A handful of men who had previously been in the den with the women appeared in the kitchen doorway, strategically after the last of Tooey’s Tonic had been choked down.
Mitchell Denault nodded at me and took a step in my direction. “I don’t want to embarrass you,” he said, a few hometown minions at his back, “but I wanted to get your John Hancock on this.” Like a Vegas mogul displaying a royal flush, he slapped a paperback copy of my latest novel, Water View, on the kitchen counter.
A fellow behind him—Dick Copeland, an attorney—patted the breast pocket of his Oxford shirt for what I assumed was a pen.
“I see Adam’s still trying to weasel his fifteen percent by promoting my work,” I said, gathering up the copy of Water View and opening it to the title page. The pages were pristine and the spine had no creases; I could tell the book had been recently purchased and not read. Dick’s pen finally materialized, and he handed it over to me with the excited impatience of a ten-year-old displaying an honor roll report card. I signed the book and thrust it in the general vicinity of Mitchell, Dick, and their horde of cronies.
By ten o’clock, most of the guests had left. I shook hands and grinned while committing to dinners at houses hosted by people I did not know. Only a few stragglers remained. The women still occupied the den, now talking quietly and in that secretive, whispering way only women have. The few remaining men lingered in the kitchen, picking at the leftover dip and finishing off the hard liquor.
I had drunk way too much; sometime during the night I’d become overwhelmed by the threat of senselessness that accompanied excessive drinking. But it made the more intrusive of the remaining guests more tolerable, and conversation flowed freely toward the end of the night.
I went over to the buffet table to scrounge around at the last of the food, balancing a plate in one hand and a Fordham beer in the other.
A man hovered over the buffet table beside me. He had small, angular features and dark oil-spot eyes swimming behind the lenses of thick, rimless glasses. His eyebrows were like nests of steel wire, and his face was networked with vibrant red blood vessels that betrayed the man’s affinity for drink. I pegged him to be in his midfifties.
“I don’t think we’ve met,” I said, setting my beer down on the buffet table and extending my hand. Even in my simmering state of inebriation, I felt sobriety rush up to greet me. “I’m Travis Glasgow.”
He shook my hand—a slight, effeminate grasp followed by a quick release. A man who did not like to shake hands. “I’m Ira Stein. You and your wife are the newcomers—is that right?”
“Yes. We’ve been here a full week. We were living over in London before Adam told us about the Dentmans’ house coming on the market.”
“Nancy and I are your next-door neighbors. You can just barely see our house without the leaves on the trees.”
“So you guys are the log cabin overlooking the lake,” I said. I recalled the way the smoke from the chimney climbed into the gray sky that day I’d walked north along the edge of the lake. “It’s an amazing view.”
Ira nodded once almost robotically. “It’s very nice, yes.”
“I’m still shocked we got our place so cheap.”
“Well, we’re glad you and your wife . . . ?”
“Jodie.”
“We’re glad you and Jodie moved in. The Dentmans were a peculiar family, as I’m sure you’ve heard. Not to speak ill of those poor people and what happened to them, of course. Nonetheless, they were peculiar.”
“What do you mean? What happened to them?”
“I’m talking about the tragedy. What happened to the boy.”
I shook my head. Fueled by an overconsumption of alcohol, I felt a wry grin break out across my face. “I’m sorry. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“The Dentman boy?” He raised a peppery eyebrow.
“What about him?”
“Oh.” Ira stared at his plate, which was empty except for a few olive pits and a plastic toothpick in the shape of a fencing sword. Then he looked across the room at a frail, amphetamine-thin woman I assumed was his wife, Nancy. She was leaning against the wall and peering into the sunken den where the other women were talking. Ostracized from the group, she could have been a lamp, a decorative statue on an end table.