The bartender walked to the saloon that night through fields in which the snow had receded into patches. He’d lived in the place long enough to know where the ponds were, frozen or otherwise. The white layers of snow peeled back by weeks of unseasonable warmth revealed a field like a tic-tac-toe board with X’s of running deer tracks and O’s of thawed ponds with sunken leaves and pine needles. Usually, he drove a truck, but it was stuck in the muddy soil in front of his house.

       February, his favorite time of year. Dan hated working in summer when the beach town was full of tourists. He crossed the field and came up onto the road that wound down to the beach, the smell of the ocean trolling over to him: not the fishy smell of August, but the steel scent of winter with gray, foamy sprays that turned into imaginary icicles in his blood.

       Almost pitch, yet barely eight. There were a few stars out. He stopped and looked up, forming constellations which weren’t there, deliberately breaking up the ones he recognized like Ursula Major and Cassiopeia.

       His mind operated on ratios, calculating the distance between objects, something he figured out about space and time. He’d worked at the bar for seven years and it was, to his system of thought, the perfect spatial relationship: the opposing magnetism between him and the customers, locals who appeared most nights of the week, and the rare winter traveler.

       He scanned the skies. He was aware that winter brought out odd things that didn’t get seen in summer, the most striking the horse and rider, a new constellation. His eyes made out the figure in November, the outline of a rider and a headless horse and he had assumed he was dreaming. His mind wasn’t so dependable some Novembers. That same night he passed a used condom on the road, and stumbled over the dunes. When he looked skyward, he saw the rider and jockey, rollicking like the mechanical horse in front of K-Mart. He stood and watched until the vision passed behind a smoky cloud. He’d put it down to hallucination. But a few nights later, he’d seen it again.

       At that time the girl first appeared in the bar. Easy to identify the regulars. Most left the island in winter anyway unless they had private wells. But she would have been easy to identify even if he didn’t have a mind for faces. Hers was pale and pitted: healed-over acne scars as if her cheeks had been crossed by swords. Her hair short, her eyes a pale blue like the color that came in through the blinds at 5am. Slim, flat-chested as a boy, worn, red cowboy boots a size too big for her.

       He figured he’d see her only once, but she showed up again, ordering the same thing, a gin and tonic, an easy drink to make and when she’d shown up a third time, he put some extra lime in it. He caught her looking him over, as if noticing him for the first time and asked for a match.

       The bar had a sea theme, with the dried-out bodies of starfish and seahorses pinned to the walls. In the corner, there was a tank of live lobsters that no one asked to boil, the regulars had named them some time ago. When they were working right, the fluorescent lights generated a warbling beam across the walls.

 

​

The remaining layers of ice under the sand of the road crunched under him and suddenly as though he had been alerted by a sound, he lifted his head and saw them, horse and rider, on the edge of the Little Dipper, peeking out from a silver wave of interstellar dust. He stood and stared, wondering again if his mind had been over-trained to make connections, to draw points together and if in fact he was doing that again, taking the tail of a comet and stitching it to the aura of a planet.

       But the apparition seemed to have its own points and closures.

       He kept walking and as usually happened when he’d seen the vision, he felt invigorated. He heard in the distance the endless drone of the ocean hitting against the cold rocks.

       Sometimes, in such a mood, he could almost think back to the era before his wife died, when the polarities were at their most relaxed and he had felt only the mildest echo of the fluttering anxieties he’d had as a child. But when she died three years ago November in a car accident, he had graduated into mathematics, the endless equations of the factors that had formed the accident: her turning the corner of Sycamore and Vine at precisely 11:45pm on her way to the bar to meet him, when, at that exact moment, Billy Seldes was pulling his eighth can of beer out of a paper bag while shooting through the stop sign at Vine and Elm. The endless mathematics if time had worked a different way. What if she had waited three more minutes at home because she got her hair caught in the narrow teeth of her teasing comb? What if he had told her to meet him at eleven? What if Billy passed out after the seventh beer? What if the night before he had not shoveled his wife’s car out of the mud in front of the house?

       Such equations were endless, one would seem to finish and then give way to another and after three years, he had still not run out of ideas.

       But he had come to respect the indelible quality of equations, because things had occurred precisely when they did, remaining in a fixed relationship with each other through time.

       Sometimes this notion gave him peace. Other times, he believed if he could vary the equations enough, he could find his way through them, change the past.

       He never guessed in the ten years he’d been with his wife that she was a person who could impact the way he thought about the universe. Most of the time he hated her company.

       Headstrong. Her hand balled up in a fist at the first sign of a challenge to her sovereignty. Her friends got it worse than he did.  She never hit anybody. Her tone of voice was enough to flatten the hardiest opponent. She always needed to stampede you with her opinions. Yet in her own way, steady as gravity, day in and day out, predictable. And despite her occasional ridicule, a measure of confidence bled over into his own soul, just from being with someone who never doubted herself.

But it took her dying for him to realize the particulars of who she was didn’t matter. She died and took everything with her, the constellation that had been their life, the connections to other people, the habits, the safety of their partnership. When he spotted the driver who killed her at their congregation some weeks later (getting off with a revoked license and community service) he stopped going. If God could interface with the devil, then it would end in a draw. Nothing left for him except the challenge of reconstituting his thoughts.

 

​

He rounded a corner, and the bar appeared, stark, small and disembodied, from the threshold of sand and rocky pavement on which it sat. He went in, hanging his coat on a wooden peg. Someone already there: Norman, the manager of the Days Inn. He’d gone ahead and made himself a vodka tonic.

       “Hey Dan, didn’t hear your truck. You stuck again?”

       The bartender rolled up his sleeves and stood at a sink, dark coffee stains circling the drain, washing his hands careful as a surgeon.

       “Yup. But I like to take the breezes in. Good for my heart. “

       “Sound judgment, friend. Wish my lungs would let me do it, but I don’t dare take any deep breaths. Might just keel over.” By the smell of him, Norman had already passed through a half-pack of Pall Malls and the odor mixed in with the smell of stale fossils in the bar.

       “See what you mean,” Dan said and taking up a damp towel wiped the ashes away.

       In an isolated bar in the middle of winter no one gave any consideration to the No Smoking rule, especially Norman.

       He stepped out from the counter and turned the lights on in the back room, and a pool table glowed back at them in bright green like a miniature golf course. There were a few round tables in back, along with a dartboard and jukebox. Someone had pinned up some yellowing advertisements for a sea ride, a summer entertainment. Sunglassed tourists boarding bright boats with swan-shaped mastheads to pedal around the bay. But it looked old now, held over from the 1950s when there seemed to be a lot more sunshine in the place.

 

​

He went back behind the bar and started dry wiping the glasses. It was a task he gave himself every night, a way to pass the first hour or so before the other regulars came in, the dozen or so people who would mostly stay till closing. He also needed to do something, he was filled with electricity from his sighting of the constellation, and he knew, because he now connected the two, that the girl would be there, for she always showed up on nights when the horse appeared.

       About 9pm, the regulars started to arrive, the pool cleaner Joe with the stubby fingers, the fisherman Matt who sometimes brought them crabs, the half-blind Jimmy, the foul-mouthed Larry, and four others, including the hairdresser Lacey whose eyebrows were penciled so far up they reached into the base of her widow’s peak.

       Dan was vibrating. He felt a shiver go through his spine and turned at exactly the moment the girl walked in, wearing a heavy mountain coat, smelling of pine, her face pale and devoured. She sat down at the far end of the bar and took out a pack of Virginia Slims. Her fingers were laced by wrinkles but something young about her eyes made him guess she was about 30. Her name, he’d found out on her third visit, was Julia.

       There were a few people in back and someone had put the Jukebox on: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, then Cry. The pool table was taken up by a couple of locals. 

       Almost from the day she first entered the bar last fall, Julia had been talking about the physics of pool, showing him with the aid of a Bic pen and white paper napkins the relationship of the various angles and measures, what could and couldn’t be achieved and he had fallen in love with the simplicity of it, for in her knowledge of the game, was laid out before him the spatial relationships and equations he'd come to believe in.

       Fixed points.

       But Julia would not play. She’d eye the men stationed like yardarms at the table and roll her eyes, pointing out to Dan in a quiet voice all they were doing wrong, that their stance gave them the wrong follow-through and how they’d be better off aiming at nothing and relying on fate. She had a slight drawl, and her words were slow coming out of her mouth, yet the next line would surprise him with its sting and sharp delivery. He couldn’t figure out where her tolerance was. She would stay at the bar for an hour or two and have 4-5 hard drinks, leaving the same way she came.  He wondered where she put it, her body slim as a paperclip. But then he looked at the bloated canvas of her face and her bloodshot eyes and maybe he knew.

       The other customers usually sat in silence as she spoke, their hands around their drinks, their focus on the level of liquor left in their glasses, the volume of beer nuts in the bowls in front of them.

       No one asked her where she came from, but he happened to notice one night as she high-crossed her legs that her boots had no sand stuck on the soles. Everyone carried a heap of sand on them, not from the beach, which they rarely visited, but from the tanks that were emptied over the layers of ice on the roads. He had also noticed her hands, the creases across the outside back of her left and right palms as if formed by the tight wrapping around them of ropes.

 

As the evening wore on, he could see the lucidity of the customers floating up to the ceiling, forming rings in the air, the jukebox wheezing but rambling on, Somethin' Stupid, It's Impossible, the barrel-chested men in the back jostling over the shots.

       Close to midnight, when she was getting ready to leave, a man from town with a shaggy ponytail, who only came in every so often to play pool, stepped in front of her.

       “I overheard you talking about the game and wondered if you’d play me a round. I don’t know how it’s supposed to work.” They had heard his balls dropping off the table earlier followed by the cackles of the men watching him. His face looked young, though his hair was touched by gray.

       She looked ahead of her, re-situating her body on the stool.

       “I don’t play anymore.”

       “Why not? Is it all on paper?”

       The bartender dried his hands and came forward.

       “I don’t care to play.”

       Norman laughed. Dan felt like wringing his neck.

       Julia turned her head away, staring into her empty glass and the pool player leaned into her.

       “I’m sorry ma’am, maybe you can just give me some pointers. You don’t have to play if you don’t want to, I just thought you could show me where I’m going wrong. It’s getting embarrassing, you know. I hate to leave like this, won’t be able to hold my head up in town.”

       She sat there, a cigarette burning its way to her fingers, and Dan wanted to march over and take it from her, but she suddenly got up, threw the butt on the floor and stomped it out. She walked over to the pool table with the man shuffling behind her. He waited while she went to the rack, picking up the cue sticks one at a time and rolling them across the table.

       “These are warped," she said and suddenly the people in the backroom looked over, alerted by the authority in her voice. She went through and tested them again, one after the other.

       “OK,” she said. “This is less screwed up than the others,” and she lit another cigarette. She let him make the break, which was miserable, barely moving any of the balls from the tight triangle at the bottom of the table, as if he’d only blown smoke at them. She chalked up the cue and approached the table. Her stance looked calculated as a math problem, her body at a perfect angle, the ideal relationship between her and the cue, the fingers that were wrapped around its lower third.

       She hit the ball, and it flew up, then sputtered to a halt as if suddenly out of gas, not coming within three inches of a single ball. But you could see in the faces of the people watching an excuse for her, since her form was as flawless as a diamond. But as the game went on it became clear that all the shots were like the first one, the cue ball dropping right into the pockets and barely touching her balls. The bartender figured she was lining up the shots. At one point it looked like she had every pocket sealed off with one of her balls. He had years ago known a man to play with such a strategy, but she didn’t cash in on it, in fact she hit them out of position every time she shot no matter how close they were to dropping in.

       The townie, for all his pitiful playing, won the game. He shook her hand. Norman had a smirk on his face that Dan wanted to slap off. She sat down and asked for another drink and for the next two hours had five in all (though she asked for ten) till her face flushed and her eyes had crimson rims. She stayed until the bar emptied out.

       Dan had never known her to stay so late and thought maybe he could get answers out of her, like who she was and where she came from. And he instinctively felt she might know something about the strange constellation he’d seen in the skies.

       But around 3am, she got up from the bar and, doubling over from the waist, vomited on the floor. For all the years he’d worked there he’d rarely seen a customer do that, because the regulars knew their capacities and when they had to throw up, went outside or unburdened themselves in the bathroom with the water running. He came out from behind the bar, gripped her arm and took her out to the road. She coughed up shiny things, like tiny clean pebbles drowning in a milky pool.

       When she was done, she sat cross-legged on the road and cried. He left her there, watching her carefully through the doorway as he put on his coat, wetted a rag and then turned off the lights in the bar. 

       They were the last to leave.

       He stood her up, placing the cold rag on the back of her neck and draped her coat around her shoulders.

       “Feeling better?”

       “Give me a cigarette.”

       He took one from the pack in her coat pocket and lit it for her.

       “I’m a good drinker. Usually, better than most people. I have a high tolerance when it comes to alcohol.”

       “I’ve seen it.”

       “I put away twice this much last New Year’s Eve.”

       “I believe you.”

       “But I can’t do it," she said, wiping her face roughly with the rag he’d given her. “I’ve never been able to do it.”

       “What, dear?”

       “Put it together. Physics to the game. I know I’m right but in all the years I’ve lived I’ve never been able to connect with a ball, not so it goes anywhere I want it to, or makes the connections perform the way I intend.”

       Her voice was stone cold and clear. In the moonlight her face looked like a wax carving.

       “I guess it’s just my cross to bear.”

       “I believe we have an affinity,” Dan said, then took his chance. “Want to tell me where you’re from?”

       “No,” she said, shaking her head. “And I don’t want you trying to guess.”

       “That’s OK. I’m no good at that.”

       His wife told him long ago he had no instincts about people. Never occurred to him to doubt her.

 

​

He led Julia to his place, knowing the long walk would do her good, offering on the way a smorgasbord of subjects, none of which caught fire. Through the thick sand and muddy snow, past his sunken truck in the driveway and finally into the shadow of his house, she made no comment. Once inside, he turned on all the lights, filled a glass of gassy water for her at the sink, and pulled her into the bedroom.

       He hadn’t had a woman in the place since his wife died and it was in an ugly state, with the kinds of things lying around a woman wouldn’t put up with, smelly socks and twice-used tissues and moldy underwear. He kicked a few items under the bed, took her coat off and sat her down.  She handed him the glass and lay back against the pillow, staring at him and nodding, silently giving her consent. He turned off the light and kneeling in front of her, pulled off her boots. The smell of her feet was a mix of lavender and damp sheep. He peeled off her white corduroys, which revealed legs which were bare and hairy, so thinly muscled they could have been a jockey’s.

       “You’re not too pickled to sleep with me?” he asked, desiring her but not wanting to take unfair advantage.

       “I’m sober as a judge.”

       “Good because if I stop, I might not be able to restart.”

       He removed his belt and she unbuttoned her shirt. He wondered when he’d get reeled in by the ghost of his wife.  He got on top of her, and she sat up suddenly and got hold of his neck, pulling him closer. He wasn’t going to risk getting caught in the net of his geometry by thinking too much, so he crossed the boundary between them and pushed into her, working her like a forgotten rhythm, humping so fast he felt like he was mixing her insides up in a blender. She let him do it, her eyes closed, her dry lips nipping at his earlobes. It was like the lost memory of some mechanical action, urged on by her small naked breasts and their flesh jiggling up and down, her hair sticking to his mouth.

       He felt he was breaking a string, reaching inside of her and forming between them a new and different constellation. With his last thrust, she seemed to rise from the bed, their shadows floating to the ceiling, a horse and rider, doing a mad dance in space. Then suddenly they broke apart, the constellation dissolved and there was no longer anything connecting them except the exhausted beating of their breaths.

       “Sorry it went that way Julia,” he said, when he could talk steady. “I got spurred on. Should have been more gentle.”

       “That’s OK. You landed your shot. Wish I could do the same. Just let me take a nap and then you can do the honors and make me a fine wholesome breakfast, whatever that is….”   

       She dozed off and he lay next to her and tried to figure out what he could offer her. He never had visitors, other than the occasional gas meter inspector. All he had in the house was coffee and stale pizza. But he soon fell asleep, his consciousness drifting down a trail of waffles with caramelized syrup in the snow.

       In the late morning, he woke up after a dream of having lost her and realized he was alone. He hadn’t heard her dress, but her clothes were gone, boots and all. No trace left, except a few blond hairs and some sour spit on the pillow.

       For the first time in years, he felt a kind of strength, as if the stale air had finally been let out of his lungs and some new sparkling mineral had been allowed in. He went outside and noticed that his truck was still sunk a half foot in the snowy mud in front of his house. He stood for a moment, sizing it up, weighing the effort, and then knelt behind the back tire, and commenced raking the mud away with his hands.

 

 

Julia never came back to the bar. He knew she wouldn't, despite his heart pounding hard every time the door creaked open, and someone stamped in. He began to wonder if he had invented her.

       On clear nights, when he searched the skies, there was no sign of the headless horse and rider, only the same old constellations he'd always known, densely starred, and filling the heavens with infinite chance.