Castaways

There was a horse at the third parking space.

Theo saw it first, because he was walking in front, because he was the one who knew where they were going, and he stopped so suddenly on the edge of McDowell Road that Jack walked into the back of him and Alexander walked into the back of Jack and Lukas, who was reading the bus map, did not walk into anybody, because he had stopped a pace behind them all without looking up, the way he always did.

It was a brown horse with a white blaze, tied by its reins to a short iron post with a ring on top, at the head of a parking space between a pickup and a small red car. It was standing very still in the heat with its head down, as though it were waiting for somebody inside to finish a drink.

Every parking space had a post. The whole car park was a row of them, iron, waist high, one at the head of every space, so that from the road it looked less like a car park than a hitching rail somebody had forgotten to stop building.

“There’s a horse,” said Jack.

“There’s a horse,” said Theo.

“Why is there a horse?”

“It’s the law.” Freddie had come up beside them, with his hands in his pockets, looking at the horse with an expression of deep professional interest. “The Travellers’ Act. Every licensed premises in the March has to keep a hitching rail reachable from the street. Since 1864.”

Jack looked at him.

“How do you know that?”

“It was in the briefing.” He considered. “There’s a page on hitching rails. There’s always a page. There was a page on the water troughs.”

“Why would they give you a page on water troughs?”

“In case somebody asked,” said Freddie, and walked past the horse, and nodded to it, as you would to anybody you passed in a car park, and went in under the sign.

---

The sign was an octopus.

It was a big lit panel on the front wall over the door, old and faded and cracked at one corner, and on it, rising out of a grey-green sea fog, was an octopus in a battered captain’s cap, with a heavy grey moustache and a scowl. One of its arms held up a mug of beer with the froth going over the top. Another held a crab, which was objecting. The rest were wound in and out of the name of the bar, in big red capitals, which said CASTAWAYS.

Lukas stopped under it and looked up.

“The last S is backwards,” he said.

They all looked up. It was. Everything else on the sign was right way round, and the last S faced the wrong way, as though it had changed its mind at the end.

“Is that on purpose?” said Alexander.

“Don’t know,” said Theo.

“It is a very large sign to have got wrong by accident.”

“Maybe the octopus did it,” said Jack, and Lukas looked at him for a moment with something like respect, and that was, Theo knew, as far as Lukas went with people he had known for a week.

---

Inside it was cold.

It was cold the way only a building in Phoenix in August could be cold, a cold that hit you in the doorway like a wall and made the hair stand up on your arms, and Jack stood in it with his eyes shut and his arms out and said “Oh,” in a voice Theo had only ever heard from him once before, in a snowdrift, in January.

It was one long room. A bar down the left side, with stools and a long mirror and taps. Booths down the right, and high tables, and screens on the walls with baseball on them with the sound off. Rope and nets and a ship’s wheel on the walls, and old charts. At the back, a little stage, with a microphone on a stand and nobody at it, and in front of the stage, at the high tables, people in teams of four and five with pens and answer sheets and the faces of people trying to remember the capital of something.

A man with a microphone was standing by the stage reading out a question.

“Round four,” he said. “Sport. Question six. In what year did…”

“Trivia,” said Theo. “It’s Tuesday.”

“What’s trivia?” said Alexander.

“It’s a quiz. In teams. You answer questions and you write them down and they mark them and whoever’s got the most wins.”

Alexander looked at the teams with great seriousness.

“What do you win?”

“Usually a voucher,” said Theo. “For the bar.”

Alexander considered the room, the answer sheets, the pens, the man with the microphone, the screens with the baseball on, with the expression of a person who has been given the rules of a game in a language he speaks perfectly and still does not understand.

“I would like to do trivia,” he said.

---

The bar first.

Theo went first. He had been planning it since about April. He had been planning it, if he was honest, since he was fourteen and his father had said, at the kitchen table, in front of Freddie, your first one’s on your eighteenth and it’s slow, and then had gone back to the crossword as if he had said nothing at all.

The barman was about forty, with a grey beard and a Castaways T-shirt and a tea towel over his shoulder, and he was pulling a pint for somebody else, and he looked up when Theo got to the bar and said, “Evening. What can I get you?”

“A pint, please.” Theo’s voice came out normal, which surprised him. “Of whatever your quietest beer is. My dad says your first one’s slow.”

The barman finished the other pint and put it down. Then he looked at Theo properly. Theo knew what he looked like: a tall boy in a white shirt with a sunburnt neck and red ears.

“ID?” said the barman.

Theo had it out before the word was finished. He had had it in his hand since the bus. His licence, from New Westminster, with the photograph of him looking surprised, and the date of birth on it, which he had checked four times on the bus because it was the kind of thing you checked.

The barman took it. He looked at the photograph. He looked at Theo. He looked at the date of birth, and stopped, and looked again.

“Today,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Today today.”

“Since midnight,” said Theo. “Ours. In New Westminster. Which was nine o’clock last night here, so technically I’ve been eighteen for twenty-three hours, and this is the first time anybody’s asked.”

The barman put the licence down on the bar and slid it back to him, and then, without saying anything else, he took a glass down from the shelf, a different glass, a good one, and pulled a pint of something pale, slowly, tilting it, the way Theo’s father said the barman at the Rathskeller in Milwaukee had pulled them in 1998, and let it settle, and topped it, and put it down in front of him on a mat.

“First one’s on the house,” said the barman. “Happy birthday.”

Theo looked at it.

He found that he could not say anything. He nodded instead. The barman nodded back, as one man to another, and turned to the next person, and that was all, and it was the best thing anybody had done for him all day, including the cake, and he would never be able to explain that to anybody, so he did not try.

He did not drink it yet. He held it, and turned round, and the others were behind him in a row at the bar, and the next part of the evening began.

---

“Pint,” said Jack. “Please. Of the same.”

“ID?”

Jack put his passport on the bar. It was a British one, dark red, with gold on the front, and the barman picked it up and looked at it with interest, because it was the first one he had seen that week, he said, and turned the pages and looked at Jack.

“Gloucestershire,” he said.

“Somebody has to be from there,” said Jack.

The barman laughed and pulled the pint.

Then Alexander.

Alexander stood at the bar very upright, with his hands flat on the wood, and said, in his careful English, “A beer, please. A small one.”

“ID?”

Alexander put his passport on the bar. It was a German one, dark red as well, but a different red, with an eagle on it, and the barman opened it and looked at the photograph and looked at Alexander and looked at the date of birth, and did some arithmetic, and his face did a kind thing.

“Seventeen,” said the barman, gently, the way a doctor gives you a result. “Sorry, pal. Not till January.”

“I know,” said Alexander. “I wanted to see what you would say.”

“I say lemonade.”

“Then lemonade, please.”

Lukas put his passport on the bar beside Alexander’s without being asked and without saying anything at all.

The barman looked at it. “Also seventeen.”

“Also lemonade,” said Lukas.

And then Freddie.

Theo watched him do it. He had watched him do it in his head on the bus, and it went exactly as he had seen it, which was the thing about Freddie: whatever you thought was going to happen to him, happened, and he let it.

“A pint, please,” said Freddie. “The same as his.”

“ID?”

Freddie put his hand in his pocket. He took it out again. There was nothing in it. There was never anything in it. He had never in his life had a passport or a card or a licence of the Realm with his name on it, because every one of them was issued in his name already, and you could not issue one to yourself, and he stood at the bar at Castaways on McDowell Road at five past eight in the evening with his empty hand, the King of eighteen, and said, quite cheerfully:

“I haven’t got any.”

“Then it’s lemonade,” said the barman, without unkindness, and poured it.

Jack made a noise into his pint.

“Again,” said Jack.

“It’s a very good lemonade,” said Freddie, and picked it up, and drank some of it, and it was.

---

The quizmaster let them in for the last two rounds.

He said that he did not usually, and then he looked at the five of them standing by the stage, three with lemonade and two with pints and one of them, the one with the red ears, holding his pint as if it were a baby bird, and said that the round on the Realm was next and they might as well, and gave them an answer sheet and a pen.

“Team name?” he said.

They looked at each other.

Lukas took the pen. He wrote something on the top of the sheet in small upright capitals and handed it back.

The quizmaster read it.

“Facts Don’t Count,” he said.

“It is a principle,” said Lukas.

“It’s going to be a problem in a quiz,” said the quizmaster, and went back to the microphone, and they took the last empty high table, by the wall under a ship’s wheel, five on four stools, with Jack standing.

---

“Round five,” said the quizmaster, into the microphone. “The Realm. Ten questions. Question one. How many polities are there in the United Kingdom of America, not counting the Columbia District or the Territory?”

“Forty-nine,” said Freddie, Theo, Alexander and Lukas, quietly, all at once.

Jack looked at them.

“How do you know that?”

“I learned it at school,” said Theo.

“I learned it at the table,” said Freddie.

“I learned it from my father,” said Alexander.

“I learned it from him,” said Lukas, and nodded at Alexander, and wrote it down.

“Question two. What is the capital of the March of Arizona?”

“Phoenix,” said Jack, with tremendous confidence, before anybody else could, and they let him write it, and he wrote it, and underlined it twice, and was happy for the rest of the round.

“Question three. The King holds how many Crown capacities?”

Freddie reached for the pen. Theo put his hand flat on it.

“No,” said Theo.

“I know the answer.”

“That’s the problem.”

“It’s fourteen.”

“I know it’s fourteen. Everybody in here knows it’s fourteen. The whole bar’s writing fourteen.” Theo pushed the pen across to Lukas. “If you write it, it’ll be in your writing, and somebody’ll pick up the sheet, and it’ll be in a frame by Christmas.”

Lukas wrote 14.

“Question four. The German Emperor is the King’s cousin. What is his name?”

There was a silence at the table under the ship’s wheel.

Alexander looked straight ahead, at the wall, at an old chart of somewhere with sea monsters on it, with his hands on his knees.

Lukas wrote something.

Theo leaned over and read it. It said Alex.

“You can’t put Alex,” said Theo.

“It is his name.”

“It’s not the answer. They’ll want the whole thing. With the number.”

Lukas crossed out Alex and wrote Alexander I, and then, after a moment’s thought, crossed out the I and wrote the First, and then crossed that out and wrote I again, and the sheet was beginning to look like a ransom note.

“Question five,” said the quizmaster, and looked at his card, and smiled a little, because it was a nice question and he knew it. “How old is King George V?”

“Eighteen,” said all five of them.

They said it too fast. They said it together, out loud, at a volume that was not a whisper, the way you say your own telephone number, and the tables near them turned round.

A woman at the next table, with a pen behind her ear and a team of four retired men, looked at them with interest.

“Somebody’s a fan,” said the quizmaster, into the microphone, and the room laughed, and Theo felt his ears go, and kept his eyes on the answer sheet, and beside him, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Freddie looking at the ship’s wheel with complete composure, like a man who has never had an age in his life.

“Write it down, Gloucestershire,” said the quizmaster, because Jack was still standing up.

Jack wrote it down.

---

The woman with the pen behind her ear leaned across between the questions.

“You look like somebody,” she said, to Freddie.

Theo stopped breathing.

“All the time,” said Freddie.

“No, really. You look exactly like…” She narrowed her eyes. She clicked her fingers, slowly, trying to get it. “The kid. On the news. The tall one. The one with the plaque this morning. The water works.”

“I get that a lot,” said Freddie.

“You really look like him.”

“He’s taller,” said Freddie.

The woman looked at him for a moment longer. Then she shook her head and turned back to her team of retired men, and said something to them, and one of them looked round at Freddie and said, “Nah,” with great certainty, and went back to his sheet.

Theo breathed out.

“He’s taller,” said Jack, very quietly, into his pint, and could not stop his shoulders going, and had to put the pint down.

“He is,” said Freddie. “On television. They stand you on a box.”

---

They came second.

They came second out of eleven teams, which was, the quizmaster said, reading out the scores, remarkable for a team that had joined for two rounds and was named after a principle. They had got all ten on the Realm, including the German Emperor’s name, which the quizmaster accepted after holding the sheet up to the light. They had got four out of ten on the last round, which was films, and none at all on sport, because sport had been round four and they had missed it, and Jack had answered the only cricket question in the history of Castaways from across the room, out loud, before anybody asked him, and been told it did not count because they had not been playing yet.

“Facts don’t count,” said Lukas, to Jack, with deep satisfaction.

“That’s my fact.”

“Then it especially does not count.”

The team of retired men won. The woman with the pen behind her ear came over to shake their hands, because it was the first time in four years, she said, that anybody had come close, and she looked at Freddie once more on the way, and shook her head again, and went.

---

At a quarter past nine they ate.

Freddie ordered off the menu without looking at the menu, because he had seen one name on it as they came in and had been waiting for an hour and a half to order it. He ordered a toasted sub called the Pruitt, with turkey and salami and mozzarella and black olives, and when it came he looked at it for a while before he ate it.

Theo knew why. Theo was the only one at the table who knew why. Mrs Pruitt had taught them geometry. Mrs Pruitt had stood in the hall at Ellicott on a Tuesday afternoon in October with an email in her hand and gone pink and asked Freddie whether he wanted to come back in, and he had, and she had gone on with the angle in a semicircle.

“It’s named after a sheriff,” said Theo. “It says. On the menu. A sheriff in the twenties.”

“I know.”

“It’s not named after her.”

“I know,” said Freddie, and ate the Pruitt, all of it, and it was very good, and he did not explain to anybody else at the table, and nobody asked.

Theo drank the last of his pint. He had made it last an hour and ten minutes, which was slow. His father would have approved, and would not have said so.

He looked at his phone, for the time, and for the bus, and not for anything else.

The phone had been on silent since Camelback Road. There was a number on the screen, in a small red circle, that he did not look at. He looked at the time. Twenty-five past nine. He looked at the timetable, which he had downloaded the night before at the hotel, because you always downloaded the timetable, in case.

“There’s one north at nine thirty-four,” he said. “From the stop on the corner. It goes up toward Scottsdale. Then we change.”

“To where?” said Jack.

“Wherever’s next.”

“You don’t know where’s next?”

“I know where’s last,” said Theo. “Freddie’s got a list. It’s the order in between I’m doing.”

They paid. Jack paid for the pints, and Freddie paid for the lemonades and the Pruitt with coins, a handful of them, out of his pocket, and put them on the bar in a stack, and the barman swept them into his hand without looking at them, and said goodnight, and happy birthday again to Theo, and Theo said thank you, and meant it so much that his ears went again.

They went out into the heat.

It came at them in the doorway like an oven opened. The horse had gone. The octopus glowed over the door with its backwards S. It was half past nine at night and the thermometer outside the dry cleaner’s across the road said 101, and Jack looked at it and said, “No,” as if it were a person.

Theo was the last out. Behind him the door was swinging shut, and in the last of the gap, as it went, he saw the barman at the till with the coins still in his hand. He was looking at them now. He had turned the top one over with his thumb, under the light, and he was looking at it. Then he looked up, through the gap, past Theo, at the tallest of the backs going away across the car park.

The door shut.

Theo looked up the road for the bus.

It was coming. He could see the lights of it, a long way off, and the number on the front, and it was the right number, and he put his hand up, the way his father had taught him, so the driver would know you meant it.

It did not occur to him until much later to look at which side of the road he was standing on.