The bar had become strange. Hootie looked around, bewildered. There was Manny: same. And the outlines of furniture: same. The JM + LP carved deep into the corner of the table at which she sat: same. But didn’t it feel as though they were on a great, rocking ship? Sheltered in the cabin while the sea roared outside, slapped against their hulls? The flames flickered, swayed, with the rolling of the surf. If Manny was experiencing the same offset reality, he gave no sign. His wide jaw was set, serious. Thick and unruly eyebrows gave his face a commanding presence in the candlelight. A mole like a tick next to his ear. Hootie tried to dismiss the notion that she had never truly seen Manny’s face before.
Hootie slept in the back room. Carl had offered it free of charge when she began to complain about the commute. At first, it was only late nights. And then it became most nights. And then her rent in Flagstaff was raised, and wasn’t it a good thing to give up driving? She was doing her environmental part. And why not save her money? One day she’d need it. Manny also slept in the back room, had taken up residence there some time after she did. It was, in a way, like camp. Hootie and Manny had small cots, army-style fold-out beds on either side of the far wall, a small window in between them so coated with grime they didn’t need a curtain to blot out the morning. They slept amid cans of baked beans (listed as homemade on the menu), crates of condiments, untapped kegs of beer, stacks of toilet paper, of dish soap, of glass tumblers to replace the ones that would soon be broken. Their tiny TV was propped up on an industrial-sized box of instant noodles.
A wooden crucifix was nailed to the wall above Manny’s bed. He had put it there some years ago, seemingly apropos of nothing. One day the wall was bare and the next, Jesus nailed to his cross was there staring at Hootie in mournful agony. Since the day of Jesus’s arrival, whether Manny was Tuesday-sober or Friday-flushed, before bed he would clasp his hands to his chest, collapse to his knees, and pray, sometimes in silence and sometimes not. “Forgive me…” he would begin, while Hootie lied in her cot, turned towards the wall, offering as much privacy as one could in such a room. “Forgive me Lord, for I have sinned…” Hootie supposed that Manny was her closest friend.
The other staff came and went. Sometimes for a season, sometimes a year. They lived along strange Route 66 off-shoots, down dirt roads, in a mobile home without its wheels, in an apartment atop a gas station, in a survivalist bunker, in a yurt. They’d pull up for shifts in old trucks, decrepit SUVs, roaring motorcycles, one-working-headlight sedans, everything the color of everything else, the color of the desert.
Dan, who had worked at the bar for two years, had given Hootie her name on her first shift.
“Is she hot at least?” Not-Yet-Hootie had asked when Dan explained how she bore a resemblance to the blonde member of the band Hootie and the Blowfish. Dan nearly threw up with laughter.
Carl lived in a proper old rancher some ways down the highway. Hootie had been to Carl’s house a few times, had driven Carl home after staff parties or his birthday, on the rare occasions he allowed himself too much to drink. Hootie didn’t mind taking Carl home. He was kind, quiet. She would pat Penny on her dopey, yellow head. Once, on a New Year’s morning some years ago, Carl had told her that he used to be a competitive Irish dancer in his youth—that he still danced sometimes, in his office.
For a while, Hootie kept a pinned-up calendar by her bed. At the end of each shift, she would add a large red X, never missing a day, not a single one, until Manny had asked: “What are you counting to?”
“I don’t know,” she said. The next morning, she dumped the calendar in the bin.
Hootie often said to Manny, as a joke, as an explanation, as a serious concern, that they had fallen out of time, those trapped at the bar, that they were in some realm of purgatory, a metronome of monotony. “You wait,” Manny would say, spatula pointing. “Zombies… Nukes… Government goes big brother and starts killing us… Killing us more than they already do, right? Everybody will be coming down here. This is the place to be.”