4

BEWARE OF BARS BEARING JACKALOPES

The first building they saw as they left the desert was a bar. A bar aptly named the Watering Hole. It stood alone, a dusty clapboard one-story structure ten miles from the middle of nowhere. Long rectangular shafts of yellow light cut across the dirt from the windows. Athena and Hermes hadn’t seen the bar on their way in, because they hadn’t passed it. After their encounter with Demeter, they hadn’t turned around the way they had come, but kept on walking and crossed over the top of her. It had taken four hours to get off the skin, and another six before they came across anything but cactus and sagebrush. Dusk had come and gone, and Hermes had wrung their water skin dry five miles ago. As they approached the building, Athena stopped short, and Hermes drew up alongside her. A light breeze kicked up from the west and chilled them, making the hairs on the back of their necks stiffen.

“Tell me you have money,” he said.

“Of course I do,” she replied. “But if I didn’t, I’d drink that place dry and burn it down.”

Hermes laughed. “Now you sound like me.”

Inside the bar, they were surprised to find a handful of patrons and much less dust. The floorboards still squeaked under their feet, and on one wall there was a mounted head of some rabbit/deer monstrosity labeled a “jackalope,” but the bar was polished hardwood, and a stone chimney held a small fire. To Athena it felt like coming home. It was primitive and firelit, and even the ridiculous jackalope felt familiar, a lame contemporary of the old creatures: the Chimera, the Minotaur, the Sphinx.

When they sat upon the swiveling stools, exhausted and confused, only the last remnants of their gods’ pride kept them from resting their foreheads on the bar. Not that anyone would have noticed. The patrons, all men, ignored them completely, immersed in their beers and in the baseball game playing on the surprisingly nice flat-screen TV. Behind the bar, the bartender absently dried glasses with a white terry towel, his eyes trained on the game while he rolled a toothpick in the corner of his mouth.

“Yo,” Hermes called out irritably. “Can we get two waters?”

“There’s a two-drink minimum,” the bartender replied without looking over.

“That wasn’t posted anywhere,” Hermes grumbled, but Athena set her pack up on the bar.

“Two waters and two Bud Lights then,” she said.

Hermes’ eyes widened. “Bud Light? I’d rather dehydrate. How about a Rolling Rock?”

“Bottle okay?”

“Fine.”

“I’m going to need to see some IDs.”

They flipped their wallets open and tapped sand out onto the floor. The bartender checked them, but it was just for show; he didn’t seem to care if they were fake as long as they were IDs.

“Let me see that.” Hermes snatched Athena’s license out of her hand. “Twenty-one. Mine too. You should change yours so people don’t think we’re twins.”

“Why should I change mine? I don’t look twenty-two. You change yours.”

“You barely look nineteen. That’s not what I meant. But with the way you are…”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

There was a sharp hiss and a pop as the cap was taken off of a beer. A few seconds later, the bartender set the Rolling Rock and a frosty mug of Bud down in front of them. Athena tossed a ten onto the counter and he spared her a wink. She didn’t think he’d bring back change, and she didn’t have the energy to argue. In days gone by she might have smote him, turned him into a tree or a statue or something. Glory days.

She took a long drink of her beer. He’d forgotten to bring the waters, but it didn’t matter. The Bud was ice cold, the carbonation a satisfying burn in her throat. Behind them, a meager cheer went up from two or three patrons as apparently something good happened to whatever baseball team was being rooted for.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Hermes asked after half of his Rolling Rock was sitting comfortably in his stomach.

She nudged the roof of her mouth with her tongue. The quill of the owl feather was more defined, but still several days from poking through the skin. When it did, she wouldn’t be able to help herself from yanking it free, drawing blood and leaving a ragged, stringy wound. Then it would probably turn into a canker sore because she wouldn’t be able to stop sucking at it.

She shook her head, but said, “I guess we have to.” Their voices were low, cloaked in that way that they still knew how to do, so that people could hear that they were talking but if pressed would never be able to remember just what it was they had been saying.