Lollapalooza

The bottle came down from the north in the spring of the bad year, in the pack of a man named Vargas who had walked four hundred miles on snowshoes and lost the small toe on his left foot to do it. He would not say where the bottle was made. He would not say what was in it. He set up at the back of the cantina in a town of cold nights and small ambitions, a town that lived on the high desert and on the patience of its women, and he charged what he liked. One glass per customer per evening. The line at his door went down the street and around the corner of the dry-goods store and ended at the hitching rail outside the assayer’s office.

The drink was smoke and the colour of a watermelon held up to a lamp. It tasted of fire built from green wood and of fruit pickled in brine, sweet and sour and salt and the slow heat of a tonic root beneath. The first man who drank it sat down on the floor of the cantina and wept for half an hour without saying why. The second laughed. The third went home and told his wife he loved her, which he had not said in eleven years, and she put a knife on the table between them and asked him what he had done. He had done nothing. He had only drunk the drink.

The mayor was a careful man named Salazar who had governed the town for nine years without distinction and without scandal, which in that country was a kind of distinction. He sent his clerk north on a mule with a satchel of silver and instructions to find the still and buy the still and bring the still back. The clerk did not return. The mule came back in the third week, alone, with the satchel empty and a brown stain on the saddle blanket that the stable boy washed out without asking.

Salazar went himself in the fourth week. He took his pistol and his good horse and a letter of credit from the bank in the territorial capital. He was seen on the road north as far as the salt flats. After the salt flats he was not seen. His good horse was found in the autumn by a shepherd, grazing along a creek with the saddle still on and the letter of credit still in the saddlebag, soaked through and illegible.

Vargas sold his last glass on a Tuesday in November. He turned the bottle upside down on the bar and held it there for a long moment so that the men could see there was nothing left, not a drop, not a film. Then he walked out of the cantina and got on a horse and rode south, and the men in the cantina watched him go through the window and did not speak.

By the time the second winter came, the town had gone back to itself. The women were patient. The nights were cold. The wells did not run dry and they did not run sweet. Most of the men who had tasted the drink never spoke of it again. They married the women they were going to marry. They buried the parents they were going to bury. They got old.

The ones who did speak of it spoke of nothing else. There were four of them at first. Then three. Then two. The last was a blacksmith named Encinas, who lived to ninety-one and who, on the last evening of his life, sitting on the porch of his daughter’s house with a tin cup of water in his hand, told his great-grandson that there had been one night, in the bad year, when he had tasted a thing that had made the rest of his life feel like a long walk home from somewhere he should not have left.

The great-grandson wrote it down. He did not understand it. He kept the paper.