The Shining

fingers over the slick plastic dustcovers, trying to imagine how it must have been on that
hot August night in 1945, the war won, the future stretching ahead so various and new, like a land of dreams. The bright and particolored Japanese lanterns hung the whole length of the circular drive, the golden-yellow light spilling from these high windows that were now drifted over with snow. Men
and women in costume, here a glittering princess, there a high-booted cavalier, flashing jewelry and flashing wit every
where, dancing, liquor flowing freely, first wine and then cocktails and then perhaps boilermakers the level of conver
sation going up and up and up until the jolly cry rang out from the bandmaster’s podium, the cry of “Unmask! Unmask!”
(And the Red Death held sway…)
He found himself standing on the other side of the dining room, just outside the stylized batwing doors of the Colorado Lounge where, on that night in 1945, all the booze would have been free.
(Belly up to the bar, pardner, the drinks’re on the house.)
He stepped through the batwings and into the deep, folded shadows of the bar. And a strange thing occurred. He had been in here before, once to check the inventory sheet Ullman had left, and he knew the place had been stripped clean. The shelves were totally bare. But now, lit only murkily by the light which filtered through from the dining room (which was itself only dimly lit because of the snow blocking the windows), he thought he saw ranks and ranks of bottles twinkling mutedly behind the bar, and syphons, and even beer dripping from the spigots of all three highly polished taps. Yes, he could even smell beer, that damp and fermented and yeasty odor, no different from the smell that had hung finely misted around his father’s face every night when he came home from work.
Eyes widening, he fumbled for the wall switch, and the low, intimate barlighting came on, circles of twenty-watt bulbs emplanted on the tops of the three wagon-wheel chandeliers overhead.
The shelves were all empty. They had not even as yet gathered a good coat of dust. The beer taps were dry, as were the chrome drains beneath them. To his left and right, the velvet-upholstered booths stood like men with high backs, each one designed to give a maximum of privacy to the couple inside. Straight ahead, across the red-carpeted floor, forty barstools stood around the horseshoe-shaped bar. Each stool was upholstered in leather and embossed with cattle brands-Circle H, Bar D Bar (that was fitting), Rocking W, Lazy B.
He approached it, giving his head a little shake of bewilderment as he did so. It was like that day on the playground when… but there was no sense in thinking about that. Still he could have sworn he had seen those bottles, vaguely, it was true, the way you see the darkened shapes of furniture in a room where the curtains have been drawn. Mild glints on glass. The only thing that remained was that smell of beer, and Jack knew that was a smell that faded into the woodwork of every bar in the world after a certain period of time, not to be eradicated by any cleaner invented. Yet the smell here seemed sharp… almost fresh.
He sat down on one of the stools and propped his elbows on the bar’s leathercushioned edge. At his left hand was a bowl for peanuts-now empty, of course. The first bar he’d been in for nineteen months and the damned thing was dry-just his luck. All the same, a bitterly powerful wave of nostalgia swept over him, and the physical craving for a drink seemed to work itself up from his belly to his throat to his mouth and nose, shriveling and wrinkling the tissues as it went, making them cry out for something wet and long and cold.
He glanced at the shelves again in wild, irrational hope but the shelves were just as empty as before. He grinned in pain and frustration. His fists, clenching slowly, made minute scratchings on the bar’s leather-padded edge.
“Hi, Lloyd,” he said. “A little slow tonight, isn’t it?”
Lloyd said it was. Lloyd asked him what it would be.
“Now I’m really glad you asked me that,” Jack said, “really glad. Because I happen to have two twenties and two tens in my wallet and I was afraid they’d be sitting there until sometime next April. There isn’t a Seven-Eleven around here, would you believe it? And I thought they had Seven-Elevens on the fucking moon.”
Lloyd sympathized.
“So here’s what,” Jack said. “You set me up an even twenty martinis. An even twenty, just like that, kazang. One for every month I’ve been on the wagon and one to grow on. You can do that, can’t you? You aren’t too busy?”
Lloyd said he wasn’t busy at all.
“Good man. You line those martians up right along the bar and I’m going to take them down, one by