The Cane & the Crowd

I turned forty-seven in March, and by June my company had decided I should move to Denver, effective September first. Regional sales rep for a medical supply company sounds boring, and it mostly is, but it pays the bills and it got me a promotion I didn't ask for. The catch was the transfer. New city, new territory, new everything, effective the first of September.

So when Raul Ruiz messaged me about our twenty-fifth college reunion, I said yes before I really thought about it. I figured it was my last chance to be the fun version of myself for a while. The version who stays out late and laughs too loud and doesn't check his email on a Saturday. Once September hit, I'd be the guy eating dinner alone in a Denver apartment, learning new highway names.

Raul had been planning this thing since January. He and his husband Sebastian own a tattoo parlor in town, and they'd talked somebody into letting them use a refurbished barn at the edge of town. Fairy lights, hay bales, the whole deal. Raul promised it would be memorable, and with Raul it always is.

I was twenty-two the last time I saw most of these people, and now I'm forty-seven, and they're all pushing fifty, which nobody warns you about. I'll be honest, I expected it to feel sad. It didn't. It felt like getting a hall pass from my own life for one night.

I pulled my rental car up the gravel drive around eight on a Friday, and the barn was already glowing. Music coming through the open doors, string lights everywhere, and a big hand-painted banner over the entrance that said WELCOME BACK, CLASS OF OLD. Raul's humor all over that.

Raul found me before I found him. He's forty-eight now, still compact and loud, still hugs like he means it. His husband Sebastian was a step behind him, forty-nine, taller, quieter, with a beer in each hand like he'd appointed himself bartender.

"Tom! You came!" Raul shouted, which was unnecessary, since I was three feet away.

"I came. You promised hay bales and you delivered hay bales."

"Twenty-five years, man. You look good. Denver is getting a handsome man, tell them that."

Sebastian handed me a beer. "Raul has been talking about this party since January. If you have a bad time, do not tell him."

"I heard that," Raul said.

"You were meant to," Sebastian said, and clinked his bottle against mine.

We caught up near the snack table. Raul told me about the shop, and I told him about the transfer, and he made a face like I'd insulted his cooking.

"Denver? What's in Denver?"

"A job, apparently."

"Two years single and they ship you off. No, no. This weekend you don't think about it. Tonight you're just Tom from the old days."

That sounded fine to me, honestly. That was the entire reason for coming, though I did not state it so directly.

It was maybe an hour in when the interesting one showed up. I heard him before I saw him, because there was a burst of laughter from the far end of the barn and Raul lit up and grabbed my sleeve.

"Oh good, Jacques came. Come on, you have to meet him. You two were never close, you won't even remember him."

"Then why do I have to meet him?"

"Because he's Jacques," Raul said, like that explained anything. It sort of did, later.

Jacques turned out to be a tall man of forty-seven, silver coming in at his temples, wearing a linen shirt and holding a wooden cane with a carved serpent coiled around the handle. The serpent's head was polished smooth, like a lot of hands had rested on it over the years.

"Tom Delgado," Raul announced. "Jacques, he was in your stats class, junior year."

Jacques squinted at me, then grinned. "The guy who fell asleep and knocked over the water bottle."

"Oh no!"

"Oh yes. Every Tuesday. Professor Werner started leaving a towel under your seat."

I laughed, because it sounded exactly like something I would have done. "That's me, then. Sorry about Tuesdays."

"Water under the bridge," he said, and wiggled the cane, and the serpent's head nodded like it agreed with him.

"You do a lot of talking for a stick," I said.

"She's a diva," he said. "Twenty-five years of carrying my weight around, you'd get opinions too."

I should mention here that Jacques does ventriloquism for a living. Actual professional ventriloquism, plus tattoo art on the side, which is a combination I did not see coming. He ended up doing a short bit for a crowd that had gathered, using the cane as his dummy. He'd throw his voice down into the serpent's head, and it would sass him back.

"You never call," the snake complained, in this cranky little voice that seemed to come from the wooden handle itself.

"I'm here now."

"For a reunion. Twenty-five years and you bring me to a barn. There's no dust in here. How am I supposed to be atmospheric?"

The crowd was dying. Raul was wheezing. Even Sebastian, who struck me as hard to crack, had his shoulders shaking. The snake called Raul "the one with the loud shirt" and called Sebastian "the sensible one, God help him," and both of them took it like men who'd heard worse.

I stood at the edge of it with my beer and thought, well, here's somebody I didn't expect. I kept watching his hands on the cane, the way he could make it seem alive with just a tilt of his wrist. I don't know what I expected from this reunion, but it wasn't a ventriloquist with a snake cane making me laugh until my face hurt.

Afterward he came and found me by the drinks table.

"So. Tuesdays. Water bottles. You going to apologize again, or are we past that?"

"We're past that. What have you been doing for twenty-five years?"

"Wandering. I left home at twenty-two and never really landed anywhere permanent. Theaters, cruise ships, a bad year in Reno. I tattoo in the winters at Raul and Sebastian's shop."

"Reno?"

"Don't ask about Reno," he said, and I didn't.

We talked for a long stretch after that. He was easy to talk to, which caught me off guard. I told him about the transfer, and he made the same face Raul had made, only with more eyebrows.

"Denver," he said. "Flat, cold, far."

"You've been?"

"Once. There was a puppet festival." He waved a hand. "Long story, also involving Reno, don't ask."

The party thinned out around midnight. People drifted off to their hotels and guest rooms, and the music got lower, and the fairy lights seemed brighter with fewer bodies under them. Raul and Sebastian were wrangling chairs and saying long goodnights to everybody, taking their time about it.

Jacques leaned on his cane and looked at me sideways. "So where are you staying?"

"The motor lodge on Route nine."

"Charming. You get the road noise all night."

"I noticed."

"I, on the other hand," he said, tapping the cane on the barn floor, "am staying in the loft above this barn. Raul's idea. Thin walls, one mattress, a window that looks out on the loudest road in the county. But there's a bottle of good scotch up there and only one glass, which is poor planning on my part."

"Sounds like it."

"I'm inviting you up for a nightcap, Tom. Drink, talk, whatever happens after that is its own conversation. No pressure either way. I've survived forty-seven years without pressuring anybody and I don't intend to start in a hay barn."

I looked at him. He looked back, patient, the snake's head resting under his thumb. I had a transfer, an apartment hunt, a whole new life waiting in September. And I had one last Friday night in the town where I'd been young, standing in front of a man who made wooden snakes talk.

"One glass between two people," I said. "That's bad planning."

"Terrible. We'll have to solve it somehow. Coming up?"

"Yeah," I said. "I'm coming up."

He grinned and led the way to the narrow stairs at the back of the barn, cane tapping every third step like it was counting.

The loft was exactly as advertised. One mattress on a platform, a stubby couch, a window rattling every time a truck went by on the road below. A suitcase stood open in the corner like it hadn't fully committed to being unpacked. He was right about the road noise. You could hear every truck in the county.

He poured the scotch into the one glass, a proper amount, not stingy, and handed it to me first.

"I'll drink after you," he said. "I'm not sharing germs with a man I haven't kissed yet."

I nearly choked. "That confident?"

"Optimistic. Different thing." He sat down on the couch, stretched his bad leg out, and set the cane against the arm within reach. "So. Denver. When do you leave?"

"September first. Transfer's effective then, and they want me out there for two weeks in August to shadow the territory." I took a sip. The scotch was good, smoky, better than anything I kept at home. "My whole life is currently boxes in a garage and a calendar full of goodbyes."

"That sounds as if you have already made up your mind."

"I did decide. In June, when the promotion came with a map attached." I sat down across from him, knee almost touching his. "I keep waiting to feel excited about it. It hasn't shown up yet."

"Maybe it's flying in late. Airports are a mess these days."

I laughed, and he looked pleased with himself, the way he had looked pleased with himself all night, and I realized I liked being the reason for it.

He told me about performing on cruise ships, which I hadn't known was a thing. Apparently cruise ships have theaters now, or had one, the one he worked, before a generator fire ended that chapter.

"Seventy percent of the passengers wanted an anchor," he said. "The other thirty wanted a name they'd regret by Tuesday."

"Did you talk them out of the names?"

"The good ones, sure. The bad ones I inked and took the money. A man's got to eat on a boat." He rolled up his sleeve to show me a lighthouse on his forearm, the detail