Puggy looked to his right. Eddie and Snake were both looking at the TV, looking interested, like it was showing naked women, instead of pickup trucks.
"Hey," said Puggy.
Eddie and Snake kept staring at the screen.
"Hey," repeated Puggy.
Snake kept staring at the screen. Eddie turned his head to look at Puggy, a hard look.
"You got a problem, chief?" he said.
"Gimme it back," said Puggy.
"What?" said Eddie, screwing up his face, trying to make an expression like he had no idea what Puggy meant, but overdoing it.
"I said gimme it back," said Puggy.
"What the fuck're you talking about?" said Eddie. Now Snake was looking, too, both of them starting to turn toward Puggy on their stools.
Puggy knew, from experience, that this was one of those situations where he could get hit. He knew he should give it up. He knew that, but, shit, ten dollars.
"I said," he said, "gimme…»
Eddie's punch didn't hurt so much, because he was still a whole stool away, and the punch caught Puggy on the shoulder. But when Puggy fell over backward to the floor, that did hurt. Then Snake was coming around from behind Eddie, stomping with the heel of his flip-flopped foot, trying to get Puggy in the face. Puggy curled up and pressed his face in where the bar met the floor, not planning to fight, just trying to ride it out. The floor smelled like puke.
Snake was making his fourth attempt to stomp Puggy's face when there was a ringing «bong» sound and Snake went down. This was because the bartender had hit him in the head from behind with an aluminum softball bat. The bartender had never played baseball, but he had a nice, efficient swing. He preferred the aluminum bat because the wood ones tended to break.
With Snake down, the bartender turned to Eddie, who was backing toward the door, hands up in front of him, the peacemaker again.
"Listen," Eddie said. "This ain't your problem."
"YOU are problem," said the bartender, taking a step forward. You could tell he expected Eddie to run, but Eddie didn't. This is because Eddie could see that Snake — who could take a bat to the head better than most — was getting to his feet behind the bartender, picking up one of Puggy's longneck beer bottles. The bartender didn't see this, but Puggy saw it, and for no good reason he could think of, even later, he rolled over and kicked out hard, his left foot catching Snake's right leg just above the ankle. The ankle made a cracking noise, and Snake, saying "unh," went down again, dropping the bottle. The bartender spun back around, saw Snake on the door, spun back to see Eddie going out the door, then spun back to Snake again. Leaning over, holding the bat like a shovel, he gave Snake a hard poke in the ribs.
"Out!" he said.
"He broke my ankle!" said Snake.
"I break your head," said the bartender. He gripped the end of the bat, cocked it for a swing, waited.
"OK OK OK," said Snake. Using a stool for support and keeping an eye on the bartender, he pulled himself up, then hobbled to the door. When he got there, he turned and pointed at Puggy, still lying under the bar.
"When I see you," Snake said, "you're dead." Then he pushed open the door and hobbled outside. Puggy noticed that it was dark.
The bartender watched Snake leave, then turned to Puggy.
"Out," he said.
"Look, mister," said Puggy, "I…»
"Out," said the bartender, gripping the bat.
Puggy got to his feet, noticing, as he did, that he had peed his pants. He looked on the bar. His voting money was gone, all of it. Eddie must have grabbed it while Snake was trying to stomp him.
"Oh, man," said Puggy.
"Out," said the bartender.
Puggy was starting toward the door when, from the other end of the bar, the bearded man, who had watched the fight, not moving from his stool, said, in English, "You can stay."
The bartender looked at the bearded man, then shrugged and relaxed his grip on the bat.
Puggy said, "I got no money. They took all my money."
The bearded man said, "Is OK. No charge."
Puggy said, "OK."
He was drinking his second free beer, feeling better again about how the day was going, except for peeing his pants, when the door opened. He flinched, thinking it might be Snake come back to kill him, but it was a guy in a suit, carrying a briefcase. The suit went to the far end of the bar and started talking foreign with the other two men. Then the bearded man called down to Puggy.
"You want to make five dollars?"
"Sure," said Puggy. This was some town, Miami.
It turned out that the job was moving a wooden crate out of the trunk of a Mercedes parked outside.
The crate was very heavy, but the bearded man and the man in the suit did not help. Puggy and the bartender, breathing hard, lugged the crate inside, past the bar, past the toilet, down a hallway to a room that the bearded man unlocked, which took a while because there were three locks. The room was bigger than Puggy thought it would be, and there were other crates inside, different sizes. They set the crate down and went back out. The bearded man locked the door and gave Puggy a five-dollar bill.
"You are strong," he said.
"I guess," said Puggy. It was true, although a lot of people didn't see it because he was also short.
"Come back tomorrow," said the bearded man. "Maybe I have another job for you."
That was how Puggy began his employment at the Jolly Jackal. Usually he came to work in the late afternoon and stayed until Leo (that was the bartender's name) or John (that was the bearded man's name) told him to go home. Some days they didn't need him to do anything, but they let him stay anyway. When they did need him to work, it was always moving heavy crates — sometimes from the Mercedes to the room; sometimes from the room to the Mercedes. Each time, when it was done, John gave him a five. One time, Puggy asked what was in the crates. John just said, "Equipment."
Mainly, Puggy watched TV and drank beer, which Leo almost never charged him for. It was like a dream. If Puggy had known jobs were like this, he would have tried to get one a long time ago.
At night, when they told him to leave, he went back to his tree. He had found the tree on his third night in Coconut Grove. He'd spent the first two nights in a park near the water, but some kind of nasty ants were biting him, plus, on the second night, from a distance, he'd seen Eddie and Snake go past, heading toward the dinghy dock. Snake was limping.
So Puggy went looking for another place. He discovered that, if you walked just a short way in Coconut Grove, you could be in a whole different kind of neighborhood, a rich people's neighborhood, with big houses that had walls around them and driveway gates that opened by a motor. There were strange trees everywhere, big, complicated trees with roots going every which way and vines all over them and branches that hung way out over the street. Puggy thought it looked like a jungle.
He found a perfect tree to live in. It was just inside a rich person's wall, but across a big, densely vegetated yard from the house, so it was private. Puggy got into the tree by climbing the wall; he was a natural climber, even after many beers. About twenty feet up in the tree, where three massive limbs branched off from the trunk, there was a rickety, mossy wooden platform, a kids' treehouse from years before. Puggy fixed it up with some cardboard on the platform and a piece of plastic, from a construction site, that he could drape over the top when it rained. Sometimes he heard people talking in the house, but whoever they were, they never came back to this end of the yard.
Late at night, there was always music coming from one end of the house. It was some kind of music with a flute, soft, coming through the jungle to Puggy. He liked to lie there and listen to it. He was very happy the way things were going, both with his career and with his tree. It was the most secure, most structured, least turbulent existence he had ever known. It lasted for almost three weeks.