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A man wearing a suit with too much padding in the shoulders came in and sat on the next stool. He was about my age and looked like some sort of sharpshooter, a small-time gambler, maybe, or pimp.

“Do you mind if I pour one out of that bottle, Mac?” he asked.

“You can pour it in your hair if you want to,” I said.

He poured a drink into a glass the bartender set in front of him.

“Hiya, Jack, you big devil, how’s tricks?” he greeted the bartender. They seemed to be old pals. I ignored their conversation and lit a cigarette. Square Shoulders poured another drink out of the bottle. Jack stopped in front of me.

“That’ll be eighty cents,” he said, spreading his big freckled paws on the bar.

“What’ll be eighty cents?”

“Them two drinks.” He nodded toward Square Shoulders’ empty glass.

“All right,” I said. “It’ll be eighty cents. So what?”

“Eighty cents on you. Pay up.”

“You know what you can do with your eighty cents,” I said.

“Now, wait a minute, Blondy,” Square Shoulders said. “Maybe you just don’t understand what you’re getting into. Jack here’s a regular guy, but you don’t want to get wrong with him. Ain’t that right, Jack?”

“You gonna pay?” Jack asked. I could see that the way I was feeling, a little of Jack was going to go a long way. His conversation palled on you after the first few bars.

“Come on now, Blondy,” Square Shoulders said, putting his hand on my arm. “You asked me to have them drinks with you, didn’t you?”

“You can buy your own drinks, you goddamned pimp,” I said. I put my hand in his face and pushed. He went over backward with the stool on top of him.

Jack was coming around the end of the bar and I got up off the stool. He looked big, and I knew he probably had twenty pounds on me. But tending bar doesn’t do much for you, and he had a roll of fat around his belly. At least, I hoped it was fat.

I hit him first and this seemed to surprise him a lot. He’d no doubt been bouncing drunks and barroom brawlers for so long he’d forgotten what it was like to have somebody get under his guard. He came on in, though, and jabbed me. For a man his size he was fast, plenty fast.

He hit me a couple of times and I found out something else about him, the reason he was tending bar in a joint like this instead of fighting. For all his size, he couldn’t punch his way out of a cardboard box. I let him hit me again and then moved in close and started slugging the roll of fat around his middle. That was where he lived, all right. I could hear him suck in wind every time I landed. Square Shoulders got up and bolted past us toward the door and I stuck out a foot and he fell into the door on his face. He finally made it outside with blood running into his mouth. Of course, while I was doing this, Jack let me have it and knocked me down. You can’t have any hobbies or side lines when you’re fighting with a pro, even a poor one.

When the cops got there the place was a mess. They got us separated and put me into a patrol wagon. My face was covered with blood but I couldn’t be sure how much of it was mine and how much Jack’s. He had cut my face up pretty badly in several places and I had a very sore left hand.

The next morning in court it was ten dollars and costs for drunk and disorderly, which was light considering the total damage to the place, and I gathered that Jack’s establishment wasn’t too highly thought of and nobody worried much about what happened to it. I refused to pay the fine. I don’t know why. It didn’t make sense, even to me, for the hotel room would cost me more than the fine by the time I got out, but I felt bad and didn’t care much anyway.

It must have been around two P.M. When the jailer came around and unlocked the door and motioned to me. “You, Big Boy,” he said.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“Turnin’ you out. Your fine’s been paid.”

I grunted and went with him. He was crazy, I supposed, or he had his guests mixed up, because there wasn’t anybody in Galveston who’d be paying my fine. Or anyone who even knew I was in jail, for that matter. But that was his funeral, not mine.

At the desk they handed back my knife and watch and an envelope with my money in it. There was about eighty dollars.

“Some sport,” the sergeant said as he watched me count it. “You with a roll like that and letting your wife pay your fine.”

I wondered whose wife was going to be disappointed when the old man didn’t get home. “Wait till I take down my hair,” I said, “and we’ll both have a good cry.”

“Beat it, wise guy, before we run you in again, on a vag.”

I beat it. I was walking down the steps outside when I saw her. She was diagonally across the street in the doorway of a cheap restaurant where she could stay almost hidden and still watch the steps of the police station. I made no sign that I had noticed her and went through an elaborate business of lighting the last cigarette I had while I tried to decide what to do. If I waved and started toward her she might try to get away, since it was obvious she didn’t want me to see her. And I didn’t want to go chasing a girl through the streets, not with my face and clothes looking the way they were. I’d be picked up as a sex maniac or escaped lunatic inside three blocks, if I didn’t have my head blown off by some outraged citizen before the cops got me.

Crossing the street slowly and looking straight ahead, I turned and started up past the café. I didn’t look toward the place, but I was sure she would move back inside the doorway. She did. When I suddenly made a quick turn into the entrance, she was there and we were face to face.

“Hello, Angelina,” I said. I was conscious of thinking that as an opening remark that would probably establish a new all-time high in stupidity, but I couldn’t think of anything else.

She didn’t say anything. She looked at me just once and then tried to get past me back onto the sidewalk with her eyes averted. I reached out and caught her arm and she stopped.

“I don’t know what to say, Angelina,” I said. “Will you walk up the street with me a little way? Maybe I can think of something.”

“I reckon so,” she said.

We walked slowly along in the hot sun with people turning to stare at my cut-up face and the blood on my clothes and I held onto her arm all the way for fear she would somehow disappear. But I couldn’t put any of the things I wanted to say into words.

We kept on going on out 20th Street toward the beach, block after block in silence. Finally she said, “You’re holding my arm awful tight. It’s beginning to go to sleep.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and self-consciously released my grip.

“How did you get to Galveston?” I asked after a while.

“A man and his wife gave me a ride to Beaumont. I rode the bus from there.”

“How did you know I was in jail?”

“I happened to be out on the sea wall by the hotel yesterday morning and saw you drive away from there in the car going toward town. I was out looking at the water. Around noon I saw the car again, parked over that way”— she waved in the direction of 24th—”and this morning I happened to be going by there again and it was still there. I asked some men at the taxi place across the street if they had seen you and they told me about the police taking you away in a paddy wagon. I didn’t know what a paddy wagon was, but I figured out it must mean they had put you in jail, so I went over there and they said you could get out if I paid your fine. So I paid it.”