Blessedly, it was Rub’s round head that appeared at the window, and a moment later he came out in his undershirt, boot laces flapping, and climbed into the El Camino, where it was warm. He faced away, though, until the dome light went off. Sully opened his door so it would come back on and he saw Rub’s swollen eye.
“Jesus, Rub,” he said, closing the door again.
Rub shrugged. “What am I supposed to do? Guys aren’t supposed to hit girls.”
“You aren’t supposed to let them hit you, either,” Sully pointed out for argument’s sake.
“I didn’t let her,” Rub explained. “She just did it.”
“You’re supposed to duck,” Sully explained.
“I did,” Rub explained. “She done this with her knee when I did duck.”
“Well,” Sully sighed. “I guess you did all you could, then.” Rub shrugged.
“Meet me at Hattie’s in the morning. Early. Six-thirty. We’re going to move some shit out of the house on Bowdon first thing. I wish we’d thought to do it before we took the floor up.”
Rub said he wisht they had too.
“What are you going to do tomorrow? Say it back to me.”
“Meet you at Hattie’s at six-thirty.”
He’d be there, too, Sully knew, one of the few things he could count on. “I’ll buy your breakfast,” he promised.
“Good,” Rub said. “I don’t have any money.”
“I’ve got a hammer in back,” Sully suggested. “We could go in and whack her on the noggin and bury her in the woods under all those blocks you broke. They’d probably never find her.”
“I wisht we could,” Rub said, getting out of the El Camino again. “She’s fat and ugly and mean.”
When Rub closed the door, Sully started to back out, only to hear Rub rap on the door as if he’d suddenly remembered something. He opened the door again. “And stingy,” he said.
Sully, unwilling to get involved for long, checked out The Horse through the beer sign in the front window before entering. It looked like Tiny had only two customers. Wirf, predictably, and, less predictably, Jocko. Both men rotated on their stools when Sully entered and ducked into the men’s room.
A moment later Jocko was standing at Sully’s side, unzipping before the second of the two wall urinals, making Sully glad that he’d decided, despite his exhaustion, to stand to pee.
“Somebody told me this was your lucky day,” Jocko offered, awaiting his urine while Sully dripped toward unsatisfactory conclusion.
Sully considered this, supposed it was true, after a fashion.
“It figures your luck would turn around just as the town’s went south,” Jocko offered.
“The town’s luck went south about two hundred years ago, pretty near,” Sully observed.
“True,” Jocko admitted, still awaiting his water. “But this’ll finish it. A good strong wind’ll blow us all away now. I bet half of Main Street will be boarded up within a year.”
Sully shrugged, zipped up, flushed. He usually felt at ease talking to Jocko, but this was a strange conversation. Jocko’s very presence in the men’s room felt not quite right in a way Sully couldn’t exactly put his finger on. They’d peed side by side into these same urinals on other occasions. Maybe it was that Jocko wasn’t peeing, he decided.
Since he had company, Sully washed his hands, then dried them on a paper towel.
“Should be plenty of work for you if you want it,” Jocko offered mysteriously.
“How’s that?”
“I know a guy right now who’d pay you a couple grand to torch his store.”
Sully let this offer sink in a moment, studying his longtime acquaintance, who seemed less embarrassed by what he’d just proposed than by the fact that he couldn’t seem to squeeze even a drop from his dick.
“Where’d this guy get the idea I’m in the arson business?” Sully finally said.
“Well,” Jocko said, giving up the pretense and zipping himself back into his pants.
“No, really,” Sully insisted.
Jocko shrugged, met Sully’s eyes for a moment before looking away. “He must have heard it somewhere.”
“Must’ve,” Sully agreed. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint him.”
“He’ll get over it,” Jocko said quietly. “He’ll be sorry he misjudged you, probably.”
“Let’s find a new place to drink,” Sully said, sliding onto the stool next to Wirf, who was chatting pleasantly with Tiny at the end of the bar. There was a full bottle of beer in front of the stool where Jocko had been sitting. Wirf, Sully noticed, had switched from club soda to beer.
“What’s wrong with this one?” Wirf said. Tiny had stiffened when Sully approached. In fact, he was glowering at Sully and not bothering to conceal the fact that personally he liked his bar better when Sully wasn’t in it.
Sully, still unsettled by his conversation with Jocko, studied Tiny before responding. “Nothing,” he said finally. “This place is perfect. It’s so friendly, is what I like best.”
“How about one of these?” Wirf said, tinking his beer bottle, their regular brand, with his glass.
“Are they good?”
“I like them.”
“Will they make this day end peacefully?”
“Let’s find out.”
“Let’s.”
Tiny went to the other end of the bar where the cooler was and returned with a beer. “You want a glass, Sully?”
“Am I entitled to one?”
Tiny gave him a glass. Also a piece of mail. Sully said thanks and swallowed a second of Jocko’s pills, chasing it with a swig of beer from the bottle. The second pill was probably not a good idea, but he figured he was close to home. The mail bore the logo of Schuyler Springs Community College. The address Sully had given at registration had been care of the White Horse Tavern, just to piss Tiny off. The envelope contained his grades for the fall semester. F’s except in philosophy, for which his young professor had awarded him an incomplete. “Good news,” Sully said, wadding up the letter and tossing it in the direction of the garbage bucket Tiny kept behind the bar. “I made the dean’s list.”
Wirf was still eyeing the unused glass, anxious as always to head off hostilities. “You hear Tiny’s hired a band for tomorrow night?”
“What’s the occasion?”
“New Year’s Eve,” Tiny said, coming back over to pick up the wad of paper from the floor. “Some people like to go out and celebrate that night.”
In truth, Sully had lost track of what day it was. “Will I need reservations?”
“A free buffet, too,” Wirf interrupted. “For all the regular customers.”
“Seventy-five pounds of chicken wings I ordered,” Tiny grumbled proudly.
“Those fucking things,” Sully said. “The whole town will be shitting razor blades sideways for a week.”
“Then don’t eat them,” Tiny said, instantly angry, as Sully had hoped. “Who cares what you want, Sully?”
“Nobody,” Sully admitted. “For twenty years I’ve wanted somebody to open another bar on Main Street and put your ugly ass out of business.”
“Twenty years?” Tiny said. “Try forty. Forty years I been right here. There were four bars right on Main Street back when your old man was around being the same kind of asshole you are now. Now I’m the only one left.”
“The only asshole?” Sully said.
“The only bar.”
“Survival of the dumbest,” Sully offered, by way of explanation.
“Twenty minutes to closing,” Tiny said, heading off down the bar toward the bar stool he kept on his side.