Rosie starts pouring him a Budweiser draft. He doesn’t have to ask.
“You expecting company?” She slides the tall, foaming glass across the old oak bar.
“You don’t know her. You don’t know nobody tonight,” he gives her the script.
“Ohhhhh-kay.” She measures vodka in a water glass for some old guy sitting by himself on a nearby stool. “I don’t know anyone in here, least not the two of you. That’s fine. Maybe I don’t want to know you.”
“Don’t break my heart,” Marino says. “How ’bout putting some lime in it.” He pushes the beer back to her.
“Well aren’t we fancy tonight.” She drops in a few slices. “That how you like it?”
“It’s really good.”
“Didn’t ask if it was good. Asked if that’s how you like it.”
As usual, the usual locals ignore them. The usuals are slouched on stools on the other side of the bar, glazed as they stare at a baseball game they’re not following on the big TV. He doesn’t know their names, but they don’t need names. There’s the fat guy with the goatee, the really fat woman who’s always complaining and her boyfriend, who is a third her size and looks like a ferret with yellow teeth. Marino wonders how the hell they fuck and imagines a jockey-sized cowboy flopping like a fish on a bucking bull. All of them smoke. On a two-Deuce night, Marino usually lights up a few, doesn’t think about Dr. Self. Whatever goes on in here stays in here.
He carries his beer with lime to the pool table and picks out a stick from the mismatched collection propped in a corner. He racks the balls and stalks around the table, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, chalking his stick. He squints at ferret, watching him get up from his stool and carry his beer to the men’s room. He always does that, afraid someone will swipe his drink. Marino’s eyes take in everything and everyone.
A scrawny, homeless-looking man with a scraggly beard, a ponytail, dark, ill-fitting Goodwill clothes, a filthy Miami Dolphins cap and weird pink-tinted glasses walks unsteadily into the bar and pulls up a chair near the door, stuffs a washcloth into the back pocket of his dark, baggy pants. A kid outside on the sidewalk is shaking a broken parking meter that just ate his money.
Marino smacks two solids into side pockets, squinting through cigarette smoke.
“That’s right. You keep knocking your balls in the hole,” Rosie calls out to him, pouring another beer. “Where you been anyway?”
She is sexy in a hard-ridden way, a little thing nobody in his right mind dares to mess with, no matter how drunk he is. Marino once saw her break a three-hundred-pounder’s wrist with a beer bottle when he wouldn’t stop grabbing at her ass.
“Quit waiting on everybody and get over here,” Marino says, smacking the eight ball.
It warbles to the center of the green felt and stops.
“Screw it,” he mutters, propping his stick against the table, wandering over to the jukebox while Rosie pops open two bottles of Miller Lite and sets them in front of the fat woman and the ferret.
Rosie’s always frenetic, like a windshield wiper on high. She dries her hands on the back of her jeans as Marino picks out a few favorites from a mix of the seventies.
“What are you staring at?” he asks the homeless-looking man sitting by the door.
“How about a game?”
“I’m busy,” Marino says, not turning around as he makes selections on the jukebox.
“You’re not playing anything unless you buy a drink,” Rosie tells the homeless-looking man slumped by the door. “And I don’t want you hanging around here just for the hell of it. How many times I got to tell you?”
“I thought he might like a game with me.” He pulls out his washcloth and nervously starts wringing it.
“I’m going to tell you the same thing I did last time you came in here buying nothing and using the john, get out,” Rosie says in his face, her hands on her hips. “You want to stay, you pay.”
He slowly gets up from his chair, wringing the washcloth, and stares at Marino, his eyes defeated and tired, but there’s something in them.
“I thought you might like to play a game,” he says to Marino.
“Out!” Rosie yells at him.
“I’ll take care of it,” Marino says, walking over to the man. “Come on, I’m seeing you out, pal, before it’s too late. You know how she gets.”
The man doesn’t resist. He doesn’t stink half as bad as Marino expected, and he follows him out the door onto the sidewalk, where the idiot kid is still shaking the parking meter.
“It ain’t a goddamn apple tree,” Marino tells the kid.
“Fuck off.”
Marino strides over to him, towers over him, and the kid’s eyes get wide.
“What’d you say?” Marino asks, cupping his ear, leaning into him. “Did I hear what I think I did?”
“I put in three quarters.”
“Well now, ain’t that a pity. I suggest you get in your piece-of-shit car and get your ass out of here before I arrest you for damaging city property,” Marino says, even though he really can’t arrest anybody anymore.
The homeless-looking man from the bar is walking slowly along the sidewalk, glancing back as if expecting Marino to follow. He says something as the kid starts his Mustang and guns it out of there.
“You talking to me?” Marino asks the homeless-looking man, walking his way.
“He’s always doing that,” the homeless-looking man says quietly, softly. “Same kid. He never puts a damn nickel in the meters around here and then shakes the hell out of them until they break.”
“What do you want.”
“Johnny came in here the night before it happened,” he says in his ill-fitting clothes, the heels of his shoes cut out.
“Who you talking about.”
“You know who. He didn’t kill himself, neither. I know who did.”
Marino gets a feeling, the same feeling he got when he walked inside Mrs. Simister’s house. He spots Lucy a block away, taking her time on the sidewalk, not dressed in her usual baggy black clothes.
“Him and me played pool the night before it happened. He had on splints. They didn’t seem to bother him. He played pool just fine.”
Marino watches Lucy without making it obvious. Tonight, she fits in. She could be any gay woman who hangs out around here, boyish but good-looking and sexy in expensive jeans, faded and full of holes, and beneath her soft, black leather jacket is a white undershirt that clings to her breasts, and he’s always liked her breasts, even if he isn’t supposed to notice them.
“I saw him just the one time when he brought this girl in here,” the homeless man is saying, looking around as if something makes him edgy, turning his back to the bar. “Think she’s somebody you ought to find. That’s all I have to say.”
“What girl and why should I give a shit?” Marino says, watching Lucy get closer, scanning the area, making sure nobody gets any ideas about her.
“Pretty,” the man says. “The kind both men and women look at around here, dressed all sexy. Nobody wanted her around.”
“Seems to me nobody wants you around, either. You just got your ass kicked out.”
Lucy walks into Deuce without looking, as if Marino and the homeless man are invisible.
“Only reason I didn’t get kicked out that night is because Johnny bought me a drink. We played pool while the girl sat by the jukebox, looking around as if she’d never been taken to such a slop hole in her life. Went in the ladies’ room a couple times and after that it smelled like weed.”
“You make a habit of going into the ladies’ room?”