He laughed. ‘“Importants?”’
‘The men who run the town.’
They got to the bridge crossing the Royal River, leaving Grand Point proper. ‘How old are you, anyway?’ he asked.
‘Old enough,’ she said.
He laughed again.
FOUR
East across the bridge, on the Pinktown side, Al’s Rustic Hacienda squatted alongside the river, low and brown like an African shelter she’d seen once in National Geographic. Years before, Al had painted the roof red to look like clay tiles, and smeared nubby white stucco on the outside, all to make the place look Mexican. It hadn’t. The million little stucco bumps caught dust from the highway, turning the place the color of dirt. Al’s Mud Hut would now be a more fitting name, no different than the bait shack it had surely once been.
Still, go figure, it was the most popular bar in Grand Point. All the Importants went there. Folks who lived east of the river said that was because the Importants felt no shame in misbehaving on the Pinktown side.
For her, that night, the Hacienda was the most dangerous bar in Grand Point. Just beyond the parking lot was where he’d caught her the past Friday night. It was where he’d almost certainly be tonight.
She slid down in her seat as Pauly swung into the parking lot. It was crammed, as usual, with cars and trucks and people sucking on longnecks.
‘I’ll wait here,’ she said.
‘The man who hit you?’
‘Likely he’s inside.’
‘I can straighten that out.’
She doubted that, extremely. ‘It’s best to leave him be. I’m hoping he’ll come to his senses.’
‘I should have a drink first, instead of just charging in and asking the bartender to cash my check. Do you really want to be out here all alone?’
It was a consideration. Pauly’s was a noticeable vehicle. She’d be seen, no matter how low she stayed on the seat.
‘You’ll be fine with me,’ he said.
It was enough. She got out, and they walked into the Hacienda.
Two middle-aged men, bankers in town, acted most desirous of making room for her, even though she was with a man. But it took almost ten minutes for McGarrity to find time to take their order.
‘He always that slow?’ Pauly asked after McGarrity shuffled away.
‘We used to go out. I broke it off.’ It wasn’t quite true. McGarrity had ended it real sudden, two days after the Important first took notice of her. She’d suspected McGarrity had been talked to, but at the time it only made the Important’s interest in her more exciting.
‘He’s still upset?’
‘He’s not the one.’ She made a smile, sure she was being watched. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to be seen smiling and unafraid, like Kathleen Turner.
‘But he’s here?’
‘I haven’t looked under all the rocks yet,’ she said, sounding now like Bette Davis.
He laughed big, and she tried, too. The evening was progressing marvelously, all things considered.
She took a casual look around. She knew the Hacienda well from her time with McGarrity. Like always, it was jammed full of what crawled in Grand Point. Two sheriff’s cops, both in uniform and on duty, sat at their normal spot at one end of the bar. A couple of punks from two towns away sat at the other end. In between were the soggy usuals: a farmer who lived south of town but spent too much time driving too slow past the junior high school and who’d offered her a ride in seventh grade; the suffering, look-away wife of the sheriff’s chief deputy with one of her barfly friends; the guy who kept the accounting books at the Materials Corporation and supposedly a thousand dirtier ones in his room above the theater.
The Importants – those that controlled the town – were never at the bar. They sat at the small round tables in the shadows against the back wall, vultures in a row.
Doc Farmont, whose hands she could still feel probing her insides, was there, of course. He was talking to somebody she couldn’t see. Likely it was that slobbering bit of squirrel meat, Randy. The doc told folks that Randy came in only occasionally to help with non-medical stuff, but nobody believed there was anything occasional about it. During her last time in that rat’s nest of small rooms above the Red Wing, she’d sensed Randy close by, scuttling softly, at the ready for any opportunity to see parts of a woman he’d never encounter on his own. They were a pair, Doc Farmont and Randy – Doc’s fast fingers and Randy’s fast eyes.
Horace Wiggins, the newspaper publisher, was two tables down, sucking on one of his stinking, plastic-ended Tiparillos. The paper’s other employee, a bird-faced, chestless woman, was right beside him. McGarrity said that everybody in town knew what else she was taking in besides dictation.
The funeral director, Bud Wiley, was in the darkest corner. Ripping drunk and red-faced, ash hanging from his cigarette, he was jabbing his finger into the chest of his nephew, Luther. Rumor was that Bud Wiley enjoyed pictures of young boys and girls that he had to go to Chicago to buy. She shuddered, imagining the funeral director’s shaking, sticky hands on her. Please God, let that man be dead before my time comes.
Luther, the pale-faced nephew, was growing to be just as repulsive. He’d taken a run at her once, in this very establishment. She suspected he used rouge to color his white cheeks, and he smelled of formaldehyde.
Unseen, but surely there, was Clamp Reems, the sheriff’s chief deputy. He wouldn’t be talking so much as sitting back, smoking a broke cigar stuffed in his corncob pipe, watching and listening and tucking it all away for future use.
Even Jimmy Bales, the runt in a grown cop’s uniform, had wandered in to stand near the town’s rulers, like he belonged.
The Importants, and those who hung onto them, were all there.
McGarrity set their gin bucks down hard, slopping the tops of their drinks onto the scarred bar.
Pauly made his move. ‘Cash my check, will you?’
McGarrity laughed.
‘Come on, it’s a DeKalb-Peering check. They’re solid, right here in Grand Point.’
She turned to look closer at Pauly’s face. He was smiling but she heard desperation in his voice.
‘Damn it,’ Pauly said. ‘It’s a solid check.’ For sure, he was desperate.
McGarrity moved down the bar, probably because he wanted nothing to do with anyone she was with.
Pauly checked his big silver watch. ‘Quarter to midnight. I know another place.’
‘What’s with that check, anyway?’
‘I need to pay a debt, is all. In cash.’
‘Tonight?’
‘There’s a place south of here,’ he said, not answering. ‘They stay open until four.’
Leaving the Hacienda was fine with her. They set down their drinks, half-full.
The parking lot was alive with drunks. They hadn’t gotten ten feet when a fat woman with sprayed-up orange hair stepped in front of her and threw up a huge arm jiggling with fat and cheap silver bracelets. ‘Well, looka here,’ the woman said, trashed. She was with a stick of a man half her size.
Pauly, already four steps ahead and mindful only of getting his check cashed, kept walking.
She didn’t recognize the woman. Nor the stick man.
‘Little tramp,’ the fat woman said, loud enough to stop everyone’s talking.
Loud enough, too, to stop Pauly, who was by now ten feet away. He turned around, a big question mark on his face. ‘Betty Jo?’ he called back.
‘I’m coming,’ she called to him, making to move around the woman.
The woman grabbed her arm. ‘Whose man you got tonight?’ Her lipstick was smeared all over her face, like she’d been kissing a horse.
‘Lady, I don’t know you,’ she said.
Pauly had come back. A gentleman – a true gentleman.
‘At least one of us is a lady,’ the fat woman said.
‘Beatrice,’ the stick man said, ‘I told you: I made sure nothing happened.’