The fat man looked up at Buttcut briefly then quickly away. The girl seemed not have heard but Jiminiz froze in midstroke for a second. Then he completed his shot.
Buttcut ordered a beer and sat on the bench beside Winer. They sat silently watching the game progress. Buttcut sipped from the beer then gave it to Winer and ordered another. He seemed possessed by a dull, malevolent anger. Winer finished the beer and drank another, studying the fat man across the length of the room. Every time the man looked up Winer would be watching, and he glanced up often as if he could feel the weight of Winer’s eyes. Roy Pace and Jiminiz seemed almost drunk. Jiminiz was still losing. The fat man looked at his wristwatch a time or two and then he came and said something to Jiminiz but Jiminiz didn’t reply or acknowledge his voice.
Finally, Buttcut spoke. “You ain’t got a hair on your ass if you don’t go talk to her,” he said. “You got to take up for yourself. You let these sons of bitches run over you and it’ll be somebody runnin over you all your life.”
“I tried that. It didn’t work so well.”
“Hellfire. You talked to Hardin. Hardin ain’t even here. Don’t worry about his guard dog. I got him covered.”
“It’s my fight, Buttcut, not yours.”
Buttcut shrugged. “I aim to try him sooner or later anyway. You might as well get a little somethin out of it.”
Winer went with his amber bottle to her table. “Hello, Briar Rose,” he said.
“Do you know this young man?” the fat man asked. When she made no reply he turned to Winer. “All these other tables are unoccupied,” he said. “Perhaps you’d care to sit somewheres else.”
Winer drank beer. The bitter taste of hops at the back of his mouth. “No,” he said. “I like it here all right.”
The fat man had a hand on Rose’s arm. “Well, we’ll leave it to you,” he said.
“I’ve got to talk to you,” Winer told her.
She was shaking her head. “I don’t want to move,” she told the man. She looked as if she might cry.
The fat man was studyin her with calm, level eyes. “What’s goin on here?” he asked. “Is my money not good enough for you or what?”
She was watching Winer but Winer was lost in the deep waters of her eyes, struggling against the seaweed strangling him. “Go away, Nathan,” she said.
“Then you go with me.”
“I can’t. You know I can’t.”
“It’s easy. All you have to do is put one foot in front of the other.”
“I can’t.” She leaned and touched his face. Her forefinger traced the length of a cut. She was crying.
The man turned to Winer in disgust. “I’ve paid her good money,” he said. “Or paid it to Hardin. And I aim to get the benefit of it. Now, I don’t know who you are or what your status is but I suggest you get your ass out of here.”
Buttcut had come up silent as cat. He leaned across the table. “Are you havin words with this young feller here?” His breath was fiery with splo whiskey.
The man turned. “None that concern you.”
“Funny. I was settin way back on that bench over there and I thought I heard you say somethin about him gettin his ass out of here. I reckon you got the deed to this place ridin in your shirt pocket?”
The man didn’t say anything.
“Did I hear that or not?”
“I don’t see how it concerns you.”
“I’ll tell you how it concerns me. You got the look about you of somebody that would drink a man’s whiskey then piss in the bottle and put the lid back on and go off somewheres and snigger about it.”
The fat man just rolled his eyes upward toward the watermarked ceiling as if he’d fallen among fools and looked resigned.
“Ain’t you?”
“I don’t know,” the fat man finally said.
“You keep studyin on it. You keep wonderin if you and that Mexican there can do it but you better walk mighty soft around me. You try me and you’ll go up like a celluloid cat in hell.”
Winer arose. “It’s not worth fightin about,” he said. “If she wants him she can have him. We’ll go somewhere else.”
“Goddamn it, there’s not anywhere else. And nobody’s runnin me anywhere.”
“Then you all can have it,” Winer said. He turned toward Rose’s pale face. “I’m leavin. Are you goin with me or stayin with these folks?”
The girl arose, took her purse from the table. “I’m sorry,” she told the fat man.
The fat man grasped her arm. “The hell you are. I got a forty-acre farm tied up in you already.”
The man in the blue suit was sitting glaring into the girl’s face and Winer was standing over them. Without even knowing he was going to Winer hit the man in the face as hard as he could. The man grunted and a mist of blood sprayed down his shirtfront and he went over backward clawing the air. Winer turned rubbing his knuckles to see the green swinging door explode inward and Jiminiz come through it with his poolcue poised like a baseball bat and to see Buttcut fell man and cuestick with a chair. “They Lord God,” the barkeep cried. Jiminiz bounced off the dopebox and lit rolling and fetched up against the barchairs routing scrambling drinkers and then he was on his knees trying to get his fingers into his brass knuckles. He had them almost on when Buttcut kicked him in the head. The knucks rattled on the dirty tile. Buttcut kicked them away viciously and stood waiting with his fist cocked. “You hell on boys,” he said. “Let’s see how you do with a man.”
Jiminiz was laying against the bar. His mouth was shattered and bleeding. If he had any breath he didn’t waste it. He got up warily ducking outside the perimeter of Buttcut’s arms and flicked his long black hair out of his eyes with an abrupt and arrogant movement of his head. He raised his left fist for a guard and came back in. His eyes were expressionless as black glass. He came boring into Buttcut’s clumsy, flatfooted stance with his head ducked and he swatted away Buttcut’s right and knocked him into the pinball machine. Buttcut wouldn’t fall. He just shook his head in a mildly annoyed sort of way as if flies were bothering him and took a halfstep forward and hit Jiminiz in the face.
The fat man was on his hands and knees trying to get his handkerchief out. Winer was standing over him to see if he tried to help Jiminiz but this was an idea that seemed not to have occurred to him. “A doctor,” he said, looking at his bloody hands. “A doctor.”
There wasn’t any doctor. There was just the frantic barkeep on the phone and a door that looked miles away from the jukebox singing, I have no one to love me except the sailor on the deep blue sea.
When the sirens began Winer was trying to haul Buttcut off Jiminiz. Buttcut was hitting him in the face. “The law’s coming,” Winer said.
“I’ll learn you,” Buttcut said. “Now beg me to quit.” Jiminiz wouldn’t beg.
Jiminiz said, “Fuck you,” through broken teeth.
The law came through the door and didn’t waste any time. Cooper hit Buttcut alongside the head with a slapstick and a pair of highway patrolmen hauled Winer up between them and started for the door. The girl would stay with him. She swung onto his arm. A young hatchetfaced patrolman named Steele turned from Winer momentarily to disengage her, his face turned in profile to Winer was red and freckled, a sharp, intent face. The expression was that of someone immersed in his work, a surgeon perhaps, removing some unwanted growth. It was a curious electric moment. Winer would always remember, the peculiar birdlike feeling of her hand clutching his arm and Steele peeling back one talon at a time, the grip finally lessening. When he struck Steele in the jaw the other patrolman blackjacked Winer and he dropped as if his knees had turned to water.
He sat groggily on the floor. The world darkened then lightened. Intercut with still photographs of the girl’s pale face were random images like sequences in a film improperly spliced: Buttcut holding Cooper aloft by the ankles and upside down and Cooper flailing wildly with the slapstick and cursing Buttcut’s knees. Then Buttcut dropped him and kicked him in the side and stepped across his body into the waiting arms of the highway patrolmen and Winer could hear their labored breathing and after a while Steele say, “He says he’ll come peaceable if we let him ride in the front.”