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“I won’t let that happen,” Olivia said.
“Good. I invariably falter in the face of temptation.”
“You’re out of your mind, you know that?”
“You sound just like my sister, Mother.”
She shook her head, but she smiled.
“This is nice booze,” she said. “I’m afraid to ask what it costs.”
“Fear not, Mother, that was my round. But actually it’s not very expensive. Not like twelve-year-old or single malts. I found it in Scotland. It was the bar whiskey.”
“In Scotland?”
“My father and I, and my father’s buddy and his-son-my-buddy, were shooting driven birds over there.”
What the hell does that mean?
“I don’t know what that means,” Olivia confessed.
“They raise pheasants,” Matt explained, “and charge people to shoot them. They call it a ‘drive.’ The shooters form a line, and then the beaters drive the birds-hence ‘driven birds’-toward the line of shooters. Great shooting.”
“It sounds barbaric,” Olivia said.
“You’re a vegetarian?”
“No.”
“Where do you think your roast beef came from? A steer that died of old age?”
Olivia didn’t reply.
“The pheasants are raised to be eaten, just like chickens and turkey. I suppose you could argue that wringing their necks would be kinder than shooting them, but I don’t see the difference. And three hours after they’re shot, they’re cleaned, plucked, packed in ice, and on the way to a gourmet restaurant. ”
“And you get your kicks by slaughtering the pheasants, right? You get a real kick out of killing things, right?”
“You got it, Mother,” Matt said. “Once you understand that, everything falls in place.”
She could tell by both the bitter tone of his voice and his eyes that she had really angered him.
He shook his head in disgust, turned away, and picked up his glass.
What made him so angry?
Oh, God! When Mickey O’Hara called him Wyatt Earp, he blew up. And then O’Hara told me about the bad guy Matt “put down”-by which he meant killed. I didn’t mean to suggest he liked killing people! But I guess it sounded like I did.
So what do I do now, apologize?
The waiter slid plates holding hot roast beef sandwiches across the bar to them.
“I think you probably have just saved my life,” Matt said, sniffing appreciatively and picking up a French fry. “But just to make sure, you’d better give me another of these.”
Olivia saw that he had drained his glass.
The bartender chuckled and looked at Olivia.
“Why not?” she said.
