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“Give everybody a round, including yourself. You might get the fucking grease off the bar while you’re at it,” the man in leather pants said. He went into the restroom and shot the bolt behind him.
“You okay on your drinks?” Harold said to the women at the bar.
“I’m feeling just right, but thanks for asking,” the woman in purple lipstick said.
“When your friend comes back, maybe tell him this is Montana,” Harold said.
“What’s that mean?” the woman said.
“That this is Montana,” Harold replied.
“That’s your limo out front?” the woman in purple lipstick asked Jamie Sue.
“No, it’s my husband’s,” Jamie Sue said.
“Are you talking about Ridley Wellstone? He must own half of Texas.”
Jamie Sue’s chin rested on her palm. Through the window she could see a boy in a red canoe spin-casting along the bank, the water’s surface shimmering like pewter whenever the wind gusted. She could feel the rush of the whiskey sour taking hold in her nervous system, warming every corner of her heart, deadening memory, preempting expectations she knew would never be fulfilled. “I used to live in Texas, but I don’t anymore,” she said.
“I wasn’t probing, honey. I grew up in a shithole in the San Joaquin. The biggest event of the year was the Garlic Festival,” the woman said. “I would have screwed the whole Russian army to get out.”
She removed a piece of mucus from the corner of her eye, then opened her purse to get a cigarette. Three joints were tucked neatly in a silk side pocket. While she lit her cigarette with a tiny gold lighter, she watched an unshaved man in corduroy pants and a work shirt and lace-up boots enter the bar and try the handle on the men’s room door. When he discovered the door was locked, he shook the handle. A moment later, he returned and shook the handle harder, rattling the door against the bolt.
The unshaved man went to the bar and ordered a beer, drinking it from the bottle, scowling at the restroom door. Then he hit on the door with the flat of his fist. “You paying rent in there?” he said.
The man inside unlocked the bolt and pushed open the door with one foot. He was still cleaning his hat with the napkins the bartender had given him, the water running from the faucet. “I’ll be done in a minute,” he said.
The woman in purple lipstick watched the scene idly; then her gaze seemed to shift sideways and sharpen slightly. She took a drag off her cigarette, held the smoke in her lungs a long time, and released it slowly, blowing it at an upward angle. “That one isn’t bad-looking, if you don’t mind them a little gamey,” she said.
“That’s Quince, my driver,” Jamie Sue said.
“I’m talking about the Native American cutie-pie who was peeking at you from the café. You must grow them shy out here.”
The bead curtain was still rustling when Jamie Sue turned on the bar stool. She walked across the dance floor, her footsteps echoing inside the emptiness of the saloon, the row of video poker machines winking at her in the shadows. Inside the café, two workingmen were drinking coffee at the counter, and a family was eating at one of the booths. A log truck was pulling onto the state highway, a dark-skinned man in a soft gray hat riding in the passenger seat, his arm propped on the window.
“Who was that who just left?” Jamie Sue asked.
The waitress wiped the counter and looked out at the highway. “A guy hitching a ride,” she replied. She picked up a coin from the counter and dropped it in her apron pocket. “Not many drifters leave a four-bit tip.”
Jamie Sue returned to the bar and sat down. “What did the Indian man look like?” she asked the woman from Malibu.
“The kind who used to make my nipples pop,” the woman said, her eyes crinkling at the corners. “I traded up, but I still think about the guy who was my first. Seventeen and a gyrene. I think he’s the reason I see a sex therapist. You ever think back on those years? I’d like to go back and maybe do things different, stay married and that kind of crap, but Maury there in the can isn’t such a bad guy, I mean, it could be worse, right? Like, I could be one of the women in his films. Jesus Christ, if you think they
’re bad on the screen, you ought to see what some of them do in their downtime.”
The restroom door opened again, and the man in black leather pants walked past Quince, blotting drops of water off his hat. “Ready to get out of here?” he said.
“It’s been nice, everybody. Oops, who just tilted the floor?” the woman in purple lipstick replied.
She and her companion started to leave just as a man in a Mercedes pulled into the parking lot and entered the saloon. The scar tissue that constituted his face, and the eyes that seemed to laugh inside the burned shell of his head, made the woman in purple lipstick involuntarily clench her companion’s arm. In fact, she seemed suddenly drunk, unprepared to deal with unpleasant realities that her rhetoric had kept at bay.
“My husband was a legionnaire. He was in a tank. In the French Sudan,” Jamie Sue said.
“What? What did you say?” the woman in purple lipstick said, unable to look away from the handicapped man.
“His tank burned. He was trapped inside it. That’s why he looks that way. Don’t stare at him. What’s the matter with you?” Jamie Sue said.
Leslie Wellstone grinned broadly. “Don’t run off. Would you like to have another drink? Or maybe a dance or two?”
