T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

Phil leaned across the bar, confidential. “We’ve got a load of smallpox-infested blankets for the Indians.”

Shirelle stared at him for a minute, blank as an oil drum, and then she let out a whoop of laughter so sharp and sudden it made me spill my beer. No one else cracked a smile. The faces by the jukebox drew together, beaked, craggy, a glimmer of blue-black Indian hair. Shirelle laughed like a woman who’s not responsible for her actions, breaking off to hack into a fist glittering with painted nails. She laughed till tears dissolved her makeup. Moles appeared out of nowhere, lines tore at her eyes. “Hey,” she gasped finally, “let me buy you another one, you funny guy,” and she reached out to pinch Phil’s cheek.

An hour later I reached for my wallet and spilled a pocketful of change on the floor. I waved at it vaguely, and then slapped a ten-dollar bill on the bar. “Another round,” I said. Shirelle and Phil were dancing, their groins locked like machine parts. Gesh was shooting pool with the Indians in back, and I was engaged in conversation with George Pete Turner at the bar. I was also leering shamelessly at Shirelle’s daughter, who’d been summoned from the house to help the other customers while her mother helped Phil.

The daughter’s name was Savoy — surname Skaggs, as George Pete informed me. Delbert Skaggs had left Shirelle ten years back to run off to Eureka with the Cudahy twins, Natalie and Norma. Turner was squinting at me through a haze of Tareyton smoke, his voice low and confidential. There was more to the saga, but I wasn’t listening. No. I was down from the hills, back from exile, and I was ogling Savoy’s butt with all the mendicant passion of a Charlie Chaplin, out at the elbows, pressing his nose to a plate-glass window rife with cream puffs and napoleons. The girl couldn’t have been eighteen, let alone twenty-one. But she looked good. Very good. Golden arms, a low-cut sweater top, violet eyes — one just slightly but noticeably smaller than the other. She caught me staring, and I asked her where she’d got her locket from.

“This?” She fished the gold heart from her cleavage and stared down at it as if she’d never seen it before. Then she giggled, showing small even teeth and an expanse of healthy pink gum. “Eugene gave it to me before he went into the army.” George Pete Turner’s whiskery face hung at my shoulder like a salami in a delicatessen. He was nodding in confirmation. “He’s stationed in Germany,” she said. “Wiesbaden.” She pronounced it wheeze.

I didn’t know what to say. I watched her as she carefully set the three sizzling beers down on coasters and lined up the shot glasses, cocked her wrist and expertly topped them off. “Nice,” I said.

“Did I tell you that Ted Turner in Georgia — the tee-vee magnet — he’s my second cousin?” George Pete’s voice had a nagging edge to it, each word a desperate raking claw fighting for a toehold. He was talking to the side of my face. I ignored him.

Savoy leaned over the bar and arranged the shot glasses in a neat little circle before me, the locket dangling enticingly from her throat. I could smell her perfume. Behind me I heard the click of the pool balls and a voice I recognized in a moment of epiphany as Phil’s, singing along with the jukebox. “Satin sheets to lie on,” he crooned, every bit as passionate and downhome as George Jones or Merle Haggard, “Satin pillows to cry on.” I don’t know what came over me, but I reached for the locket.

“Hey,” Savoy said, pulling back in slow motion, chin lifting to expose the unbroken white line of her throat.

My hand traveled with her, the button of gold pinched between my thumb and forefinger, the palm of my hand coming into inevitable contact with her breast as she straightened up. I was leaning over the bar. My hand was on her breast and I had her by the locket. “Nice,” I said again, stupidly. “Very nice.” She was grinning. George Pete’s eyes were like raging bulls, and I felt suddenly, with all the clarity of Cassandra, that something unpleasant was about to happen.

I was right.

The door swung back with a shriek and Lloyd Sapers lurched into the barroom, so drunk his feet failed him and he slammed off the doorjamb like an errant cueball. Our eyes met. I dropped locket and breast, looked away, looked back again. In that instant of looking away, a shape had obliterated the doorway, hulking shoulders, belly, head, hands like catcher’s mitts, feet of iron: Marlon.

Gesh and the Indians had paused over their pool game — elimination — Gesh arrested in the act of lining up a shot, cuestick bisecting the bridge of his fingers, angles mentally cut. He looked up at the door with a quizzical expression, as if he’d just turned a corner and found himself in the middle of a parade. Phil, entirely oblivious, had worked Shirelle up against the jukebox and was grinding away at her like an escaped sex offender.

“Well, Jesus H. Christ and all the saints and martyrs,” Sapers roared. “If it ain’t the teetotalers.”

At that moment, George Pete Turner — he was, I later learned, the prospective father-in-law, sire to the absent doughboy and guardian of the family jewels — hit me in the left ear and knocked me from the bar stool. I made a four-point landing, on hands and knees, in a puddle of beer. Lloyd Sapers laughed. I’d been blind-sided, sucker-punched, humiliated. Crouched there, poised between mercy and grief, I could hear the fearful grinding of the earth as it slipped round its axis. And then the shadow of Sapers’s son fell over me and I knew I was doomed.

When I came out of my cringe I saw that George Pete Turner was being restrained by his drinking companion, a toothless beardy old sot who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds, and that Marlon, who was merely blinking curiously at me, had the face of a fleshy Boy Scout. Savoy had emitted a short truncated gasp and then faded to the far corner of the bar, Phil was glancing over his shoulder in surprise, Shirelle’s eyes were abandoning the smokiness of passion and hardening for action, and Gesh was advancing on the bar, gripping his cuestick like a Louisville Slugger. The Indians were ice statues, drinks locked in their hands like glacial excrescences, and Johnny Cash, his basso rattling the glasses on the shelves, was letting me know that he, too, walked the line. And then, as quickly as it had erupted, it was over.

Marlon, it turned out, was no threat at all. He had a mental age of nine, and was inclined toward violence only in private, isolated circumstances — if someone inadvertently got between him and a plate of food, for instance. He was massive. A barely contained spillage of viscid flesh, titanic, crushing, monumental. But puerile. Dangerous only in potentio. He stepped over me, feet like showshoes, bellied up to the bar and asked, in the pinched, whining tones of the preadolescent, for a Coke.

“Hey-hey,” Sapers said, clucking away in some orphic backwoods code, as he staggered forward to help me to my feet. Shirelle was standing beside George Pete, who looked abashed. He apologized, and shook hands with me, but wouldn’t look me in the eye. “Guess I’ve had one too many,” he mumbled, zipping his lumberjacket, shoving through the door and vanishing into the night.

Gesh eased his cuestick into the wall rack, buttoned his torn trench coat and said, “Let’s hit it, Felix. Come on.” He had a hand on my elbow. Sapers had cringed and backed off a step when Gesh advanced on us, then turned his head and shouted something about the weather to George Pete’s toothless comrade, who was no more than two feet away from him. My ear throbbed.

I felt vague and disoriented, as if my blood had somehow evaporated. Phil, his face solemn, gathered my money from the bar and held out my coat.