Short Story

My short fiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Texas Review, Cimarron Review, Crosscurrents, City Paper, and other venues. This story appeared in Seattle Review.

Dutch Willis leans over his beer in the cool dark of Dinty's, and says softly, "This is my favorite place on earth."  I nod and have a sip.  Dinty's isn't much to look at.  It's a narrow barroom half a block off Main Street.  Fifteen stools, a smooth wooden bar, an old National cash register rearing up at the middle.  No pool table or juke box.  But I know what he means and hope he will leave it at that.

     Dutch runs Table Rock Optical, "Eyeglasses in about an Hour," around the corner on Main Street.  He has two girls working for him, a wife and a kid at home.  We went to high school together.

     "The world's all screwed up," Dutch says, pushing up his glasses. "But this is perfect.  A man can find some peace."

     "Yep."  I take another slow sip of beer and watch Bud Essinger talk corn prices with weathered men in overalls.  Tall, bald, sleepy‑eyed, Bud is what a bartender should be, invisible and omnipresent.  Seems he's forgotten all about you--until the precise moment your beer is two swallows from empty, and there he'll be, with a slight lift of his eyebrows asking if you want another.  

     Dutch is right about Dinty's, but Table Rock isn't the kind of town where you talk that way, so I know there's more to it.  Dutch is a taciturn, square‑faced man with a Clark Kent curl relieving his broad forehead.  We play tennis sometimes.  Mainly we drink beer and talk sports.  Cornhuskers in the fall, college hoops in spring, and now, leaning into summer, baseball.  And that's how I need it to be.  I'm still recovering, too brittle for any kind of strain or stridency. 

     But Dutch doesn't know about all that, and he has it in mind to say something.  Sure enough, the next minute he grabs my arm, whispering, "Listen, Jerry, I have to tell you this."

     What can I say?  I tell him to go ahead.

     "I need to explain something.  The fact is, for the last few months I've been using you.  As an excuse, you know?"

     Dutch is talking into his beer, and I want him to stop.  He's a good guy, a private, proud guy all the way back to when he couldn't play football in high school.  I can see in his face what this is costing him.  God knows I don't want to hear it.

     "And, well, I've been scared to death you'd call and Barb would answer and she'd say something about my coming to see you all the time in Omaha, and you wouldn't know what was going on."  Dutch shakes his head.  "It's rough."

     "I guess it would be.  She live in town?"

     Dutch smiles grimly.  He knows I'm thinking this is an awful small town.  "Out in the country," he says.  "Goose Valley Road, past Fraley Orchard."

     "The blonde or the other one?"

     "The blonde."

     I know it's not the right thing to be thinking, but I can't help approving‑‑of his choice, anyway.  If you're going to get into a big mess screwing around with an employee, it might as well be a pretty one.  Molly, her name is.  Slim, kind of quiet, great smile.  I make it point to say hi to her when I go to the office to get Dutch. 

Of course I know his wife too, though not so well as you'd think.  She went to public school, while Dutch and I were at St. Cecilia's.  They didn't start dating till they were at the university.  Thinking of her, I picture a perm, a full, pleasant face, covered food to shut-ins.

     He says, "The thing is, I need you to come to dinner at my house."

     I just want it to be over.  "Sure," I say, "thanks."

     "I wouldn't tell you all this but she might say something, you know, talk about, and I need you to know, so you don't..." 

     "No problem."

     After Dutch leaves, I sit there a while, sipping a beer and staring at the mural that covers the wall behind the bar.  It was painted a long time ago and is so dim with smoke and grime that a lot of the locals probably don't even notice it anymore.  But if you look at the shadows of gray and brown, you can see the ring ropes and the referee with his hand in the chest of a lone fighter who looks down at his opponent curled on the canvas.  Dutch probably doesn't want to be contemplating anything like that just now, but for me, the mural is what makes Dinty's perfect.  There it is: Life.  Sometimes it's an accumulation of blows, sometimes it's a lightning shot.  Either way you end up eating canvas in front of a crowd.

     I'm not one to go looking for symbols in Table Rock, but I think I've earned some perspective.  I was away for a while, my bad years, in Colorado.  Now I live in Omaha, and drive down once or twice a month to see my folks.  I half‑own a travel agency in the Southgate Mall.  I've travelled a lot, and I've never found a pub I liked better than Dinty's.  Not in Dublin, not in Bavaria, Barcelona, or Key West.

     When I get to my parents' house, Dad is waiting at the door, saying, "Where you been?  We're wanting to play cards before dinner."

     There's a sad irony to places like Table Rock.  The mark of parental success is that your kids move away and have careers someplace where there's a life to be had.  My folks made sure all us kids went off to college, and this is the reward they get.  Grandchildren in Dallas, Chicago, and Atlanta who they get to see once or twice a year.  It's the underachiever parents who have their kids and grandkids hanging around to love and care for them in their old age.  My folks get me, the runt of their litter, coming home once a month for a weekend of cards.    

I don't include Dutch when I think of the guys who stayed around town as losers.  There was always something aristocratic about the Willises.  In high school, like now, Dutch was a tree-stump, six‑two and sturdy.  But he never played football.  This was a source of friction with the rest of us, especially our senior year, when St. C's had a shot at being state champs.  Mr. Willis is a dentist, and the official story was that he didn't want Dutch losing any teeth, but we blamed his mother.

     It was hard on Dutch, all that pressure to play football, and then not playing.  But come basketball season he made it all okay.  We weren't great, but Dutch at center earned us respect, giving away the inches but often outplaying those lanky six‑six farmboys the other teams always seemed to have.

     Now, as an optician, with his bright shop on Main Street, he's Mr. Chamber of Commerce.  Elks Club, Rotary Club, all that civic stuff.  And that makes it better with my dad, that I go to Dinty's with Dutch Willis, not just with anybody.

     I don't see Dutch or my folks for a few weeks.  It's not that I'm avoiding them.  It's June.  Tribes of Omahans are planning their August escapes to less steamy climes.  The Colorado ski resorts run summer festivals, trying to fill those rooms, with the packages priced out low.  Everybody likes to claim the people are cheap where they come from, but Nebraskans are the worst, and I can prove it.  For several seasons I waited tables at one of those ski resorts‑‑in Vail Village, as a matter of fact‑‑and I saw people from all over, Midwest, both coasts, foreign places.

     Say what you want to about New Yorkers, they're used to paying for services rendered.  Not Nebraskans.  To this day I have to sneak back into the Dipsy Diner in Table Rock and add a buck to the two quarters Dad leaves on our breakfast tab.  It was customers like Dad that drove me from the ranks of professional waitpersons.  That, and cocaine.       

     Okay, I've said it. 

     If you want to know about it, there was a winter night six years ago with thirty or forty extra seconds in it, when my heart seized up, and a stranger walloping on my chest got it going again.  I didn't float in a tunnel or hear New Age music.  I was just scared.  I did a stint in a Denver clinic, tried my old job again and fell off the wagon in a week.  The second time out of rehab I went back up the mountain and got a hired at the sales office of a condominium timeshare outfit called Beaver Run.  The pay was shitty, but the job did make it easier to avoid occasions of sin, and that was the important part.  To this day, if a stranger came through the agency door and laid down a line on my desk, I'd snort it up just that fast, no matter if there were forty fat Rotarians looking on.  Fortunately, I now keep well out of the orbit of the kind of friends who consider laying you out a line to be just courtesy and good breeding. 

     I hated Beaver Run, but after a few months I got a  promotion, and things were a little better.  That started me on the career path, via a circuitous route that isn't very interesting, to where I am now, half‑owner of Tours 'n Tickets, selling cheap summer packages to my thrifty compatriots.

     I've been on the phone all day.  So it takes me a second to orient myself when this woman's voice on the line says, "Hi, Jerry.  You haven't been to Table Rock in a while, or else you just haven't called us."

     The fact is, I usually call Dutch at the office to meet me at Dinty's.  So Barb Willis' presumption of intimacy knocks me a little off kilter.  "Hey Barb," I say, "how you doing? Listen, I got half of Sarpy County on hold here, can I help you with something quick or give you a call back?"

Now she's flustered.  I can tell, even before I hear Dutch whisper, Ask him when he's coming to town.

     "Jerry!"  She says it with almost frantic heartiness.  "We'd like to invite you to dinner.  It doesn't matter when, just whenever you're in town.  Just give us a call."

     "Yeah," I say, "that sounds great..."

     "Okay!"  She's dying to get off the phone.  "That's wonderful, we look forward to it.  Bye."

     After the call, I can't bring myself to think about Table Rock for another two weeks, even when Mom calls and says Dad wants to play cards.  What finally makes me set aside a weekend is the fear of having Dutch Willis call, asking me himself.

     I call Barb on a Tuesday.  She must have been gearing herself up for it too, because she's bright and calm.  Friday, we agree, after work, six‑thirty.  I say, "Have Dutch call me if he doesn't have any late ones.  Tell him I can meet him at Dinty's at four."

     She doesn't miss a beat.  "Oh, you can call him if you want, but Dutch doesn't go to Dinty's any more."  She laughs lightly. "Don't worry, we'll have plenty of cold ones here at the house."  We hang up.

     I am expecting a call from Dutch within minutes to set things straight.  Doesn't go to Dinty's any more?  Would a Hindu wife say, Oh, he doesn't go down to the Ganges anymore?  But when he doesn't call, I'm damned if I'm going to call him.  I'm sorry that some weird things are happening at his house, but I feel a little betrayed, too.

     I leave the office early on Friday and drive down to Table Rock.  By four the folks have already run me through a dozen games of pitch.  Before he can deal again, I grab Dad for a walk up town.  Dad knows everybody, and now that he's seventy, he's lightened up a little.  We stop to chat with Bob Hill at the Dodge Dealership, and banter with the fat Police Chief, Andy "Hambone" Powell, the only cop north of the Bahamas who wears a pith helmet year around.

     Dad never asks about personal stuff.  Unlike Mom, he maybe has an idea that something went kablooie while I lived in Colorado.  Whatever it was, he doesn't want to know about it, except that he's sure it was my own damn fault and nobody else's but my own.  On that I agree.  I was telling myself it was my own damn fault when I left the clinic the second time, determined not to let Vail beat me.  I got on at Beaver Run, but I was fragile, and knew it.  I was like a boxer with a glass jaw, out there jabbing away, but knowing any second I could be that face‑down on the floor, like the fighter in the mural at Dinty's, never even seeing the punch that did it.

     I know he'll have a fit, but I get a bug in my butt, and as we're passing Dinty's I say, "Come on, Dad.  I'll buy you one."

     "No, sir. I don't go in those places."

     But I've already opened the door and Bud Essinger is saying, "Well look what the cat drug in.  It's Tommy Stasky."

     "And his good for nothing son, Jerry," I say.

     Dad hesitates.  "I'll have one beer," he says to Bud, coming inside.  "You know I don't believe in drinking outside the home."

     Several of the regulars laugh, but it's good‑natured. They all know Dad and think it's funny to see him there.  And he's ready to have it be a joke on him that he's at Dinty's.

     We drink two beers, and by the bottom of the second glass I'm feeling pretty good about my old Dad.  He never does get firmly settled on the stool.  Half‑standing the whole time, he trades friendly barbs with Bud and Old Henry Biggs.  He even tells a joke.  Up on the wall, the dim glowering prizefighter looks almost benign.

     We come out of there twenty minutes later, swinging the screen door wide, almost knocking down a slim blond woman.  I have never, in my thirty‑two years, seen my father drunk.  Not even tipsy.  And he isn't today, either, but the beer has put flush on his cheek.  He wraps an arm around the girl and says, "There's my Molly."

     "Hello, Mr. Stasky."

     "She's the one takes care of my glasses when I sit on them.  She can fix 'em right up so I don't have to buy another pair."

     "Good as new," she says.  "So you got your son home today.  You're celebrating."

     "He's terrible.  Leading me down the path of perdition and drunken foolery."  They look at me and laugh.  "And he'll probably have some more later.  He's going to dinner at Dutch Willis'.  You know him, he's that mean boss of yours."

     "I know him," she says, smiling.

     He waves her on down the sidewalk like a courtier.  Then, almost to himself, "Lovely girl, that Molly."

     I've never seen him so lively around a young woman.  But also, until this moment, Dutch's infidelity has been purely an abstraction.  Seeing Molly, all I can think is, so this is Dutch's lover.  From the looks she gave me, I think she knows that I know.  Her eyes met mine square on, daring to be judged.  There was something else in those eyes, something dangerous and familiar, but I put it out of my mind and walk home for another game of cards.

     It is strictly my fault that I am half an hour late to the Willis residence.  I did not have to go all the way out to Wal‑Mart to buy baseball caps with "Go Table Rockets" written in cursive style above the bill.  But I did.

     Flames leap up from the charcoal grill at the side of the house.  Dutch dances backwards, and sloshes his beer into the fire.  I come up the lawn wearing a hat and carrying three more, one of them child‑sized. 

     "How do you like your steak?" Dutch calls out.  "Crispy or extra‑crispy."

     Barb comes hustling out of the house, cradling something in front of her.  A determined four‑year old follows.  "Ice," she says to Dutch.  "Ice keeps the flames down."

     "So does beer," says Dutch. "Robbie, keep away, it's hot."

     "Just put ice on," she says, doing it.

     "You're putting it out.  Rob, I said stay back.  Barb, can you grab him."

     "Hi Jerry," Barb says, ignoring his request.  She comes toward me wiping her hands on her shorts.  We embrace awkwardly, with a touching of cheeks.  "We called your Dad, and he said you were on the way.  So we put the steaks on."  She looks good in those shorts, which are baggy and pleated, and the pink Polo shirt.

     I hold up the hats by way of explanation.  "In honor of the only Rocket here," I say, putting one on her head.  I drop the smaller one on Rob's head.  It falls off.  He squats to pick it up.

     "And you St. C's guys thought you were so cool." 

     "No way," Dutch says, taking steaks off the grill.  "Public school girls are snobs.  It's a well known fact."

     "You always said we were sluts.  We can't be snobs and sluts at the same time, can we?"

     "Not in front of Rob."

     The boy, who's been staring obliviously at the hat, obliges Dutch by saying, "What's a slut?"

     I laugh, but not Dutch.  "Great," he says, through tight lips.  "That's just great."

     Barb says, with elaborate civility, that we should go inside to eat.  The bugs are too bad out here.

  I grab a beer out of the cooler at the edge of the patio, and want to keep going.  I'm not used to this kind of tension.  I talk a lot over dinner, more than I usually do, and I drink a lot of beer.  I am determined to be a buffer zone, blocking every thrust and feint between them, not so much for their benefit as for mine.  Longing for the comfortable banality of card games, I ramble on about the summer package deals to Keystone and Breckenridge.  That's fine through most of the meal.  But then Dutch starts saying how busy he is, tipping me off that I'm being too good a salesman.  Barb is interested.  To head her off, I start in about the epic cheapness of Nebraskans, who would go sit around a ski resort for a week in the middle of summer.  It works.  Barb doesn't ask about them going.  She only says, with a kind of beaten dignity, "Well, it sounds like fun to me."

     After the plates are cleared we move back out to the patio, where it's cooler now in the early twilight.  Rob is invited to say goodnight to Uncle Jerry, and Dutch takes him to bed.  Barb lights citronella candles in small buckets, and sits on the glider beside my chair.  I lean way back and pulled the Rockets cap low over my eyes.

     "It's nice you and Dutch get can together so much," she says.  "He doesn't have anyone like that around Table Rock."

     "Yep."  I wonder if I'm imagining that whiff of sarcasm in her voice.  I know I should just let it go, but I don't.  "Why's Dutch not going to Dinty's anymore?"

     "We decided," she says carefully, "that since Dutch was out drinking with you in Omaha every week, he doesn't need to drink in Table Rock too.  I mean, it's not a very nice place, that Dinty's."

     I have a strong urge to tell her she's wrong.  And if Dad had his eyes open today, he'd know he's wrong too.  They'd both know that Dinty's is an oasis of peace in a wicked and unpredictable world, that you go there to find your center of gravity, to find sanctuary.  But I don't say anything.  I'm drunk.

     "Jerry, don't let him drink so much."  Without warning, her voice has turned desperate.  "Please don't let him drink so much.  By the time he gets back from Omaha it's so late.  He says he hasn't had that much, but I can tell.  He's going to kill himself on Highway 75."  Her hand grips my arm.  I stiffen like a corpse.  "He's not as tough as you.  You lived at ski resorts and partied all the time.  For you it's nothing.  Dutch can't handle that wild life."

     The sound of footsteps saves me from screaming at her or bolting away into the dark, one of which I would have had to do in another second.

     "Don't let him drink so much.  Please!"

     "Okay!" I whisper, to make her let go of my arm.

     "Look alive," Dutch says, tossing a cold beer at my head.  I catch it, pull the tab slowly, and set it down beside my half full one.  Dutch opens another for himself.  "Best goddamn drink in the world," he says, doing Jack Nicholson in The Last Detail.

     After a couple of minutes I say I should be going.  Dutch is well-oiled, more so than I've ever seen him at Dinty's.  I want to get out of there before his glib wit stumbles over some marital tripwire.  He puts his arm around her and they drift toward the car with me.  I stop and say goodbye in the dark shade of a pin oak, not wanting to be impaled on promises Barb would try to extract from me with her eyes.  I thank her and tell Dutch I'll see him around.

     I don't know what makes me circle the block instead of driving straight home to my folks.  I swear I hadn't seen a thing out of the ordinary.  But by the time I come around past Dutch's and get to the stop sign, there she is.  It could be any blond woman in the old Dodge Dart, but it isn't.  I follow her six blocks and she stops in front of a church.  She doesn't get out or look around, just sits there like she's been pulled over by the cops.

     "My dad's got a crush on you," I say, leaning an arm on the top of her car.

     "He's so sweet," she says.  "I really like him."

     Neither of us know what to say next.  I realize that I've followed her just because I'm proud of myself for catching her staking out her lover's house.  But I have no advice for this woman, don't want to hear her sad stories.  I want to sleep for a long time and nurse my hangover through coffee and cards.  "Well, nice seeing you."  I tap the roof of her car.  "Next time, you should pick a better spying place."

     I know the second I say it I've screwed up.  It was supposed to be light banter, acknowledgement of our shared bond, honor among thieves.  But it came out a rebuke, and I can only think I deserve it when she bursts into sobs.  I stand in the middle of the quiet street, feeling bad, listening to her apologize through her tears, and I know I can't just leave.  If she wants to talk, I say, we can get a six pack. 

     I drive the Dart up and down Main Street, just like the high school kids, and Molly talks.  Once she gets done sputtering, she speaks fast, the words pouring out of her.  She doesn't use names, just pointed pronouns.  She loves him.  He loves her too, but there's the kid to think about, and the Chamber of Commerce and the Lions Club.  If he leaves the Stepford Wife, he can expect to lose half his business.  Probably he'd go broke.

     Molly sounds more agitated than bitter.  I nod my head, say a few things.  Nothing comes as much of a surprise.  What surprises me is that I start feeling a surge of sympathy.  Maybe it's because she's pretty.  Her face is kind of a thin, with big eyes and full lips.  In a state where some law seems to require all women to have identical medium‑length perms, like Barb's, Molly leaves her hair long and loose.  Anyway, after awhile I hear myself telling her she has to get out of there.  Dutch is a dead end for her.  She likes Colorado?  I can get her a job with a timeshare place called Beaver Run.  I can't imagine what I'll tell Dutch when he finds out I've helped his mistress leave him, but I have the sudden conviction it's what I have to do.

     "It's not that easy," Molly keeps insisting. "I can't just leave."

     "You can if you want to."  I am surprised by this strange, decisive person speaking in my voice.

     The more she comes to see it as a real option, the more agitated she gets.  She flips the visor up and down.  She whips her hair out of her face with the back of her fingers.  It might be that particular gesture that first tips me off.  When she asks to stop at the rest room of the Texaco station a second time, and comes back sniffling, I know.

     "You and he do nose candy too?"

     She looks startled.  For a second I think she's going to play dumb.  Then she laughs.  "Are you kidding?  He'd probably turn me in to Hambone."  She flips her hair savagely, and in the dull glare of gas station florescents, her eyes bulge again with tears.

     I feel sorry for her and enraged at her in the same moment.  This is my old self, my good self, dormant so long, betrayed in the first moments of its rebirth.  And I know how to finish it off.  "Got some for me?"

     Molly reaches into her purse, and comes out with a closed fist.  I put out my hand, she uncloses her hand into mine, and then I have the closed fist.  I feel the smooth glass vial.  "There's not much left," she says, as I'm heading for the men's room.

     We end up at her house, by a route that takes us first by my instant cash machine, and then to a clapboard house in Davey Town, the small squalid neighborhood lying literally on the other side of the tracks.  I wait in the car while she goes in to get it, though I probably went to grade school with the dealer.  She comes back smiling and we head out Goose Valley Road, dipping up and down between the cornfields.

     There are some will tell you cocaine is no aphrodisiac.  That it makes you impotent or uninterested or both.  We sit in the kitchen, laying out lines on the formica, hoovering them through a rolled bill.  I tell her I like a lady who uses an authentic single‑sided razor blade.  In Davey Town they're probably chopping lines with their credit cards.

     She laughs.     "People in Davey Town don't have credit cards."

     "Everybody's got credit cards, darling.  Some folks just don't pay them."

     We chase the lines with Jim Beam and the Jim Beam with lines.  We make love with the frantic abandon of the very scared, and when we are finished we smile and hold each other for five minutes before sitting up to do more lines. 

     Saturday is the busiest day of the week in Table Rock.  Farm couples from three counties came to get groceries at the I.G.A., rat poison at the feed store, shotgun shells at the Woolworth.  The wives buy clothes, and have their hair done.  The husbands fill the V.F.W., the Slovak Hall, the bars.  Dinty's opens at eight on Saturdays, and when I walk in at five after, half the stools are already taken. 

     "Johnnie Walker Black, and coffee.  And a beer."

     As Bud turns away, the mural leaps off the wall at me.  I haven't slept, am still plenty messed up, but that sucker is blaring.  The fight scene has come alive and is glowing in lurid detail, cleaned and restored like some Sistine Chapel.

     I think I'm hallucinating, but I still ask Bud to move the Bic pens and corncob pipes so I can see the whole thing.  He stares at it with me, and says, "I always like it of a morning."

     Then it hits me.  Sunshine is flooding in the east windows.  I've never seen Dinty's so bright.  I stare at the face‑down fighter.  "Bastard took a fall."

     "Yeah.  Dempsey never would get that title back, you can see it in his eyes."

     "You can't see his eyes."

     Bud looks sharply at me.  "You know who won, don't you?  That's 1927, the Long Count Fight.  Dempsey put him down in the second, but didn't go right to a neutral corner, so the count didn't start for ten or twelve seconds.  Tunney managed to get up, dance away from him, and won it in a decision."

     "That right?"  My hand shakes, spilling coffee, rattling cup against saucer.  Bud drifts away.

     The screen door slams, and Dutch Willis hops on the next stool, grinning.  "Drove by your folks, didn't see your car.  Had a hunch I'd find you here."

     "Thought this was off limits to you."

     "Aw, she just says things, you know."  Dutch looks at the ceiling.  "You were great last night.  Talking about me and, you know, Omaha, with Barb.  She said she understands, it's good for me to go visit you, she doesn't mind.  I can't wait to..."  Dutch shushes himself while Bud slides him a beer.  "I can't wait to tell Molly.  I'd like the three of us to get together, in Omaha, I mean for real."

     I look at Dutch for a long time.  The innocent, open face of the adulterer.       He grins.  "What?"

     "Dutch, I feel like shit.  You want to buzz off please?"

     "Oh man, I'm rocky too."

     "No, I mean it."  I grip my beer glass.  "I don't want to talk.  Go grind your damn lenses."

     Dutch's forehead wrinkles above his glasses.  "You're dancing around something.  What's going on, Jerry?"

     "Nothing," I shout. "Just leave me the hell alone."

     "Yeah," he says, backing off the stool. "Okay. Later."

     The door slams.  I stare into the sunlit scotch, and remember her hair.  I can't say I dozed off on Molly's couch, not with all that blow in me.  But I spaced out for a while around three a.m., and I guess she did too.  Some time later I poked her and said let's go to bed.  She wouldn't wake up.  I shook her and slapped her and turned on the light, and while I stood there wondering if there was ammonia under the sink, she stopped breathing.  I dialed 911, and blew air in her mouth and beat her thin chest until the rescue squad showed up.  They did the same things, with no luck.  When they started the last ditch tracheotomy in case she'd choked, I grabbed her keys off the counter and peeled out of there.

     The light was on in the kitchen of my folks' house, but I didn't stop.  On Main Street, the traffic lights blinked yellow because good citizens were all at home asleep in that blue‑gray hour before dawn.  I drove up and down Main, staring at the brick storefronts.  A hundred years old, they had arched windows on the second floor.  At ground level they were plate glass and pastel plastic, fifties‑modern, and they all seemed incredibly beautiful.  Ladies' Finest, Einhof's Rexall Drug, Jim's FTD Florist.  Table Rock Optical, "Eyeglasses in about an Hour."

     I sit at Dinty's, drink beer and coffee and scotch, and stare at the prizefight mural.  I think it was nice for Tunney, that he got back up and won the fight.  Maybe I'll bounce back up too, one day.  Maybe I'll even win one.  But for now, with Hambone Powell coming in the door, I'm just glad I got Dutch out of there in time.  The pith helmet bobs up and down as he makes short returns to the greetings tossed his way, his eyes never leaving me.  I swear I can almost feel the wind on my cheek, the canvas rushing up to meet my face.