?No, we?re good here,? Bobby Lee said.
?I need some steak sauce,? Liam said.
Bobby Lee smoldered in silence until the waitress brought a bottle of A.1. to the table and went away.
?What are you so heated up about?? Liam asked.
?Take off that hat.?
?What for??
?It?s stupid. It looks like a woman?s.?
Liam stuffed a complete slice of white bread in his mouth and chewed it with his mouth open.
?We got to have an understanding, Liam. I trusted you when I told you maybe Preacher has got to go off the board. I got to know we?re on the same wavelength here. I can?t have you bitching me out all the time.?
?You don?t like to hear the truth, that?s your problem.?
Outside, the sun was red on the horizon, dust rising off the hills in a brown nimbus. Bobby Lee felt as though someone had stuck a metal key into the base of his neck and wound up his nerve endings as tightly as piano wire. He started to eat, then set down his fork and stared emptily at his plate.
He had played the whole deal wrong. Liam was not to be trusted or confided in; he was a whiner who scapegoated his friends. But if Liam wasn?t a bud, who was? Who was the purist in their midst? Who was the guy who did the work less for the money than for the strange visions that seemed to crawl across the backs of his eyelids?
?Looks like you?re doing some heavy thinking,? Liam said.
?You think I blew it for us at the convenience store, that I should have handled it different, that I should have let the soldier take off on me and not even go inside.?
?I thought you said to drop it.?
?I just want you to put yourself in my place and tell me what you would have done, Liam.?
?When this is over, we?ll both get laid. I got a couple of discount coupons from Screw magazine.? Liam waited, grinning idiotically.
Bobby Lee looked into Liam?s eyes. They were a translucent blue, their moral vacuity creating its own kind of brilliance, the pupils like dead insects trapped under glass. They were the eyes of a man to whom there was no significant reality beyond the tips of his fingers.
?When this is over, I?m going back to college. My sister has a house in Lauderdale. I?m gonna take her kids to Orlando,? Bobby Lee said.
?Everybody says that, but it doesn?t work that way. Can you see yourself selling shoes to old guys in Miami Beach with smelly socks??
?I?m studying to be an interior decorator.?
But Liam wasn?t listening. His attention had shifted to a man and woman who were sitting at a booth by the entrance to the restaurant.
?Don?t turn around yet, but check out John Wayne over there,? he said. ?I?m not kidding. From the side, he looks just like Wayne. He?s even got Calamity Jane with him. She must be his traveling punch. Who said western movies are dead??
14
THE AIR-CONDITIONING WAS turned up full-blast in the restaurant, fogging the bottoms of the windows. Hackberry and Pam had taken a booth close to the front counter. Family people were eating dinner in the back section, which was separated from the front by a latticework partition decorated along the top with plastic flowers. A church bus pulled up in front, and a throng of preteens came in and piled into the empty booths. Workingmen were drinking beer at the counter and watching a baseball game on a flat-screen television high on the wall. As the sun set on the hills, the interior of the restaurant was lit with a warm red glow that did not subtract from its refrigerated coolness but only added to its atmosphere of goodwill and end-of-the-day familiality.
Hackberry put his hand over his mouth and yawned and stared at the menu, the words on it swimming into a blur.
?How?s your back?? Pam asked.
?Who said anything about my back??
?Back pain saps a person?s energy. It shows in a person?s face.?
?What shows in my face are too many birthdays.?