Ranchero by Rick Gavin Read Free Book Online Page A

self. Sometimes that’ll do, but every now and then it won’t.
    I could tell by the hooting and the shouting before I ever reached the door that Tootie’s was full of lubricated Mississippi rednecks, and the worst thing I could do was try to pass as one of them. I decided, like usual, to be just me, only with a better story.
    I doubt people smoke anywhere like people smoke in the South. And it’s not the volume so much as the hunger they go at their cigarettes with, smoking each one like they’ll never have another. Tootie’s was full of people like that, men primarily along with a couple of creatures passing for women.
    One of them was as big as Desmond, with hair so thin she almost looked bald. The other was as bony as a refugee and hatchet-faced to boot.
    It didn’t matter. The men were lined up several deep to two-step with them, and the place was so blue with cigarette smoke that they all looked like they were dancing at the bottom of the sea.
    Tootie’s had a jukebox that played country crap of the Eddie Rabbit variety. A pool table with the felt in tatters. Some kind of dinging arcade game. The bar was a jackleg production made out of whatever had come to hand, and sure enough a fellow who had to be Tootie was parked at the far end. By bulk, he was probably carrying thirty pounds of neck and jowls.
    He fixed on me once I’d stepped fully inside. They all did at least in passing, but Tootie was concentrated and altogether keen about it. Desmond had pegged him. He was drinking an Iron City straight out of the bottle and smoking a Swisher. I could smell it by the door.
    The bartender, but for his extraordinary gut, looked remarkably like Popeye. He had a blond pompadour and a deficiency of teeth that made his chin jut out. He was inked, of course. Everybody’s inked anymore from schoolgirls to navy admirals, but for some reason crackers seem disinclined to buy their tattoos retail.
    On one forearm this guy had the face of a woman named Rita who looked a little like Thomas Jefferson but maybe half as pretty, and on the other he had what I guessed was an alligator, though it could have been a collie with scales.
    I took a spot at the bar and waited for him to ask me what I wanted, and he finally did after a fashion. He glared at me, anyway, and said, “What?”
    “Iron City if you’ve got it.”
    He huffed and slouched, acted like I’d asked him to paint my house.
    “Four dollars,” he said, and smacked the bottle down so hard before me that foam boiled out of the neck and beer pooled all over the place.
    I drank the first one in silence, sat there looking closed off and morose, which was hardly much of a stretch with an Iron City to polish off. I had to wonder if Tootie had ever tasted an actual potable beer or had just gone through his jowly life drinking this skunky Pittsburgh lager.
    The guy who’d last been dancing with the fat, bald woman came lurching up to the bar. His dungarees were greasy and his shirt was half-unbuttoned. He dug around in his pockets and came up with about eighty cents in change. He spilled it out on the bar top and ordered a Budweiser.
    The bartender glanced at Tootie, who moved his head from side to side.
    “Nope,” Popeye said, and that customer snorted and growled like a mucousy bear.
    Every time he moved, his stink hit me. It was a blend of body funk and dank earth with a hint of tractor diesel.
    “Hey,” he said, and I didn’t need to see him to know he was talking to me. I showed Popeye my empty Iron City bottle by way of ordering another.
    “HEY!” There was a useful touch of menace to it now.
    I swung my head around to take him in. “What?”
    “Buy me a cold one.” He was thick-tongued and his eyes were wandering. He was missing most of his left ear. From the shape of what remained, it looked like somebody had gnawed it off.
    He watched me, in as much as he could focus on anything, and drifted a little like he was fighting a wind.
    Popeye slammed my Iron City