An elbow bumped Hooker’s. “Kinda looks like Mikey’s is in good form tonight, huh, Hook?”
Hooker looked around, saw Whitey Cuzak standing next to him. Hooker shrugged and grinned. “Place hasn’t changed much since the last time I stopped by,” he murmured under the music. “Hey, Cooz. Who is that fat fool anyway?”
“I dunno his name, but I hear he’s in from New Orleans. It figures it would have to be some ragin’ Cajun.”
“New Orleans? Don’t they keep those tourists over at the Belle la Vista Lounge?”
Whitey shrugged and took a sip from his schooner. “I don’t think he’s a tourist. Somebody told me he’s a fishing guide. Takes the Okies out on the water to show ’em swordfishing ain’t the same as fishing for cat on the Big Muddy.”
“The Mississippi doesn’t run through Oklahoma, Cooz.”
“It doesn’t? Well, what the hell do I know. I grew up in this state.”
The Creedence single ended just as the bartender grabbed the arm of the New Orleans fishing guide and tried to drag him off the bar. Then a J. Geils Band song—Hooker recognized the synthesizer and percussion intra to “Freeze-Frame”—segued in, and the guide howled in delight and recommenced his erratic hopping on the bar top.
Whitey sniggered from behind the lip of his beer mug. “I also hear he wrestles sharks.”
“What?” Hooker wasn’t sure he had heard his fellow fisherman correctly.
“Yup. Someone was telling me that he takes people out at night to go fishing for shark.” He leaned closer to make himself understood over the blare from the juke box. “Story is that, when they catch a little one, like a nurse or sand shark, he likes to put on a little show for the tourists. You know how you never bring a live shark into the boat, how you drag it into a net in the water and then shoot it or take a hammer to its brains? Well, that crazy asshole takes a skinning knife and jumps down into the net with it.”
“While it’s still
alive
?”
“While it’s still alive.” Whitey shrugged, grinning like a fox. “He wrestles around with it for a while, hanging onto its dorsal fin where it can’t bend around and take a bite out of him, playing Tarzan. Scares the shit out of everyone in the boat for a few minutes doing that, before he takes the knife and puts it in its guts. After that he scrambles out of the net and gets a gun and blows the poor bastard’s brains out. I hear it makes him popular with the people who’ve come down from Minnesota. They love having their picture taken with him.”
There was a crash from the bar, which made them look up. The bartender and the bouncer, a big black guy nicknamed George the Goon, had grabbed the shark wrestler’s legs and yanked him off the bar. One of his flailing arms had toppled a bottle from the liquor case; he was bleeding and screaming obscenities as George the Goon got him in a headlock and started dragging him out the back door.
“Nice guy,” Hooker observed. “I’ll make a point of avoiding him this evening.”
“Hey, why? If George doesn’t break his legs, you oughtta go meet him. He’s been buying everyone drinks all night.”
Hooker smiled and put a hand on Whitey’s shoulder. “Y’know, Cooz, what I really had in mind was a nice, pleasant girl, who can make intelligent conversation, has a good sense of humor, who’s charming and has an intelligent perspective on life…”
“Has small firm breasts, a tight ass, and could give a vacuum cleaner a run for its money,” Cuzak interrupted, grinning broadly.
“Now, I didn’t say that….”
“But I know what you meant. Thank God my daughter’s off in college where she doesn’t have to be around your type.” Whitey hesitated, his smile fading. “I guess I should warn you, though…”
“Whitey, damn it, I haven’t even
seen
Becky since…”
“No, uh-uh, I didn’t mean that, Claude. Laura’s here tonight.”
“Oh, goddammit. She’s
here
?”
“Last time I saw her, she was over at the other end of the room, near the pool table. That was only about five minutes ago.”
“Great. I’ll make a point of avoiding her, too. Maybe she and Bluto the Shark Killer will get together and leave me alone. They’d make a nice pair.” Hooker looked over Cuzak’s shoulder, scanning the crowded barroom. “Well, the place is packed. Maybe she won’t spot me in all these people.”
“Come to think of it,” Whitey said, “she and that guy were hanging around with each other when I saw ’em.”
“See? What did I tell ya?” Whitey grinned and gave his arm a slap, then moved off into the crowd. Hooker inched his way across the room to the bar, where he found Kurt the bartender sweeping up the debris left by the fishing guide’s bar-top boogie. The sour expression on the bartender’s face stopped Hooker from making a wisecrack. Seeing him approach, Kurt put aside his broom and fetched a shot of tequila and a Dos Equis.
“Laura’s been looking for you,” he said as he measured a dose of José Cuervo into a shot glass.
“That’s nice. I’m not looking for her.”
“I told her a giant squid had attacked your boat and you were reported missing, but I don’t think she believed me.”
“Well, good try anyway. Where did you see her last?”
“Over by the pool table. She was with Rocky. Her taste must be getting weird.”
“Rocky? Who’s Rocky?”
“Rocky the dancing geek. The guy George the Goon just dragged out of here. Did you see that?”
“Yeah.” Hooker shrugged. “Very entertaining. You guys should give him a job, and put up a sign outside ‘Live Dancing’….”
Kurt flashed him a sour look. “That was going to be on the house, but for that crack you can pay up.”
Hooker closed his eyes and raised his eyebrows, and slipped his bank card into the pay slot on the bar. Kurt entered the charge on the cash register, and a receipt started to ticker out on the printer. “Go ahead and keep my number in the machine, Kurt,” Hooker said. “I plan on being here a while tonight.”
“Awright. Good luck avoiding your ex.”
“If you see her, tell her that a squid really
did
get me.”
Hooker hung around near the bar, staying away from the side of Mikey’s where the pool tables were situated. He chatted with a few friends, drank a couple of more beers, watched the end of the
Pink Panther
movie. He had wanted to shoot some pool, but since his ex-wife was over there, the idea was out of the question. Instead, he drifted over to the video games near the front door.
It was on his third game of
PsychoKiller
when he met Jeanine and indulged his monthly habit of falling madly in love.
Although she never explicitly mentioned either her age or background, Hooker managed to figure her out at least to an approximate degree. Her soft, unlined face and firm figure put her in her early- to mid-twenties. Her poise and taste in clothes gave her away as being from an upper middle-class family: a country club refugee, given to slumming during weekends away from Everett and Richard and the rest of the horsy bunch. Her manner of speech—grammatically perfect, hardly a contraction or a split infinitive to be found—indicated that she was college educated, possibly from an Ivy League school. Although she tried to pass herself off as being an old salt from the local area who happened to drop into town now and then, Hooker recognized her as being a fairly common type found in Cedar Key now and then: affluent, bored with champagne society, conservative Republican family, tending to take off to the boonies in search of freewheeling good times and perhaps a brief romantic interlude with someone who would show her a better time than dinner at the Oak Tree and being pawed in the back of the old man’s BMW.
But despite all this, Jeanine was fun. She was beautiful to look at, took the ruckus brewing around them in stride, could hold her Scotch and make easy conversation about homicidal video games and weird fishermen who danced on bar tops, and had a nice laugh for his stupid jokes. And, as best as he could sense, she was clearly interested in having him take her home that night.
It seemed as if that was what he was going to do, until he excused himself to go visit the john. The last he saw of Jeanine’s smiling young face was when he said, “Stay put, I’ll be back in a sec.”
When he came back a few minutes later, Jeanine was gone, and he found Laura waiting for him.
“Looking for your friend?” she asked him sweetly.
Hooker stopped when he saw her and simply glared. God damn it, she has done it again.
“What did you tell her this time?” he asked, after giving himself a moment to simmer down. “That I had a contagious social disease? Or did you think of something more clever, like I was the reincarnation of the Boston Strangler?” He didn’t even bother to look around Mikey’s for her. Jeanine, he knew from the moment he saw Laura standing in her place beside the
PsychoKiller
machine, was gone.
Laura shrugged, her brown hair falling over her narrow shoulders in a way which had once been provocative and had since grown to be merely irritating; tomboy grown up to be mischievous siren or smartass harpy, depending on circumstance, personal outlook, and the day of the week. “Nothing much, really,” she said soothingly. “I just slid up to her and suggested that rumor had it you were into bondage, sodomy, and cigarette burns.”
She paused. “To tell you the truth, I think she was rather turned on about the bondage and sodomy, but I don’t think she anticipated the bit about cigarette burns.”
No, Hooker thought, there wasn’t even any point in trying to catch up with Jeanine. Trying to pursue her would only convince her that she had nearly gone home with a sadist. “Thanks a lot, Laura,” he said, picking up his beer from where he had left it on top of the video machine and draining it. “Considering that we’ve been separated for… is it ten months now?… you’re really going out of your way to continue with your wifely obligations. Especially making sure that hubby stays celibate.”
Laura crossed her arms and leaned against the
PsychoKiller
machine. “Just looking out for you, Claude. Did you really want to take home that nice bit of jailbait? Jesus, she was almost young enough to be your daughter.”
“She was older than that,” he responded angrily. “And even if she wasn’t, since when she you get the job of making moral decisions for me? That’s the third time you’ve…”
“And not without good reason,” Laura snapped. She had suddenly turned serious. No longer the smartass honey, she had become her professional, schoolteacher self. She began ticking off the reasons on her fingertips. “The first time, that woman did have a contagious social disease. Things like that get around the ladies’ room, y’know. I don’t think you would have enjoyed finding little lesions on your privates a month after having a one-nighter with her. The second time, the lady in question was married. Maybe you didn’t notice, or maybe you just ignored it, but she had a little gold band around her finger. I saw it.”
She stared him straight in the eye, fixing him with her aquamarine gaze, the first thing which had fascinated him when they had met. “Maybe we’re not married anymore,” she said, “but I’m still your friend, and friends don’t let each other get hurt.”
Hooker was quiet for a moment. He glanced down at the slender hand resting on the controls of the video game. “I see you haven’t taken off
your
ring yet,” he mumbled, looking for a way out of the impasse.
Laura tilted her hand up to gaze at the slender gold band around her ring finger. “I keep it on to remind me that marrying a sailor can get you shipwrecked,” she said softly, studying it with a slight smile on her face.
Neither of them said anything for a moment. Laura gazed wistfully at the wedding ring she had not taken off, and Hooker gazed at her looking at the ring. The harpy was gone, and for some reason he couldn’t explain he was no longer mad.
I wonder why I ever left this beautiful woman
, he thought, admiring the way the video game’s gaudy flashing lights reflected on her face, her hair, her eyes.
I must have been a crazy son of a bitch
,
giving up this beautiful woman for horny-ass teenagers.
Laura sniffed hard, rubbed her finger against her nose, and laughed abruptly. “Yeah, listen to
that.
Uh, and it also works pretty well as a pest repellent.”
“Too bad you had to turn into such a pest yourself,” he caught himself saying.
Oh
,
shut up. Hooker.
Her eyes dropped. “You’re really pissed off at me this time, aren’t you, Claude?”
“Forget it,” he muttered. “Look, just… forget it.” He struggled to find something else to talk about. “Hey, if that works so well as a pest repellent, what were you doing hanging around with that bozo?”
“What bozo?”
“The bozo who was dancing on top of the bar. Uh—Rocky. Kurt told me you and he were hanging around together a little while ago.”
“We’re friends.” She shrugged offhandedly. “He’s funny even if he gets blitzed easy, but he’s a nice guy. I run into him when he drops into town. Why, you don’t think I have a thing going for him, do you?”
“No, I was just wondering,” Hooker replied. He felt a little confused, because Cuzak had told him that Rocky was from New Orleans. Well, by water, Cedar Key and Louisiana were not that far apart. “I just hadn’t seen him around here before.”
“That’s because you don’t come here that often yourself, anymore. You spend all your time on the
Shrimp
.”
She changed the subject. “Are you really that pissed off at me, Claude?”
“Well… no,” he lied. “But don’t you think I have a right to be pissed off? I mean, sometimes it’s hard enough seeing you, let alone having you act like a den mother or something.”
“Hey, it’s my town too, y’know. I mean, I got a teaching job here. You know how hard it is to get a job teaching anywhere these days? Besides that, I like Cedar Key. It’s one of the nicest places I’ve ever lived in. A divorce isn’t going to make me move. C’mon, Claude, lighten up, will you?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Uh-huh. I’ll lighten up. Excuse me, but I think I’m going to go get drunk and see if I can lighten up.”
Hooker started to turn away, but Laura grabbed his wrist with both hands. He tried to pull free, but her grip was surprisingly strong. Not so surprising, when he thought about it. Laura was a lifelong outdoorswoman. She had chopped firewood for the better part of her twenty-seven years, when she had grown up in the boonies of Vermont.