The fat man who had called Jack an asshole shrank back
from the rangy man in the Levi’s and the clean white T-shirt.
Randolph Scott started toward Jack. His big, veined hands
swung at his sides.
His eyes sparkled an icy blue . . . and then began to
change, to moil and lighten.
“Kid,” he said, and Jack fled with clumsy haste, butting the swinging door open with his fanny, not caring who he hit.
Noise pounced on him. Kenny Rogers was bellowing an
enthusiastic redneck paean to someone named Reuben James.
“You allus turned your other CHEEK,” Kenny testified to this room of shuffling, sullen-faced drunks, “and said there’s a better world waitin for the MEEK! ” Jack saw no one here who looked particularly meek. The Genny Valley Boys were
trooping back onto the bandstand and picking up their instruments. All of them but the pedal steel player looked drunk
and confused . . . perhaps not really sure of where they were.
The pedal steel player only looked bored.
To Jack’s left, a woman was talking earnestly on the Tap’s
pay phone—a phone Jack would never touch again if he had
his way about it, not for a thousand dollars. As she talked, her drunken companion probed and felt inside her half-open cowboy shirt. On the big dancefloor, perhaps seventy couples
groped and shuffled, oblivious of the current song’s bright up-tempo, simply squeezing and grinding, hands gripping but-
tocks, lips spit-sealed together, sweat running down cheeks and making large circles under the armpits.
“Well thank Gawd,” Lori said, and flipped up the hinged partition at the side of the bar for him. Smokey was halfway down the bar, filling up Gloria’s tray with gin-and-tonics, vodka sours, and what seemed to be beer’s only competition
for the Oatley Town Drink: Black Russians.
Jack saw Randolph Scott come out through the swinging
door. He glanced toward Jack, his blue eyes catching Jack’s again at once. He nodded slightly, as if to say: We’ll talk.
Yessirree. Maybe we’ll talk about what might or might not be in the Oatley tunnel. Or about bullwhips. Or sick mothers.
Maybe we’ll talk about how you’re gonna be in Genny County
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for a long, long time . . . maybe until you’re an old man crying over a shopping cart. What do you think, Jacky?
Jack shuddered.
Randolph Scott smiled, as if he had seen the shudder . . .
or felt it. Then he moved off into the crowd and the thick air.
A moment later Smokey’s thin, powerful fingers bit into
Jack’s shoulder—hunting for the most painful place and, as
always, finding it. They were educated, nerve-seeking fingers.
“Jack, you just got to move faster,” Smokey said. His voice sounded almost sympathetic, but his fingers dug and moved
and probed. His breath smelled of the pink Canada Mints he
sucked almost constantly. His mail-order false teeth clicked and clacked. Sometimes there was an obscene slurping as
they slipped a little and he sucked them back into place. “You got to move faster or I’m going to have to light a fire under your ass. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Y-yeah,” Jack said. Trying not to moan.
“All right. That’s good then.” For an excruciating second
Smokey’s fingers dug even deeper, grinding with a bitter enthusiasm at the neat little nest of nerves there. Jack did moan.
That was good enough for Smokey. He let up.
“Help me hook this keg up, Jack. And let’s make it fast.
Friday night, people got to drink.”
“Saturday morning,” Jack said stupidly.
“Then, too. Come on.”
Jack somehow managed to help Smokey lift the keg into the
square compartment under the bar. Smokey’s thin, ropey mus-
cles bulged and writhed under his Oatley Tap T-shirt. The paper fry-cook’s hat on his narrow weasel’s head stayed in place, its leading edge almost touching his left eyebrow, in apparent defiance of gravity. Jack watched, holding his breath, as
Smokey flicked off the red plastic breather-cap on the keg. The keg breathed more gustily than it should have done . . . but it didn’t foam. Jack let his breath out in a silent gust.
Smokey spun the empty toward him. “Get that back in the
storeroom. And then swamp out the bathroom. Remember
what I told you this afternoon.”
Jack remembered. At three o’clock a whistle like an air-
raid siren had gone off, almost making him jump out of his
skin. Lori had laughed, had said: Check out Jack, Smokey—I
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think he just went wee-wee in his Tuffskins. Smokey had given her a narrow, unsmiling look and motioned Jack over. Told
Jack that was the payday whistle at the Oatley T & W. Told Jack that a whistle very much like it was going off at Dogtown Rubber, a company that made beach-toys, inflatable rubber dolls, and condoms with names like Ribs of Delight.
Soon, he said, the Oatley Tap would begin filling up.
“And you and me and Lori and Gloria are going to move
just as fast as lightning,” Smokey said, “because when the eagle screams on Friday, we got to make up for what this place don’t make every Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and
Thursday. When I tell you to run me out a keg, you want to
have it out to me before I finish yelling. And you’re in the men’s room every half an hour with your mop. On Friday
nights, a guy blows his groceries every fifteen minutes or so.”
“I got the women’s,” Lori said, coming over. Her hair was
thin, wavy gold, her complexion as white as a comic-book
vampire’s. She either had a cold or a bad coke habit; she kept sniffing. Jack guessed it was a cold. He doubted if anyone in Oatley could afford a bad coke habit. “Women ain’t as bad as men, though. Almost, but not quite.”
“Shut up, Lori.”
“Up yours,” she said, and Smokey’s hand flickered out like
lightning. There was a crack and suddenly the imprint of
Smokey’s palm was printed red on one of Lori’s pallid cheeks like a child’s Tattoodle. She began to snivel . . . but Jack was sickened and bewildered to see an expression in her eyes that was almost happy. It was the look of a woman who believed
such treatment was a sign of caring.
“You just keep hustling and we’ll have no problem,”
Smokey said. “Remember to move fast when I yell for you to
run me out a keg. And remember to get in the men’s can with your mop every half an hour and clean up the puke.”
And then he had told Smokey again that he wanted to
leave and Smokey had reiterated his false promise about Sunday afternoon . . . but what good did it do to think of that?
There were louder screams now, and harsh caws of laugh-
ter. The crunch of a breaking chair and a wavering yell of
pain. A fistfight—the third of the night—had broken out on
the dance floor. Smokey uttered a curse and shoved past Jack.
“Get rid of that keg,” he said.
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Jack got the empty onto the dolly and trundled it back to-
ward the swinging door, looking around uneasily for Ran-
dolph Scott as he went. He saw the man standing in the crowd that was watching the fight, and relaxed a little.
In the storeroom he put the empty keg with the others by
the loading-bay—Updike’s Oatley Tap had already gone
through six kegs tonight. That done, he checked his pack
again. For one panicky moment he thought it was gone, and
his heart began to hammer in his chest—the magic juice was
in there, and so was the Territories coin that had become a silver dollar in this world. He moved to the right, sweat now
standing out on his forehead, and felt between two more kegs.
There it was—he could trace the curve of Speedy’s bottle
through the green nylon of the pack. His heartbeat began to slow down, but he felt shaky and rubber-legged—the way you
feel after a narrow escape.
The men’s toilet was a horror. Earlier in the evening Jack
might have vomited in sympathy, but now he actually seemed
to be getting used to the stench . . . and that was somehow the worst thing of all. He drew hot water, dumped in Comet, and began to run his soapy mop back and forth through the unspeakable mess on the floor. His mind began to go back over the last couple of days, worrying at them the way an animal in a trap will worry at a limb that has been caught.
3
The Oatley Tap had been dark, and dingy, and apparently
dead empty when Jack first walked into it. The plugs on the juke, the pinball machine, and the Space Invaders game were all pulled. The only light in the place came from the Busch display over the bar—a digital clock caught between the