14

A few days later Vaughn took Eddie to the Hot-2-Trot for beers. He felt guilty for running Eddie off on Thanksgiving, and said as much, apologizing.

“Happens to me all the time,” Eddie said. “I don't worry about it.”

They sat up on stools and watched the tattoo girl move around behind the bar. Vaughn said, “When Gail and I split I was thinking of getting some kind of dinky job, just to change things up. You know? Get out of the world I'd been in.”

“Sure,” Eddie said.

“You want to have some menial job that puts you on the sidelines for a while, where nothing is at stake, or at least not at stake in the way you're used to. You get up, have a clear head, nothing you're responsible for, and you go to work and sit around earning your minimum wage. And at night you go home, clean up, and then you're fresh and ready, and nothing to worry about until the next morning. It's like being a kid again.”

“So did you?”

“No,” Vaughn said. “I thought about working in a gas station. As you may know, I worked in a gas station for a short period when I was a kid. I don't know why that always appealed to me. Maybe the smell. But it would have to be an old gas station, not like the ones out there now.”

“We still got a couple those over here,” Eddie said.

“I know that, and I considered applying,” Vaughn said. “But I came up short. I don't think I'm cut out for retail. Too much sneezing. People will sneeze all over you if you let them. Go to any restaurant and there's always somebody sneezing, blowing those germs out twenty-three feet or whatever it is. And that's not all of it; that's just the start, the sneezing. I don't need to tell you—”

“No,” Eddie said.

“You'll walk up to a car and some guy'll let you have it just like that. No chance to escape.”

Eddie seemed barely attentive. He was watching the bar girl's butt. The tattoo was much in evidence—colorful, elaborate, and it dipped in the center, like all of them do, as if to say, “Enter Here.”

Vaughn said, “So I half expected Gail to bring this Tony kid over for Thanksgiving. She goes out all the time, though. Saturday she was out all night. I got worried, but Greta persuaded me to wait. I mean, I don't know where the guy lives, anyway. I don't know what we could've done.”

“I heard,” Eddie said. “Greta asked me to look the guy up. I'm working on the address.”

Vaughn leaned away, squinted at Eddie.

“Quit it,” Eddie said. “I'm just helping out. Maybe talk to him in the sweetest possible way, suggest that he, too, has something to lose.”

“Don't go too far with that,” Vaughn said. “Could get nasty.”

Eddie tapped his bottle. “I don't mind a little nasty now and again. Keep your hand in the game, so to speak. Anyway, she asked, so that's that.”

“She asked,” Vaughn said.

Eddie went off to the bathroom in the back of the place, and Vaughn ordered more beer for both of them. The girl with the tattoo's name was Chandra, she said.

“What's with the tattoo?” Vaughn asked when she slid the new bottles to him, one at a time.

She reached around behind her and tugged at the waistband of her jeans. “Had it awhile,” she said. “Me and some girls got them one night we were partying.”

“You like tattoos?”

“They don't hurt anybody. Guys like 'em. You've been keeping an eye on it, yeah?”

“I have it under surveillance,” Vaughn said, dropping money on the bar.

She smiled as she picked up the bills. “They speed things up,” she said. “I don't see it very often. It's back there all the time.”

Eddie got back on his stool and the girl moved away. “You hitting?” he said.

“Not now, not ever,” Vaughn said.

“You know that thing you were talking about, the shit job? I did that when I got out of rehab. I got this thing at the movie theater in Gulfport. Manager. The West Gulfport Four, a fourplex where they played stuff a week or two after it left the mall.”

“I always wanted a movie theater,” Vaughn said.

“Doubt that,” Eddie said. “I didn't do much except ride herd on the kids. They ran the place, made the eats, took tickets, started the projectors. I inherited the projection kid named Delveaux from the previous manager. Kid was pissed he didn't get the manager job, so he never started a movie on time. People would come for a three-thirty Saturday picture and at three-forty-five they'd start coming out asking where the movie was. If it got real late on a Saturday, I went upstairs to get Delveaux on the job—he'd be napping, or reading porn magazines he had stashed up there—but if it was an ordinary day, I'd just call him from the stinking hole of an office I had behind the snack counter.”

“You get to pick the movies?”

“Shit,” Eddie said. “You kidding? They came out of someplace in Alabama. I had nothing to do with it.”

“I'm not having a theater if I can't pick the movies,” Vaughn said.

“Yeah, I'll bet your movies are going to draw the big crowds,” Eddie said. “They'll be waiting in the rain to get in.”

“The shit. You got no idea what movies I'd show.”

“Rashômon,” Eddie said. “Picnic.”

“You got me,” Vaughn said. “So what happened with you and these kids?”

“The kids were okay. There was the guy Delveaux, a geeky kid named Greg or something, two girls, Tink and Haley—one of them with lousy skin, both with the bodies all the kids have now. They were supposed to wear uniforms, but I let them wear whatever they wanted. That earned me some points for a while. Then the regional manager came and found them in matching tube tops.”

“Cool,” Vaughn said.

“Looked good to me, but the regional guy was all of eighteen and very serious. He said the outfits were unprofessional. He decided we all needed to wear white shirts. ‘It'll be like a uniform,’ he said. ‘But it won't feel like a uniform.’ This was his personal breakthrough, I think.”

“That won't work,” Vaughn said. “Cheese, nachos, butter, chocolate—even when they're clean they're filthy.”

“So anyway the girls wore that bandeau stuff underneath, left the shirts open to the navel, so the regional twit didn't put me out of business.”

“You're kind of skeevy in your old age, aren't you?”

“Every opportunity,” Eddie said. “You take what you can get.”

“You want another beer?”

“Naw,” Eddie said. “I need some sleep. Anyway, the job didn't do anything for me. I didn't last long. I may have been a little too unprofessional with one of the girls, the one named Tink. I mean, how's a guy not fall in love with a girl named Tink? You know?”

“Amen,” Vaughn said.

“Regional Man got wind of it and told me my services were no longer required. I considered ripping his face off, but then I figured that would reflect badly on me and it probably wasn't worth it in the long run. I folded tents, said good-bye to the kids, and retired from the business.”

“Leaving Tink.”

“Yeah, I regret that. I went back a few times, but her interest did not last. She may have been moved by mercy.”