High Plains Tango Read Free

effort.
    Leroy came along behind the bar, cigarette dangling from his mouth, wiping his hands on a dirty white apron wrapped around his waist and hanging two inches below his knees, a rip in the hem causing part of it to hang even a little farther. As he passed the old man, Leroy slapped the bar and said, “Shut up, Frank.”
    “Fugyouleer-oy.” Frank flung the slur in the general direction of Leroy’s retreating back before his head smacked onto the bar and he was quiet.
    Leroy nodded. Not friendly, not unfriendly, not in the middle or at the extremes. Flat, in the way of no concern for anything or anyone.
    “I’ll have a Miller’s,” Carlisle said.
    Leroy slid open the metal cooler below the bar, inspected the contents, and twisted his head upward. “Outta Miller’s. Got Bud and Grain Belt.”
    “Bud’s okay.” Leroy’s smelled like every beer joint Carlisle had ever been in, only worse. Sour, acrid, a quintessential place where men came to die, a burial ground for all the old, besotted elephants of Salamander.
    Leroy opened the bottle and set it on the bar along with a little beer glass, narrow at the bottom and curving vaselike to a wider opening at the top. “That’ll be seventy-five.”
    Carlisle laid out a dollar. Leroy rang the cash register, slid a quarter along the bar toward him, and walked back to his conversation with the cowboy. “Seen the witch lately?” he asked the cowboy.
    “Screw the witch.”
    Leroy laughed. “Well, lot of us would like to give it a shot sometime.”
    “Yeah, fat chance,” he said, looking down at his whiskey and water, stirring it with his right index finger, high-heeled boot on the bar rail.
    “Ever notice that Injun she hangs around with?”
    “No .  .  . what Injun?” He raised his eyes without moving his head, staring at Leroy.
    “Old Injun. Lives somewhere out in the buttes.”
    The cowboy coughed hard and shoved his glass toward Leroy. “Screw old Injuns, too. And speaking of gettin’ old and gettin’ screwed, put a little more ol’ Jim Beam in this.”
    Leroy laughed again and reached for the bottle. “Jack, I could put nothing but two hundred proof in your glass and you’d still think I watered it down.”
    The cowboy tilted his head toward Carlisle and mumbled something only half under his breath about “hair longer’n a woman’s,” not caring whether Carlisle heard him or not. Leroy glanced down the bar while the cowboy shook his head and stirred his drink. Carlisle drank his Bud, wondering just where in the big peculiar he had landed. Silence and wind, witches and old Injuns.
    The beer was cold and tasted good in spite of the dismal ambience, even though Bud ranked about sixty-fourth in his beer hierarchy, with Grain Belt further down than last. Six feet away, Frank snored or choked; Carlisle couldn’t make out which, decided on both. One of the pool players screamed, “You lucky bastard!” while the other crowed, “Rack ’em up, Arlo.” Outside, someone revved up a car engine, the rolling boom from a hole in the muffler ricocheting off buildings along Main Street.
    “How’s Gally doing, Jack?” Leroy asked. “I haven’t seen her for a while except to catch sight of her going through town in the Bronco.”
    “She’s okay. You know women, always goddamn complaining about this or that, never happy with the way things are. Thinks we ought to sell the place and try something else. Christ, by the time we’d pay off the first and second mortgages, there’d be nothin’ left.”
    Leroy had heard it all before. He lined up empty glasses on a towel behind the bar, wishing his lower back pain would go away. Poured himself a shot of bar whiskey to ease the pain, which worked for a while but seemed only to make it worse later on.
    Carlisle thought about a second beer, but the company didn’t warrant it, and he didn’t feel like troubling Leroy again. Leroy stood with one foot on a keg, laughing with the cowboy, not bothering to turn