Off Season - Jack Ketchum [8]
He took a long swallow of the Bud and heard the Pincus boys holler down the end of the bar, looking in his direction. He turned and saw Lydia Davis glide in, with Shearing holding the door behind her. There was a big dumb grin on Shearing’s long thin face, but Peters guessed he couldn’t help it. Lydia Davis was quite something.
“Hey, boys,” she said, “who’s gonna buy?” The accustomed greeting. She walked by Peters without so much as a glance. Peters was married and a cop and there were no free beers coming from that quarter. All the same, she gave him a good close look at those pretty young breasts under the blue halter as she passed him, and again as usual, looking at Lydia made him wish he was twenty years younger and not quite so happy with his wife. Then the Pincus boys seemed to swallow her up in the dim light of the bar, and Shearing sat down on the stool beside him.
“Ain’t that something?” he said to Peters, shaking his head like a wet yellow dog.
“Happens every year,” said Peters. “The tourist girls go home and Lydia comes out struttin’. You could tear off a page of the calendar. Always nice to see it, though.”
“That it is.”
“Good shorts.”
“Very nice.”
“The Queen Bee of Dead River,” said Peters. He smiled, mostly for Shearing’s sake. He was thinking that when he was in the army there had been a girl like Lydia in every town he’d seen that made its living on the tourist trade; shy girls or unhappy girls, usually, who were pretty enough when there was not much competition, girls who would eventually marry badly for fear of growing old alone. He wondered if Shearing, who had never gotten out of Dead River, could see that. He doubted it. You had to get away for a while and hear the same foolish bar talk, the same strutting and flashing over and over again in every town, to know how sad it was. And most of these kids, Shearing included, had never been farther away than Portland.
For a moment he and Shearing stared into the bleak artificial twilight of the bar while Lydia and young Jim Pincus went to the juke to feed it quarters and push the familiar series of buttons. The juke hardly ever changed at the Caribou—only when Hank would get drunk nights and, fed up with some tune or another, pull his old battered record case out of the cellar and find a substitute. Two weeks ago he’d gotten angry at a Marty Robbins tune, and now at A41 you had Elvis singing “Are You Lonesome Tonight.” The record was a little warped, but Hank was the only one he’d ever heard play it anyhow.
I’m lookin’ for a feelin’
That I once had with you . . .
A Waylon Jennings song. That meant Pincus had picked it. Lydia would come up with something a lot more raucous, like Jerry Lee Lewis; and Peters reflected once again on the odd fact that in some ways a man was a much more romantic creature than a woman. Even if the man was a tough young weasel like Jim Pincus. In some ways much more romantic.
“How drunk are those boys?” asked Shearing. It was as if he were reading Peters’ thoughts, but that was nothing new. You work with a man for six years or so and it was bound to happen now and then.
“I’d say moderate.”
“Lydia goes for the rough ones, don’t she?”
“You see anybody else around?”
“Us.”
“Officers of the law, Sam. You want the ladies, you’ll do better fixing Port-a-Sans.”
Shearing took him seriously. He hadn’t meant to be taken seriously. “Now, George . . .” There was a whining tone in his voice that Peters had learned to put up with over the years. “You know I never . . .”
Peters gave him a broad wink. You had to be broad with Shearing.
“Don’t worry, Sam,” he said. “Helen knows