Off Season - Jack Ketchum [9]
“You get the Landers people on their way all right?” he asked.
Shearing motioned to Hank and ordered a beer. “Sure did,” he said. “And happy to see it, too.”
“You got yourself some company there,” said Peters. “I swear that there is something about a stupid woman with a problem that makes me want to hand her seventeen more.” He waved his hand in a gesture of dismissal. “And sometimes I do,” he said.
They drank their beers. Nobody was playing the jukebox now and the bar was quiet; Hank a few feet away from them staring out the window to the street in that dreamy, sad-eyed way of his that was so strange to see in a man his size; Lydia leaning on the bar between Jim and Joey Pincus; Joey’s arm slung over her shoulder, silent with something that Peters thought was very like romance, as close to that as their fear and fool bravado would probably ever take them. He began to feel the second beer swimming in his head and he pushed it away from him. He felt the old discomfort in his back that the doctor had told him came from carrying too much weight and which the beers did nothing to alleviate. The beers, in fact, did nothing much at all.
“Town’s real quiet,” he said to Shearing. “Everybody gone.”
Shearing nodded.
“I got this feeling,” Peters said. “It’s not good.”
“What kind of feeling?”
“Probably old age, Sam,” he said. “I’m maybe tired of the sameness, that’s all.”
Shearing nodded again. There was nothing to say.
“In season you got the clowns. The tourists. Off season you’ve got only us, and sometimes I think we’re clowns, too. Sitting in a little town waiting for summer to come, the fishing worse and worse every year. What’s the point? I don’t sleep good, Sam. I’m restless. Pushing fifty-five and I’m restless. Now that’s a joke, I think. When things get easy this way it always seems like a joke to me. Oh, we keep busy but it’s nothing really. And I think, This year something’s gonna happen. Between now and June One something’s gonna happen to me. Jackpot in the lottery. Some rich aunt dying I never heard of. Something. And then I take the money and the little lady and off we go to Paris. I was stationed there during the war, you know. You know about that. But in twenty-three years of work, in twenty years of marriage, nothing. That’s a joke, isn’t it?”
He pushed himself away from the bar. “Aw, to hell with it,” he said. “Two beers and I got the blues. I can’t even drink like I used to. When you gonna take this job away from me, Sam?”
“When hell freezes over,” said Shearing. “When you give it to me.”
Peters smiled. “Sounds like I got a little time, then,” he said.
The bar door opened and Willis walked in. For a moment he squinted against the darkness and then he saw Peters and Shearing sitting in silence. He walked over to them in long, gawky strides. He’s in a hurry, thought Peters. I guess that means that lunch is over.
Willis and Shearing were both in their late twenties, but where Shearing was studied and taciturn, Willis was exuberant and jumpy as a boy who’d just shot his first five-pointer. The man, thought Peters, was always in a hurry. But he didn’t come looking for them often. And to Peters the proof that it was business was that he made no notice whatever of Lydia. Willis, unmarried and hungry, was usually at Lydia like a coonhound barking up a tree.
“So?” said Peters.
“So you’re wanted back at the office right away,” said Willis. “The both of you.”
“What’s up? Mrs. Landers blow a tire or something?”
Willis smiled. “We got a good one this time,” said Willis, his face flushing red. “I mean a dilly. Fished a woman