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Side by side with a friend splintering apart this way, I suppose my father was in a mood to simply accept that life is fatal to us all, one way or another. If he ever tried to warn off Nellie from the fierce drinking, I never heard the words. The flow of booze into his best friend or the behavior of anybody else in the Stockman, Dad took without a blink of judgment. I cannot know whether he ever thought it out entirely, but I believe that in him was the notion that anyone who began his night along the bar with us must have been tussling life in his own right, just as we were. Pete McCabe's Stockman offered a few hours of neutral ground, and the wrong words, even wise ones, might snap that truce.

Three more saloons elbowed into each other on the same block with the Stockman. Next door stood the Melody Lane, with a neon cheeriness about it which probably was supposed to go with the name. Only about a third the size of the Stockman and with plump booths where couples might be sitting and cooing, the Melody Lane seemed always to be showing off its manners more than we liked. It was the kind of enterprise better suited to mixed drinks than beer, and Dad and I seldom invested much time there. But next on the block came a favorite of ours, the Maverick, hard drinking and rollicking. Under its low ceiling the air hazed into a murky blue, probably as much from accumulating cusswords as cigarette smoke. Opening the door from the street was like finding yourself in a sudden roaring fog. But if you had lungs and ears for it, the Maverick was the inevitable place to find one old friend or another bellied up sometime during the night, and it made a good sociable stop for Dad after the warmup beer at the Stockman.

For a time, the Maverick even offered gambling. Other saloons might slyly slip in a poker table or two, but the Maverick set up an entire side room. If you could wedge your way in, your money might change hands several different ways. In my memory is all of one evening spent perched on a corner of the roulette table, boosted kindly by someone who noticed me teetering on tiptoe as I tried to see across to the white marble whirling around the wheel. Roulette impressed me. I liked the practiced flip of the wheel man's thumb as he sent the marble whirring around its rim of circle, the hypnotic slow fan of the wheel moving the opposite direction, the surprise drop and glassy clatter as the marble fell onto the wheel and skittered for a slot. I probably liked to watch the stacks of silver dollars being pushed bravely onto the hunch numbers, too. It was noticeable even to me that roulette players suffered out loud, and hard, while the poker players farther back in the side room spoke only to raise, call, and ask whether everybody had put in their ante.

You can see that the Maverick could take up all of a person's night, if you would let it. But there were six more saloons in town, and Dad liked to keep on the move. Across a rutted alley from the Maverick stood a big square-fronted saloon which had earned a hard name even in this damnless town—the Grand Central. Generally, only spreeing sheepherders and the most derelict of drunks drank at the Grand Central, and you could catch a case of brooding glumness just by being around them. The upstairs floors served as the town's flophouse. It's a stiffs' outfit, Pete McCabe said down his nose. The bleary way of life there was beyond the understanding of anybody who hadn't sprawled into it, and the ragtag men of the Grand Central were known to the rest of us only by the stories which reeked out of the place like the stink of vomited wine. It was told, and thoroughly believed, that one time the undertaker had been called about a body lying head down across the stairs leading up to the flop rooms. He was baffled to find the corpse wedged hard in the stairwell, stiff as a side of frozen meat and apparently dead for at least the past twenty-four hours. He was exactly right. Thinking the sprawled victim