its own — a small adjustment toward comfort or resistance —
and died. Willis dropped the bird on the ground.
“Stay the hell off that thing,” he said to Snipe, and wiped his
hands on his coveralls.
They walked back to the truck.
Gashouse said, “If I’d have missed that last bird, I was going
to start aiming at the side of the damn barn. See if I could hit
the side of a goddamn barn! Ha!”
“Careful of the gun,” Willis said sharply to Gashouse. “Don’t
go blowing your goddamn leg off like an idiot.”
“Time was, I used to be a hell of a good shot.” Gashouse
laughed. “Of course, that was twenty-odd years ago. Could be I
might’ve been piss awful then, too, and just forgot about it. Ha!”
Willis Lister spoke to Tanner without looking at him. “At a
pigeon shoot,” he said evenly, “when a man brings a bird down,
it is always a boy who wrings the neck.”
Tanner nodded.
“That’s a boy’s job,” Willis said. “Always has been a boy’s job.”
“You want to go for a beer?” Gashouse Johnson asked Willis.
“No.”
“What about you, Tanner? You want a soda pop?”
“Take the boy home,” Willis said. “Nobody wants any soda
pop neither.”
The dress that Diane Rogers had been wearing that morning
was hanging over the kitchen sink, just washed, when Gashouse
Johnson returned with Tanner. It was a thick cotton dress and it
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Bird Shot
dripped steadily onto the dishes below, like something melting.
She had changed into slacks. She watched as Gashouse sat at
the table, Snipe at his feet.
“Tell your mother what a crack shot I am,” Gashouse said to
Tanner.
“Crack pot, ” Diane corrected.
“Come on, Diane. It was something to see.”
“Did you win any money?”
“I wasn’t betting. I was shooting.”
“I was asking Tanner.”
“I wasn’t betting,” Tanner said.
“Good for you.”
“Nobody was betting,” Gashouse said. “Nobody was even
there. On account of respect for Ed.” Gashouse leaned forward
and pointed at Diane. “Out of respect. They canceled it out of respect for the man.”
They looked at each other gravely. Then Diane laughed. She
went to the refrigerator and got beers for herself and Gashouse.
She got a glass of juice for Tanner.
“How bad a shot are you, anyhow?” she asked.
“I’m a fine shot. We got our shots in.”
“Where?”
“Willis Lister gave us three birds.”
“Four,” Tanner said.
“Okay.” Gashouse shrugged. “We shot at four birds.”
“Three,” Tanner said. “One was too sick.”
“Just for kicks, you were shooting?” Diane asked.
“So that your son could see what his father does.”
“One bird died,” Tanner said.
Gashouse opened his beer, twisting the cap off with a corner
of his shirt over his palm. He put the cap in his pocket.
“Diane? You ever tell Tanner that Willis Lister is your
cousin?”
“No,” she said. “When I was little, my mother used to say,
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‘Don’t let your cousin Willis kiss you. You tell me if he tries to
touch you.’”
“That’s not true.”
“Honey,” Diane said, “you were absolutely not there.”
“Could have been.”
“I don’t want to talk about Willis Lister.”
“Tanner?” Gashouse said. “Did I ever tell you that your
mother was the first girl I ever kissed?”
“No,” Diane said. “And don’t tell him that again, either.”
“Ha!” Gashouse laughed, and slammed the table so hard that
Tanner’s juice quivered in its glass.
“You have a girlfriend these days?” Diane asked. “Some poor
little thing?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Blond?”
“Brown.”
“Brown?”
“Brown hair.”
“Blue eyes?”
“Brown.”
“Well. That’s not your normal taste, Gashouse.”
“Brown skin, too.”
“How about that?”
“She’s pretty much brown.”
“Well.” Diane took a long drink of beer. “Sounds beautiful.”
They both laughed.
“She’s okay,” Gashouse said. “She’s no you.”
“Neither am I, anymore. Not these days. I’m too old.”
“That’s not true. That’s a damn lie. It’s always nice to sit with
you, Diane. It always has been nice to sit with you.”
“Hm,” Diane said. “Saved up any money?”
“Five thousand bucks in the bank.”
“As we speak?”
“Just sitting there.”
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Bird Shot
“You owed Ed about that much just last winter.”
“Yes, I did.”
“I don’t know. Seems to me, a man who owes five thousand
dollars one minute and has five thousand dollars the next min-
ute hasn’t really saved that money. He just hasn’t spent it yet.”
“Maybe,” Gashouse said.
“Don’t spend it all on that girl.”
“Come on, Diane.”
“I know you.”
“I should hope the hell so.”
“She call you Gashouse?”
“She calls me Leonard. Lee-oh-nard . . .” Gashouse drawled
in three long syllables.
“How old is she?”
“Twenty,” Gashouse said without blinking. When Diane
didn’t answer, he added, “Turning twenty-one next week.”
Gashouse waited, then said, “Next Thursday, as a matter of
fact. Yes, sir. The big two-one.”
Diane tucked one of her feet under her body and asked,
“What’s her name, Gashouse?”
There was a beat.
“Donna,” he said.
Diane did not respond.
“Having a big party for her, actually,” Gashouse went on. “For
her and her friends. Her little school friends. Hell, you know
how girls are.”
“Gashouse,” Diane said kindly. “All your lies are safe with
me.”
“Diane —” he said, but she cut him off with a slight and
elegant wave. An authority of silence.
They did not speak. Young Tanner Rogers had been sitting
with one foot on his chair all this time, and he had untied the
lace of his wet boot. He was practicing knots with the short
length of damp rawhide lace. It was too short a lace for compli-
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p i l g r i m s
cated knots, but he was repeating smoothly a simple knot of
three steps — a rabbit around a tree and down a hole, a quick,
snug pull. Diane looked at her son’s hands, working. She got up
for a paring knife, and when she sat down, she laid her own
hand on the table, palm up.
“Give me that dirty paw,” she said.
Tanner gave his right hand to his mother. She gripped it in all
confidence. With her paring knife, she dug under his thumbnail
jus
t firmly enough (shy of the pink bed of skin) to pull up a thin,
crumbling line of brown dirt. She wiped the knife on her knee,
then cleaned the next nail and the next and the next. Gashouse
Johnson watched. And Tanner watched, too, sitting still, with
his left hand hovering over the knot he had made — a sports-
man’s knot, a modest knot — that will hold and hold, but can
release, too, with a quick tug, in emergencies or at the end of its
usefulness.
68 ✦
Tall Folks
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In the good, good days when the Ruddy Nut Hut was
across the street from the Tall Folks Tavern, there was a
steady passage of drunks from one place to the other, every
night. It was as if the two bars were one bar, weirdly split by the
four fast lanes of First Avenue.
Ellen owned the Tall Folks Tavern, and the Ruddy Nut Hut
was her husband Tommy’s. They had been married for fifteen
years, separated for thirteen, hadn’t slept together in two, and
held no particular interest in the politics of divorce. Tommy
was a fabulous drunk. It was impossible to get kicked out of his
bar — not for fighting or falling down, not for being broke or
under age. Tommy delivered every possible permission. Ellen
delivered famous bartenders. Not all of her bartenders were
great beauties, but several were. The others had their own spe-
cialized appeal, such as immediate sympathy, great wit, or reas-
suring alcoholism. Ellen always kept one bartender who was
good with names, as a guarantor of hospitality, and she always
kept one mean bartender, because there are people who crave
that, too. There are people who crave a mean girl who calls fat
guys “slim” and throws ugly drunks out by hand. If it was not
somehow possible to fall in love with a girl in five minutes,
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Ellen would not hire her. She had done very well this way,
brokering these particular and necessary loves. And Tommy,
too, had done very well.
The Ruddy Nut Hut had pinball and darts. The Tall Folks
Tavern had a pool table. Some nights, one place had toilet paper
or cigarettes when the other did not. And in the hot summers,
the drunks crossed that stretch of First Avenue as if it was
someone’s back yard, as if the moving cars were harmless as
swing sets or sandboxes, as if the twin bars were just neighbors’
picnics, welcome as any suburb.
Then Tommy didn’t pay his rent for eight months, and the
Ruddy Nut Hut closed. All that autumn, Ellen’s customers left
their drinks and stepped out of the bar for air, paced, stepped
back inside again quickly, restless and irritated.
In December, the Ruddy Nut reopened with a hand-lettered
banner that said walter’s topless. The front window had
been painted black, and a sign hanging in it said, “The most
beautiful ladies in the world.” On the door was a smaller sign
that said, “The world’s most beautiful ladies,” and the final,
smallest sign, which was really just a note, explained that Wal-
ter’s Topless would be open every day of the week. At noon.
Ellen had a nephew named Al. She had hired him to be her
plumber, which meant that he was in charge of digging rotting
lemon wedges out of the sink drains, and replacing the toilets
that the young men sometimes tore out of the bathroom walls
to commemorate great moments at the pool table. Al was nice
to look at and easy to talk with. If he had been a girl, he would
have been a perfect Tall Folks Tavern bartender. He would have
been the kind of pretty that union guys are crazy for, and Ellen
would have given him the Thursday evening happy hour shift.
If Al had been a girl working Thursday happy hours, the car-
penters and teamsters would have come in every week and
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Tall Folks
tipped the hell out of him for being so pretty. After Tommy left,
Ellen spent most of her time with Al, and it was Al who went
with her when she finally crossed the street to check out Wal-
ter’s Topless.
Ellen knew everyone drinking at the bar when she walked in
that night.
“These are all my people,” she said to Al.
“And Tommy’s.”
“Tommy can’t really claim any of these people anymore,
can he?”
It still looked like the Ruddy Nut Hut, except that the pinball
machines were gone, replaced by a small stage with a wide
mirror behind it and a long rail in front. There was one stripper
dancing — a skinny girl with knees wider than thighs and a
druggie rock star’s tiny hips. Ellen knew her, too.
“That’s Amber the junkie,” she said.
Amber smiled over at Al, and shook her chest at him. Her
breasts were just nipples on a rib cage. Al smiled back.
“She’s terrifying,” he said.
“She used to come into my bar and drink rum and Coke all
day,” Ellen said. “I used to try to catch her shooting up in the
bathroom, but every time I’d go in there she’d just be brushing
her teeth.”
“That’s almost grosser.”
“Almost.”
“You should put blue lights in the bathrooms. That’s what
they do in fast food places. Then the junkies can’t see their veins
and they can’t shoot up.”
“That’s a little bit mean, I think.”
“I like blue lights,” Al said. “In a blue-lit room I can’t see my
balls.”
“Stop that,” Ellen said. “That’s not true.”
There was a girl behind the bar in a dark bathing suit. Ellen
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didn’t know her. She had black hair with a serious center part,
and the bathing suit was a practical one-piece, faded, with tired
elastic and wide straps.
“She looks like she should be wearing flip-flops,” Al said.
There was a man behind the bar with her, and when he
turned to face them, Ellen said, “Walter?”
He was carrying a case of beer, which he brought over and set
on the bar in front of Al. He had a long beard, seedy and gray,
like the beards of prophets or the homeless.
“Hello, Helen,” he said.
“Ellen,” she corrected. Walter said nothing.
“Don’t even tell me this is your bar now, Walter.”
Walter still said nothing.
“What the hell are you doing with a place like this? Nobody
told me this was your place.”
“Sign tells it.”
“I didn’t know you were the Walter.”
“What else Walter is there?”
“I’m Al,” Al introduced himself. “I’m Ellen’s nephew.”
The two men shook hands over the case of beer between
them.
“Walter?” Ellen said. “I’m not sure about the name of this
place. You should at least call it Walter’s Topless Bar. Walter’s Topless sounds like an announcement. It sounds like you’re the
one that’s topless.”
“It is an anno
uncement.”
“I guess so.” Ellen looked around. “Tommy didn’t tell me he’d
sold it to you.”
“It’s me.”
“I’m just surprised.”
“I don’t know how come. Sign says it plain enough.”
“Walter?” Ellen said. “Secretly, I always thought you were
Amish.”
Al laughed, and Ellen laughed, too.
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“I’ll buy you a drink on the house,” Walter said. “And one for
your nephew.”
“Thank you, sir,” Al said.
“We’ll take two beers and some good Scotch,” Ellen said.
“Thanks.”
Walter took two bottles from the case and pulled an opener
out from inside his shirt, where it hung on a chain, like a heavy
crucifix. He opened the beers, which were just short of cold, and
put them in front of Al and Ellen.
Walter went to the end of the bar for the Scotch and Al said,
“I haven’t called anyone ‘sir’ since I was twelve.”
“Walter can’t run a strip joint,” Ellen hissed. “He hates
women. He never even used to come to my bar, because he
hated women bartending. Jesus Christ, what a lousy joke.”
Walter came back with two shots of Scotch. Ellen drank hers
and left the glass upside down on the bar. Al smelled his and set
it in front of him carefully.
“Who’s your bartender?” Ellen asked.
“Rose,” Walter said. “My daughter.”
Walter and Ellen stared at each other in silence.
“Wow,” Al said. “I was thinking of asking for a job, but she’s
probably staying, I guess.”
“I have three daughters,” Walter said, still looking at Ellen.
“They all work here.”
“Are you going to drink that?” She asked Al, and when he
shook his head, she put back his Scotch, too, and set the glass
next to her own. “This is the funniest thing, Walter,” she said.
“It’s so funny that Tommy didn’t tell me it was you. But good
luck and everything, right?” Ellen took a twenty-dollar bill out
of her pocket and slid it under her beer bottle. “Make sure Rose
keeps us happy down here,” she said, and Walter walked away.
On the stage, Amber the junkie was finished. She was sit-
ting on the floor, buttoning up a man’s long-sleeved shirt. She
looked as tiny as a third-grader. Walter changed the tape and
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adjusted the volume, and another girl came up out of the base-
ment and onto the stage. She had red hair in a braid from the
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