Chapter 2 #2
It's never the end of it. The world is sprinkled with bullies, and there is exactly one thing a bully has ever listened to in the history of the species. It isn't a stern word from a man in a feed cap.
I went back to my breakfast. Slow.
June came out with their plates a few minutes later, and by God, they were charming.
The tattooed one was up out of his chair helping her set them down.
He was apologizing. Ma'am, he was saying, and hand to God, and we been on that road four days, and ain't seen a pretty girl in about a year and I plumb forgot how to act.
The scarred one had his palms up like a man at church.
They were going to tip her extra. They were going to tip her real good.
She smiled. She didn't want to. Then, she did. I watched her shoulders come down off her ears. She said it was fine, it was fine, don't worry about it.
She thought it was over.
That's the part I'd have taken back if I could take back any of it. Not what came after. That she stood there for four seconds and believed the world had corrected itself.
She turned.
The scarred one's right arm came around her waist, and his hand came up over her breast, and he pulled her down toward his lap.
I was already moving.
One stride. That's all it was—one long step out of that booth, and I had his wrist.
I peeled his hand off her the way you'd take a wrench off a bolt.
I put my other arm out and moved her behind me, gently, the flat of my hand at her shoulder, and she went.
She went easy. By the time she was clear, I'd taken that hand up and over and back into an angle God did not draw.
The scarred man's whole body went up onto its toes trying to follow it.
The tattooed one came up out of his chair.
He was fast. He wasn't nearly fast enough. He was still finding his feet when my right hand crossed the space between us. I put it through the middle of his face and out the back.
You don't punch a nose. You punch a spot four inches behind it.
The cartilage went with a sound like a boot in gravel. He sat down in that booth and he kept going, sliding sideways down the vinyl with his eyes rolled white and his arms loose. He was out before his shoulder hit the wall.
The scarred one's eyes came open wide. His free hand—the good one, the right one, the rock—started across his body for his left side.
I finished the wrist.
It went with a crack you could hear at the register. Wet and final. He howled, a high, split-open noise that didn't belong in a room that smelled like bacon. Both hands forgot about everything except each other, and he curled toward the pain.
I hauled him up out of the booth by the collar. I reached down inside the waistband of his sweaty jeans, left side, cross-draw, right where I'd put it eight seconds before I needed it, and I came out with a little black 9-mil with a worn-through finish.
I dropped the magazine, cleared the chamber into my palm, and held the whole works out to June.
"Hold that for me."
She took it in both hands like a casserole.
The room was dead quiet. Sixty years of men, and not one of them moving. The jukebox had gone to something with a fiddle in it.
"Sorry for the commotion, folks," I said. "Would somebody mind calling the sheriff?"
The old boy in the Marine Corps ballcap by the door put his hand up like we were in school. Then, he took his phone out of his shirt pocket and started dialing without ever once taking his eyes off me.
I got a handful of the unconscious one's collar and dragged him off the vinyl.
The scarred one, I barely had to pull. He came along behind his own wrist, cursing me in a thin, wobbling voice, gray to the lips.
I walked the both of them out through the door and its little brass bell and dumped them in a heap on the concrete in the shade of the building.
"Don't move," I told him.
He kept cursing. He didn't move.
There were two motorcycles nosed into the handicapped spot.
I leaned against the wall by the newspaper box and waited. The trucks went by out on the highway, and the heat came up off the lot in sheets even at seven in the morning, and the man on the concrete swore at me steadily. I let him. It seemed like the least I could do.
It took less than ten minutes.
The Tahoe that pulled in had a hundred and eighty thousand miles on it if it had one, and a dent in the rear quarter panel nobody was ever going to fix.
A deputy got out of the passenger side, young, and stayed by the hood.
The sheriff got out of the driver's side and took his time coming across the lot.
Mid-fifties. Gray in the mustache. He'd been a big man once and was a wide one now. He had the eyes of somebody who had heard every story there was and had believed about a third of them.
He looked down at the two men on the concrete. He looked at the pistol in my hand, muzzle down, magazine out, slide locked back.
"You the fella who took the trash out?"
"Yes, sir."
"Uh-huh." He got a boot under the tattooed one's shoulder and rolled him half over, took in the ruin of his face without any change of expression, and let him roll back. "Where you from, son?"
"Valentine."
He grunted. That was the whole of his reaction. It was plenty.
He looked at the door of the diner for a while, and then at the two motorcycles in the handicapped spot, and then, finally, at me.
"That girl in there's my sister's youngest. June’s her name," he said.
I didn't say anything.
"Heard what happened." He scratched his jaw. He let it sit. "You sure you don't want me to come back in a while?"
I grinned.
Texas. There is not another place like it on this earth. Hundreds of miles of scrub and heat in any direction you care to name, and one man in a dented Tahoe offering to drive around the block.
But I'm not a sadist. I've known sadists, I've worked beside a few.
There's a line, and I know exactly where it is because I've stood on it.
These two got what they had coming. They got it in front of witnesses and they got it fast and they'd each of them carry a piece of this morning for the rest of their lives.
That's the ledger balanced. Anything past that is for me, and nothing is ever for me.
"No, sir," I said. "But I'd be glad to help you load them."
The one on the ground had started to stir. The sheriff looked at him.
"Nah." He hitched his belt. "Go on and finish your breakfast, son."
I went back inside.
The bell jingled over the door. I stepped into that room, and the room started clapping.
Not the way a stadium claps. Nothing like that.
Just a couple dozen old men and a couple of wives, setting down their forks and putting their hands together, slow and dry, the way you'd clap for a boy who'd sung all the way through a hymn without losing his place.
You did the right thing, son. That kind. Cowboy to cowboy. Texan to Texan.
I gave them a nod. Then, I sat back down in the corner booth, and I finished my eggs.
They'd gone cold. They were fine.
When I was done, I caught June's eye and asked for the check.
"It's on the house."
"No, ma'am."
"Mister—"
"June." I put my palm on the tabletop. "Come here a second."
She came. She was still white around the mouth and she was holding herself very straight, the way you do when you've decided you're going to fall apart later and not one minute sooner. I recognized it, because I've done it.
"My daddy always taught me to pay my way," I said.
She looked at me for a second, and something in her face gave. She nodded slow, because she knew what that meant. Everybody in that room would have known what it meant. In that country, it isn't a saying. It's the whole religion.
"All right," she said.
"One more thing." I nodded at the room behind her. At the four-top by the window and the counter and the old man in the ballcap. "I'd like to pay all of them. Every bill in the house. If that'd be all right with you."
She stopped.
And then she really looked at me. Not the way people look at a stranger who's done something. She looked at me the way a woman looks when she's deciding whether she's going to let you.
And standing in front of me in a small-town diner a hundred and some miles from home, that girl put her chin up—and, for about one second, she was my mother. Fierce and proud and not about to take a thing from anybody until she was good and satisfied it was being offered right.
I sat very still.
June nodded once. She went to the register. She stood there a while with her lip between her teeth, running the tickets, adding it up on a pad because the machine wouldn't do what she wanted. She came back and set the whole thing down in front of me in her round, careful handwriting.
I paid it in cash. I left a hefty tip.
And when I walked out, it was more than one woman who reached out and patted my arm on the way by.
Out in the lot, the heat had gotten serious. The Tahoe was gone. The two motorcycles were still nosed into the handicapped spot, and I expect they sat there a good long while.
Well.
Time to move on to the next place.
Get a shower, first. Then hit the road.