Stories: All-New Tales - By Neil Gaiman & Al Sarrantonio Page 0,86

glass of it. There was an English song he’d heard once, of which he recalled only one verse:

The man who buys a pint of beer

Gets half a pint of water;

The only thing the landlord’s got

That’s any good’s his daughter.

The beer was watery, to be sure, but it didn’t matter because he didn’t care about beer, good or bad. But the bar held something to interest him, the very thing he’d come out for.

She was two stools away from him, and she was drinking something in a stemmed glass, with an orange slice in it. At first glance she looked like the hitchhiker, or like her older sister, the one who’d gone wrong. Her blouse was a size too small, and she’d tried to cope by unbuttoning an extra button. The lipstick was smeared on her full-lipped mouth, and her nail polish was chipped.

She picked up her drink and was surprised to find that she’d finished it. She shook her head, as if wondering how to contend with this unanticipated development, and while she was working it out he lifted a hand to catch the barman’s eye, then pointed at the girl’s empty glass.

She waited until the fresh drink was in front of her, then picked it up and turned toward her benefactor. “Thank you,” she said, “you’re a gentleman.”

He closed the distance between them. “And a fisherman,” he said.

SOMETIMES IT DIDN’T MATTER what you had on your hook. Sometimes it wasn’t even necessary to wet a line. Sometimes all you had to do was sit there and they’d jump right into the boat.

She’d had several drinks before the one he’d bought her, and she didn’t really need the two others he bought her after that. But she thought she did, and he didn’t mind spending the money or sitting there while she drank them.

Her name, she told him repeatedly, was Marni. He was in no danger of forgetting that fact, nor did she seem to be in any danger of remembering his name, which she kept asking him over and over. He’d said it was Jack—it wasn’t—and she kept apologizing for her inability to retain that information. “I’m Marni,” she’d say on each occasion. “With an i,” she added, more often than not.

He found himself remembering a woman he’d picked up years ago in a bar with much the same ambience. She’d been a very different sort of drunk, although she’d been punishing the Harvey Wallbangers as industriously as Marni was knocking back the gandy dancers. She’d grown quieter and quieter, and her eyes went glassy, and by the time he’d driven them to the place he’d selected in advance, she was out cold. He’d had some very interesting plans for her, and here she was, the next thing to comatose, and wholly incapable of knowing what was being done to her.

So he’d let himself imagine that she was dead, and took her that way, and kept waiting for her to wake up, but she didn’t. And it was exciting, more exciting than he’d have guessed, but at the end he held himself back.

And paused for a moment to consider the situation, and then very deliberately broke her neck. And then took her again, imagining that she was only sleeping.

And that was good, too.

“AT LEAST I GOT the house,” she was saying. “My ex took the kids away from me, can you imagine that? Got some lawyer saying I was an un—t mother. Can you imagine that?”

The house her ex-husband had let her keep certainly looked like a drunk lived in it. It wasn’t filthy, just remarkably untidy. She grabbed him by the hand and led him up a flight of stairs and into her bedroom, which was no neater than the rest of the place, then turned and threw herself into his arms.

He disengaged, and she seemed puzzled. He asked if there was anything in the house to drink, and she said there was beer in the fridge, and there might be some vodka in the freezer. He said he’d be right back.

He gave her five minutes, and when he returned with a can of Rolling Rock and a half-pint of vodka, she was sprawled naked on her back, snoring. He set the beer can and the vodka bottle on the bedside table, and drew the blanket to cover her.

“Catch and release,” he said, and left her there.

FISHING WAS NOT JUST a metaphor. A couple of days later he walked out his front door into a cool autumn morning.