you see him here now?”
I thought she had a point. So did Maggie.
“Okay,” Maggie conceded. “I appreciate it. Tell Roger I said you earned your free drinks.”
The woman staggered off and a scared-looking kid took her place.
“You old enough to be here?” Maggie asked him bluntly.
“Oh, yes, ma’am,” he said, whipping out a wallet and producing a military ID. “I’m twenty-four years old. I just look young for my age. Always have.”
Maggie handed his ID back without even looking at it. “You on leave?”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m shipping out tomorrow.”
“Better get good and drunk tonight then,” Maggie said.
The kid was surprised. It took him a moment to realize she was joking, and when he finally laughed, it made him look about twelve years old. I tried to get a feel of what his fate held in store for him, especially if he was headed for active duty. But all I could get from him was an image of two older people, dressed for church, arms outstretched to hug him. Not a bad memory to take with you to bad places.
“What did you see?” Maggie asked him.
The kid blushed spectacularly, turning a tomato red all the way from the base of his neck to the tips of his ears. What a thing to live with.
“What is it?” Maggie asked him more kindly, seeing his distress.
“I got tossed,” he mumbled.
“What?”
“I got tossed.” He looked up at Maggie, ashamed. “You know, like dwarf tossing?”
“No, I don’t know,” Maggie said firmly.
“I was standing there, minding my own business, watching a real pretty girl dance on the bar, when someone picked me up by my waistband and the back of my pants and kind of threw me through the crowd. I hit some fellows sitting at the end of the bar and went down. That’s when about fifty people landed on top of me and I got dragged outside, and I can’t tell you much else.”
Maggie was staring at him. “You got tossed?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said emphatically. “And I don’t have to tell you how embarrassing that is.”
“No,” Maggie said. “You don’t. You have no idea who did it?”
He shook his head. “I reckon he was pretty big.”
Maggie did not correct him, although I am sure she was thinking the same thing I was: so far, just about every customer we’d seen, with the exception of the old man in Levi’s, could have tossed this kid across the room. Especially the women. But Maggie did not pursue the point. She was like a perfectly calibrated interrogation machine, and what was more: I could tell she liked it. I was getting a glimpse into the real Maggie at last. She liked being among these people.
“Okay,” Maggie said. “Thanks. Go on inside and have your drinks. And good luck tomorrow.” She hesitated, then took his hands and squeezed them. “Don’t be a hero. Just put your head down and get through it. It’ll pass.”
He looked at her a little strangely as he walked away to his fate.
I wondered if he’d ever come back.
Two over-the-hill and overweight biker chicks took his place. “We want to testify together,” they announced in unison.
“You’re not testifying,” Maggie explained patiently. “This is all off the record. I just need to know who started it and who came after that guy.”
“We still want to do it together,” one of them said.
“Okay by me.” Maggie waved at them to take a seat.
They sat side by side, illuminated by the neon lights. They were definitely old before their time and it was likely alcohol and smoking were the reasons why. But for a pair of women who’d been hanging out at a bar all night, they seemed pretty damn sober to me. They took turns telling their story, like that children’s game Connie used to play with the boys: one person would make up a sentence, then the next person would add their own and so on, no matter how absurd it got.
“That guy was sitting at the end of the bar,” the bottle blonde of the pair explained as she pointed out Bobby Daniels. “Minding his own business. Not saying anything.”
“We figure he was laying low on account of he’s right out of the joint,” the second woman said. “Anyone can tell. A couple of the working girls approached him, knowing that and all, but he just waved them off.”
“Might have gone gay inside,” the first woman confided to Maggie. “Happens to some of them.”
“That’s true,” her friend agreed. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Then this