gold in the last bit of daylight. Potter said that he couldn’t help admiring him. Most strays didn’t last a week before they were run over on Eighth Street, or some little boy shot them with his .22. The black stripes across the cat’s face made him look a bit like an ocelot, he observed. He’d probably be good company, Potter said, if you got him fixed.
We ought to poison the little bastard before he kills every living creature on the block, Corrine said. She handed her cigarette to Potter, who held it stiffly between his thumb and index finger. He had quit twenty years earlier, and they’d been fighting about her habit since. But all his griping hadn’t mattered a bit, she thought sadly as she walked over to sweep up the bird carcass. She was going to outlive him after all.
* * *
While Karla polished glassware and cut limes, Corrine smoked one cigarette after the other. She ran her thumb across the names and phone numbers carved into the mahogany bar. On one side of the room, large plate-glass windows overlooked the golf course. The wildcatters who bankrolled the project in the late sixties had originally planned on eighteen holes, but construction ceased abruptly amid a sudden glut in the oil markets. While a bulldozer and irrigation pipes sat rusting on what would have been the tenth, club members made do with nine holes. And now, seven years later, with the price of oil ticking up, they might finally get those other nine.
When Corrine folded her beverage napkin and slid her glass to the edge of the bar, Karla brought another Scotch and Coke. Was it her fifth, sixth? Enough that she hooked her toes around the bar rail when she reached for her drink, enough that Karla set a bowl of cocktail peanuts on the bar in front of her.
One man said, just as plain as day, What we have here are two competing stories, a textbook case of he said, she said.
A second sipped his beer and set it down hard against the bar. I saw that little Mexican gal’s picture in the newspaper, he said, and she didn’t look fourteen.
Corrine paused on the number she had been tracing with her finger. They were talking about Gloria Ramírez, the girl she and Potter had seen at the Sonic. We watched her climb into that truck, Potter said, and we sat there like somebody had sewn our pants to the seat.
You okay, Mrs. Shepard? Karla was watching her from the other end of the bar, dishrag in one hand, empty mug in the other.
Yes ma’am. Corrine tried to sit up a little straighter, but her toes lost their grip and her elbow slipped off the edge of the bar.
The men looked at her briefly and then decided to ignore her. It was the best thing about being an old lady with thinning hair and boobs saggy enough to prop up on the bar. Finally, she could sit down on a barstool and drink herself blind without some jackass hassling her.
That’s how they are, a third man said, they mature faster than other girls. The men laughed. Yes, sir! A lot faster, said another.
Corrine felt the heat climbing up her neck and spreading across her face. Potter must have talked about Gloria a dozen times, usually late at night when the pain was so bad he got out of bed and went into the bathroom and she could hear him moaning. All the things he wished he’d done. Could’ve, would’ve, should’ve, she had told him. That’s all we needed, you picking a fight with a man half your age.
But Potter insisted that he had known right away something wasn’t right. He’d worked alongside young men like that for twenty-five years, and he knew. But they sat there and watched the girl climb into that truck, and then he and Corrine drove home. Two days later, when they saw the man’s mug shot in the American, Potter said that he was a coward and a sinner. A day after that, when the newspaper published Gloria Ramírez’s school picture, he sat in his recliner for a long time looking at her straight black hair and tilted chin, the gaze she directed at the camera, the little smile that might have been a smirk. Corrine said there ought to be a law against putting that girl’s name and picture in the local paper—a minor, for God’s sake. Potter said she looked