‘Hey, I wouldn’t fuck you around over a quarter.’ ‘You make me so tired,’ I said, ‘I can hardly move my fingers. ‘Eddie, Eddie,’ the Indian said to the bartender, ‘did you find any dimes and nickels down here on the floor yesterday? Did you sweep up? Did you sweep anything like that, maybe two dimes and a nickel?’ ‘Do you know when that’s it? Do you know when it’s the end?’ ‘Somebody’s gonna get fucked up over this.’ ‘And then you never paid me the quarter? You owe me a quarter, man.’ ‘And you said if I’d rack you’d get change in a minute and pay me back?’ I said, ‘Hey, wasn’t I shooting pool in here with you yesterday?’ She wasn’t there.Ī guy, a slit-eyed, black-eyed Nez Perce, nearly el- bowed me off the stool as he leaned over ordering a glass of the least expensive port wine. Indians from Klamath or Kootenai or up higher-British Columbia, Saskatchewan- sat in a row along the bar like little icons, or fat little dolls, things mistreated at the hands of a child. I did, but not enough to drink for the whole two hours. The bartender said, ‘Do you want a drink?’ I looked in all the worst locations, the Vietnam Bar and so on. But she was still in love with a man who’d recently gone to prison. I was after a seventeen-year-old belly dancer who was always in the company of a boy who claimed to be her brother, but he wasn’t her brother, he was just somebody who was in love with her, and she let him hang around because life can be that way.
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