Free Snapper by Brian Kimberling

and spending it immediately on pitchers of beer (any delay would eliminate the light-headed blood-loss bonus buzz). A few times a month I took some hardback books to the French guy who ran the secondhand bookstore and converted those into beer as well. I asked him once when I was studying French what beginner books he would recommend. He spoke several languages and I sometimes found him reading in Cyrillic.
    Erotica, he said. You’ll never forget the word for
inner thigh
.
    Several times during those years, and often after a few pitchers of beer, I found myself entangled with the wrong girl. Either she lacked conversational zing, or she was the sort of ferociously intelligent person who talked endlessly about animal testing and rainforests. There didn’t seem to be any variation on these two types in town except for Lola, and she got entangled with the wrong people too.
    John had an even harder time than I did. Bloomington was and is a kind of intellectual mecca rising from the cultural wasteland of south central Indiana, so it was disappointing to learn that we had to share it with forty thousand students all as aimless as we were. In addition to the students and faculty, Bloomington supported a huge colony of people who never moved on—whose ambitions after graduation were no match for the town’s coffee shops, ethnic clothing boutiques, assorted Thai restaurants, and live music. So they hung around in underpaid or part-time jobs (standing behind the counter at a secondhand bookstore springs to mind) and they made every line at every bar in town that much longer. Eventually I became one of them—underpaid, anyway—andspent my birding career passing through one quaint college town after another.
    John’s booze supplies began to increase on our nocturnal rambles. A fifth wasn’t that much for him, especially after I’d had some. I took big swigs for his sake. He would just get a little restless. Soon he had whole pints with him. Still I thought he was safer with me as a brake than out smashing things.
    That night we got through two bottles of red and one of Jack Daniel’s, after starting on beer at the Video Saloon. I am a little hazy on some of the other details. We built a fire because it was snapping cold and we talked for a couple hours.
    I was planning to take a Greyhound down to Evansville to see Lola. She had already left for Thanksgiving break. I imagined that if I presented myself to her dashingly, flowers in one hand and wine in the other, speaking French perhaps, she’d agree to get married and the whole complicated script of our relationship would pull itself together, deep six the extras, and whiten our teeth.
    John reminded me that she was profoundly unreliable. I reminded him that she had red hair and blue eyes and played the flute. Owns a flute, he said. You told me you never heard her play it. Give her time, I said. He reminded me that she had a boyfriend with a tattoo of a goat. I reminded him that hadn’t stopped her staying the night at my house a few times. I said she knew me better and had known me longer because we came from the same town.
    I reminded him that her name was Lola.
    See if I care, he said, but that was the whiskey. He was thinking about a Greyhound, too. To Utah or someplace. He said he felt trapped.
    I reminded him that she had once picked me out of the crowd and held my eye while belly dancing.
    He said just him and his guitar in the desert somewhere. Or maybe under a tree.
    I said so long as you come back for the wedding.
    He couldn’t really argue with that so he wished me luck and we toasted instead.
    We were walking back into town when it hit him. You sit for a long time and you don’t realize how much you’ve drunk; move around a little bit and the booze circulates and you’re on the ground. Only in John’s case he was attacking a parking meter.
    John, I said. That’ll never work.
    I don’t know if it was really a two-by-four—it was the top beam of a sawhorse