Free Maclean by Allan Donaldson

out of here and leave us alone.”
    He looked at Bill.
    Bill shrugged.
    He passed the bottle to Leveret, and Leveret unscrewed the cap and passed it to Willie. He wiped the blood and snot from his mouth and tipped the bottle back and drank, swallow after swallow without breathing.
    â€œNow, that’s enough,” Leveret said, and Bill went over and took the bottle away from him, cautiously, as if he were taking a bone away from a cross dog. It would be like Willie to throw the bottle and what was left in it into the river, but he let Bill take it.
    â€œJunior’s gotta have one too,” Willie said.
    â€œOne,” Bill said and passed the bottle to Junior.
    He tipped the bottle up, and after one swallow, Bill took the bottle away from him. Between the two of them, they had half emptied it.
    â€œO.K.,” Bill said. “Now get out of here.”
    â€œNow don’t go orderin’ me around,” Willie said, “or I may take it into my head to spend the rest of the afternoon here.”
    â€œJust you go on, now,” Leveret said, “before someone gets hurt again.”
    Willie stood long enough to satisfy his honour, then turned.
    â€œCome on, Junior,” he said. “I’ve had enough of these cheap cocksuckers.”
    They started up the path. Ginger would have gone after them, but Leveret stopped him.
    Bill looked at the bottle. There was blood and snot on the neck, and Christ knows what else. He passed the bottle to Leveret, and Leveret pulled some leaves off one of the chokecherry bushes and wiped it as clean as he could, then gave it a final polish with his handkerchief.
    â€œThere,” he said. “Clean as it came from the store.”
    He offered it to Bill, but Bill shook his head.
    â€œSomeone should kill that son of a whore,” Bill said.
    â€œI expect some day someone will,” Maclean said.
    They sat down, and the bottle went back and forth between the other three until they finished it. Ginger took it out to the tip of the rock and threw it into the river. No one was paying much attention. Ginger watched it bobbing around only a dozen yards from shore. He came back and sat down.
    â€œI expect that bottle with the note in it will just fetch up somewheres,” he said.
    They had settled themselves down in a different pattern, Leveret, Ginger, and Jimmy together, Leveret with his hat back on, his cut lip still oozing a little blood, Maclean and Bill a little way off.
    â€œYou all right?” Bill asked Maclean. “You look like you got a bump on your head.”
    â€œIt ain’t nothing,” Maclean said. “Take more than that to kill me.”
    â€œI expect,” Bill said.
    But the truth was that he wasn’t feeling good at all. His head hurt, his back hurt, his stomach had turned queasy, and there loomed above him the thought that although Willie was gone, there would be more to it some other day. The knife had been stupid.
    â€œThe son of a whore,” Bill said.
    Maclean looked at him out of the corner of his eye. He was a good-looking man. Thick, brown hair, always combed. Good features. Dress him up in a suit, and he could have been a businessman or a lawyer, a movie actor even. But if you looked close, you could see the skin going slack under the eyes, and the lids a little puffed-up and a little too pink. The booze starting to take its toll. Maclean wondered how old he was. Thirty maybe, maybe a little less. About the age he had been when he lost his last real job and gave up or gave in or whatever.
    He felt he ought to say something to Bill. Though he probably didn’t know it, Bill was on the edge. Once over, it was tough to climb back. When the war was over, and there were lots of men and not much work the way it was after the Great War, they would be able to get good carpenters who didn’t drink, so why should they hire ones like Bill who did? So you would drink because you didn’t have a job, and