Free Caring Is Creepy by David Zimmerman

thick, pink smear of scar tissue behind his elbow. “Ran a little three-wheeler into a rusty strand of barbwire. Bled like a gut-shot buck.”
    “Must of hurt,” I said.
    “I weren’t feeling no pain.”
    “Where you all going?” the guy in the front passenger seat asked. He wore his hair clipped down close to his scalp. I thought he might be twenty-five. A cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. Planted squarely in the middle of his left eyelid was a small, pink nub of a wart. He winked and the wart looked to be waving at me.
    “We’re heading over to you all’s barn, H.K.,” Dani said, “to hang out with Wayne and Billy and all them.” She grabbed my thigh and gave it a painful squeeze.
    “That ain’t no fun,” H.K. said, wheeling out on the blacktop and away from the road we needed to take to get to the barn. “Believe me, I know. I’ve spent plenty of nights out there eating bugs and drinking piss-warm beer. Come on with us. We’re going to Bow Wow’s. It’s amateur night.”
    “Don’t worry,” the second guy said, “it ain’t
that
kind of amateur night. You don’t have to get your shirt wet or nothing.”
    “I thought Bow Wow’s closed down,” Dani said. “Anyhow, won’t we get carded?”
    “Naw,” he said. “H.K.’s uncle Marty runs the place now.”
    “That’s Ealey,” H.K. said, jabbing his thumb at old wart-eye in the passenger’s seat.
    “Hi,” Ealey said, suddenly sounding shy. He wore a black T-shirt with the words MAXIMUM GRUNTS written in red across the chest.
    “I thought your uncle was still—” Dani stopped, looking unsure, as though she might of crossed a line she shouldn’t of.
    H.K. laughed at her. “He got out on Christmas Eve, and let me tell you what, he hit the ground running.”
    H.K. tore through the gears, making the engine whine and cry uncle. Dark trees whipped past the fingerprint-smeared windows in a blur. Thin trash pines and palmetto bushes. On the curves, me and Dani went bouncing from door to door, sliding across the seat and bumping heads. Beer cans and take-out bags from Forkin’ Pork BBQ rattled between our feet.
    “Can I have one of those smokes?” I asked Ealey.
    He lit one with the tip of his own and passed it back over the seat. The filter was wet. He said, “Sorry if I nigger-lipped it.”
    I’d driven past Bow Wow’s a thousand times, but I’d never been inside. It was an unpainted cinderblock building set back about ahundred yards from the two-lane county highway under a droopy, old live oak covered in Spanish moss. Somehow, even the Spanish moss looked ratty. There was no sign that said Bow Wow’s out front. There wasn’t even a real parking lot, just a raw red clearing of packed clay full up with patched-together, primer-spotted trucks. Just beside the turnoff, a floodlight pointed at a sign with the words AMATEUR BOXING TUESDAY NIGHT—$50 ENTRY/$500 PURSE spelled out in black removable letters, like the kind they use on church signs to spell out Jesus slogans. We stepped out of the car. I could hear the screaming and the music.
    H.K. nodded to the doorman, a huge guy with a glistening shaved head and a wifebeater stained with little brown blobs of what looked to be some sort of gravy. When the man gestured with his chin at us, H.K. counted four bills into his oven-mitt hand. The doorman smiled at Dani, showing her a mouth of teeth so perfect and white they almost seemed fake. Inside, a rush of smoke and beer-sour breath hit us full in the face. The shouting was such I couldn’t hear a word H.K. said until he yelled it right in my ear.
    “Beer?” he asked.
    It took a few seconds to get an idea of the place. Bow Wow’s looked twice as big on the inside. A long plywood bar set atop dented aluminum kegs ran along a good part of the left wall. Three bartenders raced about behind it, setting up Dixie-cup shots and pouring draft beer. Just inside the front door there were three pool tables with green glass shades