Free Big Bad Love by Larry Brown Page A

eyes from the bar again.
    I didn’t want to mess with any more of those girls. I’d already seen the fine ones, up in Memphis, where they let them go naked in front of you and then expect you to behave yourself. I knew in some men that kind of stuff caused rapes,which is why it was dangerous to offer that kind of stuff to the general public, since a lot of times the general public had a hard dick and little conscience. I decided to just sit there and nurse my beer, lick my wounds, and see if the chick walked back in.
    There were guys groping chicks in the corners. I didn’t know what the hour of night was. Late was all I knew. My friend wasn’t anywhere around. He knew the name of the boat and I didn’t. He knew the dock they docked at. But he’d probably already had his throat cut and was being eaten by fish, or the dogs and cats at the seafood plants. It didn’t make me just real happy or at ease sitting there waiting for him. Maybe he’d given up on ever finding me and had just gone back home. That’d be real hucky ducky if that was the case. If he’d taken my pickup that’d be real uncool and I’d have to catch the big Hound going north emptyhanded. Rich fuckers like they were, they could get things done. They might even hire my legs broken. I knew they knew plenty of people they could sub it out to.
    I ordered another beer. Some waitress brought it and I gave her some money. She popped her gum and gave me my change. I lit a smoke. Just then I noticed a guy sitting near me, almost at my elbow. He looked sort of hungry. I glanced at him, and then I didn’t pay any more attention to him. All I wanted to do was just drink until something happened. I knew if I drank long enough, it would.
    I got a little philosophical sitting there, surrounded by all that sin, feeling so mired down in it. I hadn’t been raised to go into places like that. And there I was in one. I didn’t knowwhere the sun might find me. I just hoped it wasn’t a place as dark as that one.
    That guy leaned over and groped my leg. I sighed.
    I’d had to deal with a thing like that once before. It had been a long time ago and I’d nearly forgotten it. A sailor had bought me a drink and then touched me in an unwelcome way in a bar. I thanked the sailor for the drink and told him to get his hand off my leg. He removed it and said he didn’t mean anything by it. Then he told me about his wife and family and friends for twenty minutes. Then he bought me another drink. Then he put his hand on me in an unwelcome way again. I remember sighing inwardly. I leaned over to the bartender and told him I hated to get thrown out of the bar, but if that guy put his hand on me again in an unwelcome way again I was going to have to knock the shit out of him. Then I told the sailor exactly the same words. It made him hot, and words were said, and I wound up choking him. It hadn’t been nice, and I knew this thing probably wasn’t going to be nice either.
    I turned around and looked at this guy. He had a cap shoved back on his head, and some missing teeth, and a black eye. His hand on my leg felt like a granite claw. I looked into his eyes. They were tinged with yellow and red, and they looked a little wobbly.
    He was a real big guy.
    I sat there and held my beer, wondering what to do. For all I knew he could have been a henchman, one of hers. I knew to operate like she did she had to have henchmen.
    I finally told him he wouldn’t believe how much I’d appreciate the shit out of it if he’d get his hand off my leg.
    I thought Yeah, their goddamn shrimp. Their damn shrimpy minds. Why do you want to put yourself in the employ of people like that? Who have no interest in you other than what you can do for them? I was really getting sleepy and I yawned several times. It didn’t look like my friend was going to show up and I knew somebody had to go down to the dock the next morning and