Read Online Two Bits Four Bits by Mark Cotton - Free Book Online Page A

had been taped to one of the front windows in a
makeshift attempt to repair a shattered portion near the
bottom—probably the result of a late-night eviction by the club’s
bouncer. Half a dozen empty beer cans and a flattened straw cowboy
hat littered the dirt parking lot, and there were only two cars,
both of them parked in front of a windowless steel door close to
the rear of the building. One was a late model silver Lincoln
Navigator with dark-tinted windows and the other a dust-covered
Toyota with a baby-seat in the back.
    I parked in front of the
building and tried the blacked-out front door. The air inside
smelled like stale beer and smoke and was only slightly cooler than
outside. There was a noticeable humidity created by the swamp
coolers, which filled the space with a quiet roar. A thin woman in
her thirties emerged from a doorway behind the bar as I pulled up a
stool. Her hair was an unnatural shade of black and teased on the
top the way women used to wear it when my parents were young. She
was wearing a sleeveless black T-shirt bearing a large green
marijuana leaf and the words What Would Willie Smoke? Someone had
used a pair of scissors to crudely cut the neck opening of the
shirt to make it larger and lower, so that the wearer revealed an
ample supply of what appeared to be store-bought cleavage. She was
too thin to have that much fat on her chest naturally.
    “Hi there, can I get you
something?” she asked.
    I ordered a Shiner Bock
and laid a twenty on the counter. She reached down and slid open
the hatch to a refrigerator chest between us, in a practiced move
that seemed designed to reveal a glimpse down the front of her
T-shirt. She smiled as she pulled up a dripping longneck bottle and
put it down in front of me after removing the cap.
    “You want a glass with
that, sugar?”
    “No that’s okay,” I said,
taking a pull from the cold bottle.
    She busied herself with
straightening up the area behind the bar while I took a few more
sips.
    “Looked like you might be
closed from outside,” I said. “Am I the first customer of the
day?”
    “You sure are, honey. I
guess you get the door-prize,” she said, smiling at me in the
mirrored back wall as she straightened the bottles of liquor that
lined it.
    “Hot damn, I knew this was
my lucky day,” I said. “Hey, somebody told me Benny Shanks ran this
club.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Well, isn’t that
something. You know, Benny probably sold me my first beer, back
when I was a teenager. And here I am, still buying beer from
him.”
    “Is that right? He’s back
there in the office watching the baseball game,” she said, nodding
towards the doorway she had come out of earlier.
    “Are you sure I wouldn’t
be bothering him?”
    “Hell no, you won’t be
bothering him. The Rangers is losing anyway. It’ll help him take
his mind off his troubles,” she laughed.
    I picked up my beer and
stepped around the end of the bar and into a short hallway that led
to a small room with an old metal desk on one end and a large
flat-screen TV affixed to the opposite wall. There was a dark brown
leather couch and matching chair in front of the TV, with a
glass-topped coffee table bearing a stack of dog-eared magazines
and a couple of overflowing ashtrays. The volume was turned low and
the Texas Rangers were at bat against the Arizona Diamondbacks.
Benny looked up from the desk as I knocked gently on the
doorway.
    “The young lady out front
said you might need some help with these Rangers,” I said,
gesturing towards the television with my beer bottle.
    “Well, hell. Unless you’re
God himself, I don’t know that you can do any good for those sorry
sons of bitches.”
    “Buddy Griffin,” I said,
stepping over to the desk and extending my hand.
    “Well, I’ll be shit,” he
said, giving my hand a squeeze. “I remember when you were just a
kid running up and down the sidelines at the Elmore High football
games. I lost so much goddamn money when you were