of the winners of the latest turkey shoot hung haphazardly inside the door. The jukebox rumbled with “Honky Tonk Woman” followed by “If It Don’t Come Easy.” Fishing corks plugged bullet holes in one wall and the hide of a sixteen-foot alligator decorated another. There was one pool table, the green felt stained from decades of spilled beer. The waitresses were sturdy sedans no longer on warranty and wore jeans, sneakers, and T-shirts tied around ample waists. The bartender paid off winners of a stud poker video game with two six-packs or a sawbuck-take your choice-and if the boys from the state beverage commission didn’t like it, screw them.
The bongs and clangs of a pinball machine competed with the twang from the jukebox. The voices were husky southern drawls, but pockets of the room erupted in occasional bursts of rapid-fire Spanish and inner-city jive. A gray haze of cigarette smoke drifted toward a ceiling of unpainted two-by-fours and kept the termite population to manageable levels. On the men’s room wall, above a machine that dispensed condoms for a quarter, a poet had scrawled, “Encase your porker before you dork her.”
There were no ferns. Or guys with white-on-white shirts, power ties, and red suspenders. Or talk of Aspen, tax-free municipals, or selling short.
Mississippi Jack’s was not the Harvard Club.
The waitress wiped our table with a wet towel, then stood, head cocked, hip shot, and smiling. About forty, she had a round face and a headful of bleached yellow curls that made her look like a happy poodle. “You’all here for the catfish fry or the gator hunt?”
“The beer,” I said. “Pitcher. Whatever’s on tap.”
“How ‘bout some swamp cabbage to go with that? Got a vat simmering in the back.”
So that’s what I smelled. “Plain or fried?”
She raised an eyebrow. I didn’t mean to sound like Chef Paul, just wanted to know what I was getting into.
“Any way you want it. We cook it with salt pork and milk, a dash of pepper. Personally, I like it plain in a cup, but you want it fried up with fritters, you got it. You want it another way, go talk to the cook after he sobers up.”
I turned to my drinking buddy. “Francisco?”
He was shaking his head.
“Maybe we’ll just stick to the beer,” I told her.
I have nothing against eating the boot of the sabal palm tree. In a little bottle at the French grocery, soaking in vinegar, they call it heart of palm. It’s not as elegant hereabouts, but it’s the same raw ingredient.
She brought Budweiser. American beer is weak and watery, and like network television, is calculated to appeal to the most folks while offending the fewest. It’s the lowest common denominator of brew, and like so many of our products, competes not on its quality, but on its image as created by Manhattan video slicksters. Best I can tell, there’s no beer that will help me dunk a basketball or attract a bushel of beach bunnies, so I go for the taste when I have a choice. Not that I’m a beer snob, which is an oxymoron rivaling “honest lawyer.”
Still, the Dutch beer Grolsch is my all-around favorite for savoring full flavor. I like it at forty-two degrees, not out of the ice chest. Americans drink their beer too cold and too light. The Yankee brews are laced with rice malt or corn malt, bland substitutes for barley. There are exceptions. Brooklyn Lager with its burnt amber color and molasses aroma is strong enough to go head-to-head with the spiciest chili. The wheaty, oaky Anchor Steam from San Francisco can hold its own with barbecue. Boston’s Samuel Adams has a bittersweet hoppy taste that washes down peanuts and jalapenos. But that’s about it for the American beers. The only time I’ll go for a light beer is with some broiled red snapper or other delicate victuals. Then I’ll choose one of the German weiss beers made from wheat. With a steak, I’ll try a Dos Equis if there’s no Grolsch around. Tsing Tao, the sweet Chinese beer, is fine for Szechuan or Hunan food, and a Guinness stout with its nutty hop aroma and burnt-oak flavor goes well with dessert.
Today, though, the talk was more important than taste, and after turning down the swamp cabbage, I didn’t want the waitress to consider me a citified sissy:
“Hey, Jim Bob, feller out here wants to know if we serve beer from Holland.”
“No, but if’n he wants, I’ll stick a tulip up his ass.”
Crespo drained his first glass without taking a breath. If he was feeling any heat from the upcoming trial, he didn’t show it. “ Diez anos?”
“That’s the offer now. A plea to manslaughter. Ten years, you’d be out in three.”
He poured himself another beer from the chipped pitcher. Budweiser was fine with him. I fished some boiled peanuts out of a bowl. From Jaw-ja, the waitress told us. You were supposed to scatter the shells on the floor. I did what I was supposed to. “Of course, you’d have to cooperate.”
Crespo looked at me with wary eyes. His face had healed nicely with only traces of scars on his leathery skin. Small and ferret-faced, he still managed to look dangerous. You wouldn’t be surprised to see him pull a switchblade from an ankle sheath.
“You’d have to tell them who killed the Russian,” I continued.
He shook his head. “I could do the time. No problema. But I’d have to live that long.”
He just let it hang there.
“Want to talk about it?” I asked.
Over at the jukebox, Randy Travis was singing a song I didn’t know. At the next table, a guy in a University of Florida baseball cap was telling a pal how much money he would make snaring alligators during the thirty-day hunt. “I figure I get my limit easy. That’s fifteen gators at, say, average of ten feet.” He did some arithmetic with a pencil on a soggy napkin. “Close to seven thousand for the hides at forty-five dollars a foot. And that don’t include the meat.”
“But you’re not figurin’ expenses,” his friend argued. The guy wore Army fatigues and was no wider than your average Buick. He sounded like a cracker C.P.A. “Don’t be fergittin’ your costs. License, tags, gasoline. And your time. Figger it out, boy.”
I moved closer to my client. Dr. Weiner would have said I was closing the horizontal zone. I just wanted Crespo to trust his faithful mouthpiece, somebody who had known him a long time, but maybe didn’t know him at all. “Francisco, you want to tell me about it. Who’s threatening you?”
His eyes darted across the room and back to me. But the mouth stayed closed.
“Is it Yagamata? Because if it is, I’ve got a real problem here. I don’t care if he’s a big client of my firm. I can’t let him manipulate you.”
“I am grateful to Senor Yagamata for looking after me.”
“That’s my job!” I banged my beer glass on the table, slopping some of the anemic brew. The alligator hunter stopped computing and glared at me. “Look, I promised your mother I’d take care of you, and I promised myself, too. This is a murder charge, Francisco, not another A and B in a bar.”
That made him smile, just a little. “I’ve gotten away with worse.”
Of course. I just wasn’t used to him bringing it up. “That wasn’t murder, Francisco. Justifiable homicide all the way. Even I could have gotten you off.”
“No, you couldn’t. You would have been a witness.” He smiled again. Two in one day was a new world record. “Except you couldn’t identify the killer, so nobody was ever arrested.”
“I thought the physical description I gave was pretty creative. You remember what I told the homicide detective?”
“ Si. A tall, husky Anglo with red hair in a brush cut and a tattoo of the American flag on his forearm.”
“I’d nearly forgotten about the tattoo. A nice touch, wasn’t it? Specifics always add a touch of reality.”
We both sat there thinking about it, the link between us that spanned the years, the spilled blood that made us the unlikeliest of brothers. My debt to him could never be repaid, so he wanted to cancel it. I couldn’t let it go.
“The coaches always told us to stay out of bars,” I said.
Crespo shrugged, then looked away. He was finished talking about it. He could banish the thoughts. I couldn’t. I always asked what I could have done differently. I could have listened to the coaches, for one thing.
Now I sat looking at Francisco Crespo in another bar. This time, ten years later, it was his life on the line, or at least his freedom. “Your mother’s worried to death, and so am I.”
“I will survive. I always do.”
“We’re the ones who care about you. Not Yagamata. Do you understand that?”
