'No,' she said.
'Whew,' he said.
She laughed, then studied his face some more. She had the greenest eyes.
'Just so you know,' she said, 'I love to dance.'
'Man,' said Eddie, watching Eliot and Anna walk away. 'I can't believe the way some people treat veterans, after what we done for this country.'
'We didn't do shit,' Snake pointed out. 'We ain't veterans.'
'They don't know that,' said Eddie. 'And I bet I would of been a vet, if I was old enough.'
'I think you have to graduate from at least, like, eighth grade,' said Snake.
'Well, that ain't the point,' said Eddie. 'Point is, these people are some ungrateful fucks.' He spat a wad of brownish glop on the sidewalk. 'We ain't made but three dollars today.'
'Speaking of which,' said Snake. 'Somethin' I wanna do.'
Eddie waited.
'You know that little punk at the Jackal?' Snake said. 'Who did my ankle?'
'Yeah.'
'I heard he works there now, sometimes.'
'So?'
'So I wanna pay him a visit.'
'I dunno, man. I don't wanna fuck with that bartender again. Him and his baseball bat.'
'His bat don't mean shit if we got a gun.'
'We ain't got a gun.'
'I know a guy can get us one.'
Eddie thought about it. 'I dunno,' he said. 'Why don't we just jump the punk outside?'
'Because the cash register is inside.'
Eddie looked at Snake.
'So this ain't really about the punk,' he said.
'Oh, it's about the punk,' said Snake. 'And the bartender. And the cash register. Three birds with one stone.'
Eddie thought about it.
'I don't know nothin' about no guns,' he said.
'Time you learned,' said Snake. 'Bein' a veteran and all.'
five
When the guy walked into the Jolly Jackal, Puggy was sitting at the bar, watching a rebroadcast of The Jerry Springer Show. The topic was husbands who wanted their wives to shave the fuzz off their upper lips. The position of the wives was that fuzz is natural; the position of the husbands was, OK, maybe it's natural, but it's also ugly. The wives were now arguing that if the husbands wanted to see ugly, they might look at their own selves in the mirror, because they were not exactly a threat to Brad Pitt. Nobody on either side of this debate weighed under 250 pounds. So far, there had not been any punching, but Puggy could tell, from the way Jerry Springer was edging away from the stage into the audience, that there soon would be.
The guy who walked into the Jolly Jackal was carrying a briefcase, so Puggy figured he was going to go to the back to talk to the bearded guy, John. That's what the guys with briefcases usually did.
Puggy was not the sharpest quill on the porcupine, but he had figured out that the Jolly Jackal was not a regular bar. There were few drinking patrons: The best customer, as measured in total beers consumed, was, by a large margin, Puggy, who did not pay. The real action at the Jolly Jackal, Puggy noted, took place in the back, at the table where John sat. A couple of times a day, a guy, or maybe several guys, would come in to talk to John. Every few days, Leo the bartender would call Puggy back to the locked room with the crates, and they'd grunt and shove and heave a crate or two into, or out of, the Mercedes, or some van, or sometimes a U-Haul.
Puggy still didn't know what was in the crates. If he had to guess, he'd say it was drugs, although it seemed kind of heavy to be drugs. But basically his position was, as long as they let him watch TV and drink beer, it didn't concern him what was in the crates, or who John and Leo were.
In point of fact, John and Leo—whose real names were Ivan Chukov and Leonid Yudanski—were Russians. They had met in 1986, when they'd both served as maintenance technicians in a Soviet army division whose mission was to protect and defend—which meant occupy and, if necessary, stomp on—the Soviet Socialist Republic of Grzkjistan.
This was not a plum assignment. The Soviet Socialist Republic of Grzkjistan was a remote, harsh, mountainous, extremely tribal nation whose economy was based primarily on revenge. The Grzkjistanis spent their adult lives thinking up and carrying out elaborate plots to kill and maim each other in connection with bitter, centuries-old grudges, many of them involving goats.
The only group that the Grzkjistanis hated more than each other was outsiders, which meant that the Russian soldiers were as popular as ringworm. Fraternization between the two cultures was officially banned, but every now and then a soldier would try to hook up with one of the Grzkjistani women. This required a breathtaking level of horniness, because after centuries of inbreeding, the average Grzkjistani was, in terms of physical attractiveness, on a par with the average Grzkjistani goat.
Nevertheless, such liaisons did occasionally take place, and when they were discovered, as they inevitably were, the army had learned that it was wise to get the soldier involved out of the country immediately, because otherwise, sooner or later, he would be found tied naked to a rock with his genitals nowhere near the rest of his body.
