“Fact is, the right kind of male companionship could get lucky tonight.”
“You always this forward?”
“I don’t know. Tell you what. You bring the apple and I’ll bring a snake and a tree and we’ll find out. Say eight-thirty…” Her voice dropped a register, somewhere between sophistication and guile.
“And, Harry, leave the suit home. It’s not that kind of place.”
33
Outside, some comedian had pasted a smile face label over the cracked thermometer on the VFW door. Inside, Ginny Hakala sunned her stuff below the bent neon helix of a grain belt beer sign. Her personals ad would be upbeat. “Man wanted; must have muzzle loader that can keep up with my six-shooter. Thirty-year-old single white natural female. Smokes, drinks, never leaves a spec of chrome on the trailer hitch.”
Here we go. Eyes turned as Harry came down the bar. The men in dirty blaze orange who packed the stools and booths exuded a musk of beer, bar whiskey, the grease pit, cold winter alfalfa dust, deer guts, and heavy machinery. Their stumpy hands had trained for doing shot glass curls by twisting frozen hex nuts off rusted bolts.
Most wore snowmobile boots and suits, unzipped, arms out, hanging down their backs like capes. Some of them probably had fresh memories of his buckshot whistling over their heads.
202 / CHUCK LOGAN
A game was in progress on the pool table. Alabama cursed Neil Young on the Wurlitzer. He did not see Jay Cox.
Ginny draped sideways in a booth next to the pool table and made no concessions to the weather. Her thin, stiff, oxblood leather car coat popped open to let her cleavage shine and the hem of her black clingy minidress crept high on her blazing thighs. She saw him and crossed her legs.
Harry grinned, big easy grin. Pretend it’s 1968.
She’d swept her hair up, went easy on the eyeliner and makeup.
As he slid into the booth she tugged at the cuff of his sheep-lined Levi’s jacket. “You didn’t wear your suit.”
“Get yourself an outfit and be a cowboy, too,” said Harry.
“Dig it. Everybody is watching us.”
“They don’t look very excited. In fact, I expected it to be louder in here.”
“Too many Finnlanders,” she said. “We’re into melancholy, big time. There’s a saying. Whatever happens, we’ll be on the losing side.”
A waitress appeared. Ginny ordered a Black Russian. “Pabst and a doubleshot of bar whiskey,” the words rolled naturally off his tongue.
“What I heard is you don’t drink.” She cocked her head.
Harry took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves. “Just chipping.”
She traced the griffin tattoo on his left arm with a cool finger.
“Like your identity there on your arm.” She nodded. “Jay’s got one, too…From the marines. His says ‘Death Before Dishonor.’” She curled her upper lip. “Probably crawled off his arm out of pure shame.”
Their eyes met and he saw more range in hers than he’d anticip-ated. She let her hand rest lightly on his forearm. With the other she lit a Winston 100 with a plastic lighter and blew a stream of smoke.
“I’m not dumb, Harry. You and Jay Cox got a thing.” Her secretive smile broadened, revealing the slight overbite. Her fingers lingered, a clairvoyant sweep along his arm.
“You got any other tattoos? Or scars?” she asked.
HUNTER’S MOON / 203
Harry knit his brows in mock concern. “You one of these weird backwoods hippie chicks? Into disfigured men?”
“It’s a problem,” she said. “Exciting guys have scars and tattoos.
Unfortunately they also have lots of unresolved baggage. Are you like that, Harry?”
“For sure.”
Maybe it was all his pores cranked open to the barroom scent of tacit danger. She turned him on with a flick of her eyes. She would always turn men on and they would always worship her in private as long as they were horizontal. But they would always get up and leave her for women who were more respectable, conventionally better looking, and lousy in bed.
Their drinks came. “You know a lot of things,” he said.
“For a waitress, huh? Who’s almost pretty as long as she keeps her mouth shut.” She mocked the unintended condescension that had crept into his voice. Joke was on him.
Jay Cox walked into the bar and conversation paused a beat. Half a dozen of the barflies gravitated to him.
“Here comes trouble,” said Ginny gamely, sitting up and self-consciously fluffing her hair with both palms.
“What is this, a test?” Harry muttered.
“Just want to see what you’re made of, Mr. Harry Griffin.”
Cox pushed between two guys at the bar and ordered a drink. He watched them over his shoulder with sullen eyes. Harry could almost smell the gasoline on him.
Cox sipped from a shot glass and Harry felt the fight pack in the air, tight as an ice ball. People moved away. The murmur of the barroom picked up a raw, static zing.
Harry gulped his whiskey and it seared his throat and started a memory dance of physical blows and ignorance behind his eyes.
Why is it I always pick the bars with tilted floors? Why is it, the one violent asshole in the joint always runs downhill to me?
Cox, egged on by his huddle of cronies, made his move. He swaggered to the pool table and took a cue stick from the wall rack.
Slapping the cue in his palm, he strutted in front of the booth. The stick vibrated in his bone-prominent hands.
204 / CHUCK LOGAN
“Hiya, Cox,” said Harry. His voice trembled. Scared. Until he got hit.
Cox panted a stubble ugly grin and Harry noticed a web of scar tissue on his throat that crawled with his Adam’s apple. He was building menace and he had an audience. Christ, they were two middle-aged men. This was going to be real dumb.
Cox snarled, “Doing your number on him now, huh, Ginny?
Thought better of you. Out with this guy. Fact is, I bet he don’t even like women.”
Ginny put
