Link picked at the label of his beer bottle and added to the dandruff of shredded paper in the ashtray before him. “Hey, Abe,” he said.
“Hey, Link,” he said. He looked down at the little girls’ bags. “You’ve made some finds,” he said. “Congratulations.”
They were wearing different clothes now—double-knit neon pop-art dresses and horn-rim shades and white legs flashing beneath the tabletop. They kicked their toes and smiled and drank their beers, which seemed comically large in their hands.
Casually, he looked to see who was minding the counter at the Greek’s and saw that it was the idiot son, who wasn’t smart enough to know that serving liquor to minors was asking for bad trouble.
“Where’s Krishna?” he asked.
One girl compressed her heart-shaped lips into a thin line.
And so she resolved to help her brother, because when it’s your fault that something has turned to shit, you have to wash shit. And so she resolved to help her brother, which meant that, step one, she had to get him to stop screwing up.
“He took off,” the girl said. Her pancake makeup had sweated away during the day and her acne wasn’t so bad that she’d needed it. “He took off running, like he’d forgotten something important. Looked scared.”
“Why don’t you go get more beers,” Link said angrily, cutting her off, and Alan had an intuition that Link had become Krishna’s Renfield, a recursion of Renfields, each nesting inside the last like Russian dolls in reverse: Big Link inside medium Krishna inside the stump that remained of Darrel.
And that meant that she had to take him out of the company of his bad companions, which she would accomplish through the simple expedient of scaring the everlasting fuck out of them.