“Naw. You just come back sometime when the sun’s up and it’s been raining a few days before. Come back and see her when she’s brimming!”
“I will,” called Camper, “I sure will.”
Luke Lampson finally walked into the dark acres adjoining the few lamps and measured streets of Mistletoe. Approached from almost any side, it was open country, sand, clay and nests of weed; the horseshoe street was swept abruptly from a rutted field. Children’s dolls and slides always lay toward the flagpole center, never behind the houses on the plain. Luke entered town by picking his way between two single story cabins and crossing the street before him to the drugstore: Estrellita’s. He straightened his hat, brushed the burrs from his pants and pushed through the patched screen door.
“Howdy, Lampson, howdy, Lampson,” murmured and softly echoed the men around oilclothed tables.
“Evening, gentlemen.”
He crossed to the counter and settled himself on a chromium stool.
“A bottle of pop, Mary Jane,” he said to the little girl in apron and white soda fountain cap.
Luke hooked his heels on a rung, spread his sharp knees and leaned over the straw. His back was to the men, his head hidden under the curled black brim. He looked into the rear kitchenette where an old man fried hamburgers and the girl did her lessons; he looked through the connecting door to the billiard room and back to his drink. There was only one light in the billiard hall, a pair of feet on the edge of a table and the row of cues. On the few nights of the week when a customer might enter, beer was served him and the light turned up. But those men who used to pride themselves on studied shots and drop ashes on the green cloth, now took to Estrellita’s. They watched the cowboy, his stooped shoulders, the split in his shirt, the white calf of his leg between the top of the boot and the rolled denim.
“Any of you boys seen Bohn?”
They waited a moment and then: “Naw, Luke, not tonight.”