"Lovely little Eloise. Two-faced bitch. While you're around, stop in again any time. We'll have a nice little chat. I'm usually here. Hell, I used to have a lot of other things to do. Zoning board. Chamber of Commerce. Rotary. Always on the run. Always busy. Now I have a lot of time. All the time in the world."
I was dismissed. I walked back through the narrow store to the street door. The clerk leaned against one of the counters near the front, picking his teeth with a match. It felt good to get back out into the sunlight. The cheap liquor had left a bad taste in my mouth. It was too early to go after the car. I went into the nearest bar I could find and ordered an ale. It was a dark place, full of brown and violet shadows, with deer antlers on the wall and some dusty mounted fish. Two elderly men played checkers at a corner table. The bartender was a dwarf. The floor was built up behind the bar to bring him up to the right height.
I sipped the ale and thought about Fitz, about my own unexpectedly violent reaction that had been made ludicrous by his superior strength. I had not thought that I cared enough. It was a long time since camp. But he had brought it all back. The time with him had not been pure fiasco, however. I sensed that I had won a very small victory in the talk that had followed the one-sided fight. He was not certain of where I stood, how much I knew. The talk with George had canceled that small victory. George puzzled me. There was a curious under-current in his relationship with Fitz, something I could not understand.
Bartenders are good sources of information. I sensed that the little man was watching me, trying to figure out who I was. I signaled for a refill. When he brought my glass back from the beer tap I said, "What do people do for excitement around this town?"
He had a high, thin voice. "Stranger in town, are you? It's pretty quiet. Saturday night there's things going on here and there. Not much on a weekday. There's some that drive all the way to Redding. There's gambling there, but it's crooked. Then it's easier to meet women there than here. You a salesman?"
I needed a quick answer and I suddenly remembered something that Fitz had said to give me my gimmick, ready-made, and reasonably plausible. "I'm working on a book."
He showed a quick interest. "Writer, are you? What's there here to write about? Historical stuff?"
"No. It's a different kind of a book. I was taken prisoner in Korea. Some of the boys died there, boys I knew. This book is a sort of personal history of those boys. You know, the way they lived, what they did, what they would have come back to if they'd lived. One of them is from this town. Timmy Warden."
"Hell, did you know Timmy? My God, that was a shame. There was a good kid."
"I've been talking to his brother, George, just down the street."