Marvin went to the motel to get them rooms. Vale invited him to come back for a drink but Marvin begged off. Vale himself was surprised to find that on a Tuesday night, the lounge of the Tip-Top apparently attracted every alcoholic, dope fiend and wanting-to-party redneck within a fifty mile radius. The fox-killing bartender, who everyone called Jimmy Two (or was it Jimmy Too?), muted all the televisions and turned on the jukebox. A nauseating flow of auto-tuned country songs rattled forth.
Vale ordered shot after shot of whiskey with beer backs. Cowboy hats and mesh-back baseball caps were the only constants throughout the room, and cans of chewing tobacco whitened the back pockets of many a pair of jeans.
A woman sat down next to Vale at the bar. She had a tsunami of gelled hair and a pair of gigantic breasts that struggled against the constraints of her top and seemed, like everyone else in the bar, infused with a kind of unwitting melancholy, the result, Vale assumed, of having spent your entire life in a thirty-mile radius.
“Hon,” she said, “you look about like how I feel.” She laughed shrilly and rubbed the bar with one hand as if she had a rag.
Vale sat silent and petrified. Decades of bravado had vanished with his fleeting fame. He was suddenly vastly interested in the television playing in front of him. He lifted his bottle up, that reassuring clink of glass against his teeth.
She turned to him and planted an elbow on the bar. “What happened to your head?”
He couldn’t help it—his eyes skittered up her cleavage like a mole rat up a cliffside. She winked at him and pressed her knee against his leg.
“Motorcycle accident,” he said, the first thing that came to him.
“Oooh,” the woman said.
A man stepped up to the bar on Vale’s other side. He slugged back his drink and exhaled, shook his head like a mastiff sloughing off water. He was possibly the hairiest man Vale had ever seen, with a beard that crept up nearly to his eyes. Into the mouth of his glass he said, “Don’t do it, Maura.”
“I’ll do what I want, Robby,” the woman snapped. “You little two-pump chump.”
Robby sighed and motioned to Jimmy Two for another drink.
“Hit me again too,” Maura said, leaning over on her elbows. Jimmy Two shared an uncomfortable glance with Robby and said, “It’s on Robby’s card, Maura. And he says no. Sorry.”
“I’ll buy her a drink,” Vale said. Maura beamed.
Jimmy Two looked at all of them, sad and uncomfortable. Vale was too, but here was something—if not the Moment, then at least something else. Some feeling. Robby leaned his massive sagging face toward Vale’s ear and said, almost kindly, “Don’t write a check that your ass can’t cash, mister man.”
“Whatever he’s saying,” Maura said, “don’t listen to him.”
Robby peered at her over Vale’s shoulder. “We aren’t divorced yet, Maura.”
“Consider it done,” she said, waving her hand like she was writing something in the air. “You’ve been infidelitous on me for the last time.”
Vale pushed a twenty toward the bartender, who said, “I wish you wouldn’t, bud.”
Vale said, “Get her a drink, Jimmy. Jimmy Two. Can I call you Jimmy Two?”
Jimmy Two said, “You can’t.” Then he said to Maura, “You know this guy gave a blowjob to the Tasmanian Devil, right?” He walked off with Vale’s money.
Maura laughed and slapped her hand on the bar like Jimmy Two had told the best joke ever. Vale’s head was full of light and fog.
Robby drank and fumed beside him. His glass looked tiny inside his gigantic furry hand. Vale couldn’t be sure, but it looked like he had hair on every knuckle on his finger, right down to the fingernail. Like a werewolf redneck in a plaid shirt. On the jukebox some cowgirl drawled in a voice heavy as syrup, “He’s my truckdrivin, fly-fishin, straight-shootin maaaaaaan. Uh-huh! And he knows just how I like it.”
“You’re buying yourself a world of hurt,” Robby said. “One shit storm bought and paid for. Not even on layaway.” Vale turned to him and smiled. The Moment would not be making an appearance tonight. But yes, something would be happening, he was sure of it. He felt loose-boned and impervious to harm. Robby could throw him against the wall and he would bounce off, not hurt until tomorrow. He would either sleep tonight in the glorious hammock of Maura’s breasts or be beaten to a pulp in a gravel parking lot by her monstrous, furry, estranged husband. Either one would work because either one was beyond where he was now. His head wobbled on his shoulders.
“This one cheated on me,” Maura said. “With that fat-assed Becky Tomlinson down at the Stihl outlet. ‘I gotta go get oil for the chainsaw, honey,’” she said in a shockingly good imitation of Robby’s baritone. “Coming home ten o’clock at night, reeking of poontang and motor oil, good God.”
“A man has needs,” Robby said petulantly, and Vale laughed.
Maura leaned over onto the bar again—a breathtaking spill of cleavage in his peripheral, and Vale’s eyes rabbited up to the television again—and said, “Yeah, well, you ain’t the only one. I know you’re hearing me over there.”
Jimmy came back and reluctantly pushed Maura’s drink across the bar. It was some cloudy pink thing that looked like he had poured some evil combination of liquor over a can of fruit cocktail. It emboldened her, and she put her arm around Vale’s neck, pushed her breasts against him. Jimmy Two did not give him any change.
“I might just take this buck right here,” Maura said.
Robby shook his head, wounded and shocked. “This dirty, scabbed-up motherfucker? You wouldn’t.”
Maura sucked some of her drink through a swirly red straw that lay shipwrecked in the fruity island of her glass. “You keep telling me what I will and won’t do, Robby. See what happens.”
“Maura—”
“How’s Becky these days? How’s your chainsaw, stud?”
“I told you I was sorry about it.”
“You told me one time you were sorry about it, and then you went and did it again!”
“What do you want me to do? Get down on my fuckin’ knees?”
“I want you to get the hell out of here. I’m on a date.” Maura cinched her arm tighter around Vale’s neck; he couldn’t help but think of Casper in a headlock a few hours before. She smelled like gin and hairspray and a perfume that reminded him of magazine samples. Her fingernails were painted turquoise, and he saw a line where her pale scalp met her orange spray-on tan and even in his embattled state felt the stirrings of an erection.
Vale grinned and placed his hand on the small of Maura’s back. “You blew it, Robby.”
Robby pushed himself off the bar and pulled Maura’s arm off of him. Then he put his own hand on the back of Vale’s neck. His fingers almost met at Vale’s throat, he was that big. “I don’t know what weird-ass, liberal Portland hobo camp you came out of, but it’s time for you to go back there, asshole.”
“Hell,” Maura said, leaning over and licking Vale’s ear. “Me and him might even put that shit up on YouTube, you never know.”
Robby, still with one hand around Vale’s neck, drew his other hand into a fist, held it out in front of Vale. He couldn’t help it, it was so silly: he laughed, and so did Maura.
And then someone behind them said, “Excuse me,” and Robby turned, bringing Vale along with him. And there was Marvin, whose head came roughly to Robby’s midsection. “I was wondering,” Marvin said absently, as if to begin some long-winded question about directions, and he struck his fingertips to the inside of Robby’s free arm, a little jab. It didn’t seem like much.
Robby promptly sank to his knees, his face opening up in a soundless scream.
Marvin looked up and said, “I got us a couple rooms, Mike.”
“Jesus fudge mothershit that hurts so bad oh my God—”
“We should get going,” Marvin said, as Robby gasped and pawed weakly at their knees with his good arm. “Lot of driving to do tomorrow.” Vale let himself be led away.