Little Anzio was not the kind of place that someone in a fancy Rolls-Royce had ever frequented. The ad hoc veterans club was down on Western in the middle of a block where there were two forbidding alleys, a strip club with no bouncer out front, another bar next to a liquor store, and a seven-story sweatshop that hired Chinese and Mexican women to do some kind of labor from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.

The bungalow that housed Little Anzio wasn’t designed to be a bar. There were large picture windows across the front obscured by full-length battered green-and-ocher window shades. The front door, at the left side of the one-story building, was made from metal and painted rust red. You could feel the heft of that hatch when pulling it open.

The barroom smelled equally of sweat, old skin, and the fumes from more cigarettes than Nat King Cole had smoked in an entire lifetime. The fluorescent lighting was bright, almost blinding, and there were twenty or so customers—all men. Most of these were from about my age upward to eighty, but there was a scattering of youngsters too—ex-servicemen who had spent their time in Korea, Vietnam, and other, less publicized campaigns. They were of all races, an unusual detail for gatherings of military men in the turbulent sixties.

“Who the fuck are you?” a man barked. He was standing with his back to the waist-high oak bar—a good nine paces away.

He was glaring at me. I glanced back.

“I asked you a question,” he said. He wasn’t really shouting, but his voice was both focused and sharp.

He was a white man, in his middle forties and a decade or so from peak shape. But I imagined he remembered the dance well enough.

Still, I didn’t answer.

He pushed himself away from the bar and took the first few of the nine steps. The five or six other men standing at the bar watched his progress.

“You deaf?” he asked, his voice still gruff and definitely threatening.

“No, I’m not.”

The vets turned their attention to me, wondering, I supposed, if a fight might break out.

“It’s just that,” I added, “my mother taught me that I am not required to reply to rudeness.”

“Your mother?” he said, taking three more steps.

I let my right foot move back half a span so that my left shoulder pointed forward. That would make him think I was retreating and allow the best torque for a right hook, should the need arise.

But before the blowsy barfly could take steps seven and eight, an elderly gentleman moved spryly between us. The dance was becoming more social.

“Hold up, Bernard,” the older man said, gesturing with the point finger of his left hand. I got the feeling that our interrupter was right-handed and so was using the same ploy as I.

“Outta my way, Cletus,” Bernard said.