His lips were wet and his teeth were so white she thought of chalk. She glanced back pretending to be watching the door and saw him lean back too far on his bar stool. She took a hard swallow of beer. It was flat and left her throat dry. She heard the crack of wood as he hit the floor. No one moved to help him. She told herself again he wasn’t the man she knew. The man she knew could lift himself up with one gathered movement, a cat reaching from sleep. He was anise and corn silk, the rough smell of water trickling in dirt troughs rutted deep by thirsty cattle. He wasn’t the smell of smoke and barrooms and vinegared eggs.

She pushed herself back from the bar. Eddie Taylor shined a single glass until it squeaked. Louise walked over to Jules Bart. She could feel grit beneath the toes of her shoes so she walked hard placing each foot flat on the ground. He sat on the floor loose as an old woman’s jowls. His head lolled forward. She breathed in and slipped her arms beneath his armpits, pulling up. She felt the lugging strain of him in her groin, in the bones shifting in her back. He wheezed forward, gathering the momentum of ten extra pounds.

“If anybody can, you can,” somebody called to her.

She kneed Jules Bart hard in the back once, and he burped and sat up. She could feel the muscles in her legs flex hard. She squatted down for leverage and tightened her arms around the barrel of his ribs. His face was hot to her cheek and rough with whiskers. She pulled up and heard the dry whisper of his beautiful boots on the wood floor. She had him close to standing when Dag Bailey moved past her.

“I got her,” he said.

And Louise watched him lift the man to standing. Jules Bart stood for a moment unassisted. In the wavering light Louise saw pale smoke rise up, a watery mist behind him. At the nape of his neck his dark hair curled with sweat. His jaw was slack as a child’s near sleep. She saw Jules’s head droop to Bailey’s shoulder. For one brief moment, his eyes focused on her and then rolled back white.

A woman sniggered behind her, “I think he likes you.”

Louise turned to her and saw grinning Marjorie Canfield, a thin white woman with bleeding gums who always ate U-No chocolate bars and drank tomato juice and beer from midafternoon till closing time.

“Piss up a rope,” Louise said.

Jules Bart had drooled on her hand and she rubbed it in her skin like glycerine. All the men in the bar were looking at her. Louise straightened her skirt, ran her fingers through her hair, then lit a cigarette. She ordered another beer.