I handed him a quart bottle of white whiskey. He took a long, long drink, gagged, gulped and leaned back in his chair. Sweat popped out on his forehead. He shuddered all over, and his face turned a few shades whiter. For a minute I thought he was going to be one sick man; all that lying and flattering to Myra had been just too much for him. Then, all at once, the color flooded back into his face, and he stopped sweating and shaking. And he drew a long, deep sigh.

“God-dang!” he said softly. “I shore needed that.”

“Fella can’t ride a horse with one stirrup,” I said. “Have another one, Ken.”

“Well, god-dang it,” he said. “God-dang it, Nick, I don’t care if I do.”

He had a couple of more drinks, which brought the bottle down to about the halfway level. Then he said he guessed he’d better slow down a little bit. And I told him to just take his time, he couldn’t get a train back home for a couple of hours yet.

We sat there for a minute or two, not saying much of anything. He looked at me and looked away again, and a kind of shy-sly look came over his face.

“Mighty handsome young fella your brother-in-law,” he said. “Yes, sir, mighty handsome.”

“And he’s an idjit,” I said. “Anyways, he sure ain’t quite right in the head.”

Ken nodded and said, yeah, he’d noticed that. “But maybe that might not make too much difference to a certain kind of woman, you know, Nick? Say a woman that was a lot older than he was. A woman that was pretty ugly and pretty apt to stay that way.”

“Well, I just don’t know about that,” I said. “I wouldn’t say you were wrong but I sure wouldn’t say you was right either.”

“Well, maybe that’s because you ain’t real bright,” Ken said. “Why, I’ll bet you there’s a woman right in this town that would really ‘pree-fer’ Lennie to a fella like you. I ain’t saying that you ain’t a plenty goodbookin’ fella yourself, but probably you ain’t got as long a dingle-dangle as he has—they tell me them idjits are hung like a stud-hoss. And, anyways—”

“Well, now, I don’t know about that,” I said. “I ain’t never had any complaints in that department yet.”

“Shut up when I’m talkin’!” Ken said. “Shut up and maybe you’ll learn somethin’! I was about to say that everything else being equal, which I doubt like hell in your case because all of them idjits have got dongs you could skip rope with, ‘but’—but irregardless of that a woman still might rather have a dummy pour it on her than a normal fella. Because she don’t have to put on for him, know what I mean? She can boss him around. She can be just as haggy as all hell and twice as mean, and she can still get what she needs.”

I scratched my head and said, well, maybe so. But I still thought he was wrong about Lennie. “I know for a fact that there ain’t no woman in this town that’s got any use for him. They pretend that they do, to keep on the good side of Myra, but I know they all hate his guts.”