Daddy Flem didn’t answer, leaning into the table again and knocking in an orange solid. He chalked up his cue and walked around the table, looking for a good shot, eyes switching from the green felt up to the fat man. The fat man must’ve seen it, definitely felt it, standing there with his arms crossed over his big gut, a smile on his face saying, “come on and get you some, old man.”

“Ain’t nothing,” Daddy said.

“You’re bleeding.”

“Just a busted seam.”

Fat Boy looked to the bug-eyed black fella and laughed. “The short ones always give you the most trouble,” he said. “Short ones always got the most to prove. Like a little runt dog nipping at your heels.”

Oh, hell. Dusty stood up, pretty damn sure that Daddy was about to run the damn table, but also knowing that he might break that pool cue against the fat boy’s skull. He reached out and touched his daddy’s arm. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s git.”

“Bullshit,” Daddy Flem said. “I paid my time.”

“Let’s go home.”

“Shit.”

“He ain’t worth it.”

Daddy breathed in a lot of air through his nose and nodded. He leaned into the table, surveying his options and decided on a shot that put his back toward the fat boy. The fat boy drank some beer and looked away, and that was when Daddy reared back the cue hard and fast right between the fat man’s legs. Damn, he got that boy good in the nuts. The man made a high-pitched sound, like a hurt dog, throwing him against his pool table and then coming full out on Daddy, Daddy turning the cue into a club and whacking that man hard and fast across his skull. Somewhere out front, the owner of the pool hall started to yell, saying he was gonna call the cops. But it was too late, the black man was out of the chair and on his feet heading toward Daddy with a malt liquor bottle raised over his head. Dusty saw him, too, and jumped up high on the man’s back, punching at the back of his head and biting a nice chunk off his ear. Dusty could taste the gristle and blood in his mouth, spitting it onto the floor, Daddy now having that big fat boy down on his knees where he kept on whacking and whacking like that fat man wasn’t nothing but the stump of a stubborn oak, the cue just an old mattock that would tear those roots apart.

The spit and blood went flying until that big ole boy finally fell. The black man already loose and free from Dusty. He had his hand on his bleeding ear, screaming that he was gonna kill both those short motherfuckers. The black man walked to the wall, going for the gun that was most surely in his coat.

But the man was too slow. Dusty had a revolver up into the man’s sweating neck, whispering into his bloody ear, “You damn blacks taste just like chicken.”