There was the fuck yous and all the threats about how they’d find them and kill them. Just a bunch of wind and bullshit. Dusty wasn’t in any mood to get down and dirty but that fat man had played it when he’d disrespected Daddy Flem.

The pool room was still and silent. You could hear the men shift on the old buckled wooden planks. The two or three other tables had stopped cold, all eyes on Dusty and Daddy Flem. Daddy having the grace to take the bloody and broken cue and place it neatly and orderly in the rack. The Nix boys slid into their coats, Daddy doing it with a lot of pain, so much blood on his right flank that Dusty knew the whole damn thing had torn loose. Smoke hung around the low-hanging lights. Whatever soul music had been playing on the jukebox was gone. It was like something out of one of those old-time Westerns Daddy watched before falling asleep in his La-Z-Boy.

“Momma will sew you up.”

“She always does.”

“You okay?”

They passed by all the eyes and the whispers, the black-as-night owner of the pool hall already on the phone with Johnny Law. They made it out back and into the night and the cold. Daddy leaned on the passenger door before Dusty helped him inside. The sky was endless and dark, a million pinpricks of light winking above.

“It wadn’t about him,” Daddy said. “I’m still mad as hell at that goddamn bitch who stuck me.”

“Do you ever get tired of teaching folks a lesson?”

“I reckon I don’t,” Daddy said. “Some folks just have it comin’ and I’m glad to send them on their way.”

SIX

Holly Harkins knew the fella at table eight was going to be trouble, slow, steady eyes on her chest and on her backside when she took his order for the fisherman’s platter with double fries and extra tartar sauce. When she’d delivered his food, he’d asked her about the freshness of the fish and whether it had been frozen. She’d wanted to say, “Of course it’s been goddamn frozen. How many shrimp and clams do you think you could catch out on Choctaw Lake?” But she’d just smiled and said she didn’t know, saying they got shipments twice a week from down on the coast. He’d listened to her, eyes taking in her breasts in the tight blue Captain Table’s T-shirt, as he reached for a French fry and dabbed it into the tartar sauce. “Mmm,” he said. “I just love fresh young things.”

The man stuck around to nearly closing time, Holly finding herself looking out the big windows to the parking lot to see if TJ had come back with her momma’s minivan. Most nights TJ was there fifteen, twenty minutes early just in case things got slow and the manager let Holly go. But TJ wasn’t there, probably making out with Ladarius somewhere, listening to her Cheap Trick or fucking Quiet Riot, telling tall tales about how her daddy had been a folk hero and things might’ve been different if her momma had stayed with him and made him a better man.