There were a lot of drunk people in there. It felt pretty homey, what with all the friendly smiles and the people who knew each other talking to each other and some people were dancing out on the dance floor although I wasn’t. My dog had died, had been killed, actually, by another dog, and it had taken all my self-control to keep from slipping a round into the magazine of my 30.30 and slowly, lovingly, squeezing off one sweet bullet into the head of that dog that had killed him. He’d come up and pissed on one of my fenceposts the day before, and I’d gone as far as to load up the rifle and lay it on the hood of my pickup and watch him, daring him to come on up and piss on my rosebush in the yard. I even sighted on him. I even fixed the crosshairs on his burry head and said to myself, You’re a lucky son of a bitch that I’m such a nice guy even though you’re not.

I hung around on my stool for a while. I’d paid my income tax and I had hardly any money to drink on at all. I wanted some love myself and knew I was too shoddy-looking to get any. I tried to dance with a few women but nobody wanted to dance with me and I couldn’t blame them. I was looking pretty disreputable. I’d had to tape up the toe of one of my boots and my fingernails had a lot of black greasy dirt under them from changing out a water pump on my truck. Doing that had made me thirsty, and since it was my birthday, I had come back to this dark hole-in-the-wall looking for love.