“Nah, hell, wasn’t that. They’s all married off when I got back.”

I knew better. War had hurt him. He never got the bullets and the bombs out of his head. I know he shot men. He once saw a dogfight over the African desert, with all the action at five thousand feet. He said the American plane that went down left a solid black trail of smoke all the way to the ground, and the whole company sat down in the sand and cried. Then they went out that night and killed a bunch of people. He told me that.

He was drunk by the time he’d told it, and that time I left him asleep on the floor. I locked the door before I left. He wouldn’t have let me help him across the road to his house.

The other thing I’m fixing to tell you has a lot to do with what I just told you.

This was years later. Uptown in a bar one night. It was raining so hard I had to make a mad dash from my car to the door, raining so hard you could hardly see how to drive with the wipers going full speed. But I got in there and took my coat off and was glad to be in out of the rain. I was between women, living alone for a while again, and I didn’t know how or when I’d find another one. The beer I ordered came and I paid.

There was nothing much going on. A few guys shooting pool and a few older women sitting at tables talking. Then I saw Squirrel at about the same time he saw me. I could tell he was drunk. He got up and started making his way over to me. I sat there and waited for him.

He’s a good man. He’s worked hard all his life laying brick, but he’s had his troubles with the bottle. He’s somewhere in his fifties, maybe sixties, I don’t know now.

He sat down beside me and we talked for a while. Or he did. With drunks you know you just mostly agree and nod your head a lot. You don’t have to worry about carrying the conversation, they’ll do it. Squirrel was pissed off. He was ready to go home and he didn’t have any wheels, because he’d left his wheels at home and come to town with two of the old guys shooting pool. He was ready to go and they weren’t. I didn’t want to think about what he was working his way up to. I was in out of that rain, I wanted to stay in out of it for a while.