LITMIR.BIZ

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Dupree in the FSU end zone with three seconds on the clock and bookies dying of cardiac arrest all over the Great Republic.

      Then McLuster said, “Screw rock stars. Tell me about the time you beat Miami in that hellacious rainstorm. That must have been something.”

      So Teach told it. How the ball was heavy with the rain, and slick as a Suwannee River catfish, but he’d completed nineteen of twenty-three and led the Gators to a squeaker 14–13 victory over a team that bettered them in size and speed. Bettered them on paper. But football games, he told the man next to him, weren’t played on paper. They were played on grass in real weather against men whose skill and courage equaled yours or didn’t.

      Teach lifted his glass and gazed into it. Christ, he’d had more to drink than he’d intended. More than he was used to. His companion was quiet now, appreciating what he had said. “Gentlemen,” Teach whispered, including the bartender now, “it’s consistency that wins, not the brilliant thing you do only once. It’s doing the job day in and day out, and knowing you can do it.” It was what Teach had always had, the thing that got it done. The thing you called upon when the contagion of defeat crept into other men’s eyes.

      And suddenly it hurt, what Teach was saying. It hurt because he was forty-five and his best days were behind him. It hurt because he had used the words he had just whispered, the truest words he knew, to sell pills to physicians all over the state of Florida for so many years now that he couldn’t say them anymore without seeing himself in some family-practice doc’s waiting room with a display case on his knees.

      He swallowed the last of his bourbon and remembered that Dean’s ballet recital would start in two hours. He closed his eyes and saw his daughter turning and toeing and sweeping her flower-petal hands in gestures so gorgeous and graceful that they brought tears to his eyes. Well, the football stories had pushed the pills that earned the money that bought the toe shoes and the tutus. Teach caught his reflection in the mirror. It was time to pee and leave.

      The front door opened and sunlight slanted across the floor of Malone’s Bar and a black man stepped in. He was tall and moved with an easy, athletic grace, and this made Teach watch him sit at a table near the men’s room door.

      Teach pushed away from the bar and stretched. “Well,” he said, “time to point Percy at the pavement.” He glanced at his watch. “And then off I go to perform the duties of a father.” He looked at McLuster, inviting him into the age-old complicity of fathers. The man nodded, and it seemed to Teach like a good way to end this pleasant interlude.

      He knew, and he supposed McLuster did too, that he could never share Teach’s understanding of what it was to rise to the top of something. But any man could know the warm arms of a wife, the sweetness of a daughter’s kiss, and the two of them could part in that knowledge.

      As Teach started for the men’s room, McLuster said, “Hell, I guess I’ll bleed the monster too.”

      They were at the urinals when the black man came in. Teach had it out and flowing. His head thrown back, his knees flexed, he was thinking about pulling himself together for the ballet recital. He’d cinch up his tie, drive through rush-hour Tampa to the Women’s Club, get the old Minolta out of the trunk of the Buick. A mint for his breath. Lord, he’d forgotten to buy film. He’d have to find a drugstore.

      Paige’s society friends would all be there in pearls and boutique dresses. Their faces would be made up perfectly, which meant imperceptibly, and they’d smell delicately of Chanel, and their necks and shoulders would be flushed with worry for the girls about to dance. And they would watch Teach, the widower, enter. The man not quite of their station, whose wife had been one of them. Beautiful Paige who had died so suddenly and in such an ugly way.

      “Well, look at you nasty white motherfuckers.”

      The voice, its threat, its confidence, made Teach quickly holster his cock and turn to face the men’s room door. He heard McLuster at the next urinal mutter, “What the . . . ? Oh Jesus.”

      Teach could see now that the black man was no man. He was tall and filled out—Teach made him at least 220 and all of it muscle—but he couldn’t have been more than eighteen. That Teach had taken him for a grown man said something for the confident way the boy moved. Teach remembered giving the boy a friendly nod on his way to the men’s room. And hadn’t the boy nodded back?

      The boy took another step into the room. There was no mistaking the threat of his stance, legs wide, arms ready at his sides.

      The boy wore black jeans and a white silk shirt. He pointed at them with his left hand. “Give it up, bitches.” The white shirt opened at his waist, and Teach saw it in the waistband of the black jeans—the shiny black handle of a straight razor. McLuster started to pant, and Teach thought, Heart attack, then McLuster moaned, “Oh no,” and Teach saw the dark stain spreading around the man’s clutching fingers.

      The boy laughed quietly. “You bitches better give it up. I ain’t gone say it again.”

      Teach held his eyes on the boy’s face and made himself smile. His salesman’s smile. The smile that ate shit if shit got the purchase order signed. He willed the boy to look at him, apply those cold, coffee-bean eyes to his. When the boy did it, Teach let his smile flow into his eyes, ten years of schmoozing receptionists, accommodating assholes in white lab coats, and closing, closing. He had to close the distance here. He reached out a careful hand and eased McLuster to his right. Teach had to talk but didn’t know what to say. There was a razor in the boy’s waistband.

      He saw the headlines: Local Businessman Slashed in Bar. Motive: Robbery. But headlines were ink and there was going to be blood here. Teach imagined the boy grasping the black handle of the razor and flipping out the gleaming blade. The smallest touch of such an instrument, Teach knew, could bring forth the red gush that ended life in seconds. And for what? Some cracked-out kid wanted money.

      Teach said, “What do you want? Our wallets? Is that it?”

      The boy looked at him, his head tilted sideways. He held up his left fist and loosened three fingers. “That’s three, bitch. I said I wasn’t gone ask you again.”

      Teach glanced at McLuster and shrugged. “He wants us to give it up. You got any idea what he’s talking about?”

      When the boy looked at McLuster, Teach did it: leapt across the space between them and delivered a sweeping right forearm to the side of the boy’s head. Even as Teach knew the sweet smack of contact, felt the boy’s body go limp against his, heard the whack and skitter of the razor hitting the tile floor, he thought it had been too easy. Somehow too easy, too lucky. The boy’s head hit the doorframe, and he slid unconscious to the floor, blood pouring from his split cheek.

      Teach looked at what he had done. What he’d had to do. The thing, apparently, he was still ready to do after all these years. His right elbow ached where the shock of the blow vibrated. He turned to his companion. McLuster with his back against the wall, both hands clutching the urine stain that spread down his trouser legs. “My God,” he said, “look at this. I don’t fucking believe this.”

      Then the boy on the floor groaned and Teach knew this wasn’t over.

      He grabbed the boy’s collar and dragged him facedown through the men’s room door and into the middle of the bar. There he knelt beside the boy, pinning his right arm between his shoulder blades.

      The bartender, a stocky bald man whose name tag said Benny, a man Teach had only vaguely noticed before, a man with the bartender’s gift for appearing with the needed thing and then returning to the status of furniture, looked across the bar at Teach and the boy who was bleeding onto the carpet. The bartender’s face said everything about the things we least expect.

      Teach said, “Call the cops. This kid tried to rob us in the men’s room.” Then, to the man’s expression of disbelief, Teach said, “He had a knife. He was going to rob us. Kill us. I don’t know. Call 911.”

      The bartender turned for the phone, and the boy groaned again. His eyes were foggy but clearing. Teach shoved his

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