LITMIR.BIZ

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gut the huge man like a fish when he made the move he was so clearly working himself up for.

      The bartender, a middle-sized, prematurely balding man whose name was Mathus Conn, and who also happened to own and run the gaudy, also seemed to notice the big man’s reaction.

      “Now step right back from there, you hear?” he said, his tone softer, but barely. “Now. You don’t want me to reach under the counter.”

      Though sitting in a half sprawl in the chair as if solidly at his ease, Ryan watched the man-mountain narrowly through his lone eye. He knew an aggressor usually had to get himself worked up to actually launch an attack. It was just human nature. But he also knew that in some men that could happen with frightening speed.

      But apparently he didn’t want to see what the gaudy owner had under the counter. Instead his raised his ham-slab hands placatingly toward the bar as he shuffled away across the dried-grass-covered floor.

      “I wonder what he does have under there,” Ricky said beneath his breath.

      “Sawed-off double-barrel 10-gauge muzzle-loader,” J.B. said softly, “if I had to guess.”

      “Sorry, Mathus,” Potar said. “Just funnin’ a little. You know I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”

      “I know no such thing,” Conn stated crisply. “But I do know you. And you know I don’t put up with trouble inside my place. So I reckon it’s time for you to leave.”

      The huge man looked around. The gaudy was filled with faces lit yellow by smoky oil lamps. None of them looked sympathetic. Potar turned and strode out, head high, as if leaving was his idea.

      “He’s the town bully over to Sinkhole,” Conn told the companions.

      “We figured,” Mildred replied.

      “I think he just wants acceptance.”

      “The kind of big lunk who has no real harm in him, huh?” Mildred said acerbically.

      Ryan cocked a disapproving brow at her. The gaudy owner was their main and best customer for their scavvy. He saw no point in letting Mildred sour a perfectly profitable business relationship.

      Conn laughed without much real humor. “Oh, there’s plenty harm in him,” he said. “It just happens to stem from him not being able to find a place in the world, is all.”

      Ryan looked around at his friends. With his head turned so no one else in the gaudy could see but them, he inflated his cheeks and blew out an exaggerated sigh between pursed lips.

      Krysty winked at him.

      Stenson’s Creek’s gaudy was much like any other, if cleaner than most. That made it different from the nearby ville of Sinkhole, which was something of a dump. It seemed to be run-down more from a sense of comfortable complacency than from the pervasive despair that defined much of the world outside the Pennyrile district. The gaudy was a sprawling roadhouse in the woods, east of Sinkhole along the creek that provided its name. It was mostly solid postnuke construction, fieldstone and timber. The bar was polished local hardwood. The tables and chairs had a crude look to them, as if they’d been made with little concern for appearance. But they were sturdy. The place didn’t offer much by way of decor, but that wasn’t what Conn was in the business of selling, and his customers didn’t seem to mind.

      “Hey, big boy,” a dispirited-looking gaudy slut asked a man at the table nearest Ryan and company, “looking for a good time?”

      She wore a ragged skirt, a blouse whose neckline hung almost as low as her breasts did and a sort of scarf around her neck made of interwoven rags. It was apparently meant to suggest a feather boa. What it did suggest was a mutie hybrid of an actual boa constrictor and a weasel with the mange.

      The man she was talking to looked cast from a similar mold to the departed Potar, but of a shorter, wider, flabbier model. He had a neck bulged out thicker than his head, into which a succession of chins blended seamlessly as he slurped at the foam on his own beer mug with an intensity single-minded enough to suggest to Ryan that it just about maxed out his capabilities in the mind department. He didn’t so much as flick his vacant brown eyes the slut’s way.

      She ran her fingers down the burly shoulder left bare by his grime-, sweat- and man-grease-mottled singlet, and leaned down so far Ryan could see the full pendulousness of her breasts from ten feet away without trying to, much less wanting so. Putting her painted lips close enough to his ear to risk leaving red marks, she purred, “Mebbe you didn’t hear me the first ti—”

      He shoved her away, and she went down on her not-so-well-upholstered fanny so hard her tailbone cracked against the floorboards like a knuckle rapping on a table.

      Scowling, Conn put down the bottle of shine he held and started around the bar, reaching under the counter as he did so.

      The woman jumped to her feet. “What the nuke, you fat slob?”

      “Back up off the triggers of them blasters, everybody,” a deep voice boomed from another corner of the room.

      It was naturally arresting. Everyone stopped—even Conn himself, whom Ryan had observed in their previous visits was the unquestioned master in his own house.

      The speaker wasn’t tall, but he was wide. A black man, the gray in his short, tightly curled hair showed him to be in middle age. And while he had a bit of a gut bulging out onto his thighs as he sat nursing his brew, Ryan suspected there was more muscle than flab. He was surrounded by four men and two women, most of whom showed a family resemblance, though it was far less pronounced than in the three largely chinless, large-foreheaded types who accompanied the meatbag.

      “Don’t take it to heart,” he said calmly. “You’re new in these parts and don’t know. Them Sumzes don’t ball nobody more distantly related than first cousin. And Buffort, there, ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed.”

      “It’s a family turdition, Tarley,” said a skinny redheaded Sumz with ears like open wag doors. “Dates back to the dark times. That’s how us Sumzes pulled through.”

      Buffort guffawed and pounded a beefy fist on the table. It happened to be the one clenching the handle of his mug. Frothy brown beer slopped forth.

      Ryan could smell him and his brothers from twenty feet away. The Sumzes were turpentiners, he knew—they made the stuff from the resin of loblolly pines growing around the valley where they made their home. Its astringent, piney smell overwhelmed even the body reek wafting from the group, and the fresh-sawdust-and-old-vomit stink that even the best-kept-up gaudy sported. It was even noticeable over the odor of the lanterns, which like most of the lamps hereabouts burned a blend of the pine oil with wood alcohol.

      “You tell ’em, Yoostas!” the huge fat man crowed in a surprisingly shrill voice. “Family that sleeps together keeps together!”

      Everybody laughed. Even the gaudy slut, though she looked as if she wasn’t clear as to the why.

      A couple of husky young men, one dark-skinned, one light, had appeared near the scene. They were local youths Conn employed for odd jobs, including bouncing the occasional rowdy patron. They looked now to their boss.

      He sighed, but he was already withdrawing his hand from underneath the bar. He used it to smooth back his thinning seal-colored hair instead.

      “Right,” he said. “Keep a tighter leash on your boy, there, Yoostas.”

      “Aw, c’mon, Conn. There ain’t no harm to him.”

      “I know,” Conn said, moving back to his accustomed spot and picking up his bottle again, as if he meant to use it for its original purpose instead of cracking heads. “That’s why y’all are still here.”

      He looked at the girl, who was trying to untangle her arms and upper torso from her ratty makeshift boa.

      “Go take a break, Annie,” he said. “Catch a breath, pull yourself together.”

      “But

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