Someday Never Comes

Chapter Seven

Come midnight operations were winding to a close. We were down to the endurance drinkers by then; a contingent made up of some of the younger park rangers and their civilian buddies. They'd slowly condensed into the tables nearest the door; the lesser distance to stager.

Back at the counter, I was enjoying the downtime. A few minutes earlier the last of stool jockeys had cleared out and freed me from the role of entertainer. Leaning on the counter, beer in hand, I relished the relative silence. I had, for the better part of seven hours, been chiseling out smalltalk with a group that considered cattle prices front-page material. I vaunted my bullshiting skills as being firmly in the heavyweight division. What had I told Jamie? All part of the game? Still I was forced to admit it had been a near thing. Not least of all because I'd also spent those hours intermittently parrying fishing expeditions for my life's history. Here was a set that would have made the Gestapo proud. Made them weep tears of goddamn joy at their tenacity.

Jamie wandered back in from the front line as I downed another slug of Coors. Muttering under his breath, he dumped a pair of glasses into the dishpan and picked up his own bottle of horse-piss-weak beer. I stole a side-eye glance at his arm as he raised the bottle; the telltale zipper row of suture scars revealed by the sleeves he'd rolled up at some point in the evening. Nightstick fracture, or so I'd always heard it called. Not a common break. Rarer still to break it bad enough there that it had to be corrected surgically, but a ton or so of crumpled car frame can work wonders. Of course that brought me back to the one topic I was in a constant state of actively trying not to dwell on. Lot's Wife: The Psychology Edition.

Across the room, glasses rattled as one of late crowd pushed back his chair. Un-gritting my teeth, I swallowed more cheap beer, willing my brain towards other topics. About as effective as it ever was. I was trying to focus on the present, on Ranger Rick giving his drinking buddies the hail-fellow-well-met bow out speech. Superimposed though were all the things I was trying to ignore; a vindictive slideshow. I watched the ranger slap his hat on, laughing, swaying a little and saw a paramedic shifting a screaming Ada Vavra onto a stretcher.

Meanwhile in the here and now Jamie was hissing something under his breath. Belatedly I realized the words were directed at me.

"What's that?"

"Tone it down a shade," he said, still speaking through his teeth. "We're gonna have a good old fashioned bar fight if junior there catches you staring at his ass."

I inhaled beer. Son of a bitch. There was suddenly a quilt shop's worth of stick pins in my nose, all of them intent on murder. "I wasn't-" I started, trying to snort back beery snot.

"Uh huh," Jamie intoned, very blandly.

"I wasn't," I said again when I could breathe. I hadn't been. Had I? Okay, in a distracted sort of way I might have been. Might. It was still one hell of an assumption to make, just because I was staring in the general direction of another guy's ass, unless-

"The hell, dude," I said, "do I have a sign somewhere?" Last I checked, my bumper had been wholly rainbow sticker free.

"I used the force, young Jedi," Jamie intoned.  Shrugging he swilled more Coors. "Tribal instinct."

"You?" I asked; heard the echo of it in my head, disbelieving, like some aging spinster wringing her pearls.

Jamie tilted his head to look at me. "You didn't know?"

"What? No." I'd had him pegged as a fussy metrosexual, tops. Not gay. Not by a mile.

"Hah," he huffed. 

It clicked then, a moment in our conversation that morning. I nearly inhaled beer again, this time from laughter.

"Shit," I wheezed between breaths.
Jamie squinted at me; ten to one, trying to recall the nearest psych-ward's phone number. 
"This morning," I finally got out. "When I said I was going to 'be in town for a few days,' you thought that was like, what? Some kind of nail and bail offer?"