The Dark Country Read Online Free Page B

started on it. The kitchen wouldn't be serving for another hour and the room was still empty, even here at the bar. There were a couple of too-young waitresses making like they were busy, wiping off the plastic menus and refilling the little bowls with sugar packets. I sat watching them in the light of the sunset, their figures silhouetted against the empty panes, but I knew all about the game and I didn't feel up to it. They looked like nervous laughs and weekends at Mammoth and a taste for cold duck, and when they joked at each other under their breaths the sound came to me above the piped-in music: telephone voices just out of the shower, brittle as window glass, unexpectedly cold, and transparent.
    There wasn't much left of the drink so I turned on the stool for one last view. I knew I couldn't see my place from here, buried past a stretch of big rich ones, but I tried just the same.
    "Which one?"
    The voice was so flat, so toneless, the thought occurred that it might have been my own. I drained the glass against my teeth and put it down. The bartender was twisting some bottles of Bud in shaved ice. He flicked his eyes in what I took to be the direction of the color TV, but it wasn't on. It never was. I leaned in, trying to see past the end of the bar.
    She was back there at the small table, the one you never notice against the wood. I wouldn't have spotted her at all except for her eyes, the way the whites reflected the dim light coming through the stained glass porthole on the side door.
    They were huge, very wide-set, as if drawn by a Forties comic strip artist; I couldn't place the style. They were not looking at me. I squinted anyway, trying to see into the shadows. But she was not looking at me.
    Something small and white lifted to her lips. No, I thought, or maybe I muttered it. Not this time, and I did not reach for the matches on the bar.
    Then she did something I wasn't ready for, something that had a little class, just a little, at least. She went ahead and lit the cigarette, without the look, the wait. And suddenly I felt bitter in the throat at myself as well as the game, at the whole thing, just the whole damn thing.
    "The lady," said the bartender. "I think she's talking to you."
    She still wasn't looking at me. "What did she say?" "Don't ask me, man," he said, and he winked. That settled it for me. No way. "No way," I said.
    He shrugged. I climbed off the stool. He was watching but I wasn't going to give him the next act. "Set up one more," I told him. "I'm going to the head."
    "Sure," he said. You know how he said it.
    I took a couple of steps. Then I remembered about the head. (A varnished plaque on the door: BUCKS.) It was back there, down a hall between the cigarette machine and the pay phone. The hall next to the small table.
    Well, the hell with her.
    I passed the table. I was about to turn into the hall, but I couldn't resist checking her out, just once. Call it a flaw in my character, an itch in the place you know you can't scratch but can't stop yourself from trying, every time.
    There was something I recognized. Maybe she reminded me of the types in the class Beverly Hills saloons with the Boston ferns hanging from the ceiling, the ones I've seen as I passed by outside the glass: twenty-nine going on forty, skin diet-taut, a streak bleached into the hair; a look that says that she's got a C-note folded in her bag and that she's waiting, just waiting. This one had the expression, I guess, but that was all. Her hair was black, no streak. Not shiny black, but dull, more like what's left in the grate a minute before the fire goes out. Drawn back along the sides of her head, but not tight, not a cheap
    face-lift, not like she cared. Her skin was white, but not kept from the sun like some courtesan; it was the kind of pale you get when you don't care enough to go outside.
    And there were the eyes. They set me on edge. They were too extreme, like something you learn never to expect in this life: gilt on