Drop City

Left out. A pang of jealousy shot through him: they'd had the adventures and he'd been eating mush.
    Sky Dog leaned back into the bar, lit a cigarette and managed to look rueful and put-upon at the same time. The country-inflected strains of one song faded away and another started up in its place. Everybody at the bar was looking at him, waiting for clarification. “Public indecency,” he said. “I was just--”
    “He was pissing against a tree, that's what he was doing,” Lester said, panting between hoots of laughter. “Put a real fear into them girls, isn't that right, Franklin?”
    “Whole town was terrified.”
    A new round of laughter. Dale Murray joined in too, whinnying along with the rest of them. Sky Dog looked abashed. He ducked his head and shrugged. “It wasn't all that funny, man--it cost me a night in jail.”
    “Right,” Lester said, “and this spade's twenty-five bucks, American. Which you still owe me, by the way.” Then he turned to Ronnie, took a long slow sip of the whiskey, and let his eyes drop to his boots and rise again. “And you, my friend,” he puffed, his voice so soft it was barely audible, “what are you dressed up to be--Wild Bill Hickok? Or maybe it's Buffalo Bill? One of them honky _Bills__ anyway, right?”
    Lester was enjoying this. He had center stage now, as exotic in the Three Pup as a panther on a leash. They'd seen Indians up here, they'd seen Eskimos, Finns, Swedes and Frenchmen, but a _spade__ was something else altogether, and Pan could appreciate that, appreciate the strain it must have been on Lester to delve ever deeper into the redneck fastness of the last outpost of the forty-ninth state, but there were limits to what he could take. He'd let the child-raper comment pass, but now the man was mounting the balls to stand here and mock him for the way he was dressed? Well, fuck that. “I don't know what the fuck you're talking about,” he said.
    “The heat,” Lester said, pointing to the holster. “And this--what's this?” and he had the knife out of its sheath before Pan could react, twisting the blade in the dull wash of light for the amusement of everyone at the bar. “Don't tell me you're a mule skinner now--or do you just use this thing for cleaning your nails?”
    “Mule skinners don't skin anything,” Dale Murray put in. “Least of all mules.”
    Verbie was there at his elbow, the pale muffin of her face, looking for someone to buy her a beer. “Twenty-Mule Team Borax,” was her comment.
    Pan couldn't have said where the anger came from or how it rose up so quickly and luminously, but he took hold of Lester's upraised wrist--the wrist attached to the hand with the knife in it--and in the same instant snatched off his hat and sailed it across the room. Lester's eyes went cold. The hair was flattened to his head, linty, dirty, twisted into something like cornrows with a couple of sky blue rubber bands, and nobody had ever seen anything like that, not since Farina anyway. “And what are you dressed up to be? You're the one in the cowboy hat.”
    Soft, so soft: “That's my Hendrix hat, man.” And Lester let him take the knife and fit it back into the sheath while Franklin crossed the room and bent to retrieve the hat. “Touchy, Pan, touchy,” Lester chided. “Don't you know I'm just goofin'? Don't you know that? Huh?”
    That was when Lynette turned away from the grill, one hand at her hip, and informed them if they wanted to roughhouse they were going to have to do it over at the Nougat because any more of this sort of thing and they were out the door, all of them. “And I don't tolerate cussing in here either--you ought to know that, mister, and I'm talking to you, Ronnie. And you better inform your friends too.”
    “Come on, man,” Sky Dog was saying, “come on, have a beer and forget it--you know Lester. He's just fucking with your head is all. It's a joke, man--can't you take a joke?”
    And then it was all right and somebody found the only two rock and roll sides on the jukebox and the beers went round for everybody, even Verbie, who wound up sitting in Iron Steve's lap and drinking on his tab while he kneaded her breasts and licked the side of her face like a deer at a salt lick. Sky Dog produced another joint--“We brought a ton of the shit, man, and they almost nailed us at the border too if they were only smart enough to like look _inside__ the spare tire”--and the sky darkened another degree till it was like twilight.