Empire Falls

geezers didn’t start fights, she told herself. Again, except for Max Roby.
    “In fact,” Bea told him now, suspecting that her previous instructions might be interpreted too narrowly, “leave everybody alone.”
    “Invite him down here,” Max suggested. “I could use some company.”
    Bea glared at him. “What’d I just say?”
    “How’s that bothering anybody? I like Horace.”
    “Me too,” Bea said, studying him in the entryway hunched over the cigarette machine, madly pulling at the levers now. He’d clearly abandoned his own brand for whatever the machine might deign to give him. “Which is why I told you to leave him alone. A man ought to be able to come in here without you bumming cigarettes and draft beers.”
    Out in the entryway, the machine surrendered a pack of some brand or other, which Horace bent down to scoop out of the trough. When he raised up again and turned toward the bar, he caught sight of Max, the only customer, seated at the far end, where Bea always parked him because he smelled rancid and was a pain in the ass. This sight occasioned a small hitch in Horace’s giddy-up, a split second’s hesitation, during which a man might consider his options. Like leaving. Other men had been known to turn promptly on their heels upon spying Max, but all his life Horace had been victimized by his own good manners. A reporter for the Empire Gazette for going on thirty years, he’d seen humanity from every angle. Most people, he concluded, were selfish, greedy, unprincipled, venal, utterly irredeemable shit-eaters, but he’d also observed that these same people were highly sensitive to criticism. Max Roby was an exception, but Horace nonetheless couldn’t bring himself to hurt the man’s feelings. Which meant he also couldn’t plop down at the opposite end of the bar. That strategy wouldn’t work anyway, since the exact same conversation would ensue, with Max shouting it.
    “What’d it give you this time?” Max said in an idly curious tone when Horace slid onto a nearby stool, leaving one between them as a buffer zone, however inadequate. Horace tried to imagine the situation whereby someone would come in and fill that vacancy. It’d have to be a stranger. A blind stranger. No sense of smell, either.
    “Chesterfields,” Horace said, examining the pack before placing it on the bar alongside a twenty-dollar bill. Bea poured him a draft and slid an ashtray in front of him, leaving the twenty where it was, for now. “You want one, Max?”
    “Sure,” he said, leaning over to snatch the pack, then deftly peeling off its slender ribbon, thumbing up its flip top, discarding the foil and removing two cigarettes.
    Horace noted that Max had taken two, not one, but said nothing, just as Max had known he wouldn’t. “You might as well draw one for my friend here,” he told Bea. “He’s got that thirsty look.”
    Bea did not approve of Horace’s generosity, but she complied with his request. “Working late?” she asked.
    Horace nodded. Tonight had been a beaut. For starters he’d had to cover the school board meeting in Fairhaven, one of his least favorite assignments; this one had progressed rapidly from civil to uncivil to angry to plain insulting, stopping just short of fisticuffs. Then, on the way home, his car had broken down on a seldom-used back road out by the old landfill. There was only one house within a radius of about a mile, and Horace, hoping to use the phone to call for a tow, had walked up the long dirt driveway and there, around back of the dark old house, had secretly witnessed something that had rattled him to the core, something that went far beyond the selfish, greedy, unprincipled, venal, utterly irredeemable shit-eating behavior he was used to and sent him stealing back out to the road, as if he himself and not that sad, alarming boy had been the guilty party. As he walked nearly three miles into town, what he’d witnessed was with him every step, and it made him glad of companionship now, even if one of his companions was Max Roby.
    “You should get that thing removed,” Max suggested, glancing at the fibroid cyst on Horace’s forehead.
    “What thing?” Horace said, his standard reply to such comments, which were more frequent than anyone would imagine.
    “I’m always afraid it’ll explode when I’m talking to you,” Max said, draining half of his beer in one sudden motion. It hadn’t been Max’s intention to gulp so much, but he’d been