Empire Falls

perched there on his barstool, dry, for a hell of a while. A bar could become a desert when you were broke, its beer spigots a mirage. When you finally arrived at the oasis you could tell yourself not to drink too deeply, but a body parched so long by the desert sand has its own needs, its own devices, and Max was just glad his body hadn’t demanded the whole glass Horace had bought him. The idea now was to be patient and adjust himself to the pace of the man he hoped to continue drinking with. If he tried to push Horace by draining his own glass too quickly, the other man would feel pressured and leave, then Max would be smack-dab in the middle of the desert again. Horace had a car and, if so motivated, could just get up and walk out and drive to the Lamplighter, a place where Max wasn’t welcome—even if he had a way to get there, which he didn’t, unless he walked or hitched. The first he refused to do, the second he never had much luck at, owing, if his son Miles was to be believed, to his personal appearance.
    This lack of transportation was beginning to get Max down. They’d taken away his license three years ago when he ran over the mayor’s daughter’s dog, strengthening his conviction that a man’s prospects in life were determined by luck and politics. In a town overrun by mangy curs, it was a damned unlucky man who ran over a purebred fox terrier owned by the mayor’s eight-year-old brat. Any other victim wouldn’t have had the political wherewithal to pull Max’s records and get him declared a public menace. A luckier fellow would’ve run over a stray mutt and been proclaimed a public benefactor—they’d have probably given him a job at the humane society, where they allowed animals a week, two at the outside, to get claimed, after which they got the needle.
    No, Max knew all about luck. He knew, for instance, what bad luck was always followed by. Worse luck. Not a month after losing his license, he’d left Callahan’s around closing time one night and, nodding off at the wheel, had driven into a ditch, where the car’s frame snapped in half, leaving him no choice but to walk back to Callahan’s and report the vehicle stolen. Also leaving him in the condition in which he now found himself—a man not only without a license, which was inconvenience enough, but also without a car, which made it a full-blown dilemma. An old man without wheels was a pitiful thing. People could get up and leave and you couldn’t follow them, and they knew you couldn’t, which meant they were more likely to do just that. Winter was just around the corner, too. High time he got himself down to Key West, where you didn’t freeze your ass off and you didn’t need a car, since the bars were all lined up one right after another, and almost everybody either walked or rode bicycles.
    Max sighed, staring at his now empty glass, considering the unfairness of it all. “What would it cost you to have it removed?” he wondered out loud, touching his forehead where his own cyst, if he’d had one, would have been located. Horace was sitting there nursing his beer, which made Max even more resentful. “A couple hundred bucks?”
    Horace shrugged, exchanging a glance with Bea, who was getting ready to give Max the boot, he could tell. “Hard to say.”
    Max stifled a bitter laugh. “Why? You never looked into it?”
    “Never did.”
    “I sure would’ve,” Max said. “That son of a bitch was growing out of the middle of my forehead, I’d have looked into it pronto.”
    “I think it might be the source of my intelligence,” Horace told him, winking at Bea. “What if I let somebody cut it off and then discovered it was responsible for all my best ideas?”
    “That’s something Max wouldn’t have to worry about,” Bea said. “Not having a brain.”
    Max treated this insult the way he treated all insults, by pushing his glass forward for a refill. In his experience, after insulting you, people generally felt guilty. It occurred to them that maybe they were selling you short. They wondered if they could do something to make it up to you. This impulse never lasted long, though, so you had to take advantage swiftly. Max had been offering Bea opportunities to insult him all night long, but until this very moment she’d resisted, which meant she hadn’t owed him anything and his glass had remained dry. Now she had no choice but to fill it and grudgingly slide it back in front of him. This time he drained off