Mohawk

bottle.
    “You and my granddaughter hitting it off pretty good?”
    “That’s a change of subject.”
    “Young girls today don’t never say no,” Rory Gaffney mused. “Your granddad, he’d of worried about it. He was that sort. The same with the leather we took. He figured it was stealing. We never could get him over the worrying.”
    Randall took in what the other man was saying, but slowly. This is what I have come back to learn, he thought mechanically, outside himself, watching himself learn. His stomach churned suddenly, and he tasted something vile on the back of his tongue. Remember this taste, he told himself, learn it. “No,” he heard himself say. “My grandfather was no thief. He’d have starved first.”
    Rory Gaffney nodded. “Starved is
just
what he would of done. It’s what we all would of done if a skin hadn’t got itself misplaced now and then. And not just us, either. Wives and kids along with us. What the hell were we but family men? What was your granddad?”
    Randall swallowed hard as an alternative to spitting into the dirt at their feet, but the taste didn’t go away.
    “No man was more a family man than Mather Grouse. Nobody in Mohawk was good enough for that mother of yours. My poor boy was sweet on her, like all the rest.”
    There was an edge to the man’s voice, and Randall guessed that Rory Gaffney, too, was tasting somethingnasty when he dredged up the yellow past. “Ask your mother about my poor boy some day.”
    Inside the trailer, the baby cried just once, then both men listened to the crickets.
    “I understood your granddad. A man gets a little crazy over his own, especially when she’s a girl and prettier than anybody ever saw. Who wouldn’t a wanted her for hisself?”
    Randall started to speak, but couldn’t.
    “Anyways, I went along. I always tried to be Mather Grouses’s friend, even though he never wanted none. They were tough times, but we all made out somehow.”
    Randall continued to hear the fundamental insincerity of the man, but also knew that the most effective lies were those liberally laced with truth. The lie could be ninety-nine parts truth to one part falsehood, the one tarnished part mingling with the pure until it was all tainted, more false than pure fabrication.
    “You’re the same,” the man concluded. “A young Mather Grouse.” With effort Rory Gaffney lifted himself from the truck tire he had been sitting on. He was half a head taller than Randall and seemed aware of the fact, though the boy had to admit that maybe it was he himself who was.
    “No,” Randall said, unsure of exactly what he was denying.
    Gaffney raised the bottle. “To your granddad,” he said, “and youth.”
    When the man offered him the bottle, Randall took it and drank without wiping the lip. The whiskey tasted only slightly better than what it washed down. Then, as the rancid liquid tracked downward toward his bowels, a strange notion occurred to Randall.
I could go to war
, he thought to himself.
I could kill a man
.

45
    On Saturday night after the bars close, the only spot hotter than The Velvet Pussycat is the new Mohawk Medical Services Center, though most generally concede that the new hospital lacks the ambience of the old, whose crowded vestibule encouraged a desperate camaraderie of the bleeding. If you’d tiptoed home six hours late and your wife hit you in the face with a chair, chances were pretty good you’d be standing in line next to someone with a remarkably similar set of circumstances or, at least, an equally interesting story. That was the cozy kind of place the old hospital had been. You could compare wounds and feel either fortunate or proud.
    The new hospital has a reception area like a large modern hotel, and the carpet sucked sound. You overheard no intimate revelations as the staff scurried about stuffing patients into the sterile, private cubicles that ringed the lobby, as if the institution was ashamed of its patients. In the hospital’s planning stages, someone had come to the entirely erroneous conclusion that people preferred to hurt in private. From the beginning no one liked the new facility. They didn’t mind particularly that the building came in over budget, nor that the lights dimmed and flickered during thunderstorms.In fact, the place was altogether too bright. The walls were bright, the furniture bright, the paintings vivid. People were yanked out of sight before you could figure out what was wrong with them,