Mohawk

the vacant stool at the end of the counter. It was a matter of jest between Dallas and Harry that he and Wild Bill were related. Harry always pretended to blow up at the suggestion. Today, though, the joke was flat. “I ain’t even seen him since he got in trouble.”
    The boy Wild Bill had flung against the dumpster was still in the hospital with a skull fracture and concussion.
    “Serve those boys right if they all got their heads split, the way they torment him. Which is what I told the cops. His uncle was in here right away, all hot to arrest him.”
    “Naturally,” Dallas said. Oddly enough, the subject of fighting was on his mind since Anne had told him over the phone that Randall had been in a fight and that it might be a good idea for him to have a man-to-man with his son. From what Anne said he couldn’t tell if he was supposed to teach the boy to run away or play to win. Not that it mattered. If this conversation ran true to form, he doubted he and Randall would get anywhere. Everybody said his son was supposed to be smart as hell, but Dallas privately abstained. The boy just seemed odd. Of course most of the smart people he’d ever run across were odd, too, so it was possible.
    “I told that fat fuck I didn’t want him in here no more. He can write a hundred tickets out front if he wants, but he’ll never get another cup of coffee off Harry Saunders.”
    “Gaff’s all right,” Dallas observed noncommittally.
    “Sure,” Harry admitted, “except he’s an asshole, like his brother. The Gaffneys are all peckerheads, everyone of them.… You sure you don’t want some turkey?”
    Dallas was tempted. The food smelled good and he wasn’t looking forward to dinner at the Grouses. He’d been talked into it by Loraine, who said that if he called wanting to take his son out for Thanksgiving dinner, Anne was bound to invite him to eat with them. “And if that doesn’t work out, you’ll eat with us,” she added. Unfortunately, the first plan had worked out. Dallas would have much preferred dinner at his brother’s. Or rather his brother’s wife’s.
    For a long time after they split up, Dallas had assumed that he and Anne would get back together. But then ten or twelve years slipped by, and one day it occurred to him that he might be wrong. Even more surprising was the fact that he didn’t miss Anne very much, and couldn’t remember having missed her, though he might’ve for a while and then forgotten about it. He was pretty content with his life, and Anne was more trouble than any other five women he knew. Even if by some stroke he should win her back—something he wouldn’t make book on after all the intervening years—there would be the daily struggle to keep her and figure out why she wasn’t happy. All of which he could live without.
    There was a time when he hadn’t minded fighting over women. He lost his front teeth over Anne when he was nineteen, in a fight people in Mohawk County still talked about, at least the ones old enough to remember it. The whole thing had started when he got off work one afternoon and ran into a buddy of his who told him he’d seen Anne parked outside the newspaper with Dan Wood, that the two were kissing. Dallas was too fair-minded not to give the boy a chance totake it back, but he stood grimly by his story, even after Dallas knocked him flat on the pavement. “It’s the freakin’ truth,” the boy had insisted. “I can’t take back the freakin’ truth.…”
    When Benny D. got to his feet, Dallas hit him again, but this time he managed to stay perpendicular and, seeing no alternative, took the liberty of breaking Dallas’s nose. Despite being naturally athletic, Dallas wasn’t much of a fighter. He was game to a fault, though, and took a terrible beating at the hands of his more talented adversary, who jabbed and ducked and weaved in workmanlike fashion. Time after time Dallas was surprised to discover himself on the ground, and he no sooner got up than he was promptly seated again. Soon Benny D. was covered with blood, which gave Dallas the unfortunate and entirely mistaken impression that he was unaccountably winning, despite being beaten to the punch on every exchange. He had no idea that his own broken nose was responsible for the ghastly appearance of his opponent. He actually expected Benny D. to concede at any moment, until the boy hit Dallas in the mouth so hard that several teeth gave and the pain was so bad Dallas couldn’t hold