“You hungry?”
“I could eat.”
His father prodded the woman with an elbow and she shrugged and pushed the sheet back and slipped her legs over the side of the bed. She was thin but her breasts were full and bobbed when she moved and the kid kept his eyes on her. She caught him looking and winked. Then she stood and turned to face him and stretched full out and he took another long draw on the smoke. She bent to retrieve her clothes and began to dress. His father slid out of bed and the kid could see the gauntness of him, his buttocks like small lumps of dough and the rest of him all juts and pokes and seams of bone under sallow skin. He watched him dress and finished the smoke and the woman took another jolt out of the bottle and walked to the door.
“Later?” she asked.
“Not likely,” his father said.
She looked at him and the kid thought she was going to say something more but she just nodded and opened the door and stepped out and shut it quietly behind her. He could hear her move down the hallway. The raving man stopped suddenly then started up again once she’d passed, and he could hear the clunk of her steps on the rickety stairs.
“That your woman?” the kid asked.
“Told you,” his father said, poking at his hair with a comb. “She’s a whore.”
His father sat on the edge of the bed and pulled on a pair of work boots and laced them up halfway so that the tongues hung out and flapped. Then he picked up a tattered old denim jacket and swung it on, stood and wriggled his shoulders, and looked at the kid.
“Take ya to eat,” he said. “My treat.”
“Guess you’re doing your father thing now.”
“Not especially. It’s a belly thing is all.”
He tapped another cigarette loose from the pack on the bedside table and tucked it behind an ear then walked past the kid, opened the door, and stepped out into the hallway. The kid watched him walk away. He turned to look at the room, shook his head sadly, and walked into the hallway, pulling the door shut behind him. His father was a dim shadow at the head of the stairs. The kid followed him out into the street.
THE PLACE WAS A DANK HOVEL. It had the look of an old garage or warehouse, a low-slung one-storey joint that hadn’t seen paint in years. There was a hand-painted sign under a lone spotlight on a rickety pole held in place by guy wires run to the roof. The sign said Charlie’s. The windows were swing outs and one of them was held open by a broomstick. Sounds from a jukebox and the garble of voices and the clink of glasses, and when they stepped through the door the kid saw a plywood bar set up on old barrels and mismatched tables and chairs strewn haphazardly around the room. The lights were dim, giving the faces that turned to look them over a pall as if they were shrouded by shadow, and the talk lowered. As the kid followed his father across the room, the weight of their eyes on him was like the feeling of being watched by something unseen on a mountain trail. His father strode through the room, merely flicking a wrist in greeting to those who spoke to him, and opened a door at the far end and stepped out onto a deck. It was suspended over the dark push of the river by huge pilings and the kid could hear the hiss and gurgle of it from beneath the boards. There were propane heaters set around and there were knots of men at the tables. His father walked to an empty table close to the railing and hauled a chair back and sat looking out over the water. The kid shook his head and when his father still did not speak he took his makings out and began to twist a smoke. He drummed his fingers on the table. After a moment he lit up and took a draw and looked out at the river streaming past like a long black train. When he turned back he saw a tall, gangly man step through the door with a bottle on a tray and walk quickly to their table, set the bottle down and then stand and look at his father, who continued to look at the river.
“Twinkles,” he said finally.
“I’m right here.”
“You still owe.”
“I know. I’m good for it.”
“You ain’t workin’ no more.”
“I’m still good for it.”
The tall man looked at him and squinted and studied him a moment.
The kid smoked and looked away. “How much?” he asked.
“He owes thirty,” the man said.
The kid put the smoke in the ashtray and dug in his pocket for the cash the old man had given him. He counted out forty dollars and handed them to the man, who looked at the bills as though they were foreign things.
“Change?” he asked.
“How much for the hooch?”
“You can have it for the ten.”
“He wants to eat,” his father said.
“All’s we got left is the chicken and some beans.”
“Put it on my tab.”
“I don’t know, Eldon.”
“Hey, I made up what I owed.”
“Yeah.”
“Well?”
The man set the tray down and folded the money and tucked it in his pocket. He looked at the kid, who finished his smoke, ground it out on the deck, and stashed the butt in his chest pocket. “You want a drink with that?”
“Coffee,” the kid said.
“And you?”
“I ate,” his father said.
He nodded and walked back across the deck and the kid turned and looked at his father, who sat with his chin in one hand. “Your treat, huh?”
The kid smirked and put his feet up on the chair across from him. His father opened the bottle and raised it and took a couple of heavy swallows and set the bottle down and wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand. The plume from the stack downriver was like a ghostly geyser and the lights of the mill all orange and hazed like a carnival lot. On the far shore the town disappeared into the shadows thrown by the dim run of lights along the thin streets. The line of mountain was a black seam above it all.
The man returned with his coffee. The kid drank and waited, feeling angry and impatient. His father was silent. For a while there was only the garrulous talk of the men in the background, the high arch of a fiddle on the juke, and the swish of the river beneath them. The coffee was bitter and hot and he cradled the cup in his palms and watched his father.
“So how come they call you Twinkles?” he asked.
“It’s bullshit.”
“What?”
“Starlight. Twinkle, twinkle. You get it.”
“Yeah, but you ain’t exactly the twinkly sort.”
“What am I then?”
“How in hell would I know? Cloudy, I guess.”
His father shook his head and took another drink, smaller, more deliberate. “How I feel, I suppose.”
“You fixin’ to die?”
“Jesus. How’d you get so hard-assed?”
“Just asking a question.”
The man brought the chicken and beans and a tortilla, and the kid dug into them and ate hungrily while his father watched him and nursed the bottle along. It was good chicken and he slopped up the beans with the tortilla and washed them down with the coffee. He sat back in his chair. His father stared at him with flat eyes and for a moment the kid thought he was stone drunk. They sat wordlessly and looked at the river.
“She