Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
barmaid was friendly. She wore butterfly glasses and a beehive hairdo. You could see in an
instant that she had been the local good-time girl since about 193-1. She had “Ready for
Sex” written all over her face, but “Better Bring a Paper Bag” written all over her body.
Somehow she had managed to pour her capacious backside into some tight red toreador
pants and to stretch a clinging blouse over her bosom. She looked as if she had dressed in
her granddaughter's clothes by mistake. She was about sixty. I could see why the guy with
one leg had chosen to sit in the farthest corner.
I asked her what people in Dullard did for fun. “What exactly did you have in mind,
honey?” she said and rolled her eyes suggestively. “Well, perhaps something in the way of
legitimate theater or maybe an international chess congress,” I croaked weakly. However,
once we established that I was only prepared to love her for her mind, she became quite
sensible and even rather charming. She told me in great and frank detail about her life,
which seemed to have involved a dizzying succession of marriages to guys who were now
in prison or dead as a result of shootouts, and dropped in breathtakingly candid disclosures
like, “Now Jimmy kilt his mother, I never did know why, but Curtis never kilt nobody ex-
cept once by accident when he was robbing a gas station and his gun went off. And Floyd-
hewasmyfourthhusband-heneverkiltnobodyneither,butheusedtobreakpeople'sarms
if they got him riled.”
“You must have some interesting family reunions,” I ventured politely.
“I don't know what ever became of Floyd,” she went on. “He had a little cleft in his chin
rot year”after a moment I realized that this was downstate Illinois for “right here, on this
very spot indicated”-“that made him look kind of like Kirk Douglas. He was real cute, but
he had a temper on him. I got a two-foot scar right across my back where he cut me with
an ice pick. You wanna see it?” She started to hoist up her blouse, but I stopped her. She
went on and on like that for ages. Every once in a while the guy in the corner, who was
clearly eavesdropping, would grin, showing large yellow teeth. I expect Floyd had torn his
leg off in a moment of high spirits. At the end of our conversation, the barmaid gave me a
sideways look, as if I had been slyly trying to fool her, and said, “Say, where do you come
from anyway, honey?”
I didn't feeling like giving her my whole life story, so I just said, “Great Britain.”
Well,I'lltellyouonething,honey,”shesaid,“foraforeigneryouspeakEnglishrealgood.”
Afterwards I retired with a six-pack to my motel, where I discovered that the bed, judging
by its fragrance and shape, had only recently been vacated by a horse. It had a sag in it
so severe that I could see the TV at its foot only by splaying my legs to their widest ex-
