Page 46 of Thug

“I haven’t found a phone. Did you lose it last night?”

He shrugged like it was no big deal. “Hard saying. Hate carrying that fucking thing, anyway. He’ll find me sooner or later.”

“Want something to drink?” I asked.

He shot me a look. “Well, I sure as fuck didn’t come in here to talk.”

I wanted to lure him out of his foul mood. I opened a bottle of Budweiser and pushed it across the bar. “I had fun last night.”

After I spoke, I wished I would have said something like, I enjoyed last night. There was nothing I could do about it, but I had fun sounded juvenile. I mentally crossed my fingers and hoped he didn’t call me childish.

Price reached for the bottle of beer. “Had fun, huh?” He took a drink. “Don’t know that I’d call it fun. Enlightening is more like it.”

Relieved that I wasn’t attacked for having fun, I stuck to my guns. “I thought it was fun.” I reached for a bar rag because I didn’t know what else to do. “Do you ever have fun?”

“Fun?” An awkward period of silence followed before he responded. “I don’t think so. There’s a handful of things I enjoy, but I don’t know that anything I’m doing is fun.”

“You should try it,” I said.

“Having fun?”

“Yeah.”

“Little kids have fun. I’m not a little kid anymore.” He took a drink of his beer. “Haven’t been for a long time.”

Other than the stern look he often wore, Price didn’t show a tremendous amount of emotion. I wondered how much of his detached demeanor was due to losing his parents at such a young age.

“Entertaining,” I said. “I should have said it was entertaining, not fun.”

“Why?” he asked. “Was it fun? For you?”

I couldn’t lie. “It was,” I said, attaching a reassuring nod to my response.

“Call it fun. Don’t water it down to entertaining to suit me. If it was fun, call it fun.”

“Okay,” I said, relieved that he seemed to be okay with my description of the night. “It was fun.”

He took another drink of his beer, and then another. With the empty bottle dangling loosely from the web of his hand, he gazed blankly at a jar of pickled eggs.

I had no idea where his mind was, but I took the opportunity to admire him. His face was lean, but not to the point of being gaunt. A week-long beard of stubble covered his tanned jawline. His black hair was streaked with gray that blended in so well it could pass for being a professional balayage.

“When I was seven, we took a trip to Texas,” he said, still staring at the jar of eggs. “It was summertime. May or June. Maybe July. It was hot, that’s the point.” He shifted his eyes from the eggs to me. “The air conditioner in the car wasn’t working at the time, and we almost didn’t go because of it. My mother bitched up a storm, saying if a man made a promise, it had to be kept.”

He almost smiled during his recollection of the events.

Almost.

He took a drink of beer and then continued with the tale. “So, we took off in the hundred-degree heat without air conditioning. They wouldn’t tell me where we were going, just that when we got there, it was going to be fun.” He shook his head. “The trip was awful. Las Cruces, El Paso, all the way through west fucking Texas, Odessa, Midland. Drove through every damned one of them on Highway 10, on our way to Fort Worth. Back then, all the banks had signs that displayed the time and temperature. Each time we drove by one, I’d stick my head out the window, waiting for it to flash the temperature. I was hoping for 85 or 90, but they were all something like 105, 108, 113.”

I exhaled an exaggerated breath. “I can’t imagine driving across the country without air conditioning in that heat.”

“It was so fucking hot I felt sick.” He sipped his beer as if doing so somehow provided him relief from his youthful cross-country trip. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “So, we pulled up to this ratty-ass little motel about midnight and my dad took me with him into the office or whatever it’s called. When we walked in, it felt like I’d walked into an igloo. There was an old-school thermometer on the wall at the end of the desk in one of those little metal displays that were used for advertisements. It said ‘Murphy’s Tires’ or something on it. You know, the long glass tube that has red shit inside of it?”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “I know what you’re talking about.”

“Well, that fucker was sitting halfway between 70 and 80. So, I looked at the guy on the other side of the counter and asked, ‘are the rooms air-conditioned?’” He paused and raked the hair away from his face with his hands, making a production of doing so. “My hair was about twice this long at the time and matted to my head from sixteen hours of sweating like a Hebrew slave. I bet I looked like hot hammered shit. So, the guy laughs and nods his head. ‘Yep. They’re all air-conditioned,’ he said. ‘What do you think I’m runnin’? Some second-rate outfit?’”

He nearly smiled again. It was nice to see him come so close to being human. After taking a quick drink of his beer, he continued.