don’t know ironic,” Ned replied. “But it sure was sweet.”
“Tell him what your mom said,” Billy urged.
Following a sip of beer, Ned obliged: “My mom told me, ‘Honey, praise the Lord, this proves there’s a God.’”
After taking a moment to absorb those words, the tourist said, “She sounds like quite a religious woman.”
“She wasn’t always. But at seventy-two, she caught pneumonia.”
“It’s sure convenient to have God at a time like that.”
“She figured if God existed, maybe He’d save her. If He didn’t exist, she wouldn’t be out nothing but some time wasted on prayer.”
“Time,” the tourist advised, “is our most precious possession.”
“True,” Ned agreed. “But Mom wouldn’t have wasted much because mostly she could pray while she watched TV.”
“What an inspiring story,” said the tourist, and ordered a beer.
Billy opened a pretentious bottle of Heineken, provided a fresh chilled glass, and whispered, “This one’s on the house.”
“That’s nice of you. Thanks. I’d been thinking you’re quiet and soft-spoken for a bartender, but now maybe I understand why.”
From his lonely outpost farther along the bar, Ned Pearsall raised his glass in a toast. “To Ariadne. May she rest in peace.”
Although it might have been against his will, the tourist was engaged again. Of Ned, he asked, “Not another gnome tragedy?”
“Cancer. Two years after Henry fell off the roof. I sure wish it hadn’t happened.”
Pouring the fresh Heineken down the side of his tilted glass, the stranger said, “Death has a way of putting our petty squabbles in perspective.”
“I miss her,” Ned said. “She had the most spectacular rack, and she didn’t always wear a bra.”
The tourist twitched.
“She’d be working in the yard,” Ned remembered almost dreamily, “or walking the dog, and that fine pair would be bouncing and swaying so sweet you couldn’t catch your breath.”
The tourist checked his face in the back-bar mirror, perhaps to see if he looked as appalled as he felt.
“Billy,” Ned asked, “didn’t she have the finest set of mamas you could hope to see?”
“She did,” Billy agreed.
Ned slid off his stool, shambled toward the men’s room, paused at the tourist. “Even when cancer withered her, those mamas didn’t shrink. The leaner she got, the bigger they were in proportion. Almost to the end, she looked hot. What a waste, huh, Billy?”
“What a waste,” Billy echoed as Ned continued to the men’s room.
After a shared silence, the tourist said, “You’re an interesting guy, Billy Barkeep.”
“Me? I’ve never hosed anyone’s windows.”
“You’re like a sponge, I think. You take everything in.”
Billy picked up a dishcloth and polished some pilsner glasses that had previously been washed and dried.
“But then you’re a stone too,” the tourist said, “because if you’re squeezed, you give nothing back.”
Billy continued polishing the glasses.
The gray eyes, bright with amusement, brightened further. “You’re a man with a philosophy, which is unusual these days, when most people don’t know who they are or what they believe, or why.”
This, too, was a style of barroom jabber with which Billy was familiar, though he didn’t hear it often. Compared to Ned Pearsall’s rants, such boozy observations could seem erudite; but it was all just beer-based psychoanalysis.
He was disappointed. Briefly, the tourist had seemed different from the usual two-cheeked heaters who warmed the barstool vinyl.
Smiling, shaking his head, Billy said, “Philosophy. You give me too much credit.”
The tourist sipped his Heineken.
Although Billy had not intended to say more, he heard himself continue: “Stay low, stay quiet, keep it simple, don’t expect much, enjoy what you have.”
The stranger smiled. “Be self-sufficient, don’t get involved, let the world go to Hell if it wants.”
“Maybe,” Billy conceded.
“Admittedly, it’s not Plato,” said the tourist, “but it is a philosophy.”
“You have one of your own?” Billy asked.
“Right now, I believe that my life will be better and more meaningful if I can just avoid any further conversation with Ned.”
“That’s not a philosophy,” Billy told him. “That’s a fact.”
At ten minutes past four, Ivy Elgin came to work. She was a waitress as good as any and an object of desire without equal.
Billy liked her but didn’t long for her. His lack of lust made him unique among the men who worked or drank in the tavern.
Ivy had mahogany hair, limpid eyes the color of brandy, and the body for which Hugh Hefner had spent his life searching.
Although twenty-four, she seemed genuinely unaware that she was the essential male fantasy in the flesh. She was never seductive. At times she could be flirtatious, but only in a winsome way.
Her beauty and choirgirl wholesomeness were a combination so erotic that her smile alone could melt the average man’s earwax.
“Hi, Billy,” Ivy said, coming directly to the bar. “I saw a dead possum along Old Mill Road, about a quarter mile from Kornell Lane.”
“Naturally dead or road kill?” he asked.
“Fully road kill.”
“What do you think it means?”
“Nothing specific yet,” she said, handing her purse to him so he could store it behind the bar. “It’s the first dead thing I’ve seen in a week, so it depends on what other bodies show up, if any.”
Ivy believed that she was a haruspex. Haruspices, a class of priests in ancient Rome, divined the future from the entrails of animals killed in sacrifices.
They had been respected, even revered, by other Romans, but most likely they had not received a lot of party invitations.
Ivy wasn’t morbid. Haruspicy did not occupy
