There was nothing to eat in the refrigerator except a plastic bowl of a concoction his father called patio beans, one of the three or four one-dish meals he had cooked off and on for the last forty years. “It starts,” Waylon remembered his father always announcing at the onset of one of his culinary fits, “with one ordinary dead chicken.” Charlie would then always wait for Waylon and his two sisters to groan in disgust before he went on to name the other ingredients, and if they didn’t respond, he’d begin describing the cooking process all over again until they did.
Waylon shook the container back and forth, but the brown foodstuff had seized up during its time in the cold on the second shelf and would not move, not even when tilted at a ninety-degree angle. He pushed it away, drank a glass of water at the sink and headed for the door.
The sun had sunk below the horizon, and the sky was dark enough for Waylon to see the glow of the burning flares at the Arco refinery as he drove down Proctor Street toward the Nederland Club. A bank of clouds rolling in from the Gulf picked up the reflection of the light and gave it back to all those who cared to look, pinks and roses and oranges that would deepen to a steady red when full darkness settled over the Golden Triangle of Texas. It had been that way since the first excess gases were lit to burn off when the petrochemical plants went into operation, and it would continue as long as people used fossil fuels in their internal combustion engines.
Waylon sniffed at the air pouring into his Chevrolet through its vents and smelled the tang of esters, congruents, reagents and ozone working together in the thin soup of the atmosphere, and signaling a turn, pulled into the parking lot behind the Nederland Club, comforted.
The domino tables were filled with retirees from Gulf, Pure, Exxon, Arco, and Texaco, slapping their dotted counters down briskly in the unending bouts of Forty-Two, one foursome over in a corner doing additions in their heads at the site reserved for straight domino, while in the back part of the building two younger men were studying what the break had left them on one of the four pool tables.
“Five,” one of them said to the other, “side pocket,” as Waylon made his way behind them toward the bar. He heard the click of the cue and the shooter’s curse as the five ball lipped the hole and skittered away.
“You still make hamburgers?” Waylon asked the man behind the counter watching him sit down on a stool a little too high for comfortable mounting.
“Up to seven o’clock. No fries. Potato chips.”
“All right. That and a Regal,” Waylon said and turned to look back at the pool shooters, again silent as they considered the possibilities on the green field before them.
“Woo!” one of the retirees at the closest Forty-Two table yelled. “Shoot the moon.”
“Don’t you bust another domino in two, Arleigh,” the bartender said in a voice so low even Waylon could hardly hear it, as near as he was. “I’ll make you buy your own.”
“These old boys are rough on the bones, huh?” Waylon said, but the bartender had stepped away to speak to somebody through the pass-through cut into the wall to the kitchen and didn’t answer.
“Yes, they are,” Waylon said aloud to himself. “They get excited, understand, when they see their numbers adding up to something.”
“I get you,” he said in a higher tone, answering himself. “You put things so clear.”
“Who the fuck you talking to, McPhee?” came a voice from two or three stools down the bar. “Ain’t nobody listening to you.”
“Who’s that?” Waylon said, turning to look to his left. “Who’s taking my name in vain?”
A few feet away a small man was looking up from his beer to return Waylon’s stare, his right hand cupped around the glass in front of him as though he was afraid the bartender would snatch it away if he let his attention wander. Waylon couldn’t make out the man’s face in the dim light, and he leaned forward to see better, giving a little grunt of recognition when he saw the man’s flat-top hair style outlined against the window behind him.
“That you, Shepard?” he said. “Hard to tell without my glasses.”
“Yep,” Bobby Shepard said, turning back to his glass and taking a measured sip from it. “It’s me, all right.”
“I knew you by your haircut,” Waylon said. “Takes me back to the class of ’68.”
“You see something wrong with my haircut, McPhee?”
“No, Bobby, to the contrary. It fits you right down to the ground.” Waylon heard the clunk of the Regal bottle next to his elbow and turned to observe the bartender return to his lonely station near a stack of soft-drink cases.
“Promise me something, Bobby,” Waylon said.
“What you talking about?”
“Don’t go changing,” Waylon said. “That’s what I’m talking about. Stay just the way I see you tonight.”
“Crazy fucker,” Bobby Shepard said and allowed himself another sip from his glass. After a minute he spoke again. “What you doing in town? I thought you was working at BP up in Beaumont.”
“I was for several years,” Waylon said, regarding the pale green bottle before him. “Then I wasn’t.”
“Why not? Get run off?”
“Well, yes, Bobby, in a manner of speaking that captures it. But that’s not what they call it these days.”
“What? Getting laid off?”
“No, that’s not the term either, Bobby,” Waylon said, sipping directly from the Regal bottle. “I have been re-engineered. All part of the process of benchmarking and redefinition and downsizing underway at BP.”
“Shit,” Bobby said in a suspicious tone. “Re-engineering. You ain’t no engineer in the first place.”
“Bobby, you misunderstand me. I am not and never have been an engineer, no. I am being re-engineered. I am acted upon, not acting myself. Some might call me a victim of strategic planning.”
“What’d you do to get fired,” Bobby Shepard said. “That’s what I’m asking you, McPhee.”
“I ran into a narrow passage in the flow sequence, Bobby. One I couldn’t fit through, no matter how tight I squeezed myself up. The new filter they installed at British Petroleum got me. It was just too fine a gauge for me to slip on through that sucker.”
“Huh,” Bobby Shepard said and addressed his beer.
“And you know what else, Bobby?” Waylon said.
“Uh-uh, I don’t.”
“The union didn’t help me a bit when I filed a grievance against what happened to me. Just stood back and let me fight BP about it on my own.”
“And you lost?”
“Just like the Astros always do. Yessir, I did.”
“You say chips?” the bartender called
