toward Bobby Shepard’s end of the bar. “What you doing these days, Shepard?”
“Same old, same old.”
“Gauging?”
“Forty hours a week at Pure Oil.”
“Uh huh,” Waylon said and addressed his Regal.
“Let me ask you something.”
“What’s that, Bobby?”
“Why do you drink that Regal shit? It ain’t but seven ounces to a bottle.”
“You got it exactly,” Waylon said. “See how little the bottle is, and how big it makes my hand look? Now, if a woman was to come in here, she’d look at that and think I was a good-sized man, the way it looks here in my fist.”
Waylon turned the bottle slowly from side to side, admiring the flash of light off the golden crown worked into the center of the design on the label. “Now if I were to drink directly from a full-sized, twelve-ounce Falstaff, I’d look like a dwarf sucking on a baby bottle.”
Bobby Shepard snorted into his glass. “You are a crazy fucker, McPhee, saying that about yourself.”
“Somebody’s going to do it,” Waylon answered. “I might as well get the jump. A little compact man has got to work all the angles, Bobby. Hell, you know that. What do you weigh these days? You don’t seem to have grown much since high school.”
“One-eighty.”
“Bullshit, Bobby,” Waylon said, looking from the top of Shepard’s flattop down his T-shirt to his jeans and to the cowboy boots shyly peeking out of their cuffs. “You don’t weigh a pound more than one-thirty, one-thirty-five.”
“Well, I don’t weigh much, see.”
“You sure as shit don’t.”
“Naw,” Bobby Shepard said after a minute of looking intently at the surface of the bar in the Nederland Club. “What I mean is I don’t get on a weighing machine. To see how much I weigh. That’s what I’m talking about.”
“There is a reason a man avoids measurements, Bobby,” Waylon said. “Of every kind.”
Waylon’s hamburger came, and he killed the rest of the beer in the small green bottle and looked down at the plate. “Where’s the chips?” he asked.
“You got to ask for them extra,” the bartender said, delicately picking up Waylon’s empty between thumb and forefinger as though performing a step in a catalytic conversion in a Gulf Oil laboratory. “In the bag’s the only way they come.”
“I thought I did ask,” Waylon said. “All right, in the bag and another Regal.”
“You ain’t been in the Nederland Club in so long a time you don’t know how to act,” Bobby Shepard called as the two men watched the bartender stretch to pull a bag of potato chips off the rack positioned over an assortment of gins and whiskeys and vodkas lined up on a shelf.
“It’s tough trying to make it back into the big leagues,” Waylon said, lifting his hamburger toward his mouth. “These lay-offs affect the hand-eye coordination adversely.”
“Huh,” Bobby Shepard said, watching with close attention as Waylon ate his supper.
“What you going to do now?” he said in the middle of Waylon’s next-to-last bite of the sandwich. “Try to get on Pure Oil?”
“No, Bobby,” Waylon said, swiping out the last crumbs of potato chips from the bag. “Once you try to run a grievance on one of these companies, they enter your name in a special file in the data bank.”
“They do?”
“Yep, it’s called the keep-this-asshole-running file, and let me tell you, partner, that storage file is hell to get out of.” Waylon took an after-dinner sip from his new Regal and then went on. “No, I believe I might try to do a little substitute teaching again, Bobby. See what might turn up in the field of education.”
“You went to college, didn’t you?”
“If you want to call it that, Bobby. Yes, I did. And I outlasted the fuckers, no matter how much they tried to run me out of the place.”
“You graduated at Lamar? I never heard you did.”
“Not with my class, Bobby,” Waylon said. “That bunch picked up a three-year jump on me. But once I learned how to change majors and got myself into the education track, I finally nailed that sucker down.”
“You say you already been teaching some?”
“A few years back, yes, indeed. I was at Cypress-Fairbanks High, out in the marshes over yonder toward Houston for four years. Taught five classes of remedial math every day of the week to that bunch of webfooted kids.”
Bobby Shepard motioned toward the bartender with his empty beer glass, his head tilted to one side as though he were trying to dislodge a thought caught somewhere on one side of his skull. After he had been refilled and had taken another sip, he turned back to look toward Waylon. “Well,” he said, “let me ask one other thing, then, Mister Math Teacher.”
“Something about the quadratic equation? I can’t help you there, Bobby. I’m not current no more.”
“No,” Bobby said, waving a hand back and forth, “I want to know if around all them high school girls you ever got you any strange pussy.”
“You wouldn’t believe it, Bobby,” Waylon said, “how strange it was. Country kids like they are out there in the marshes—you know they’re swampbred and they don’t get into town much—those big old strong girls will just overpower a small man teacher. He doesn’t stand a chance against one of the stout ones that’s got her blood up.”
“You trying to shit me, McPhee.”
“I got no reason to, Bobby,” Waylon said. “I’m a newly re-engineered man looking for a job without a single reason to lie.”
“Tell me something else,” Bobby Shepard said, waving one hand as though to dismiss Waylon’s complaint. “What kind of cheerleaders they got at Cypress-Fairbanks? I bet they’re all ugly as hell.”
“Cheerleaders?” Waylon said. “I didn’t notice them much, Bobby, to tell you the truth, but I was a good citizen of my school. I imagine they’re about like the rest of those swamp children. Big and strong and have to shave their legs real close everyday. Why do you ask?”
“Because I bet you didn’t get any strange stuff from no cheerleaders, that’s why. They wouldn’t have to settle for for a high school teacher. Cheerleaders wouldn’t.”
“I have to admit,” Waylon said, “that in the heat of the moment I never asked any of them their rank or military classification out there in the marshes. Those old girls were always too wrought up to want to converse much anyway. See, Bobby, it wasn’t a verbal interaction we were having.”
“You carrying it too far now, McPhee. I bet you didn’t touch a one of
