Scratch Fever by Max Allan Collins

drink. He’d have to go out to that parking lot, where Julie was dealing with that crazy lez, and tell her about Infante. Thinking about her with Ron gave him a sick feeling; thinking about what Infante had told him, and how Julie would react to it, made him feel sicker. He went to the bar just outside his office and unlocked the booze and mixed himself a Manhattan.
    Despite his not drinking much, he could make a hell of a mixed drink. He’d been a bartender for three years, after all. That’s what he’d been doing when Julie came back into his life a century ago. Last year.
    Of course he and Julie went back a lot farther than a year ago. She had been the high school cheerleader, the homecoming queen candidate, the local beauty contest winner, who had caught the eye of the local football hero—Harold. His eye wasn’t all she’d caught: on the eve of his freshman year at State, she announced she was pregnant.
    No problem: he had scholarship money, and an extra job. And he loved her. Very, very much. So they married. They had a beautiful little girl, Lisa. They were happy. Or at least he was. Julie seemed moody, but it wasn’t a bad first year for a marriage. Then his grades got bad.
    He hadn’t been in Vietnam long when he got the “Dear Harold” letter.
    He didn’t see any action in ’Nam. He’d had two things going for him: bad eyes and the ability to type.
    He was a clerk typist, in the rear area, and never heard a shell go off. It was an easy war for Harold.
    Peace had been another matter. He was divorced from a woman he still loved. He was a football hero without a college degree and had few qualifications for anything outside of clerical work or a factory job. He ended up a bartender, in an all-night joint in Gulf Port, across the river from Burlington, where he’d gone to work in a college buddy’s office as a clerk. He’d thought about bettering himself. He’d considered going back to college and trying again; he’d considered going to a business school, for a two-year degree at least, to bolster his clerical credentials.
    But he gave that up after one of the two-week summer visits he had yearly with his daughter. She was being raised by Julie’s younger sister and her husband, an executive with a public relations firm in Minneapolis; she was very happy with them. They were her parents, for all intents and purposes. And while Lisa—who was thirteen now—loved her father, enjoyed their visits together, she made it clear she was happy where she was. And one thing Harold wouldn’t do was make his daughter unhappy.
    There were only two things Harold wanted in life: his daughter, Lisa, who was lost to him, except in the “Uncle Daddy” sense, and his ex-wife, Julie, who had gone into business, with a beauty shop in a small Iowa town called West Liberty, and who wanted nothing to do with him—though she did call him on the phone now and then, when she was feeling low.
    So Harold had settled into life-as-existence. He worked at menial jobs. The bartending gig was about the longest-term employment he’d had since the service. He took an odd pride in his ability to mix a good drink, any drink, and talked sports with customers till all hours. Harold did still get some pleasure out of watching sports on TV. That, and listening to old Beach Boys and Beatles albums from his high school days, was about all Harold had.
    Till that afternoon last year when Julie showed up at the bar.
    She had looked strange. And beautiful, of course. She was wearing a clingy blood-red sweater and slacks. She had a wild look, her eyes aglitter, her hair slightly disarrayed. An animal look. And there was good reason: she was on the run.
    “Do you want me back?” she whispered. Just like that. Leaning across the bar. There were only a few customers in the place. Jody’s, like most Gulf Port establishments, was a night spot primarily. But she whispered.
    “You know I do,” he said.
    “Can you get somebody to relieve you