SK01 - Waist Deep by Frank Zafiro

his prices posted, like he was supposed to. It was a good bet he was hitting me for at least an extra dollar and would pocket the difference. That is, if he was just tending bar and wasn’t the owner. If he was the owner, he was just raising his profit margin.
    I put a ten on the bar and he quickly made change. I didn’t figure he got too many bar checks from Liquor Control agents. Not with his volume. They would be tied up with whatever new place downtown was drawing all the hot women, and hence all the guys chasing them. Those places would do in a night what this former Marine did in a week. So they got the attention and he got to play his little games with the Molson or whatever else he felt like doing.
    I left the five ones on the bar and took a slug of the Molson. It was cool and crisp and the taste of it immediately made me want to drink it down and order another. Instead, I sipped it a second time and put the bo ttle back on the bar .
    The trick was to act like I wasn’t interesting at all and that should get everyone interested. I knew I didn’t fit in. The bars I belonged in had well worn bar stools, maybe some repairs made with colored duct tape, but the tears in the seats weren’t left alone like they were in this place. The people who came to The Hole didn’t bother combing their hair in the morning and no one noticed. Or cared if they did.
    I’m poor but clean, I thought, suppressing a smile. I hoped that my long walk had served to dirty me up a little. I’d pu rposely tousled my hair some before coming inside. The jeans I had on were simple Levi’s and were well worn. The T-shirt underneath was a plain blue. Neither one would raise an eyebrow, even in here. My jacket might, though. It was the dark brown leather jacket that every American male owns, a knock off of the World War Two bomber jacket. I imagine my generation probably wore the jacket more due to Indiana Jones than those heroes of the air, but either way, every guy seemed to have one. Mine had belonged to my dad . God knows where he got it or why he kept it, but it was the only thing of his I had .
    If I’d known I was coming to The Hole, I’d never have worn it. Of course, if I’d known how much walking I was going to do today, I wouldn’t have worn my cowboy boots, either. At least they were heavily worn and a scarred dark brown that didn’t suggest wealth of any kind.
    I sat and sipped and waited. The sourpuss bartender made a point to ignore me, standing in what must have been “his spot” with his arms crossed. The old man at the end of the bar showed no interest, either. He sat and stared down at the shot glass in front of him and every so often, he’d lift it with shaking hands and take a small sip. Sometimes he’d cough and it was a horrible, phlegm-filled sound that reeked of death. After each coughing fit, he brought a wavering hand to his lips and puffed on his cigarette. The smoke curled up around his face. I knew if I sat there long enough, he’d ask me to “buy an old man a drink.”
    I figured the woman in the Raiders jersey to be one of Rolo’s working girls. She wore a pair of stretch shorts and a long Raiders jersey that hung down almost like a skirt. Compared to Tiffany, though, this one was a looker. I f it’d been her grabbing me behind the paint store, we would’ve been talking about more than forty bucks.
    I put her out of my mind. It was the kid I was interested in, the one that sat next to her in the booth. Every now and then she leaned down and he whispered with her. He wore a light blue basketball jersey over a white t-shirt. Silky black pants and oversized high tops rounded out his attire. He sat on the very edge of the booth, both feet out from underneath the table.
    It was t oo dark for me to guess his age . Still, he had to be well under twenty-one. He couldn’t be Rolo.
    Could he?
    I thought about how young some of the criminals had been when I worked the streets. I remembered once that Tom Chisolm