The old cowboy walked past him on the way out and rumbled, “Goodnight, sir,” and passed beyond the man tentatively content to be Jon towards the afternoon sun.

“Sir,” agreed he, half sunken in his weird hunt, shifting back into Time long enough to hear the door creek and the cowboy salute some young soul, “Darlin’.”

“Thank you, Sir,” came a voice of charm tinged with shivering grace—for that voice made him uneasy.

The four vultures, come down from their roost, turned and looked like one thing with four heads at the door behind Jon. They posed in an instant marked more by morbid wonder than by their usual vacant hunger. The tattooed barmaid began taking their drink orders while the nearest bone smoker glanced at him, with a condescending eye, and the furthest continued to consider the baby in its mother’s arms behind and to his right. None were paying the attention due the pretty, Thirst Responder, barmaid by any normal table of fading men.

‘Yes, for you, wicked ones have already flown your meatless home,’ he mused without effort, the indictment rising within him.

The nearest one shivered as he ordered his wine, began to turn and eye his silent accuser, and was calmed by his partner, placing one paint-tanned hand on those leather pants. All four wore black riding boots, their leather pants held above their narrow hips with black leather belts no less glossy.

A scent like a memory buried deep in his sorrow-harrowed soul, wafted beside him as two daintily booted feet, sheathed in soft suede hiking boots, stopped beside him.

Jon—who knew just now he was Jon—looked left, reluctantly taking his eyes off his quarry, and saw that the boots supported two shapely legs slipped into powder blue jeans, topped by a white lace shirt of old Spanish style, wide at the neck to reveal soft skin freckled with Gaelic grace. Soft, deep red hair fell about the athletic shoulders of a young woman, above the collar of the V-neck of white lace. Her chin was a darling button, her teeth small and even, white but not machined, her nose straight and slight, her eyes huge under her thin red brows, twinkling with green light. The hoop earrings gave him pause as a comic waggle of her head above those half-bare shoulders accentuated her feigned distress, a wide smile telling of handsome lines to come in her hopeful old age, “A Southern man, should not balk so, Sir. Might it be that my rival primps in the mirror of yonder privy?”

As if slapped, Jon rose from the stool, a square one, he just noted, and blundered, “By all means, Madam, be seated—this is a public table, you know.”

‘Fool, fool, stop looking at her gently swaying breasts on display for to cultivate your eventual dismay.’

Returning to her eyes, she grinned, and yet declined to sit, winking comically with the corners of her mouth, then expressively looking at his head and blinking her eyes as if in old Morse code.

“Oh, my, no offense meant, Madam,” and he doffed his beret, a not very “Southern,” head piece, until he noted that above the left eye a CSA anchor and crossed swords had been sewn there in the colors of Old Saint George, whose cross was also present at the back of the head.

She was seated, looking up at him comically again, seeming to regard him as her own private joke. “It is a public table, you know,” she winked up at him as he stood frumpy in his threadbare suit, his gut protruding. He tried to suck it in, and failing, drew from her a girlish chuckle, “My Love, have a seat.”

Her little hands, bespangled with two silver bracelets, not a finger occupied by a ring, tapped the table as if she played piano, her voice a silvery hiss, “My Love, sit—do not make me beg.”

He knew the voice, yet could not place her, without the accompanying ringing in his head. Looking at her with a start, he sat, hat in his hands, and she grinned, “My Jon, I have been calling you for so long. Thank you for coming to me…”

And her hands snaked across the glossy stained table, from those elegant wide sleeves, set aside his beret from between his hands, and held them both in a very begging, even pleading, posture, “Please, Jon, do not put me off any longer. I have so many things to say, things I can only imagine saying to you—no other ear is worthy.”

Doll was now at the end of the table between them, giving him wide-eyed looks of betrayal, looking down at the beautiful young hands holding his hands, which seemed so claw-like and monstrous in their soft contrast, “Since us old broads are all chopped liver now, would you care to introduce us, Jon.”

The young vixen sent him an angry eye flare, “Jon already—he kept his name form me for years.”

He was becoming disoriented and stammered as Doll recovered, “Oh, we card everyone here.”

The young lady smiled, flashed a micro-glare of spite, painted over it with a pout of delight, and reached into her rear pants pocket and drew out a lone plastic card, an I.D. He did not try to read it, but saw it was her. Doll’s eyes looked at the card, read it, and seeing the printed information, apparently, did a double take on the young lady, and shrank, “So nice to have you, Ma’am, well done. Good living—so what will it be, Young Lady,” as the green eyes seemed to walk the weepy blue eyes of the barmaid through the ritual.

The young woman batted her eyes, as if to release the bar maid from some terrible trance, and those perky lips smiled wide and childish, “Orange juice with a spritz of club soda, please. I am the designated driver. Jon here is forever forgetting where he parked his 1978 powder blue Ford Pinto. A strange color for a two-door fast back, don’t you think, Celina?”

“Yes,” giggled the barmaid named Celina, better served by Doll, as she asked the as yet unnamed red head, “Another round for Mister Imbolden?”

The green eyes regarded Jon and Celina both with alternating flashes of grace and haste, all of the grace now reserved for the stunned Celina, “A double, Celina, Jon likes it neat—but let’s say we shed some of that trove of cash on your best small batch instead of his dreadful well liquor.”

“Yes Ma’am,” smiled Celina as whoever in the world she was, sneered beautifully at him, “Now, Jon, dear, the shanty life is behind us now. Peel off one of those reluctant Benjamin’s for lovely Celina, who you so cruelly played along—you bad thing.”

Jon, in obedience to she who released his hands, managed with great pain in his sunken soul, to draw out that fold of crispy 100s, three inches thick, and peeled one off for Celina, who took it with a cute bend of the knees and a happy smile, assured by her new Mistress, “That is just for this round, DOLL, keep the change.”

Celina gave him a narrow hurt gaze, as if he had been anything other then polite. And there he was, off his game, the hunt ruined, the fags having left, their glasses of wine half drunk, the rims stained with their hideous, narrow mouth prints.

“Jon, Baby, thank you for returning to me, though we have never been in this ghost town before—a soothing reunion this is,” and, pulling herself across the table and bringing her ruby lips and emerald eyes too close for him to deny that they had, at some time, been intimately acquainted, kissed him.

‘What is her name?’ he mused

And she answered, half-hissing, half-drinking his lame kiss, “It’s Mary, you shithead drunk mick!”

To be concluded in Danscape