“I’d pop your elbow flat out of the socket.”

“Oh, I bet you would.”

“Let me try it,” she says.

I smack my elbow onto the bar, twist my palm into a wrestling grip.

“Your drink,” she says.

“See, you can’t make plans,” says the old man as I slide the drink past him to the woman. “Life don’t let you. Wasn’t long afore I found out she was sleeping outside our marriage bed. With my brother, Curt.”

“You don’t say,” I say.

“I just did,” says the old man. “But I could deal with that. Leastways she kept it in the family. No need to upset the apple cart and spill the milk.”

“What do you think?” I say to the woman, whose pretty face is twisted sour after a sip of my drink.

“It tastes like hummingbird vomit,” she says as she passes it back.

“My name’s Victor. Victor Carl.”

“What, they run out of last names when you were born?” she says. “Had to give you two first names instead?”

“Exactly that. So what do they call you?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“I’m just trying to be friendly here.”

“I know what you’re trying,” she says, but a smile starts breaking out anyway.

“It was the cancer, finally did in all them plans,” says the old man. “It tore up the throat. Curt’s throat. When he died, she up and ran off with the night nurse. Happiest day of my life when she left. Now I miss her every minute of every hour. I loved her true, like a Hank Williams song, but what does that matter?”

I snatch down the rest of my drink, and that is apparently the moment my mental recorder decides to go seriously on the fritz. I remember Jim Morrison intoning sweet mystical nothings from the jukebox. I remember my drink tasting funny and me laughing at the joke. I remember the old man getting up for a moment and me slipping onto his warm stool so I could sit next to the woman. I remember ordering us another round.

She smelled of beer and gasoline and a clean sweat, that I remember, and I thought as I sat next to her that if I could bottle her scent right there, I could make a fortune in the perfume racket. At least I hope I only thought it, because if I said it that would be a truly lame line, which might explain what I seem to remember next, her giving me a strange, piteous look before pushing herself off her stool and starting out the door.