One of the men wore a pair of dark sunglasses as he fanned out a hand of cards. Reuben had once let Billy try on a similar pair, and he could see hidden red patterns on the back of each card in a red light.

The stripper sidled up next to the boy as he looked around Club Lasso. She was kind of attractive but a little soft-faced, with a round white belly under her cowhide bra. She placed a hand on his knee and asked him his name.

“His name’s Billy,” Reuben said. “And he’s too young for you, Birmingham. Get back on stage.”

The boy turned back to Reuben, who was smoking, and Reuben smiled at his son, cigarette clamped square in his teeth. But his eyes grew unfocused as he stared into an empty place on the opposite wall. He smiled again before heading back to the bathroom.

Billy sat there for a while and watched Miss Birmingham strip down to her panties and shake her fat titties while winking, and he borrowed a couple nickels from Reuben’s stickman – a teenage negro named Charley Frank Bass – and played a few slots, winning a few bucks.

But he still needed the five and walked back to the toilets and knocked. He heard water running and opened the door.

Reuben stood with one foot up on the commode, his trouser leg rolled up to his knee, showing a leather rig above his left calf. His blue knee sock had been rolled down to the ankle, and in his left hand he had a pistol cylinder open from the frame where he fed bullets with his fingers.

Billy smiled at him.

But he gave the boy such a hard look back that Billy shut the door and left Club Lasso with only his winnings.

ALBERT PATTERSON RETURNED FROM MONTGOMERY LATE that night, too late to watch his youngest boy, Jack, in the high school play, where Jack played Lord Bothwell in The Pipes of Dunbar. Jack had been pretty excited that week talking about how Lord Bothwell symbolized justice in a time of bloodshed and that the girl who played his wife Mary, Queen of Scots, was a real looker.