A Time of Predators

Preston turned his empty bottle with a muscle-thickened hand that looked capable of crushing the glass to brown powder. “I never finished high school — was in the eleventh grade when Korea started, so I quit to join the Army. After Korea, I never went back.” His marvelous grin suddenly quirked at the corners of his mouth and made his blue eyes light up almost impishly. “I figured there wasn’t enough in my head to live on anyway, so I decided to depend on my back.” He slid off his stool. “Why don’t you order us a couple of more, Curt? I’ll be right back — my kidneys are floating.”

Curt caught Ferrano’s eye, nodded for two more beers, and then caught his own reflection in the back-bar mirror. What did they call it? Fighting the mirror. Odd, Ferrano had spotted him as a body-builder — unless it just had been a guess based on the fact that he was with Preston. That seemed more likely.

His elbow was jostled; the place was filling up. How many years had it been since he’d drunk beer in a workingman’s bar? Ferrano brought the beers. He had a good thing going here, and knew it. Curt glanced around, saw Preston returning with his catlike tread. In his form-fitting T-shirt and tight slacks, he was a living advertisement for his own gymnasium. Curt also saw that the man who had jostled his elbow had taken Preston’s stool despite the weight-lifter’s change, cigarettes, glass, and newly opened beer on the bar in front of it.

“That’s okay,” Preston said, coming up as Curt was reaching out to tap the other man on the shoulder. “I’d just as soon stand for a bit.” He edged up to the bar between Curt and the other man, and began pouring out his beer.

The man on the stool turned abruptly. “Hey, watch who you’re shoving, mac,” he said.

Preston eyed him pleasantly. “Sorry. I didn’t know you’d bought the place from Al.”

He turned back to Curt, but the other man laid a heavy hand on his shoulder from behind. The shoulder quivered under the touch, Curt saw, exactly like the shoulder of a horse quivering under a fly, but Preston allowed himself to be swung around.

“I said watch who you’re shoving, mac.” He was stocky and dark, with a tough belligerent face hazed with the day’s whiskers. A pair of stained and tattered leather work gloves was on the bar beside him. “If I want any crap from you, mister, I’ll beat it out.”

“Are you looking for trouble?” asked Preston pleasantly.

“Yeah, as a matter of fact, I—”

Preston hit him.

The blow traveled a bare six inches, but man and stool went over backwards and sideways with a crash that froze conversation along the bar. The fallen warrior, sprawled on the rug, shook his head as if to clear it. The action had been so much like a television fight that Curt almost expected a huckster to appear selling cigarettes. None did.

Instead. Preston poked a finger at the other man. “If you want to fight, get up and fight. Otherwise, I owe you a beer.”

Ferrano set them up, bustling noisily, making jokes, slapping shoulders, as the man got up and moved down the bar, muttering, with his companion.

Preston sent two beers down to them, righted his stool, and calmly sat down. “If a guy wants trouble, hit him first,” he remarked. “But if he has a thick neck and isn’t fat, watch out. And if he doesn’t fall down — run.”

Curt shook his head in amazement. “Does this sort of thing happen to you very often?”

“It used to when I first opened the gym. Guys then still used to think that weight-lifters and body-builders were so musclebound that they’d tear something if they lifted an arm above their shoulder.” He shook his head and grinned. “I suppose I used to think the same thing, before I started lifting. That was while I was in the Army — cadre in the infantry in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. Little Korea, we called it.”

“You sounded like an anthropologist yourself there for a minute,” Curt said. Then he added, seeing Preston’s blank expression, “That thing about watching out for men with thick necks who aren’t fat. You are a student of the physical man — and in the broadest terms, anthropology is a study of man and his works.”

Curt meant to stop there, but he had drunk several beers, had eaten only a light lunch after a heavy workout, and had been having a rotten time sleeping at night. He went on to social anthropology, his own discipline in the field, and found he was talking almost compulsively. It was a strange performance, with part of him sitting back and shaking its head while he rocketed on ineluctably toward Paula’s suicide. The ease with which Preston had handled the random violence in the bar had loosened some inner brake; he was like a truck left unattended on top of a hill, taking a long time to get started but impossible to stop once he was rolling.

It was nearly three o’clock when he finally ran down, ending with, “...and Sergeant Worden says there’s no legal way to touch them, even if the police ever would catch up with the ones who did it.”