Bad Men

“What’s your problem, Off-fis-sur?” said Lubey. “I’m having a drink with my buddy. We ain’t bothering nobody.”

“I think you’ve had enough.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Lubey. “Shoot me?”

Dupree looked at him. Lubey held the gaze for as long as he could, then glanced away, a dumb smile playing on his lips. Dupree returned his attention to Scarfe.

“I want you off the island, Terry. Thorson has a crossing in ten minutes. You be on that ferry.”

Scarfe looked at Lubey, shrugged, then slid from his stool and picked up his jacket.

“The Green Giant wants me off the island, Carl, so I got to go. I’ll be seeing you.”

“Yeah, be seeing you, Terry. Fight the power.”

Dupree stepped back and watched as Scarfe headed unsteadily for the door, then turned back to Lubey.

“You drive here?” he asked.

Lubey didn’t reply.

“I asked you a question, Carl.”

“Yeah, I drove,” said Lubey at last.

“Give me your keys.”

The other man dug into his pockets and found his car keys. As Dupree reached out for them, Lubey dropped them to the floor.

“Whoops,” he said.

“Pick them up.”

He climbed from the stool, bent down gingerly, then toppled over. Dupree helped him to his feet, picking up the keys as he did so. Once he was upright again, Lubey shrugged off the policeman’s hand.

“Get your hands off me.”

“You want me to put you in cuffs, I will. We can get a boat over here and you can spend the night in a cell.”

Lubey reached for his coat.

“I’m going,” he said.

“You can pick up your keys from the station house in the morning.”

Lubey waved a hand in dismissal and headed for the door. Behind the bar, Jeb Burris took off his apron and said: “I’ll give him a ride back.”

Dupree nodded and gave him Lubey’s car keys.

“Yeah, do that.”

Back outside, he watched as Terry Scarfe and two other people, tourists who’d been eating at the restaurant, climbed onboard Thorson’s ferry and headed back to Portland.

Scarfe kept looking back at the island, and Dupree, until the ferry faded from view.

Marianne had enjoyed a couple of glasses of wine at dinner, Dupree a single beer. He offered to drive her back to her house and said he would arrange to have her car dropped at her door before eight the next morning. She sat in the passenger seat of Dupree’s own Jeep and stared in silence through the side window. Dupree wanted to believe that it was a comfortable silence, but he sensed her sadness as he drove.

“You okay?”

She nodded, but her mouth wrinkled and he could see that she was near tears.

“It’s been a long time, you know?”

He didn’t, and he felt foolish for not knowing.

“Since what?”

“Since I had a nice evening with a man. I’d kind of forgotten what it was like.”

He coughed to hide his embarrassment and his secret pleasure.

“You always cry at the end of a nice evening?”

She smiled and wiped at the tears with the tips of her fingers.

“Hell, I must have snail trails running down my face.”

“No, you look good.”

“Liar.”

He hung a right into the driveway of her small house and pulled up outside her door. She looked at him.

“Would you like to come in? I can make you coffee.”

“Sure. Coffee would be good.”

He followed her inside, and sat on the edge of the living-room couch as she went to the bathroom to fix her makeup. When she came out, she went straight to the kitchen and put the kettle on the stove, then swore.

“I’m sorry,” she called out. “I’ve only got instant.”

“It’ll be just like home.”

She peered around the corner of the doorway, unsure if he was being sarcastic.

He caught the look.

“No, honest, it will be just like home. All I ever make is instant.”

“Well, if you say so. Put on some music, if you like.”

He rose and walked to the pile of CDs that lay stacked against the wall. A JVC system stood on the third shelf of the Home Depot bookcase. He tried squatting and looking sideways at the CDs, then kneeling. Finally, he lay flat on the floor and ran his finger down the spines.

“I don’t recognize any of this stuff,” he said as she came into the room carrying two mugs of coffee on a tray.

“You’re out of touch,” she said.

“Radio reception sucks this far out, and I don’t go over to the mainland as much as I used to. Hey, are the Doobie Brothers still together?”

“I hear Michael McDonald left,” she said. “Things aren’t looking so good for Simon and Garfunkel either.”

He smelled her perfume as she knelt down beside him, and her arm brushed his hair gently as she reached across and carefully removed a disc from the pile. He placed his hand against the discs beneath, steadying them so that they would not fall. She put a bright blue CD into the player, then skipped through the tracks until she got to number six. Slow funk emerged from the speakers.

“Sounds like Prince,” he said.

She cocked an eyebrow at him. “Maybe you’re not so out of touch after all. You’re close. It’s Maxwell. This track’s called ‘Til the Cops Come Knockin’. I thought you might appreciate the humor.”

“It’s good,” he said. “The song, I mean. The humor I’m not so sure about.”