One Thing Leads to Another (pt 2).

Wolf plays hockey with the bottle cap after draining the second beer and loving every second of it; he’s just about decided to throw True into his car and go, except that Jude says he’s hooked deep now so he’d be losing his mind before they got halfway back to Chicago – unless they brought some with them, just to keep him level until he got him home. Just a little.

And Wolf can’t get that idea out of his head, licking his lips until they’re raw.

Jude is ripping up the phone book and talking non-stop about things that don’t make any sense, jumping topics when he loses his place – he was a friend of Wolf’s mom who started coming around that year they had the big flood; Wolf remembers that the carpets in the trailer sloshed and that he and True had water fights, rocking things off the walls when they jumped up and down, splashing each other while his mom roared with laughter.

Wolf grimaces thinking about his mother, who he hasn’t seen since he was sixteen years old: the Quails were already local-famous for being weird and crazy, those kinds of people who came and went but who knew things and who could help you out if you didn’t mind putting your religion aside for the day, and they had these strange names on top of it all: his mother was Tambourine Quail, daughter of Big Bad Dollarbill Quail and That Run-Off Bitch With No Name. When Wolf was ten Tammy drove her sons to a field in east Kansas, meeting over fifty others of her line there and presenting her sons in front of a bonfire, her eyes shining like she was high in a way Wolf never forgot. I brought them, she shouted, and named ‘em Werewolf Kerosene Quail and Truthful Shade Quail. Their dad was Bread Man Went And Died and he wasn’t bad to me at all.

Can you knock it off? Wolf says to Jude, whose head snaps up as if he can’t figure out where Wolf came from. He puts the magazine aside but with nothing to work on he slaps his hands against his thighs.

I don’t want trouble, he finally says. It’s water under the bridge, and I been doing you a favor, I don’t barely charge him nothing.

Wolf shakes his head; his third beer gives him goosebumps. Putting your dick in him whenever you want is a big favor to me, he says. Thanks a lot.

The way Jude keeps looking at the drawer next to him, Wolf thinks he’s got something in there he’s going to pull before too long; he raises his hands in surrender. I didn’t come down here for this, he says. You’re right, water under the bridge.

It wasn’t me who called the cops, Jude says petulantly. Anybody could’a done that, I don’t know why people said it was me.

I believe you, Wolf says – though of course he has always known better.