ELDORADO
-An Excerpt-

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...Eddie Liberty ordered another round, picked at the scab of nachos on the bar between us, alongside our darts.

“The cat didn’t come back?” he said.

“She didn’t give him a chance.”

He shook his head and cupped the glass of rum the bartender brought him.  The gold medallion, a family heirloom, hung from his open neck and swung above his glass.  Blonde hair, like some kind of mad growth, sprouted from his chest, springing through the collar of his purple Hawaiian shirt so no clear line existed between his chest hair and three-day beard.

Businessmen lorded over the tables behind us, smoking and drinking Manhattans with their bloody steaks.  Fanning around the bar, old timers alternately stared into their mugs and propositioned the waitress, while one small boy spun around his father’s table, crunching the spent peanut shells on the floor.  My own son was pushing seventeen, probably trying to sneak into joints like this with his friends, but I couldn’t be certain about him or which of my needs had become his.

“Maybe the cat’s better off,” Eddie Liberty said.  “He was sick, wasn’t he?”

“Anemic maybe, but that comes with the territory.”  I shifted on my stool; my crosswords were jammed in my back pocket.  “He’s a scamp,” I said.  “Makes a lot of noise.  I think it’s the caterwauling that bothers Mrs. Hewlett.”

“Cheers.”

I’d known Eddie Liberty since our principal’s-office days in grade school.  Now, he was a captain of industry.  His garage was two stories high so he could keep one of his cranes with him at home.  When I still had my business, we did some jobs together, gas stations and fast food restaurants.  Every “Arby’s” in the state was ours.  After both our divorces and subsequent losses in court, we lived together off of St. Thomas where we joined a few like-minded entrepreneurs to run a club for the tourists who’d clamber in from the cruise ships to marvel at the alcoholic snake that hung from our rafters and drank rum shots off the bar.  Eddie’s brother ran the cranes while we wore Hawaiian shirts, swung in hammocks, and played bumper pool with the island girls.  Soon, though, Eddie Liberty had to return home before his brother lost the rest of his business.  He smuggled a quiver of hollow surf rods packed with uncut cocaine to help pay the notes on the remaining cranes, and I followed shortly after, moving to the next town over.  Back in Colorado I discovered none of my old friends or partners wanted to know me anymore.  They claimed they could smell the rot in my soul.  All of them except Eddie Liberty, that is, who had the same smell, only he wore his second act success like drugstore cologne.  He smelled of bluster and pheromones.

“So what are you going to do about it?” he asked.  “The cat.”

“Wait until her husband gets home and reason with him.”

“Reason?  What reason?  I remember when you never would’ve let yourself be handcuffed by reason.  These aren’t reasonable people.”

“It’s a matter of principles,” I said.

He tucked his medallion inside his shirt.

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