He’d pushed his cart to the 6:00 a.m. bar, just down the dirty boulevard, to escape the cold, and the dark clouds building out east and north in his head. He’d drown the fucking rat that ran across his stank army blanket when sleep was a cunt-hair away, his head resting on a chunk of concrete broken free from the underpass, a joke gift from God. He’d find her sitting on the far stool, cutting darkness, a slight glimmer of shine still left from when she fucked frat boys for good money and blew new dads in the backseat of their Volvos after their wives stopped fucking them. Well before the pipe took her, and her teeth joined the bottle shards in the dead dirt where the bridge pilings met the culvert. They’d drink his last rumpled bills, earned hardscrabble, with sunburned palms and a tattered Sharpie cardboard sign after Heavy Hand Jim poured out two double vodka and cranberry sippers from the bilge. In the glow of neon, chocking on stale beer and piss air, four feet stuck to the floor, they’d toast to warmth and silently curse the tease of a better day.
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