The first room had eight or ten circular tables, each capable of seating a dozen people. Solitary male diners were scattered across the room, one per table, listening to the fuzzy, rasping, oddly distorted Christmas music and having at their meat and potatoes. One of them was Buck Chandler. He had his back turned to the room, facing the corner, and sat hunched over, chewing his food very slowly and staring fixedly at a waterfowl mural that had gone all brown with cigarette smoke.
Buck hadn’t seen him yet, and so, in the short term, Clyde could get away with choosing another table. But Buck would probably see him eventually and then be offended. So Clyde shuffled forward awkwardly, bumping into an empty chair in an effort to make some noise so that Buck would notice him. But Buck kept staring at those ducks on the wall. As Clyde came around the table, he was shocked by Buck’s appearance: his eyes were red and bleary, and he had not shaved, or even combed his hair, in a couple of days. Buck inhaled convulsively through a mouthful of beef and then uncorked a slow, gassy belch that inflated his cheeks and eventually escaped through his nostrils, suffusing the corner of the room with a strong chemical vapor that reminded Clyde of his soon-to-be-ex-boss.
“Buck,” Clyde said, “you mind?”
Buck swiveled his eyes toward Clyde, then dropped them toward his plate and bowed his head. Clyde took a seat.
“Merry Christmas,” Clyde said. It might have been a cruel thing to say. But Clyde reminded himself that his life situation was, if anything, worse than Buck’s, and he was keeping his chin up.
Buck Chandler did not respond to this salutation for several minutes, and when he did, it was with the words, “Fucking camel jockeys.”
Clyde had grown up listening to Buck Chandler’s voice announcing Twisters football games from the press box at the stadium, the roar of the crowd in the background, and he could never get over hearing that voice saying such words.
He didn’t know what to say in response to “Fucking camel jockeys” and so he kept eating. After some minutes he noticed that Buck was staring at him disgustedly.
“Oh, I know you’re buddies with those kinds of people.”
“Would you like me to leave you alone?” Clyde said.
“That’s real nice of you, Clyde, to be buddies with our foreign guests. But you keep in mind something.” Buck set his steak knife down with exaggerated caution and began shaking his finger at Clyde, gripping the edge of the table with his other hand to steady himself. “Don’t trust ’em, Clyde. ’Cause they got no principles.”
Since Buck Chandler was not being too coherent, Clyde brought his Sherlockian capabilities to bear on the problem. One good hypothesis was that Buck had got involved in a real-estate transaction with some foreign students, which had ended badly.
“Shit,” Buck said, “you might have thought they’d at least wait until after Christmas to burst my goddamn bubble. But no. Hell, they don’t even have Christmas. Why would they?”
“Don’t know,” Clyde said.
A new, and apparently terrifying, thought occurred to Buck. “My ’vette,” he blurted. “You came to repo my ’vette, didn’t you, Clyde?”
“Sheriffs don’t do repo work, Buck. You can rest easy about that darn Corvette.”
“Oh, yeah. Thank God.”
Clyde chewed and pondered. When he’d dropped off the divorce summons at Tick Henry’s house, it had been sometime in midsummer. Buck had been homeless and living in squalor. After that he hadn’t seen Buck until around Halloween, when he was on the wagon, well dressed, and driving a new Corvette.
He didn’t know much about the real-estate business, except that it worked on a commission basis—a large number of small transactions, the income accumulating slowly and steadily over time. It did seem remarkable, now that he thought about it, that Buck had turned his business around dramatically enough to buy a Corvette—in no more than three months’ time.
On the other hand, if he had made one very large sale, he could have got the whole bundle at once. But sales that large were unusual in this area.
“You got into a business deal with some Arabs?” Clyde said.
Buck scoffed and shook his head in disgust. “Deal? Swindle is more like it.”
“How much do you figure you got swindled out of?”
Buck lowered his head and stared into his food again. The look on his face told Clyde that Buck Chandler hadn’t been swindled out of anything. “They just pulled out on me, that’s all. Cut and run.”
“I never heard about this deal of yours, Buck.”
“Well, course not! That’s ’cause it was a secret deal from the word go.”
“Is it still secret?”
“Hell no. Fuck no,” Buck said. He took a big breath and his eyes blazed up as he realized something: “I don’t have to keep any secrets no more! To hell with ’em! What’re they gonna do, sue me?”
“I’d like to see ’em try,” Clyde scoffed, getting into the spirit of the thing. “What kind of a deal did you put together, Buck?”
“With the Kuwaitis,” Buck said.
“Are you pulling my leg?”