Swag by Elmore Leonard Page A

the best-stocked bar in the building. Frank started it, inviting people up, especially on weekends. After a while they could count on people dropping in whenever there was a sign of something going on.
    There’d be a good selection of career ladies.
    There might even be some of the young married set. Frank would lure them away from their cookouts with Chivas Regal and talk about car prices and inflation with the husbands while he appraised the cute little housewives.
    There might be two or three young single guys, somebody’s date, and Barry Kleiman for sure. The career ladies called Barry the Prince. Stick thought because he looked like Prince Valiant with his hair, but that wasn’t the reason. Barry was successful, owned a McDonald’s franchise, wore bright-colored sport outfits with a white plastic belt and white patent-leather loafers, and was only about twenty pounds overweight. Barry would stand with his elbows tucked in close and his wrists limp and say, “Listen, when I was a kid, the neighborhood I grew up in? It was so dirty I’d sit out in the sun for two hours and get a nice stain.” Then he’d wait for their reaction with an innocent, wide-eyed expression. Karen said he used to do Jerry Lewis imitations.
    â€œNot a bad guy,” Frank said. “He could be a pain in the ass, you know? But he’s not a bad guy.”
    â€œYou go for Barry, you must really like the place,” Stick said.
    Frank seemed surprised. “Yeah, I like it. You don’t?”
    â€œIt’s all right, I guess.”
    â€œAll right ? You ever had it like this, pouring cement?”
    No, he’d never lived in a place with a swimming pool and had a party going most of the week with two guns in the closet and fifteen hundred bucks in an Oxydol box under the sink. It was funny, he never had.
    When Frank recited his line—“Well, here we are”—instead of saying, “Are you sure?” he should say, “Where, Frank? Where exactly are we? And for how long?”
    It was like getting excited and moving to Florida and having the Atlantic Ocean down the street and palm trees and a nice tan all year and wondering. Now what? Sitting in a marina bar, watching gulls diving at the waves and seeing the charter boats out by the horizon, it didn’t make the beer taste better. He’d tell himself this was the life and go home and have to take a nap before supper.
    He wondered if he missed working, putting in a nine-ten-hour day driving the big transit mix and pouring the footings for the condominiums that would someday wall out the ocean from Key West to Jacksonville Beach. There was plenty of work down there. It was on his mind a lot and he wasn’t sure why, because the thought of going back to hauling cement bored the shit out of him.
    He’d say to himself, What do you want to do more than anything?
    Go see his little girl.
    All right, but what do you want to do with your life ?
    He’d think about it awhile and picture things.
    He didn’t see himself owning a cement company or a chicken farm or a restaurant. He never thought much about owning things, having a big house and a powerboat. He didn’t care one way or the other about clothes. He’d never been much of a tourist. The travel brochures made it look good and he could see himself under a thatched roof with a big rum drink and some colored guys banging on oil drums, but he’d end up thinking. Then what do you do? Go in and get dressed up and eat the American Plan dinner and listen to the fag with the hairpiece play his cocktail piano and get bombed for no reason and go to bed and get up and do it over again the next day. He could picture a girl with him, on the beach, under the thatched roof. A nice-looking, quiet girl. Not his ex-wife. He never pictured his ex-wife with him and he never pictured the girl as his wife.
    Maybe, Stick told himself, this was the kind of life he always wanted but