Southwestern-themed hotel bar, lost within the sprawl of the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex. Antlers and a self-playing piano. Blond timbers and Navajo blankets. A placard in the lobby reads WELCOME TO THE 2019 TEXAS QUILTERS RENDEZVOUS—and here they are rendezvousing. Lone Star quilter-ladies knocking back cocktails, booing the plinking start of each pianola song. “Camptown Races.” “Oh, Susannah.” Play Billy Joel, robot! Enough already of the cowpoke tunes. 

And Bobby is into another bourbon. One of the quilter-ladies is at his elbow, claiming a barstool beside him. She looks sixtyish, but formidable. Tall and beefy. Spiky, tip-frosted hair. Her outfit-of-many-colors is plugged with rhinestones and turquoise. 

She turns to him. “I’m Margaret. Who are you?” 

“Bobby, ma’am.” 

“Cutie-pie! You a stitcher?”

He is in the same gray sweatshirt as yesterday. The same faded blue jeans, masking his prosthetic leg. He didn’t make it to Ortiz’s funeral. He never even left the hotel. Margaret giggles. “Kidding. But could be you’re the only one in here who isn’t. Well, you and our depressed saloonkeep back there.” Then she nods in the direction of a hat-and sunglasses blind man, nursing an O’Doul’s from the stool to her left. “And him too, of course.”

“I’m just passing through, ma’am.” 

“Business? Pleasure?” 

“Work,” he lies. “Road construction.” 

In truth, he has not worked a paying job, any paying job, in almost three years. He has ten Big Thicket acres, and an off-the-grid cabin, awaiting his return to East Texas, behind the Pine Curtain—but no boss, no supervisor, no commanding officer. The disability checks, so far, have been enough to get him by. 

“I appreciate you, Robby.” 

“Huh?” 

“My Lloyd is a Marine, retired. I can always spot it—even in a longhair like you.”

“I was Guard.” 

“Texas Guard? You have a nowhere accent.” 

A phone oinks, and she reaches into a patchwork tote bag. Bobby twists away on his stool, hoping that might conclude their conversation. Wrong. Margaret whacks him on the shoulder. Bobby tenses. Breathe. Settle. He thinks of Ortiz. At twenty-two, state and federal Purple Hearts for each of them, due to that IED blast—and then, at twenty-five, a civilian death for Ortiz on a Japanese motorcycle.

Margaret brings the phone to Bobby’s face. “I hit pause,” she says. “You’ll swear this is neat.” 

He takes the phone. Seeing, now, a monochrome, night-vision livestream of two furry hogs—wild hogs—in a large, wire-fenced pen of some sort. Their paused snouts are to the ground. Their paused eyes are glowing. 

“Right this minute on our land,” says Margaret. “Howdy-who, do we got us a pig problem! Lloyd has me on trap duty tonight.” 

Bobby gives her the phone back. 

“A week we’ve been baiting them. I tap a button on my cell, snap, the gate shuts. But anything less than four or five we just let them gnaw on our corn. They’re ape smart, but it’s early still. Maybe more’ll be coming.” 

“And then what?” 

“Lloyd and an AR-15 blood bath, is what.” 

Margaret, drunk on duty, stashes the phone in the tote bag—and because she keeps glancing behind her, Bobby spins around. There, nearest to the player piano, a table of other ladies, dressed like Margaret, is watching them. 

“Now I’m embarrassed,” says Margaret. She tugs his arm until they are fronting the bar again. Her voice has lowered. “I’m not flirting with you, kiddo—but I do need you to buy me a drink.” 

“What’s happening?” 

“Them’s the other Nacogdoches Seam Rippers, gawking … and you’re it for red meat in this place … and this, this is me, cheating on a bet.” She squeezes his wrist. “So buy me that drink, Robby? I’ll put a twenty in the collection plate Sunday.”

The thin, walrus-mustached bartender has appeared. A white shirt with arm gaiters. A black vest. He is monitoring them sullenly, spidery hands clasped on ribcage—and, behind the bartender, the blind man is motionless in a mirror. Bobby remembers a joke. A blind man walks into a bar. And a pool table. And a jukebox. Maybe the blind man fractures his skull. Maybe the blind man dies. 

Bobby points at the bartender, then at Margaret, making a show of it for the cluster of Seam Rippers. “Whatever she wants,” he says. “Please.” 

Fast forward. 

Margaret kisses his cheek, a salt-rimmed margarita goblet held high as she leaves him. Bobby, hearing laughter, and clapping, drains his final bourbon and asks for the bill. This, he thinks, had probably been a nice moment of human connection—yet all he can fixate on is that soon, even before he is back safe, or unsafe, in his hotel room, tipsy Margaret will confess to the favor a young veteran did for her. That Robby from nowhere, he fooled you all.

Skip Horack is the author of the story collection THE SOUTHERN CROSS, winner of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference 2008 Bakeless Fiction Prize; and the novels THE EDEN HUNTER (a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice) and THE OTHER JOSEPH. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, and he is currently director of the Creative Writing Program at Florida State University.