Old Skip
by Tom Andes
Old Skip knew better than to mess around with Donna. For one thing, she was half his age, twenty-four to Skip’s forty-eight. For another thing, she was besties with Skip’s old lady, Zoe, who was also the bar manager at the North Country Pub in Milton, New Hampshire, where Donna and Zoe worked, and where Skip was a regular, hanging out enough he might as well have been on payroll.
That night in July, Donna was in her vintage Mötley Crüe tee-shirt with no bra, and she was near tears because the guy she’d been seeing from down to Dover had gone and stuck it in one of her cousins. And Skip was only trying to comfort her.
And yeah, he agreed with her: men were dogs, and that was the way of the world. He knew that too well, had what you’d call firsthand experience.
“When’s Zoe supposed to get back, anyway?” Donna wiped her cheeks. She was stocking the coolers, the place closed, the last customers gone, Skynyrd on the jukebox, “Gimme Three Steps.” And so far, Skip was just listening.
He’d always been a good listener. Zoe told him that. She’d told him that’s what made him different from other men, other guys she’d been with, including her deadbeat ex-husband.
“Guess it’ll be a little while now.” Skip gestured with his bottle of Bud in the direction of Old Orchard Beach, Maine. If he was honest with himself, he felt an undercurrent of resentment, Zoe having a girls night when he wouldn’t have minded seeing Pink Floyd, even if they were a little too artsy-fartsy. But the light show was supposed to be balls-to-the-wall, tits out awesome.
He didn’t mind Zoe talking about other men, dudes she’d been with. At their age, if you were a virgin, well, the only reason for that was that you were socially retarded, besides which, he liked a woman who’d been around the block, who was seasoned, who wouldn’t break down crying like Donna, and all over a skinny twerp in tight jeans and a cowboy hat.
“I was supposed to go with them,” she said, “but someone had to take care of this place.”
She’d cashed out, and she counted the money back into the drawer, left a bank for tomorrow’s day shift, which Zoe was working. The old lady who owned the place, Gloria, who everybody called Ma, had the cancer, something wrong with one of her eyes, so she wore a patch, and everyone was working doubles, trying to keep the doors open and the lights on.
Donna reached in the cooler, grabbed a Bud longneck, and popped the top, coming around the bar to sit next to Skip. Since he’d shot his foot with a nail gun on a jobsite, he spent his days and nights occupying his customary stool on the corner, playing pool and dispensing wisdom.
Just like he was doing now.
“Listen,” he said, “don’t let this guy get you down. If you want to know the honest to God truth, you can do a hell of a lot better than Ole Skinny-Britches, anyway.”
“Skinny-Britches? Stop.” Donna swatted his arm, but she was giggling, and Skip felt a flush of pleasure. Yeah, he still had it, whatever the “it” was that made the ladies dance and drop their pants. Back in the day, before he’d shacked up with Zoe, Old Skip had been a hound.
Donna’s man—who was really more of a boy—was one of those dudes who wore a ten-gallon hat but wouldn’t know which end of a steer the horns belonged on, and he wore what must’ve been size 24 Wranglers, skinnier than Skip, even.
“Tell me the truth about that hat,” Skip said, “that old ten-pint hat.” He was warming to the subject. “You can’t really like that whole cowboy thing, can you?”
He was enjoying himself, maybe a little too much.
Donna sighed, looking with a long, sad face at her bottle, so for a second Skip worried she was going to start with the waterworks again. “He does look good in those Wranglers. And he screws like the dickens. I’m telling you he’s the best lay I’ve ever had.”
Skip felt that first flash of jealousy that should’ve been a sign he was in trouble, along with mild shock she would’ve volunteered that information, the two of them sitting alone at the bar. But that’s how it was at that place, like family, Donna practically Zoe’s daughter, or maybe more like a distant cousin, and nobody could keep a secret, anyway.
“Kids,” Skip said, swallowing the last of the warm backwash in his bottle, trying to hide his distaste. “You all think it’s about how hard and fast it is. You’ll have better, I promise.”
Donna leaned her head against his shoulder. Underneath the bar smell, the smell of cigarettes, beer, and the faint tang of sweat from working an eight-hour shift, serving drinks and doing all the cooking herself, he could smell her, that fresh, baby powder smell a young woman had that was so different from an older woman, or anyway, a woman Skip’s—or Zoe’s—age.
Yeah, Old Skip wasn’t the type to go chasing the young stuff, but Old Skip was still a dog, and he had her—Donna—in his nostrils.
“Promise?” Those big, blue eyes were still wet from the tears she’d been crying over this loser in his ten-gallon hat. Underneath that concert tee, her chest moved up and down. Maybe it was the air conditioning in the bar, but her nipples were hard, one of them titties poking the fabric next to Nikki Sixx’s head.
And that’s all it took. From there it was inches, the few inches Old Skip had to lean down to close the distance between their mouths. Even her breath smelled good, fragrant with Budweiser, that fruity bouquet.
He kissed her lips, which tasted of strawberry Chapstick, and chucked her on the chin. The glitter in her eyeshadow sparkled under the bar lights. “I promise.”
Old Skip had done half a semester at UNH back in ’74, a couple years after he came home from Vietnam. Even if he had long hair, he didn’t fit in with all those hippie radicals living off mommy and daddy’s money, future bankers and stockbrokers, all of them. But he’d read a lot of books, Robert Ludlum and such. He was the original rock and roll man, old school like those kids in the projects down to Boston said, and he didn’t need a lot of philosophy or book learning to know he was a fool, which was all most of the great literature told you, anyway.
According to the Budweiser clock on the wall it was a quarter of twelve. By now the band had finished their second encore, and Zoe and her friends would be getting on the road, fighting traffic to get out of the stadium parking lot. Old Skip had roadied for Aerosmith on the Rocks tour, so he knew how it worked. He had an hour, maybe an hour and a half before she got home.
He didn’t need a lot of book learning, either, to know what he was going to do when she said what she said next, even if it was the wrong thing to do, a seismic betrayal of Zoe, Donna, and himself.
“Show me,” she said, and damned fool or not, Old Skip said he would try.
***
Nearly as soon as it was done, Skip could feel things going wrong, and it started with the fact Donna was crying again, but this time she wasn’t crying about Ole Skinny-Britches.
“I just can’t believe we did this to Zoe,” she said. As if it hadn’t been her idea.
She was sitting on the edge of the pool table, and Skip hoped the wet spot they’d left on the green felt would disappear by morning. She was looking around for that Mötley Crüe concert tee, which was wadded up and stuffed in a corner pocket, Skip admiring those torpedo-shaped titties, which were as perky and buoyant as youth itself, while at the same time understanding he would never touch or suck on those fun bags again. Not for as long as he lived and breathed. Once Zoe finished with him, that might not be much longer.
“I’m sorry,” Skip said. “It’s never happened like that before.”
He felt confused and angry at his body’s betrayal. Not that he couldn’t get it up or anything like that because he was a randy old goat, but it would’ve been fair to say he was only halfway hard, so it felt like he was trying to cram a Slinky into a dish of fruit preserves. Once he did get it in, something about the angle on that pool table had made him lose control, and he’d lasted all of three strokes before he had to pull out, so that the Budweiser clock on the wall now read only five minutes of midnight.
Ten minutes, from first kiss to humiliating end. He was ashamed to think Ole Skinny-Britches screwed her better than that, granite-stiff, the dude’s balls slapping her butt for hours, swinging like the light bag at a boxing gym.
“Pass me that bar towel,” Donna said, “will you?”
She used the terrycloth rag to wipe up the mess on her stomach, that skin white and unblemished, and Old Skip would never touch her there again, either, not unless he bumped into her one night in the bar.
It was so different from Zoe’s stomach, where she had stretch marks from two pregnancies, one of her daughters Donna’s age, the other three years older, and the scar from her hysterectomy.
Old Skip felt a pang, the ground opening under him, as he grasped the size of what he’d done.
“You alright?” His dungarees were around his ankles—more trouble than it was worth taking his boots off, on account of that injury to his foot—and he pulled them up, fastening his belt. Garth was on the jukebox, “Friends in Low Places.”
“I’ve got to go clean up.” Donna left her pants on the floor next to the pool table, her big white butt shining in the moonlight from the windows as she went back to the ladies room, and the answer to that question was no: she was not alright.
Well, that’s what Old Skip got, messing with young stuff. An older woman like Zoe was more what did you call it, pliable. She could take a licking and keep on ticking, like the Timex watch in that commercial with the Sumo wrestlers. A young piece like Donna came with drama.
Yeah, Old Skip sure was a fool, promising this sweet young filly a good time, then crapping out before the first heat was through. He ran his hand down his mustache, which was still wet, rank with the musky odor of her crotch. He needed to wash his face, shampoo his flavor saver with a little Head & Shoulders before Zoe got back and kissed him on the mouth.
He gathered up his flannel, put that back on over his Molly Hatchet concert tee, and went behind the bar, where he dug a couple singles out of his wallet and left them next to the register, helping himself to a Bud longneck from the cooler. What was he going to tell her?
Headlights sliced across the room, a car coming off the main road and down into the lot. Zoe must be back early. Whatever it looked like, the two of them here alone in the bar this late, no reason that should make her suspicious, since Skip hung out till closing time on the regular. But the engine was too loud, and the headlights were shining three feet too high on the back wall. Peeking around the blinds, Old Skip gulped. It was that white Dodge RAM Ole Skinny-Britches drove, with its jacked-up suspension you could park a bus under, with the manifold rumbling, with four-foot tires and dualies in the back. Sure enough, Old Skip had stepped in the dung heap.
He might’ve taken off running out the back door, but how far was he going to get with that hobbled left foot? Besides which, his own pickup, a red F150, was parked in front of the bar.
“Holy shit.” Donna was standing at the back of the room. With the headlights from the truck shining around the blinds, her skin was so white it glowed, that brown tangle of hair dewy where her thighs met, and he was glad she didn’t shave, like a lot of girls did, while at the same time he would never again kneel before that altar, never again worship at the font of Donna’s snatch, that temple where life began. She grabbed her jeans from the floor. “Lester’s here.”
Lester being Ole Skinny-Britches, the man with the ten-pint hat.
The truck doused its headlights, so the bar went dark, Meatloaf playing on the jukebox, “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That).” Would Skip do anything for love? He wished he could get out of that bar and maybe Stafford County, if not the whole state of New Hampshire, without having to face any of them, not Lester, not Donna, and not Zoe, either.
“I’ll talk to him,” Skip said, “if you want to take off out the back.”
Wasn’t it chivalrous of Skip—if that was the word—to offer to deal with the guy for her?
But Donna was making a face, showing her teeth, almost smiling.
“My car’s out front,” she said. “He’s already going to know both of us are here.”
Not that she was enjoying this scene. Not that she’d what was the word, orchestrated it. Not that she’d wanted it to happen. But maybe she didn’t mind, either.
Had Old Skip been played?
“You know he was coming?” Skip drank from his longneck. He felt like Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, which he’d seen in the theater down to the Lilac Mall last year, sipping from that bottle of liquor under the hanging tree before he goes back into town to shoot up the saloon. Only Skip wasn’t going to be doing any shooting, and he might be the guy who ended up killed.
Donna looked caught, her face red, brushing a strand of her feathered brown hair out of her eyes as she stepped into her stonewashed jeans.
“No,” she said. “I mean, yes, I thought there was a chance he might show up, but I didn’t plan this, if that’s what you’re saying.”
She looked shocked at the accusation, but if Old Skip was a fool, he wasn’t a damn idiot.
Five minutes earlier, he said, and Lester would’ve caught them.
Not that once upon a time he would’ve minded being someone’s revenge lay. But that was a young man’s game.
Outside, the truck door slammed, then bootsteps sounded on the gravel. Silhouetted by the streetlight on Route 125, the guy’s profile moved past the windows, skinny as a cigarette with that giant hat perched on his head.
“Does it smell like pussy in here?” Skip sniffed, couldn’t decide whether it was the room or his mustache, so he reached in the pocket of that flannel and took out a Winston, lighting it with his Zippo, which was engraved with the name of his regiment, the 17th Calvary, that group of guys he’d done a single tour with, most of whom had drifted, if they didn’t drink themselves to death or eat their pistols after the war. He had a Colt 45 under the couch and a Winchester Pre-64 Model 70 in the closet in the mobile home where he lived with Zoe in Pineland Park, half a mile down the street, past the highway department. Fat lot of good they did him now.
Donna had just buttoned her jeans when the guy tried the door, rattling the knob, then pounding on the frame.
“Just be cool.” She pulled on the impractical tasseled fuck-me boots she wore behind the bar because as Zoe said, that was a young woman’s prerogative, and she straightened her shirt.
At least she’d remembered to lock the damn door in the first place.
Be cool. And that should’ve been easy for Old Skip, who was as cool as they came, but he was shitting bricks.
When the door swung open, the guy was standing there in his cowboy hat, his Wranglers, and a shirt he might’ve stolen from Hank Williams’ corpse, and he was holding a bouquet, likely five-dollar roses from the Shop ‘n Save down to Rochester.
“Lester,” Donna said, trying her best to sound surprised, and maybe forgetting that she was supposed to be pissed off at him for laying pipe to her cousin. “What are you doing here?”
“D’you think?” Lester was weaving, slurring, speaking too loudly. “I come to see you.” He stepped past her and into the room, holding the roses out to Donna. “I got these. For you.”
“Thanks, Lester.” Donna scowled. “You shouldn’t have.”
But her cheeks flushed with pleasure, or maybe it was afterglow, even if Skip hadn’t managed to take her to the mountain. Hell, who was he kidding? He hadn’t pushed her halfway up the hill. Just take the damn roses, girl.
Lester cocked his head, narrowing his eyes at Skip. “What’s he doing here?”
“Evening, Les.” Skip never made any bones about not liking the guy, but they’d always been what was the word, cordial. Old Skip had never met a stranger, and he could get along with anybody. Even a two-bit insurance salesman, an Allstate rep in a cowboy hat, like Lester.
“He’s helping me clean up,” Donna said. “You know Zoe went off to see Pink Floyd with the gals and left him all alone.”
Lester took off his cowboy hat. He wore his long, stringy hair in a combover, plastering it to his bald scalp. Might’ve been half Old Skip’s age, but he had half as much hair as Skip did.
He was holding his hat in his hand like he’d just set foot in his mama’s house. Donna closed the door behind him, giving Old Skip a helpless look over the guy’s shoulder.
“You know I don’t like you wearing them boots.” Lester frowned at Donna.
“Sorry, Les.” Standing on one foot, then the other, Donna took them off. “I didn’t know you were coming.”
“I’m gonna get something to put those flowers in.” Shaking his head, Old Skip went behind the bar and into the kitchen. If a man grew up enough, he didn’t need to be threatened by a woman who stood a few inches taller than he did.
In the kitchen, he looked around for a what did you call it, vase, and if this was his chance to hightail it, maybe by then he’d decided they were going to get away with it, or maybe that honorable part of him that was still a dang fool didn’t want to leave Donna alone with Lester after he’d been drinking. Whatever it was, instead of slipping out the back by the walk-in coolers, sneaking around to his F150, and peeling out of the lot, Old Skip grabbed an empty plastic container of the Wesson oil they used for the grill and brought that out front. Lester and Donna were sucking face, tongues stuck down each other’s throats like they were playing tonsil hockey. In her bare feet on the carpeted floor, Donna stood the same height Lester did.
Maybe Old Skip was so overcome with regret, he was resigned to his fate. Maybe that was why he didn’t run when he had the chance.
“I’m still mad at you for porking my cousin.” Donna was running her fingers through the guy’s hair, tucking strands of it behind his ears.
“That didn’t mean nothing,” Lester said. “Besides which, she came onto me. The hell am I supposed to do, babe? I’m only a man, but I’m all man, you know what I mean?”
And he grabbed the crotch of those Wranglers, gave his unit a squeeze.
Walking down the bar to fill that bottle with water, Old Skip dragged his bum leg because he might’ve been a man, but he was a coward, too. He wasn’t ashamed of it. You don’t need to be suspicious of me, Lester. No, sir. I’m just an old cripple.
His song came on the jukebox, “Up Against the Wall, Red Neck,” and that made him feel better. Skip had always been a redneck hippie like Waylon, Willie, and the rest of that Outlaw movement, one of the last of the Big D Democrats in the state, even if he knew better that to trust the government and had doubts about a draft dodging, dope smoking pussy hound like Clinton. Sure enough, that song was a sign everything was going to be fine. He filled the bottle with water, dropped the roses in, and set it on the bar.
Old Skip forced a yawn that started out fake but became real because he was an old man and tired in his bones. “Guess I should be heading on home.”
“Nonsense.” Lester pulled away from Donna, coming up for air long enough to reach in his wallet. He slapped a twenty on the bar. “Next round’s on me.”
“Aw, hell, Lester.” Tension showed in Donna’s face. “We’re closed.”
“Just leave the bill out on the bar.” Lester pointed at Skip’s money from earlier. “They can ring it up tomorrow.”
“What the hell.” Skip wouldn’t have minded another beer, since he hadn’t halfway tied one on, and the adrenaline when Lester showed up had cut through whatever buzz he’d had.
“That’s the spirit,” Lester said.
“Girl,” he said, while Skip was reaching down into the cooler to fetch up three longneck bottles of Bud, “You sure are wet. And you ain’t even wearing any drawers.”
Right, the dude had his hand down Donna’s pants, two knuckles deep in heaven.
But hadn’t she been wearing panties?
“I just get so turned on seeing you.” Donna’s voice was breathy like it had been half an hour ago in Skip’s ear. “I can’t help it, baby.”
Skip opened three bottles, set them on the bar.
“Hold that thought,” Lester said. “I’ve gotta go see a man about a horse.” He walked into the dining room. “Looks like someone spilled something.” He touched the felt on the pool table. Like a bloodhound, he sniffed. “Smells like ass over here.”
And he let out a big, horsey laugh and went around the cigarette machine to the can.
“You alright?” Skip slid Donna her beer.
“Guess I still love him.” She was cringing, like she expected someone to hit her, holding the bottle to her brow. “I’m sorry, but what happened between us, it ain’t the same, you know?”
Well, that was how the game was played. Within a day or two, unable to live with guilt of betraying her best friend, no doubt Donna would confess what they’d done to Zoe, disburdening her conscience, never mind Old Skip, who would have to live with the consequences.
“Think I might take off.” He drank his beer. “Leave you two lovebirds alone.”
And so, by Old Skip’s lights, they’d gotten away with it, and whatever happened with Zoe, he’d managed to avoid a good old-fashioned ass kicking. But when Lester came around the corner by the pool table, from his index finger he was dangling Donna’s pink thong.
“Babe.” He looked gutted, like even though he’d stuck it in her nineteen-year-old cousin, who’d only last year graduated from Nute High and had two brats in strollers, he couldn’t fathom the betrayal. “Ain’t these yours, same ones I got you at the JC Penny’s down to the Lilac Mall?”
Donna giggled, trying to play it off. “Where’d you find those, Les?” But her eyes were panicked, her voice shaking.
“I just now fished them,” Les said, “out of the corner pocket.”
He was pointing at the stain on the felt. And if there was any doubt in the guy’s mind about what had happened, Donna looked at Skip across the bar with a helpless shrug.
Lester dropped the panties like someone had set them on fire.
“You.” He crooked his finger at Skip.
And Old Skip, who’d always been like Michael Jackson a lover, not a fighter, the kind of guy to talk his way out of a jam instead of using his fists, what did he do?
Crippled foot or no, he took off running for the door.
He’d just grabbed the latch when the hand landed on his shoulder. Behind them, Donna was screaming Lester’s name.
“Baby,” she kept saying, “it’s not his fault. I came onto him.”
Lester spun Old Skip around, holding him by the front of his flannel shirt.
I’m just a man. Skip was about to say that.
“Boy,” Lester said, “I’m gonna learn you something.”
The first punch broke Skip’s nose. The second one sent him flying out the door and into the gravel lot in front of the bar.
***
Hard to say how long the beating went on. Long enough, anyway, that Old Skip had given up, curling up in the fetal position on the gravel and letting the guy kick him with those Tony Lamas. He was starting to wonder about organ damage, whether the guy was going to rupture one of his kidneys, when the headlights came over the rise, “Comfortably Numb” blasting from the stereo of Zoe’s ‘84 Ford Escort.
“Get up.” Lester was standing over him in those skinny-ass Wranglers. God help him, Old Skip was laughing. Blurred by the tears in his eyes, Lester stood like a conquering hero, like Conan the Barbarian, with Donna clinging to his arm. “Get up and take it like a man.”
Tires slid across the gravel as the car came to a stop, high beams illuminating that scene, Ole Skinny Britches standing over Skip, kicking his ass into next year.
“What the hell is happening here?” That was Zoe’s voice. And damned if this wasn’t about to get a whole lot worse.
The car door slammed. Everyone was speaking at once, shouting over each other. Skip was glad the beating had stopped. He was fixing his face in a grin that if you’d looked in the dictionary, would’ve been right there, next to the words shit-eating.
“What’re you doing here?” Lester cracked his knuckles.
“I went home,” Zoe said, “but his truck wasn’t there. Where the hell else would he be? This place is practically our goddamn living room.”
“I guess he’s learnt his lesson.” But Lester took one more shot at Skip’s ribs, for good measure.
“I’m sorry.” Donna was crying. “Zoe, please don’t be mad at me. I’m so, so sorry.”
“Mad at you for what?” And Old Skip knew that shade in Zoe’s voice and all it portended.
“He done porked her,” Lester said, “right on the pool table. Whole bar smells like ass. It’s like a dang tuna fish factory in there.”
When Old Skip opened his eyes, Zoe’s face was floating in front of him. She had a feathered Farah Fawcett haircut and big thick glasses with smudged lenses. After two ex-wives and three kids who wouldn’t return his calls, she was the love of his life, the best thing that had ever happened to him, all that kept him together body and soul, so why had he done this? Why, except to prove to himself that his dick still worked, or that he could swing with the best of them at forty-eight? If her pinned eyes were any indication, she’d taken those two hits of Orange Sunshine her friend had promised her at the show, so what was she doing driving, anyway?
Swallowing a throatful of blood and snot, keeping that grin on his face, he called her the nickname he’d used since he’d first hitched his wagon to hers five years ago: “Mother?”
Zoe picked him up by the front of his shirt, leaned close, smelling his mustache. She made a disgusted face, then dropped him on the gravel.
“No.” Standing, she dusted her hands. “He ain’t never gonna learn.”
Shamus Award-winning writer Tom Andes is the author of the detective novel Wait There Till You Hear from Me (Crescent City Books 2025). His stories have appeared in Best American Mystery and Suspense Stories 2025. He lives in Albuquerque, where he is a working musician. Find him at tomandes.com.
by Tom Andes
Old Skip knew better than to mess around with Donna. For one thing, she was half his age, twenty-four to Skip’s forty-eight. For another thing, she was besties with Skip’s old lady, Zoe, who was also the bar manager at the North Country Pub in Milton, New Hampshire, where Donna and Zoe worked, and where Skip was a regular, hanging out enough he might as well have been on payroll.
That night in July, Donna was in her vintage Mötley Crüe tee-shirt with no bra, and she was near tears because the guy she’d been seeing from down to Dover had gone and stuck it in one of her cousins. And Skip was only trying to comfort her.
And yeah, he agreed with her: men were dogs, and that was the way of the world. He knew that too well, had what you’d call firsthand experience.
“When’s Zoe supposed to get back, anyway?” Donna wiped her cheeks. She was stocking the coolers, the place closed, the last customers gone, Skynyrd on the jukebox, “Gimme Three Steps.” And so far, Skip was just listening.
He’d always been a good listener. Zoe told him that. She’d told him that’s what made him different from other men, other guys she’d been with, including her deadbeat ex-husband.
“Guess it’ll be a little while now.” Skip gestured with his bottle of Bud in the direction of Old Orchard Beach, Maine. If he was honest with himself, he felt an undercurrent of resentment, Zoe having a girls night when he wouldn’t have minded seeing Pink Floyd, even if they were a little too artsy-fartsy. But the light show was supposed to be balls-to-the-wall, tits out awesome.
He didn’t mind Zoe talking about other men, dudes she’d been with. At their age, if you were a virgin, well, the only reason for that was that you were socially retarded, besides which, he liked a woman who’d been around the block, who was seasoned, who wouldn’t break down crying like Donna, and all over a skinny twerp in tight jeans and a cowboy hat.
“I was supposed to go with them,” she said, “but someone had to take care of this place.”
She’d cashed out, and she counted the money back into the drawer, left a bank for tomorrow’s day shift, which Zoe was working. The old lady who owned the place, Gloria, who everybody called Ma, had the cancer, something wrong with one of her eyes, so she wore a patch, and everyone was working doubles, trying to keep the doors open and the lights on.
Donna reached in the cooler, grabbed a Bud longneck, and popped the top, coming around the bar to sit next to Skip. Since he’d shot his foot with a nail gun on a jobsite, he spent his days and nights occupying his customary stool on the corner, playing pool and dispensing wisdom.
Just like he was doing now.
“Listen,” he said, “don’t let this guy get you down. If you want to know the honest to God truth, you can do a hell of a lot better than Ole Skinny-Britches, anyway.”
“Skinny-Britches? Stop.” Donna swatted his arm, but she was giggling, and Skip felt a flush of pleasure. Yeah, he still had it, whatever the “it” was that made the ladies dance and drop their pants. Back in the day, before he’d shacked up with Zoe, Old Skip had been a hound.
Donna’s man—who was really more of a boy—was one of those dudes who wore a ten-gallon hat but wouldn’t know which end of a steer the horns belonged on, and he wore what must’ve been size 24 Wranglers, skinnier than Skip, even.
“Tell me the truth about that hat,” Skip said, “that old ten-pint hat.” He was warming to the subject. “You can’t really like that whole cowboy thing, can you?”
He was enjoying himself, maybe a little too much.
Donna sighed, looking with a long, sad face at her bottle, so for a second Skip worried she was going to start with the waterworks again. “He does look good in those Wranglers. And he screws like the dickens. I’m telling you he’s the best lay I’ve ever had.”
Skip felt that first flash of jealousy that should’ve been a sign he was in trouble, along with mild shock she would’ve volunteered that information, the two of them sitting alone at the bar. But that’s how it was at that place, like family, Donna practically Zoe’s daughter, or maybe more like a distant cousin, and nobody could keep a secret, anyway.
“Kids,” Skip said, swallowing the last of the warm backwash in his bottle, trying to hide his distaste. “You all think it’s about how hard and fast it is. You’ll have better, I promise.”
Donna leaned her head against his shoulder. Underneath the bar smell, the smell of cigarettes, beer, and the faint tang of sweat from working an eight-hour shift, serving drinks and doing all the cooking herself, he could smell her, that fresh, baby powder smell a young woman had that was so different from an older woman, or anyway, a woman Skip’s—or Zoe’s—age.
Yeah, Old Skip wasn’t the type to go chasing the young stuff, but Old Skip was still a dog, and he had her—Donna—in his nostrils.
“Promise?” Those big, blue eyes were still wet from the tears she’d been crying over this loser in his ten-gallon hat. Underneath that concert tee, her chest moved up and down. Maybe it was the air conditioning in the bar, but her nipples were hard, one of them titties poking the fabric next to Nikki Sixx’s head.
And that’s all it took. From there it was inches, the few inches Old Skip had to lean down to close the distance between their mouths. Even her breath smelled good, fragrant with Budweiser, that fruity bouquet.
He kissed her lips, which tasted of strawberry Chapstick, and chucked her on the chin. The glitter in her eyeshadow sparkled under the bar lights. “I promise.”
Old Skip had done half a semester at UNH back in ’74, a couple years after he came home from Vietnam. Even if he had long hair, he didn’t fit in with all those hippie radicals living off mommy and daddy’s money, future bankers and stockbrokers, all of them. But he’d read a lot of books, Robert Ludlum and such. He was the original rock and roll man, old school like those kids in the projects down to Boston said, and he didn’t need a lot of philosophy or book learning to know he was a fool, which was all most of the great literature told you, anyway.
According to the Budweiser clock on the wall it was a quarter of twelve. By now the band had finished their second encore, and Zoe and her friends would be getting on the road, fighting traffic to get out of the stadium parking lot. Old Skip had roadied for Aerosmith on the Rocks tour, so he knew how it worked. He had an hour, maybe an hour and a half before she got home.
He didn’t need a lot of book learning, either, to know what he was going to do when she said what she said next, even if it was the wrong thing to do, a seismic betrayal of Zoe, Donna, and himself.
“Show me,” she said, and damned fool or not, Old Skip said he would try.
***
Nearly as soon as it was done, Skip could feel things going wrong, and it started with the fact Donna was crying again, but this time she wasn’t crying about Ole Skinny-Britches.
“I just can’t believe we did this to Zoe,” she said. As if it hadn’t been her idea.
She was sitting on the edge of the pool table, and Skip hoped the wet spot they’d left on the green felt would disappear by morning. She was looking around for that Mötley Crüe concert tee, which was wadded up and stuffed in a corner pocket, Skip admiring those torpedo-shaped titties, which were as perky and buoyant as youth itself, while at the same time understanding he would never touch or suck on those fun bags again. Not for as long as he lived and breathed. Once Zoe finished with him, that might not be much longer.
“I’m sorry,” Skip said. “It’s never happened like that before.”
He felt confused and angry at his body’s betrayal. Not that he couldn’t get it up or anything like that because he was a randy old goat, but it would’ve been fair to say he was only halfway hard, so it felt like he was trying to cram a Slinky into a dish of fruit preserves. Once he did get it in, something about the angle on that pool table had made him lose control, and he’d lasted all of three strokes before he had to pull out, so that the Budweiser clock on the wall now read only five minutes of midnight.
Ten minutes, from first kiss to humiliating end. He was ashamed to think Ole Skinny-Britches screwed her better than that, granite-stiff, the dude’s balls slapping her butt for hours, swinging like the light bag at a boxing gym.
“Pass me that bar towel,” Donna said, “will you?”
She used the terrycloth rag to wipe up the mess on her stomach, that skin white and unblemished, and Old Skip would never touch her there again, either, not unless he bumped into her one night in the bar.
It was so different from Zoe’s stomach, where she had stretch marks from two pregnancies, one of her daughters Donna’s age, the other three years older, and the scar from her hysterectomy.
Old Skip felt a pang, the ground opening under him, as he grasped the size of what he’d done.
“You alright?” His dungarees were around his ankles—more trouble than it was worth taking his boots off, on account of that injury to his foot—and he pulled them up, fastening his belt. Garth was on the jukebox, “Friends in Low Places.”
“I’ve got to go clean up.” Donna left her pants on the floor next to the pool table, her big white butt shining in the moonlight from the windows as she went back to the ladies room, and the answer to that question was no: she was not alright.
Well, that’s what Old Skip got, messing with young stuff. An older woman like Zoe was more what did you call it, pliable. She could take a licking and keep on ticking, like the Timex watch in that commercial with the Sumo wrestlers. A young piece like Donna came with drama.
Yeah, Old Skip sure was a fool, promising this sweet young filly a good time, then crapping out before the first heat was through. He ran his hand down his mustache, which was still wet, rank with the musky odor of her crotch. He needed to wash his face, shampoo his flavor saver with a little Head & Shoulders before Zoe got back and kissed him on the mouth.
He gathered up his flannel, put that back on over his Molly Hatchet concert tee, and went behind the bar, where he dug a couple singles out of his wallet and left them next to the register, helping himself to a Bud longneck from the cooler. What was he going to tell her?
Headlights sliced across the room, a car coming off the main road and down into the lot. Zoe must be back early. Whatever it looked like, the two of them here alone in the bar this late, no reason that should make her suspicious, since Skip hung out till closing time on the regular. But the engine was too loud, and the headlights were shining three feet too high on the back wall. Peeking around the blinds, Old Skip gulped. It was that white Dodge RAM Ole Skinny-Britches drove, with its jacked-up suspension you could park a bus under, with the manifold rumbling, with four-foot tires and dualies in the back. Sure enough, Old Skip had stepped in the dung heap.
He might’ve taken off running out the back door, but how far was he going to get with that hobbled left foot? Besides which, his own pickup, a red F150, was parked in front of the bar.
“Holy shit.” Donna was standing at the back of the room. With the headlights from the truck shining around the blinds, her skin was so white it glowed, that brown tangle of hair dewy where her thighs met, and he was glad she didn’t shave, like a lot of girls did, while at the same time he would never again kneel before that altar, never again worship at the font of Donna’s snatch, that temple where life began. She grabbed her jeans from the floor. “Lester’s here.”
Lester being Ole Skinny-Britches, the man with the ten-pint hat.
The truck doused its headlights, so the bar went dark, Meatloaf playing on the jukebox, “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That).” Would Skip do anything for love? He wished he could get out of that bar and maybe Stafford County, if not the whole state of New Hampshire, without having to face any of them, not Lester, not Donna, and not Zoe, either.
“I’ll talk to him,” Skip said, “if you want to take off out the back.”
Wasn’t it chivalrous of Skip—if that was the word—to offer to deal with the guy for her?
But Donna was making a face, showing her teeth, almost smiling.
“My car’s out front,” she said. “He’s already going to know both of us are here.”
Not that she was enjoying this scene. Not that she’d what was the word, orchestrated it. Not that she’d wanted it to happen. But maybe she didn’t mind, either.
Had Old Skip been played?
“You know he was coming?” Skip drank from his longneck. He felt like Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, which he’d seen in the theater down to the Lilac Mall last year, sipping from that bottle of liquor under the hanging tree before he goes back into town to shoot up the saloon. Only Skip wasn’t going to be doing any shooting, and he might be the guy who ended up killed.
Donna looked caught, her face red, brushing a strand of her feathered brown hair out of her eyes as she stepped into her stonewashed jeans.
“No,” she said. “I mean, yes, I thought there was a chance he might show up, but I didn’t plan this, if that’s what you’re saying.”
She looked shocked at the accusation, but if Old Skip was a fool, he wasn’t a damn idiot.
Five minutes earlier, he said, and Lester would’ve caught them.
Not that once upon a time he would’ve minded being someone’s revenge lay. But that was a young man’s game.
Outside, the truck door slammed, then bootsteps sounded on the gravel. Silhouetted by the streetlight on Route 125, the guy’s profile moved past the windows, skinny as a cigarette with that giant hat perched on his head.
“Does it smell like pussy in here?” Skip sniffed, couldn’t decide whether it was the room or his mustache, so he reached in the pocket of that flannel and took out a Winston, lighting it with his Zippo, which was engraved with the name of his regiment, the 17th Calvary, that group of guys he’d done a single tour with, most of whom had drifted, if they didn’t drink themselves to death or eat their pistols after the war. He had a Colt 45 under the couch and a Winchester Pre-64 Model 70 in the closet in the mobile home where he lived with Zoe in Pineland Park, half a mile down the street, past the highway department. Fat lot of good they did him now.
Donna had just buttoned her jeans when the guy tried the door, rattling the knob, then pounding on the frame.
“Just be cool.” She pulled on the impractical tasseled fuck-me boots she wore behind the bar because as Zoe said, that was a young woman’s prerogative, and she straightened her shirt.
At least she’d remembered to lock the damn door in the first place.
Be cool. And that should’ve been easy for Old Skip, who was as cool as they came, but he was shitting bricks.
When the door swung open, the guy was standing there in his cowboy hat, his Wranglers, and a shirt he might’ve stolen from Hank Williams’ corpse, and he was holding a bouquet, likely five-dollar roses from the Shop ‘n Save down to Rochester.
“Lester,” Donna said, trying her best to sound surprised, and maybe forgetting that she was supposed to be pissed off at him for laying pipe to her cousin. “What are you doing here?”
“D’you think?” Lester was weaving, slurring, speaking too loudly. “I come to see you.” He stepped past her and into the room, holding the roses out to Donna. “I got these. For you.”
“Thanks, Lester.” Donna scowled. “You shouldn’t have.”
But her cheeks flushed with pleasure, or maybe it was afterglow, even if Skip hadn’t managed to take her to the mountain. Hell, who was he kidding? He hadn’t pushed her halfway up the hill. Just take the damn roses, girl.
Lester cocked his head, narrowing his eyes at Skip. “What’s he doing here?”
“Evening, Les.” Skip never made any bones about not liking the guy, but they’d always been what was the word, cordial. Old Skip had never met a stranger, and he could get along with anybody. Even a two-bit insurance salesman, an Allstate rep in a cowboy hat, like Lester.
“He’s helping me clean up,” Donna said. “You know Zoe went off to see Pink Floyd with the gals and left him all alone.”
Lester took off his cowboy hat. He wore his long, stringy hair in a combover, plastering it to his bald scalp. Might’ve been half Old Skip’s age, but he had half as much hair as Skip did.
He was holding his hat in his hand like he’d just set foot in his mama’s house. Donna closed the door behind him, giving Old Skip a helpless look over the guy’s shoulder.
“You know I don’t like you wearing them boots.” Lester frowned at Donna.
“Sorry, Les.” Standing on one foot, then the other, Donna took them off. “I didn’t know you were coming.”
“I’m gonna get something to put those flowers in.” Shaking his head, Old Skip went behind the bar and into the kitchen. If a man grew up enough, he didn’t need to be threatened by a woman who stood a few inches taller than he did.
In the kitchen, he looked around for a what did you call it, vase, and if this was his chance to hightail it, maybe by then he’d decided they were going to get away with it, or maybe that honorable part of him that was still a dang fool didn’t want to leave Donna alone with Lester after he’d been drinking. Whatever it was, instead of slipping out the back by the walk-in coolers, sneaking around to his F150, and peeling out of the lot, Old Skip grabbed an empty plastic container of the Wesson oil they used for the grill and brought that out front. Lester and Donna were sucking face, tongues stuck down each other’s throats like they were playing tonsil hockey. In her bare feet on the carpeted floor, Donna stood the same height Lester did.
Maybe Old Skip was so overcome with regret, he was resigned to his fate. Maybe that was why he didn’t run when he had the chance.
“I’m still mad at you for porking my cousin.” Donna was running her fingers through the guy’s hair, tucking strands of it behind his ears.
“That didn’t mean nothing,” Lester said. “Besides which, she came onto me. The hell am I supposed to do, babe? I’m only a man, but I’m all man, you know what I mean?”
And he grabbed the crotch of those Wranglers, gave his unit a squeeze.
Walking down the bar to fill that bottle with water, Old Skip dragged his bum leg because he might’ve been a man, but he was a coward, too. He wasn’t ashamed of it. You don’t need to be suspicious of me, Lester. No, sir. I’m just an old cripple.
His song came on the jukebox, “Up Against the Wall, Red Neck,” and that made him feel better. Skip had always been a redneck hippie like Waylon, Willie, and the rest of that Outlaw movement, one of the last of the Big D Democrats in the state, even if he knew better that to trust the government and had doubts about a draft dodging, dope smoking pussy hound like Clinton. Sure enough, that song was a sign everything was going to be fine. He filled the bottle with water, dropped the roses in, and set it on the bar.
Old Skip forced a yawn that started out fake but became real because he was an old man and tired in his bones. “Guess I should be heading on home.”
“Nonsense.” Lester pulled away from Donna, coming up for air long enough to reach in his wallet. He slapped a twenty on the bar. “Next round’s on me.”
“Aw, hell, Lester.” Tension showed in Donna’s face. “We’re closed.”
“Just leave the bill out on the bar.” Lester pointed at Skip’s money from earlier. “They can ring it up tomorrow.”
“What the hell.” Skip wouldn’t have minded another beer, since he hadn’t halfway tied one on, and the adrenaline when Lester showed up had cut through whatever buzz he’d had.
“That’s the spirit,” Lester said.
“Girl,” he said, while Skip was reaching down into the cooler to fetch up three longneck bottles of Bud, “You sure are wet. And you ain’t even wearing any drawers.”
Right, the dude had his hand down Donna’s pants, two knuckles deep in heaven.
But hadn’t she been wearing panties?
“I just get so turned on seeing you.” Donna’s voice was breathy like it had been half an hour ago in Skip’s ear. “I can’t help it, baby.”
Skip opened three bottles, set them on the bar.
“Hold that thought,” Lester said. “I’ve gotta go see a man about a horse.” He walked into the dining room. “Looks like someone spilled something.” He touched the felt on the pool table. Like a bloodhound, he sniffed. “Smells like ass over here.”
And he let out a big, horsey laugh and went around the cigarette machine to the can.
“You alright?” Skip slid Donna her beer.
“Guess I still love him.” She was cringing, like she expected someone to hit her, holding the bottle to her brow. “I’m sorry, but what happened between us, it ain’t the same, you know?”
Well, that was how the game was played. Within a day or two, unable to live with guilt of betraying her best friend, no doubt Donna would confess what they’d done to Zoe, disburdening her conscience, never mind Old Skip, who would have to live with the consequences.
“Think I might take off.” He drank his beer. “Leave you two lovebirds alone.”
And so, by Old Skip’s lights, they’d gotten away with it, and whatever happened with Zoe, he’d managed to avoid a good old-fashioned ass kicking. But when Lester came around the corner by the pool table, from his index finger he was dangling Donna’s pink thong.
“Babe.” He looked gutted, like even though he’d stuck it in her nineteen-year-old cousin, who’d only last year graduated from Nute High and had two brats in strollers, he couldn’t fathom the betrayal. “Ain’t these yours, same ones I got you at the JC Penny’s down to the Lilac Mall?”
Donna giggled, trying to play it off. “Where’d you find those, Les?” But her eyes were panicked, her voice shaking.
“I just now fished them,” Les said, “out of the corner pocket.”
He was pointing at the stain on the felt. And if there was any doubt in the guy’s mind about what had happened, Donna looked at Skip across the bar with a helpless shrug.
Lester dropped the panties like someone had set them on fire.
“You.” He crooked his finger at Skip.
And Old Skip, who’d always been like Michael Jackson a lover, not a fighter, the kind of guy to talk his way out of a jam instead of using his fists, what did he do?
Crippled foot or no, he took off running for the door.
He’d just grabbed the latch when the hand landed on his shoulder. Behind them, Donna was screaming Lester’s name.
“Baby,” she kept saying, “it’s not his fault. I came onto him.”
Lester spun Old Skip around, holding him by the front of his flannel shirt.
I’m just a man. Skip was about to say that.
“Boy,” Lester said, “I’m gonna learn you something.”
The first punch broke Skip’s nose. The second one sent him flying out the door and into the gravel lot in front of the bar.
***
Hard to say how long the beating went on. Long enough, anyway, that Old Skip had given up, curling up in the fetal position on the gravel and letting the guy kick him with those Tony Lamas. He was starting to wonder about organ damage, whether the guy was going to rupture one of his kidneys, when the headlights came over the rise, “Comfortably Numb” blasting from the stereo of Zoe’s ‘84 Ford Escort.
“Get up.” Lester was standing over him in those skinny-ass Wranglers. God help him, Old Skip was laughing. Blurred by the tears in his eyes, Lester stood like a conquering hero, like Conan the Barbarian, with Donna clinging to his arm. “Get up and take it like a man.”
Tires slid across the gravel as the car came to a stop, high beams illuminating that scene, Ole Skinny Britches standing over Skip, kicking his ass into next year.
“What the hell is happening here?” That was Zoe’s voice. And damned if this wasn’t about to get a whole lot worse.
The car door slammed. Everyone was speaking at once, shouting over each other. Skip was glad the beating had stopped. He was fixing his face in a grin that if you’d looked in the dictionary, would’ve been right there, next to the words shit-eating.
“What’re you doing here?” Lester cracked his knuckles.
“I went home,” Zoe said, “but his truck wasn’t there. Where the hell else would he be? This place is practically our goddamn living room.”
“I guess he’s learnt his lesson.” But Lester took one more shot at Skip’s ribs, for good measure.
“I’m sorry.” Donna was crying. “Zoe, please don’t be mad at me. I’m so, so sorry.”
“Mad at you for what?” And Old Skip knew that shade in Zoe’s voice and all it portended.
“He done porked her,” Lester said, “right on the pool table. Whole bar smells like ass. It’s like a dang tuna fish factory in there.”
When Old Skip opened his eyes, Zoe’s face was floating in front of him. She had a feathered Farah Fawcett haircut and big thick glasses with smudged lenses. After two ex-wives and three kids who wouldn’t return his calls, she was the love of his life, the best thing that had ever happened to him, all that kept him together body and soul, so why had he done this? Why, except to prove to himself that his dick still worked, or that he could swing with the best of them at forty-eight? If her pinned eyes were any indication, she’d taken those two hits of Orange Sunshine her friend had promised her at the show, so what was she doing driving, anyway?
Swallowing a throatful of blood and snot, keeping that grin on his face, he called her the nickname he’d used since he’d first hitched his wagon to hers five years ago: “Mother?”
Zoe picked him up by the front of his shirt, leaned close, smelling his mustache. She made a disgusted face, then dropped him on the gravel.
“No.” Standing, she dusted her hands. “He ain’t never gonna learn.”
Shamus Award-winning writer Tom Andes is the author of the detective novel Wait There Till You Hear from Me (Crescent City Books 2025). His stories have appeared in Best American Mystery and Suspense Stories 2025. He lives in Albuquerque, where he is a working musician. Find him at tomandes.com.