Coasters. Gerald Duff

      “Who’s that?” Waylon said, turning to look to his left. “Who’s taking my name in vain?”

      A few feet away a small man was looking up from his beer to return Waylon’s stare, his right hand cupped around the glass in front of him as though he was afraid the bartender would snatch it away if he let his attention wander. Waylon couldn’t make out the man’s face in the dim light, and he leaned forward to see better, giving a little grunt of recognition when he saw the man’s flat-top hair style outlined against the window behind him.

      “That you, Shepard?” he said. “Hard to tell without my glasses.”

      “Yep,” Bobby Shepard said, turning back to his glass and taking a measured sip from it. “It’s me, all right.”

      “I knew you by your haircut,” Waylon said. “Takes me back to the class of ’68.”

      “You see something wrong with my haircut, McPhee?”

      “No, Bobby, to the contrary. It fits you right down to the ground.” Waylon heard the clunk of the Regal bottle next to his elbow and turned to observe the bartender return to his lonely station near a stack of soft-drink cases.

      “Promise me something, Bobby,” Waylon said.

      “What you talking about?”

      “Don’t go changing,” Waylon said. “That’s what I’m talking about. Stay just the way I see you tonight.”

      “Crazy fucker,” Bobby Shepard said and allowed himself another sip from his glass. After a minute he spoke again. “What you doing in town? I thought you was working at BP up in Beaumont.”

      “I was for several years,” Waylon said, regarding the pale green bottle before him. “Then I wasn’t.”

      “Why not? Get run off?”

      “Well, yes, Bobby, in a manner of speaking that captures it. But that’s not what they call it these days.”

      “What? Getting laid off?”

      “No, that’s not the term either, Bobby,” Waylon said, sipping directly from the Regal bottle. “I have been re-engineered. All part of the process of benchmarking and redefinition and downsizing underway at BP.”

      “Shit,” Bobby said in a suspicious tone. “Re-engineering. You ain’t no engineer in the first place.”

      “Bobby, you misunderstand me. I am not and never have been an engineer, no. I am being re-engineered. I am acted upon, not acting myself. Some might call me a victim of strategic planning.”

      “What’d you do to get fired,” Bobby Shepard said. “That’s what I’m asking you, McPhee.”

      “I ran into a narrow passage in the flow sequence, Bobby. One I couldn’t fit through, no matter how tight I squeezed myself up. The new filter they installed at British Petroleum got me. It was just too fine a gauge for me to slip on through that sucker.”

      “Huh,” Bobby Shepard said and addressed his beer.

      “And you know what else, Bobby?” Waylon said.

      “Uh-uh, I don’t.”

      “The union didn’t help me a bit when I filed a grievance against what happened to me. Just stood back and let me fight BP about it on my own.”

      “And you lost?”

      “Just like the Astros always do. Yessir, I did.”

      “You say chips?” the bartender called to Waylon. “With that burger?”

      “Is there any choice?”

      “No.”

      “Well, yes, I’ll say chips, then,” Waylon told him and looked back toward Bobby Shepard’s end of the bar. “What you doing these days, Shepard?”

      “Same old, same old.”

      “Gauging?”

      “Forty hours a week at Pure Oil.”

      “Uh huh,” Waylon said and addressed his Regal.

      “Let me ask you something.”

      “What’s that, Bobby?”

      “Why do you drink that Regal shit? It ain’t but seven ounces to a bottle.”

      “You got it exactly,” Waylon said. “See how little the bottle is, and how big it makes my hand look? Now, if a woman was to come in here, she’d look at that and think I was a good-sized man, the way it looks here in my fist.”

      Waylon turned the bottle slowly from side to side, admiring the flash of light off the golden crown worked into the center of the design on the label. “Now if I were to drink directly from a full-sized, twelve-ounce Falstaff, I’d look like a dwarf sucking on a baby bottle.”

      Bobby Shepard snorted into his glass. “You are a crazy fucker, McPhee, saying that about yourself.”

      “Somebody’s going to do it,” Waylon answered. “I might as well get the jump. A little compact man has got to work all the angles, Bobby. Hell, you know that. What do you weigh these days? You don’t seem to have grown much since high school.”

      “One-eighty.”

      “Bullshit, Bobby,” Waylon said, looking from the top of Shepard’s flattop down his T-shirt to his jeans and to the cowboy boots shyly peeking out of their cuffs. “You don’t weigh a pound more than one-thirty, one-thirty-five.”

      “Well, I don’t weigh much, see.”

      “You sure as shit don’t.”

      “Naw,” Bobby Shepard said after a minute of looking intently at the surface of the bar in the Nederland Club. “What I mean is I don’t get on a weighing machine. To see how much I weigh. That’s what I’m talking about.”

      “There is a reason a man avoids measurements, Bobby,” Waylon said. “Of every kind.”

      Waylon’s hamburger came, and he killed the rest of the beer in the small green bottle and looked down at the plate. “Where’s the chips?” he asked.

      “You got to ask for them extra,” the bartender said, delicately picking up Waylon’s empty between thumb and forefinger as though performing a step in a catalytic conversion in a Gulf Oil laboratory. “In the bag’s the only way they come.”

      “I thought I did ask,” Waylon said. “All right, in the bag and another Regal.”

      “You ain’t been in the Nederland Club in so long a time you don’t know how to act,” Bobby Shepard called as the two men watched the bartender stretch to pull a bag of potato chips off the rack positioned over an assortment of gins and whiskeys and vodkas lined up on a shelf.

      “It’s tough trying to make it back into the big leagues,” Waylon said, lifting his hamburger toward his mouth. “These lay-offs affect the hand-eye coordination adversely.”

      “Huh,” Bobby Shepard said, watching with close attention as Waylon ate his supper.

      “What you going to do now?” he said in the middle of Waylon’s next-to-last bite of the sandwich. “Try to get on Pure Oil?”

      “No, Bobby,” Waylon said, swiping out the last crumbs of potato chips from the bag. “Once you try to run a grievance on one of these companies, they enter your name in a special file in the data bank.”

      “They do?”

      “Yep, it’s called the keep-this-asshole-running file, and let me tell you, partner, that storage file is hell to get out of.” Waylon took an after-dinner sip from his new Regal and then went on. “No, I believe I might try to do a little substitute teaching again, Bobby. See what might turn up in the field of education.”

      “You went