Flesh Mob by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lawrence Block
Published: 2021-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

AT MAC’S, THE roadhouse on Route 68 where Matthew Boulton sat drinking boilermakers and listening to the jukebox, things got livelier with the passage of time. First, though, there was the dinner hour, at which time Mac’s was relatively empty. The drunk was still there, sleeping peacefully if precariously on his stool. The bartender was still there, reading the Dayton Daily News and smoking a cheap cigar. And Matt was still there, of course.

Strangely enough, he was not getting drunk. He could feel his liquor, but he had reached a certain point of gentle mellowness and had stayed there, only ordering enough in the way of fresh drinks to maintain that mellow-edge without slipping over the line toward actual drunkenness. By the time the dinner hour ended and the evening trade began to filter in, he had more or less switched to beer, which he sipped slowly if at all. He was doing more thinking than anything else. He was trying to plot the course of the future, a trying proposition at best, and his mood was pensive. He sipped beer, he smoked, he listened to the music.

The evening crowd at Mac’s was a fairly wild bunch. There were the single guys—construction workers, travelling men, veterans, bums. There were married men who wanted to get away from houses and wives and kids and mortgage payments and power-mowers and have some undefined and perhaps undefinable fun. There were married women playing around, single women looking for romance and ready to settle for half, whores ready to play any game in the world for a fast five dollars, and apprentice tramps who just plain wanted to get made good and proper.

The atmosphere of Mac’s at evening was raucous, carried along by the twin engines of booze and sex. People came there to get drunk or to get made, or both, or to start a fight, or to let go and holler a little. It was a roadhouse—not a neighborhood bar, not a quiet saloon for serious drinking. It was a loud, wild, open-throated sort of place.

Matt enjoyed it. He liked it when a shabby sort of whore came over to him and played with his fly and told him all of the filthy things she would do in a cabin in the rear for just five dollars. He liked it when a loud-mouthed man with thinning black hair pawed a girl’s breasts and another man picked up a bar stool and hit the loud-mouth over the head with it. He liked it when a pair of teenage tramps started dancing, twisting their bodies and shaking at one another, until a pair of men took them and dragged them out of the door and behind the roadhouse and rented a pair of cabins and passed the two girls back and forth all night.

It was raw, primitive. It was a big switch from the academic life, a far cry from Clifton College society. And Matt sat there, drinking an occasional beer, joining an

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