The Stud Book Read Online Free Page A

rag into the air, caught it, and wiped the hardwood counter down. A disco rehash blasted a rattling sound track.
    A couple sat beside Humble. The woman’s back made a wall where she turned away to share a plate of assembly line–style calamari with her date. She twisted around to look at Humble, a greasy, fried circle held between her fingers like a wedding ring. She sized him up. She swiveled away again and used her other hand to flick a strand of her long dark hair.
    Humble Johnson hadn’t played dead girl shots in years, but he thought about it sometimes. Did anyone play anymore? He’d playedin college at Oregon State, in the lounge, surrounded by the smell of pressed-board furniture and the sweat of his dorm-mates.
    The bartender pulled a beer for somebody farther down the row.
    Humble hunched over his bourbon, elbows on the glossy wood of the polished bar top, what had once been a slice of the body of a massive old-growth tree. A hundred years earlier when loggers ruled, when a tree in Oregon was bigger around than an SUV and SUVs didn’t exist yet, somebody needed a place to set a drink and so felled timber big enough to knock out a neighborhood.
    This place had been a logger’s watering hole turned wino’s haven. More recently a pair of midlife bankers had bought the building and hired a Vietnamese crew to peel molding plywood off the windows. They aired out aged smoke, put up red velvet and gold-flecked wallpaper, and lined the glass shelves with a higher grade of hooch. Humble Johnson, forty-two years old, born and raised in Portland, used to ride his tricycle on the sidewalks around there. He’d waited for the TriMet bus at a bench just down the block. He’d been drinking in that bar and elsewhere for more than twenty years, maybe as long as the bartender had been alive. His history was written in dive bars, laced with malt winds off the old Weinhard’s brewery—the Swinehard’s Factory, his friends called it. The Swig Hard, the Swill. Beer foam runoff filled the streets back then.
    Nobody would put up with that shit now. Beer foam in the streets? The brewery shut down. The “Brewery Blocks” had been converted to a stretch of condos and art galleries. The old Industrial Northwest had been renamed the Alphabet District, like some kind of baby crackers or cheap soup.
    When did people get so delicate?
    It’s a special crowd that settles in to the amber candlelit glow of booze and mirrors before mothers of the neighborhood call their children home to dinner, before a standard workday ends. Humble was part of that crowd. It warmed the cockles of his heart, whatever the hell cockles were. In this haunt, on a strip of northeast Portland, the new owners had added three flat-screen TVs. One, almost overhead, showed the news. Another, just past the pool table,
CSI
reruns. The third was a string of ads.
    He watched TV, all three of them, and waited for a girl to die.
    Bourbon coated his tongue and burned its way down histhroat. He watched the news. His guess? Dead local girl inside of fifteen minutes, almost to the weather report, halfway to sports. He would’ve laid that bet.
    The way you played the game was, watch TV with drinks ready. When you see a dead woman, pour a shot and throw it back. When you see a girl pulled out of the river, fake-looking TV-land strangle marks on her pale neck, chug a pint. When you see a glamour girl splayed-legged and faceup, dusted blue, dressed just enough to please the FCC, shout “Skoal!” and clink glasses and bottoms up.
    Humble missed those days. It’d been fun.
    On the
CSI
rerun, a dead girl started the episode. Humble’s internal meter told him there wouldn’t be another body there for a while.
    You could lay bets. With the TV off, you could bet how many minutes until the dead girl showed up, turn the TV on, and time it. Bet how many channels and flip through. You could bet how many channels until the dead girl, or how many channels, at any minute, were showing a