And it didn’t turn out to be much of a fight, anyway, so eventually he turned away. The woman had showed up on Saturday. By the next afternoon, she had guys fighting over her. He shook his head. With his brother Ace it was always women. And not just the kind of women who went with booze. Women liked him. ’Cause he’s good-looking, lean, and has that smile. The opposite of me. Dale got a pretty good look at her, and she seemed to be a short-haired redhead, kind of trashy and skinny. Whatever. He paced the interior of the pole barn and heard his boot soles echo faintly on the crumbling concrete slab. Empty like a cavern in here. Dale had this habit that, if he didn’t concentrate, he saw things the way they looked when he was a child. Like this place. He remembered it full of big iron—bright-yellow backhoes, crawler dozers, loaders, and graders. Back in the missile time, when Dad was in the money; always chewing a cigar, talking on the phone in the front office, his brother Ace jockeying the big machines around the lot.
