Banis He would remain like that forever in her memory: his mouth agape, sky-blue eyes wide with shock and the first hot glint of pain. He was gone before she could speak, rushing out the door, the car’s tires shrieking accusations at her as they went down the driveway. She never saw him again. The sheriff advised against it. “You’d never know him,” he said. “He was beat up pretty awful.” There was no mystery to how he had gotten so “beat up.” He’d missed that bad curve on the old highway, hitting a tree at—according to the best estimates—something like ninety miles an hour. Even the car had barely been recognizable. The mystery was how a man who almost never touched liquor could have been so drunk. “Drunk as a skunk,” the sheriff said, though he put it a bit more delicately with the widow. “I only saw him one other time,” the bartender at The Lone Pine said. “He was in once with Doc Wister, had coffee that time. The other night, though, he must have put away a half-dozen shots, more than that, maybe, in fifteen, twenty minutes.
