“Yes, for two or three days,” I said. “I’ve got something on the fire.”
He stood up and smiled, and held out his hand.
“Thanks for the tip, Parker,” he said. “If you’ll take a walk with me I’ll give you something real to drink.”
I didn’t have anything against that. He led me out of the Golden Horseshoe and down a side street to an adobe house set out where the town fringed off into the desert. In the front room he waved me to a chair and went into the next room.
“What do you fancy?” he called through the door. “Rye, gin, tequila, Scotch—”
“The last one wins,” I interrupted his catalog.
He brought in a bottle of Black and White, a siphon and some glasses, and we settled down to drinking. When that bottle was empty there was another to take its place. We drank and talked, drank and talked, and each of us pretended to be drunker than he really was—though before long we were both as full as a pair of goats.
It was a drinking contest pure and simple. He was trying to drink me into a pulp—a pulp that would easily give up all of its secrets—and I was trying the same game on him. Neither of us made much progress. Neither he nor I was young enough in the world to blab much when we were drunk that wouldn’t have come out if we had been sober. Few grown men do, unless they get to boasting, or are very skillfully handled. All that afternoon we faced each other over the table in the center of the room, drank and entertained each other.
“Y’ know,” he was saying somewhere along toward dark, “I’ve been a damn ass. Got a wife—the nicesh woman in the worl’. Wantsh me t’ come back to her, an’ all tha’ short of thing. Yet I hang around here,