It was a small shack—three wooden walls stuck against the adobe wall of the Border Palace—jammed with a lunch counter, eight stools, a stove, a handful of cooking implements, half the flies in the world, an iron cot behind a half-drawn burlap curtain, and the proprietor. The interior had once been painted white. It was a smoky grease-color now, except where homemade signs said:
Meals At All Hours. No Credit.
and gave the prices of various foods. These signs were a fly-specked yellow-grey.
The proprietor wasn’t a Jew—an Armenian or something of the sort, I thought. He was a small man, old, scrawny, dark-skinned, wrinkled and cheerful.
“You the new sheriff?” he asked, and when he grinned I saw he had no teeth.
“Deputy,” I admitted, “and hungry. I’ll eat anything you’ve got that won’t bite back, and that won’t take long to get ready.”
“Sure!” He turned to his stove and began banging pans around. “We need sheriffs,” he said over his shoulder. “Sure, we need them!”
“Somebody been picking on you?”
He showed his empty gums in another grin.
“Nobody pick on me—I tell you that!” He flourished a stringy hand at a sugar barrel under the shelves behind his counter. “I fix them decidedly!”
A shotgun butt stuck out of the barrel. I pulled it out: a double-barrel shotgun with the barrels sawed off short: a mean weapon close up.