THEY DRANK THEIR BEERS and watched without comment the college wrestling match under way on a TV above the bar, two muscular near-naked men twining like pythons, until the channel switched unaccountably to a basketball game. In the backbar mirror the boy saw himself and Lester sitting side by side and it seemed an odd, implausible thing to see. When the bartender brought their burgers, fat and tottering on nests of fries, they both set into them gratefully, though the boy was not hungry.

The bartender indicated their glasses but only Reed Lester was ready for another.

“I don’t much follow college sports,” he said to the boy around a mouthful of beef. “You?”

“Not much.”

“What do they call them in Wisconsin, is it Buckeyes?”

“Badgers,” he said. The word flaring red on the white field of memory—her running shorts on the mountain, in the woods.

“Know what they call them here?”

He didn’t, and Reed Lester leaned and said cagily: “Cornhuskers. You believe that? Who can say that word without thinking cornholers?”

They finished the burgers and worked the fries. The bartender came to check on their glasses and rapped a knuckle on the bar. “Nothing personal against you gents, but there’s a booth opening up over there if you want it.”

They looked and Lester said, “What do you say?”

The boy glanced out the near window. The sleet was still coming down hard. Endless needles shooting through the red haze of the neon beer sign.

“I don’t mind sitting a while, but I won’t drink any more.”

“You sit and I’ll drink.”

They carried their glasses to the booth and the redhead, Patti, took their order and went away.

“How old you think she is?” said Lester.

“I don’t know. Thirty.”

“I think more like thirty-five. Still, she might be about as good as it’s gonna get in the old Paradise tonight.” As he said it the front door swung open and two young women blew in hunched and clutching each other and gathering control of their skating bootheels and laughing. “Holy fuck my hair,” one said, and they laughed again and cast their made-up eyes around the room.

Reed Lester raised an eyebrow at the boy.

The girls spied the two empty stools at the bar and hurried over and seated themselves with considerable tugging on short skirts and shifting of bottoms and tossing of hair.

“Bombed,” the boy said.

“They might not mind being bombed in a booth,” said Lester. He looked at the girls and his grin died away. “Shit.”

Two men had come across the floor to bookend the girls. Or not men but large boys in red and white football jerseys, baseball caps set backward on their skulls. Each bent toward the near girl, stiff-arming the bar in reverse images of capture. The name on the bigger boy’s jersey was Valentine. At a table across the room two other boys also sat watching, and after a minute the girls turned to look at the table, and then leaned and consulted into each other’s hair, and then they laughed and rose together from their stools and with more skirt tugging preceded the boys across the room. The smaller of the jerseyed boys snatched two chairs from an adjacent table without asking and all sat down and introductions began.

“Cornholers,” Reed Lester said.

The waitress returned to set their drinks before them and moved on again. The boy didn’t want to be there, but he wanted to be sober and so he drank his Coke while Lester drank his Jack and Coke.

“I used to watch such geniuses as these watching Mia at the bars,” said Lester.

The boy looked at him.

“My girlfriend—the Cuban? I’d see them huddling up and calling the play. Sure enough, some cornholing genius would come on over and start talking her up, like I wasn’t even there. She’d look at me like she didn’t know what the hell was going on, like what was she supposed to do, she’d just been sitting there. And she had just been sitting there, is the thing, boss. That’s all she ever did and still they came.” He swallowed half his drink and sat pondering the remains. “Well,” he said. “That’s all she did whenever I was around. But I wasn’t always around. And then, after a while, neither was she.”

“Where was she?”

“Where was she? Where was she, you ask? I asked myself the same thing. I began to get a little dark in my mind, boss, I confess it. I went by her building. I went over there just to see if I could catch her coming or going. I wanted to see her face, I wanted her to look me in the eye, that was all.” A cheerless smile crept into his lips. “Well,” he said. “You can guess where this is going. I’m standing there across the street one night and this black Caddy pulls up and sits there idling for five minutes, twenty minutes, I don’t know, until finally the dome light comes on and out she pops, smiling back at the man in the car, wiggling her fingers at him. Mia. My Mia. Jesus.”

He hunched over his drink, raised it to his lips and drank and then returned it to its wet ring on the table.

The boy wanted a cigarette. He looked in vain for a clock.

Lester watched him from under his eyebrows. “The thing is, I knew that car, boss. And I knew the old bald head that lit up when the dome light came on. It was the writer. The famous writer the college had rented for the year.”

The boy waited for the name of the writer, but Lester only lifted his glass again and swallowed and winced.

“About two nights after that first night, I see that black Caddy parked outside a certain bar, this certain local craphole where the old professors go to run their hands up the skirts of their students in the back booths. So in I walk and there they are. Having the conversation of their lives. Just about knocking their goddam heads over the table and him with his old claw on her wrist and the next thing I know I’m walking on back there. I’m walking back there and they both look up and at the sight of me Mia’s smile falls away, just falls away.”

He stared into some remote place, some sector of vision beyond the boy’s right shoulder, turning his glass slowly in his hands.

“I stand at the booth and the great writer looks at me. With his bald head and his goatee. He looks at Mia, and he looks at me again and he says: ‘The jealous boyfriend, I presume?’ And I look at him and I say, ‘It’s an honor to meet you, sir, I’m a great admirer of your work,’ and he nods and says, ‘That’s very kind,’ and I say, ‘How do you like fucking my girlfriend?’ ”

Lester lifted his drink, sipped at it, set it down.

“Mia says something but I don’t hear it. It’s just me and the writer now, and we’re just staring at each other. ‘Young man,’ he says finally, very quiet. Very serene. And I remember every word, boss. ‘Young man,’ he says, ‘I can only assume by such a comment that you have made the assumption, based perhaps on my age, perhaps on my demeanor, perhaps on God knows what, that I will not stand up from this booth and knock you on your insolent ass. That is a poor assumption. On the other hand, it is absolutely true that I would prefer to stay seated as I am. Why don’t you sit down and allow me to buy you a drink?’ To which I replied: ‘I read one of your books once, you old cocksucker, and I would sooner have another one force-fed up my ass than have to read it.’

“Well,” said Lester. “The great writer turned to Mia and excused himself, as if he was going to the head, and he got out of the booth and turned and took this funny, old-school jab at my gut, but he caught me on the wrist and I heard some of his bones go and before he got his hand up I came around with the left and sat him back down in the booth with the blood pouring from his nose, just gushing from it, all over his nice shirt and his sport coat and all over Mia’s hands when she came around and tried to sop it up with cocktail napkins. Jesus, she looked like a nurse trying to stop a gut wound with those little goddam napkins.”