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laying pipe for Donnelly Construction, or at least, that would be what their timesheets would show when they submitted their invoices to Jill Donnelly for working on her most recent house flip. Still, Jill wouldn’t know because her day job as the city swimming pool manager kept her too busy to check on the remodeling project during the day. Larry wondered briefly how Jill expected to flip a house since the population in Fredonia had been dropping faster than cow patties from the back end of a tall cow and had been since the ADM Mill closed its doors years ago.
    Jeff and Doug were nice guys — except when they were drinking. Strangely enough, Larry had never been around the Rickenhauser brothers when they weren’t drinking. He couldn’t think of too many other reasons to go into Racine’s in the middle of the day during the middle of the week, unless you had a thing for watching what the Huckleberry Twins called dancing.
    Naked or not, bright shiny aluminum pole or not, carpeted stage with subdued lighting or not, Merrie and Terrie managed to look exactly like the dancing hippos from the Disney movie Fantasia . At least, they did before someone complained about that movie section being racist and Disney removed it. They removed the dancing hippos, not Merrie and Terrie, though Larry would swear in court they got their removal orders reversed. It wasn’t that the Huckleberry Twins were racist in the least, but then Larry could only see where the hippos had been racist by squinting his eyes at the screen and throwing his imagination into high gear.
    After Larry emptied his bladder in the dirt parking lot, he headed toward the front door. The truck didn’t have the same set of values as Larry’s tractor when it came to getting urine on its back tires. The beat up old pickup was happy with any attention it could get. Old trucks were like that — sometimes. Larry’s truck knew it had a choice of attitudes about such things, however, it had long since decided that happy acceptance was preferable to being grumpy about something it had no control over.
    Racine built her strip club so the front door faced the back of the building. It allowed her customers with delicate sensibilities and/or sensible wives to park behind the building where their car, truck, or tractor couldn’t be seen from the road. Larry didn’t have any delicate sensibilities or a wife, not that Nancy would have minded if Larry went to a strip club. No matter what her other foibles had been, Nancy had been a good wife that way, probably because she went to school with Merrie and Terrie and had seen them naked in the showers after gym class.
    Larry kept his eyes averted away from the stage as he bellied up to the bar, ordering a draft beer and a six-pack to go. The bartender pulled up his shirt, exposing his rippled abdomen, and said, “I’m ready to go whenever you are, sweetie.”
    Larry sighed. He didn’t mind being propositioned and wasn’t homophobic or gay, but everyone knew the bartender wasn’t gay either, or at least his wife and four kids didn’t think so. The man just thought the joke was too funny to not repeat — and repeat — and repeat, just like a shampoo bottle’s instructions without the rinsing part.
    “Bag the bottles and keep it cold until I finish my draft.” He tried to keep his eyes averted from the stage while watching the Rickenhauser brothers watch Terrie attempt something like a moonwalk. Larry was still working on the vision of the little strawberry blond fox Betty and her four tits, so Terrie wasn’t presenting any entertainment value.
    The brothers hadn’t spotted him yet, so he ducked into the back poolroom, admiring the ten-year-old carpet. The blue carpet would match his drapes perfectly, but he wouldn’t scrounge this carpet when Racine redecorated, since the crime scene cleaners had used bleach on the carpet to clean up the blood last year and Larry couldn’t figure how to place his furniture to hide the