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Dunlop’s gone hunting and won’t be home for two days!”
    “Thank you,” he said, giving me a wave, “I’ll be back.”
    Maybe , I thought, but when you get here you won’t like what you see because our repair shop is going to be a spray-painted mess and your client won’t be wanting this place any more!

CHAPTER SIX
    Kenny’s
    Through the pool-hall window I could hear Kris Kristofferson’s voice singing “Help Me Make It Through the Night”, and I felt like he was singing for me. Kenny’s stank like beer and sweat and maybe something else but I don’t know what. Looking through the glass door was like staring at a smoky bad dream. All I could think about was how Daddy always told me not to come here.
    I could barely make out Darrell and his gang over by the rack of pool cues. They wore cool clothes, like Grateful Dead tank tops or black T-shirts with rolled-up sleeves. I looked down at my own clothes and wished I wasn’t wearing my striped T-shirt and too-short jeans. I tugged at my jeans, trying to make them stretch down to my sneakers, but it was no use. I looked like that kid Opie from The Andy Griffith Show , skinny and freckled, with the same red hair.
    I yanked open the door and stepped inside like I belonged there. I looked around quickly to see if Kenny was in the main room and breathed a sigh when I realized he must be in the kitchen. Daddy said Kenny was all right, unless you hurt him or his property and then you were a goner, but Kenny kind of scared me. He was the size of Beau but as hard as Beau was soft.
    “Quit gawking like a little kid,” Darrell hissed in my ear.
    I hadn’t even seen him walk up to me.
    “Follow me,” he said.
    I tried to walk with a swagger like Darrell did, but my legs felt more like a couple of loose pistons slapping. When I finally made it over to the group by the pool table I was glad to slink against the wall even though the stucco poked my back like a bunch of tacks. I didn’t much like how the smoke was stinging my eyes, but I appreciated the fog it made so I could hide in it.
    Darrell was standing across the table from me, at the edge of the group of guys, all high schoolers. If he didn’t feel out of place, he sure looked it. The other boys seemed cooler than Darrell without even trying. While they were talking quietly, Darrell would laugh real loud all of a sudden and they’d all look at each other or shake their heads, but Darrell didn’t seem to notice. Even when he slapped Glen on the back, Darrell didn’t see the dirty look Glen gave him.
    Glen Connor wasn’t the kind of guy you should slap on the back, especially if you were Darrell. His daddy was some local politician, I couldn’t remember what, and Glen was the spitting image of him, only not as wide. He even had the same slicked-down blond hair and stuck-up voice. He and his daddy came by our house at election time and Daddy had said, in a nice way, that they were wasting their time because we were dyed-in-the-wool Democrats. Mr Connor had grinned, but it was the kind of grit-your-teeth grin that you do when you want to stop some bad words from coming out. Glen didn’t bother to even fake a smile. I didn’t care for them much, but Daddy said to watch myself because Mr Connor had a lot of power. Judging by how the guys in Kenny’s were flocking around Glen, he seemed to have power, too, even though he hadn’t been elected to anything.
    The other guy I knew was Larry, who just happened to be both Kenny’s and Mr Harrison’s nephew. Right now, I didn’t feel too kindly towards him because of Mr Harrison. Other than that, Larry was okay. The rest of the guys I’d seen in and out of the What-U-Want, but I didn’t really know them.
    But I sure knew the guy who yanked the glass door open and hesitated for a moment, just like I had, before stepping into Kenny’s like it was the principal’s office. Thomas! The line between his eyebrows as he stared at Darrell’s gang reminded me of that same