Read The Scared Stiff for Free Online Page B

Nothing else: no glass, no screens, nothing. When you sit at a table along this edge, you lo\ok down past your thigh at white water and black boulders way down there.
    "Enjoy your meal," Mike told us before he left, but his heart didn't seem to be in it. And we sat there, me particularly resplendent in all that light in a royal-blue shirt, worn especially for the occasion.
    Our waitress arrived a minute later. A nice slender convent-bred local girl with a sweet smile, she was difficult to be rude to, but I did my best. When she stopped beside our table, before she could ask a single question or even wish us a good evening, I fixed a slightly drunken stare on her and demanded, "Do you know what Tanqueray gin is?"
    "Oh, yes, sir, would you—"
    "I mean
Tanqueray,"
I interrupted. "I don't mean booga-booga or some other local crap, I mean
Tanqueray.
You know what that is."
    "Yes, sir," she assured me, her smile only slightly dimmed. "It is in a green bottle. Our barten—"
    To Lola, with elaborate astonishment, I exclaimed, "A green bottle! How do you like that? It's in a green bottle! Civilization has come to wherever the fuck we are."
    "Oh, shut up, Barry," Lola said, clearly having had it up to here with me. "Since I suppose you're going to insist on having a drink, why don't you just go ahead and order it?"
    "Oh, I have your permission," I said. "Oh, how wonderful. How
gracious."
    Lola, tight-lipped, stared down at the river and the rocks.
    To the waitress I said, "A Tanqueray Gibson. Can your bartender handle that?"
    "Oh, yes, sir, he—"
    To Lola I said, "And you, my darling? What would
you
like most of all on this lovely evening?"
    She glowered at me, and everything she wasn't saying hung in the air over all heads in the immediate vicinity. Beneath their shimmer, after a little pause, she turned to the waitress, smiling politely in an effort to return civility to the table, and said, "Just water for me, thank you." Yes, ma am.
    The waitress would have turned away, but I said, "You didn't write it down."
    The look she gave me was cool. "I don't need to, sir."
    "Oh, of course! Stupid me, I do beg your pardon." I flopped first my left hand, then my right, onto the table, palms up, as I looked at each in turn and said, "One Tanqueray Gibson, one glass of water. Even
I
could remember that."
    The waitress, without her smile, made her escape, and I grinned savagely at Lola.
    "Water. If you want water so much" — thumb gesture at the river down below — "why not just jump?"
    She leaned closer across the table. "Do try to keep it down, Barry," she muttered, in a tense undertone that nevertheless, I'm certain, carried very well. "People are looking at you."
    "If people are looking at me instead of their food," I said, not at all keeping it down, "they'll stab themselves in the cheek with their forks. And deserve it, too."
    Well, it went on like that. I wasn't funny, I was merely boorish. Clearly, I was either someone who couldn't hold his liquor or I was someone who'd had more liquor than anyone could hold.
    It was hard at night to get rid of liquids at that table. There was no potted plant handy, to corrupt with alcohol. If you just poured your unwanted drink over the side to join the river, it would glisten and gleam in the floodlight glare all the way to the rushing water below.
    So what we did, we both drank our water right away, and I poured the first two Gibsons into those glasses after I'd fished out and eaten the onions. The third (and last) Gibson arrived just after the white wine had been delivered in a nice traditional ice bucket containing water and ice, so from then on the gin went to help cool the wine, and so did some of the wine.
    Meantime, I was picking at my food, getting drunker, slowly becoming louder without ever reaching the point where Mike might have to come over to have a word with me, and sniping without letup at Lola, who occasionally snarled back but usually just sat there in grim forbearance, frowned at