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hesitated, said, “Let’s get some coffee. Gadget here, she might could eat something.”
    “I’m not hungry,” she said.
    “Then watch us drink coffee,” I said. “And if you run off, we’ll just chase you down. We don’t care how it looks or what anyone thinks. We are wild and crazy guys.”
    “What if Tanedrue and the rest of them come and find you?” she said.
    “That would be bad for them,” Leonard said. “Didn’t you just hear Hap say we were wild and crazy?”

10
    I parked us near the garage between some yellow lines and under the overhang. The rain plunked on the aluminum above us like buckshot. The guy who had been reading
Poontang Palace
was still inside the garage, but now he was digging around in a toolbox, probably trying to find a big enough hammer to beat some sort of automotive problem into submission.
    Inside the joint we got the same table as before and the guy who waited on us before came over, said, “You must like it here, back in the same day, and now with a friend.”
    “We don’t like the fries, just want to go on record with that,” Leonard said. “But the hamburgers do the alligator rock. And she’s not a friend.”
    “What?” the waiter said.
    “He likes the hamburgers,” I said. “He doesn’t like the fries. The girl is not a friend. She’s a friend of a friend.”
    The waiter didn’t look at me. He studied Leonard for a moment. Leonard smiled. There was always something about that smile. It was less like a smile and more like a snake trying to grin up a frog right before it struck and ate it.
    The waiter looked away from Leonard, looked at me. “What happened to your face?”
    I reached up and touched the scratches on my cheeks. “Briars.”
    “You ought to see his ass,” Leonard said. “That’s where the real work was done.”
    “That right?” the waiter said. “Sorry I asked. Here’s menus.”
    When the waiter went away, I said, “What you going to have, Gadget?”
    “I’m not hungry.”
    “That crummy way you feel, that’s because you’re so hungry your belly thinks your throat’s cut. Have some soup. They got soup here. I don’t know how it is, but stay away from the French fries. Soup, any kind of soup, if it’s fresh, it’s pretty hard to mess up.”
    She didn’t order anything, but when the waiter came back I ordered a cup of coffee and a bowl of chicken soup and Leonard ordered another hamburger, minus the fries, potato chips instead.
    When the waiter was gone, I looked at Leonard, said, “You just ate couple hours ago. Maybe less. You want another hamburger?”
    “Whipping the pure-dee-dog-doodie out of people makes me hungry. Don’t it you?”
    “A little.”
    The food came and I drank the coffee and pushed the soup over close to Gadget. I said, “I don’t want the soup after all. Why don’t you give it a taste? It smells pretty good.”
    She shook her head. “I know what you’re doing.”
    I nodded. “Suit yourself.”
    Leonard dug into his hamburger. “Oh, Jesus, this is so good it makes you want to hold down a wild hog and fuck it in the ass.”
    “That passes for manners at his house,” I said to Gadget.
    “I’ve heard worse.”
    I noticed she had picked up the spoon and was starting to stir the soup. I pushed the crackers over close to her. She opened one of the cracker packages and bit a corner off the cracker. She crumbled the rest in her soup. I turned at an angle so I wasn’t watching her. I got up and went over and ordered some pie and a glass of milk. When my pie and milk came, Leonard had to have the same, and now Gadget, finished with her soup, wanted some pie and milk too.
    By this time she was starting to look better. I had a feeling it had been a long time since she’d eaten anything besides cheese crackers, potato chips, peanut butter and Cracker Jack. My guess was she was the neatnik who put the paper towels over the dog piles.
    I paid the bill because Leonard didn’t have any money, or said he