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stay,’ Arliss said.
    The bartender winked and poured them three beers. ‘There will be women soon. I will call.’
    They picked up their beers and relaxed. JP leaned on his stool with his arms over the back and he looked like a man who'd been shot.
    Modine said to him, ‘what's up, JP? You aint hardly said a word all night.’
    ‘I'm alright.’
    ‘You nervous?’
    ‘I aint nervous.’
    ‘Don't worry about it. If I was as inexperienced as you I'd be nervous.’
    JP shook his head. ‘I aint as inexperienced as you imagine, Modine.’
    Modine smiled. He liked bringing JP along with them. The kid had flair. ‘I got high hopes for you, son,’ he said.
    JP looked up at the both of them. He drank some beer and wiped his mouth. ‘This here's my first time out of Texas,’ he said.
    Arliss put his hand on JP's arm. ‘Las Cruces is practically Texas.’
    JP shook his head. He looked round at the room, empty and dusty and dark. There was something in the atmosphere of the place, a moisture in the air, faint, but just enough to let him know he was no longer home.
    ‘No it aint,’ he said.
    Modine drank. ‘Let's get one of them tables.’
    They moved to the table at the center of the room. A forty‐watt bulb in a dusty shade hung from a chain above them, the only light in the place. They drank and the bartender brought them new drinks as they needed. Arliss took out his cigarettes and threw the pack on the table and they each took from it and smoked. He said, ‘how long them women going to take?’
    Modine said, ‘we could be in El Paso right now. Or Juárez even. And I know what I'd be doing if we were.’
    ‘What's that?’
    ‘What a man ought to be doing on a Friday night.’
    ‘You don't know nothing about what a man ought to be doing.’
    ‘I know it and I'd be doing it.’
    ‘And you'd be finished already too,’ Arliss said.
    JP laughed.
    Modine shook his head. ‘Not me. You say the pleasure's in the anticipation, Arliss. But us Modine's are a different breed. Bred for stamina we are. An uncle of mine once got shot in the back with a forty‐four while he was on top of a woman at a whorehouse in Fort Stockton. Old sumbitch didn't even slow down. Just kept going on that whore till he was done.’
    ‘Did he survive?’
    ‘He survived and then he went and got the man who done it.’
    ‘The whore didn't mind?’
    ‘I think it done added to it for her.’
    ‘I bet it did.’
    JP stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Why didn't the man who done it shoot him a second time?’
    Modine looked at him and then back to Arliss. ‘Goddamn it, do I got to explain everything to this here kid?’
    Arliss shrugged.
    It was only in the last few weeks that they had started taking JP to bars. Hell, it was really only in the last few weeks that they had started hitting bars with anything approaching regularity themselves. Before, they would have counted themselves lucky to see the bottom of a shot glass once in two months. The old lady had kept a tight ship, no denying it, and there's no way she'd have stood for them going out on a weekly basis. JP was hardly sixteen and none of the three of them had any business going to those places, far as she was concerned.
    Modine turned to JP and explained. ‘JP, a thing like that, it amazes a man. That poor sucker probably didn't know what he was seeing. I'd say it would be fair to conclude he done lost his nerve.’
    ‘Is that a fact, Modine?’
    ‘That's pretty verifiable I'd say.’
    Arliss said to Modine, ‘bred for stamina?’
    Modine shrugged. ‘They say it, not me.’
    ‘Who says it?’
    ‘It's known.’
    Arliss said, ‘well how come I never heard it? And never heard about your uncle neither?’
    ‘I never told it.’
    Arliss shook his head. ‘I seen you go up them stairs in Juárez, Modine, and come back down and me still on my first beer?’
    JP laughed.
    ‘And the girl you took up never broke a sweat neither.’
    Modine stubbed out his cigarette. ‘You two don't know a