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Show on the radio. Hey, says Dave, you really did want that fucking job in Denver, didn't you? and it seems easiest for Morgan to nod his head and say yeah, he guesses he probably did. Well don't be down about it, he says, if you gotta be something be pissed off. Get drunk and be pis.sed off. Morgan plays with his can of Olympia beer and stares out at the approaching lights of Vermillion, imagines they are the lights of Hartford. When they turn onto the asphalt they follow a gold Chevy pickup with a bumper sticker which reads HELP PRESERVE THE OLD WEST, BALL A COWBOY TODAY. It is a hot and steamy Friday night, and the town of Vermillion is a carnival of college kids who do not yet have much to study, to do, or to worry about; each and every one of them, says Dave with a grin, out to get laid. Morgan does not feel like raising hell and he does not feel like getting drunk. In fact he can't get drunk though he tries, out of some concession to form, and as they move from one crowded bar to another he finds his thoughts drifting in some singularly boring region between sobriety and intoxication. The costumed students have no such problem. They are loud, happy with their music and the smell of sex, and as the evening drags on Morgan begins to see them as a blur of leather and denim on the hoof, scrubbed hopeful faces full of disturbingly genuine smiles. Words and phrases bump into him like pieces of furniture in the dark, a girl saying that the thing now is to do it in the infirmary. |
