"and I can't seem to get enough of you"
-- The Sugar Daddys, Amtrak

"Wha?" She said, confused.

It was as though she knew what each word meant, but couldn't understand it when they were all put together. I could see the moment on her face when she got it. She gave me a look,

"No," she said. "You're pullin' my leg!"

"Truth." I said.

I hadn't touched the second shot at my table. I'd been pacing myself. I picked it up and took a small sip. Just to tease my palette for what was coming. I was enjoying this.

"No!" She gave a sharp little laugh.

She gave me a shove, pushing me back against the back of my chair. I tried not to wince from the pain, but it was sharp and sudden. I hadn't seen it coming, and she saw me react.

"Crap! I'm sorry." She reached over to touch my side. "And you just told me about it. I'm sorry. Are you OK?"

"No worries," I told her. "I just didn't see it coming, that's all. No damage done."

I didn't think there was anything other than lingering ache of complaint from my side. Later on, I would excuse myself to the bathroom later on and check, but not while things were going well.

"It just confirms a basic theory of mine," I said.

"What?" She asked.

"Small women are dangerous," I teased.

She stuck her tongue out at me, and I raised my glass in a toast. I upended the fallen soldier and put it back on the table. That was enough for the moment, but another shot arrived -- unbidden. Betty hadn't even made any kind of signal. I was a little looser than I wanted to be. That one was definitely going to wait.

"Well this one is, bub," she said. "Don't you forget it."

"How could I?" I said.

"Librarian huh?" She asked.

"Not the kind you're used to," I said.

I wanted to make this last. I wasn't going to tell it all at once, but play it out.

"Obviously." The smile was back. "Can't see you working in a library though."

"It wasn't one like the kind you're used too either," I said.

"Yeah I can't see you behind the counter shushing people," she said.

"There are other types'," I said. "I was the kind who worked for corporations, or did it freelance."

"How does that work?" she asked.

"Say you need to find some kind of information," I said. "Maybe for a corporate report or you need some facts to support your lawsuit. You call someone like me. It's one thing to have all this information out there," I gestured, referring to the whole wide world, "and there is more data added to the pile all the time. It's another thing to know how to find what you need. That's what I did, I found information, and billed by the hour."

"Useful guy to have around," she said appreciatively.

It is, but it's the kind of job that slides under the radar of most people. If they even think about librarians, they probably picture a small middle-aged woman with a perpetually soft voice and glasses. Or they imagine something from an 80's music video -- the plain/sexy woman with her hair in a tight bun, just waiting for the right man to unleash a lioness. It's just a job. It's just like any of the other thousands of kinds of jobs out there that no one ever thinks about. If there's a need, someone will find a way to charge for it. Wait long enough, and universities will offer degrees in it.

It's not a job for everyone. It appeals to people who look at the world with an appetite for information, and a desire to collate and categorize. It suited me well. It wasn't a bad living, and I was good at it. It sated my hunger for facts and data, and I could feed my appetite on someone else's dime. It was just a job though, nothing more. I'd had a vocation before that and I wasn't sure it was worth it. No longer a leader of men, I had photography, music, reading, and friends to prove my worth.

"I know how to sew buttons too," I winked.

"Even better," she said. "I can see how you'd be handy in a squad."

"The mob too," I said.

"What?" She wasn't expecting that answer.

"The military aren't the only ones who do dark work," I told her, "or who need folk who can find things." Or order young men to run into the breach.

"So you were in the mob?" She asked. Her tone implied she had trouble accepting that.

"I'm not saying one thing or another" I said. "I'm just saying you can't assume. There are other kinds of people who hire for that kind of job, like corporations and organized crime, and none of them want it talked about either."

"Gotcha," she said. She made a show of looking over her shoulder. She dropped her voice. "You sure ya can't tell me what you were doing? I promise not to tell."

"Sorry," I shook my head, "I wish I could, but I can't -- not yet. Maybe one of these days I'll be able to tell you part of the story. If you're still interested, that is."

"Count on it," she said.

"OK," I said, "There are parts of it I do want to tell. There are places I've been, things I've seen. I'd love to tell people about that. You can't do any job without accumulating a few stories. I'm sure this place has given you more than a few."

She smiled and nodded.

"I probably don't have as many stories as you think," I said. "I didn't really have that much of a life. We never stayed in one place for long. In my off time, I kept to myself. I didn't want to make any connections. It was a just different way of committing suicide."

She stared at me. I think she thought hadn't she heard me correctly. The conversation had turned serious again.

"What do you do if you are past redemption?" I asked her. "Then what do you do if you cant bring yourself to open a vein? Taking the job was my answer. I was just pulling the plug in a different way."

I shook my head and closed my eyes. I pressed my fingers into the back of my neck, and then dragged them across the skin -- trying to push away the tension that had built up. I slowly tilted my head first to the left, fighting the motion as it went. I did that until I felt the bones in my neck pop. I repeated the procedure to the right. When I opened my eyes, Betty had her arms wrapped around herself.

"Then what brought ya back to the land of the living?" She asked.

I sighed. "I can't tell you that without telling you why I left, and I just don't know if I can."

"Another secret?" She asked.

"No, not like that," I said. "I just don't know if I've got the strength to tell it, and I don't know if you'd still want me sitting here when I'm done. Look, I've really let the air out of this conversation as it is. Are you sure you don't want to talk about something else? Movies? Books? The evolution of Hard House music?"

"Sure," she said, "if you want, but you ain't scared me off, you know. So if you don't want to say, that's OK. This may not help you put your socks on, but I've seen nothing to judge you down about, OK?"

I took a deep breath and then another. I grabbed the hair on the back of my head and gave it a little tug, to get the blood flowing.

"Let's see how much I can do." I said. "The short answer is redemption. I still don't know if I can get it, but I figured out that I wanted it. I realized how much I needed a chance at it. After a while, it was all I could think about.

"I started to come out of the fog I was in. It lifted and I saw how little I had. There was just the job. I did it well, but I missed having other things in my life. Hell, that's not even right. I didn't have a life and I missed having one. I starting thinking about getting out. I could make a new identity, set up someplace and start a new life. I could put all of it behind me."

"So why didn't ya?" Betty asked.

"I almost did, but I realized that it wouldn't give me what I needed. Ever read The Maltese Falcon?" I asked.

She shook her head.

"I saw the movie." She said.

"It's in the movie too," I said. "The part where Spade tells a story about a man who was almost killed in an accident. He realized how mundane his life was, so he runs away to start a new one. Spade is hired to find him, and does. When Spade looked at the man's new life, he saw that all the man had done was to rebuild his old life. He even married a woman who looked like his old wife.

"I knew that was what would happen to me. If I just started over -- if I made a new start of it in Edinburgh -- or some other place I was fond of, I'd make the same mistakes over again. I'd just make the same life, in a different place. I knew that before I could do anything else, I'd have to deal with the old mistakes. I needed to try and redeem myself, and that meant that I had to find one person."

"Your friend?" She asked.

"Got it in one," I said. "I had to see if I could make things right with Becks. If I couldn't, then it wouldn't be because I didn't try. I'd succeed or I'd fail, but I'd have tried. Once I made the decision, it took a while to get myself out of the job, but I did it."

"That sounds like it might have been hard," she said. "I sounds like they might not be the kind of folks who'd take kindly to that."

"Yes and no," I told her, "but it wasn't as bad as that. It just took time. I couldn't just give two weeks notice, and take my box of things and a few stolen packs of sticky notes home with me. It meant I had to tie up a lot of loose ends. It took months. We parted on good terms. I don't want to go back, but I didn't want them pissed off at me either." She nodded.

I don't know what she imagined I had been doing, but she got the gravity of it.

"Then I made my way back," I said, "flew in to San Francisco, drove up here, and you know the rest -- Becks, Vance, all of it."

There was a lot more to it than that, but I couldn't tell that part. It hadn't been as simple as booking a flight and being done with it. I had to reestablish my identity, and create plausible evidence of where I'd been. Somewhere during my story the band had started to play. At the moment, they were doing an energetic cover of the Sugar Daddy's Amtrak.

"So you leaving had to have something to do with her?" She asked.

"You saw that coming, huh?" I asked. Not like it was a hard guess. "Yeah, my life had been coming apart."

"Because your wife died?" She asked. "It seems like the two things happened kinda close in together."

"Somewhat," I nodded, "but the big event was a few months after Judy died. Things were bad with Judy; it just seemed like the same thing over and over again. So I wasn't in the best state when it happened, when she died. I was blind-sided -- losing her like that. Have you ever lost someone you were close to?"

She nodded. I didn't press, not wanting to dredge up anything she didn't want to tell me.

"So you know that no matter how irrational it is, part of you thinks it's your fault," I said. "It doesn't have to make sense, it's just the way people work."

"My mom died when I was thirteen," she said. "I always kinda thought it was because I kept talking back."

"So you know," I said. She nodded.

"I was a fool and gave in to the guilt." I said. "I thought the best thing to do was to keep working. I just ended up piling that stress on top of everything else. It affected everything, and I was doing crappy work.

"I found myself leaning on Becks more and more. I mean, it made sense at the time. She was my best friend, but she's a private person. Too much contact can be uncomfortable for her. I was wearing out my welcome, and I could tell it too, but sometimes you see the wall coming, and you still aim for it. We had a couple of misunderstandings, and they just made things worse. I got more obsessive about hanging on to her. I was scared that I'd lose my best friend on top of everything else. Hindsight's 20/20, but I was pretty myopic at the time. I should have seen it, the clues were all around at the time."

"Then what?" Betty prompted.

"Somewhere along the line," I said, "I actually managed to convince myself I was in love with Becks -- the big L, romantic kind. I wasn't really -- it was just stupid. I mean, even if I had been in love, it was too soon after Judy. I was in no shape to be in a relationship with anyone, but I couldn't see that. I was just a big ball of pain and grief and self-pity. I think I just wanted something that would distract me from how much I hurt. It was another way of running away from my problems.

"Add all that to a pot, and the mix isn't good. I even realized it at the time. I decided to push any romantic thoughts of Becks out of my head. I put it in much more noble terms than that, the way you do when you are lying to yourself. I would wait for her to see me in that light. Something idiotic like that. God, I am such a piece of work. It worked for a while; it seemed like I was getting a handle on things."

"Then something happened, right?" She said.

"Yeah," I said, "Becks and I had gone out one night and it was all going pretty well. She had just got back together with Ray." I paused. "You know how it is when things are going well at the beginning? How it can make you flirty with everyone?"

She nodded.

"Becks was like that," I said, "and I fed on it. We'd both had too much to drink, and we were walking back to her place. We'd been talking about...intimate things. There was nothing new to that, but you've got to mix it in with everything else. You know the kissing scene in Blade Runner"

"The one where Deckard pushes Rachael up against the wall?" She sounded wistful.

"That's the one," I said. "It does seem to be popular," Betty winked. "Anyway, as Becks was about to open her door, she told me that just once she wanted that kind of connection, where a guy could just lean in and take it from her that way. That was just about the most wrong thing Becks could have said."

Betty didn't say a word, but I think she saw where it was going. I wanted to just stop and leave it there, but I'd made it this far. I should try and finish it.

"She said it, and I should've seen it for what it was, but I didn't. I took it as an invitation.

"I grabbed her shoulders and pushed hard her against her door," I said. "I didn't do the dialog, but I could have -- word for word. I could feel how soft her lips were. I could smell the mix of alcohol and skin. I kissed her hard and for a moment she kissed me back."

"Just a moment?" She asked.

"Sometimes everything balances on a moment. It doesn't matter how you got there, but things can fall one way or another.

"If she had just kept kissing me, I can't tell you what would have happened. I'd noticed that she had stopped, but I didn't back off. Just didn't care and just kept at it."

I closed my eyes. The memories were with me every day, but now they were at the surface, in vivid detail. It felt like everyone in the world had already passed judgment. I wanted to just put my head down on the table. I put the heal of my palm to my forehead. It felt like I couldn't keep my head up without help..

"She asked me to stop," I pressed on, "but I just pressed her back up against the wall. I don't know. I think I was trying to get the moment back. I stared at her. I wasn't listening to what she was saying.

"I started kissing her again. My body was pressed up against hers. Then there was a car horn. When I turned to look, Becks pulled away from me. It was Wilson -- I don't know how much of it he saw or could have seen. Maybe he was just trying to be playful, but it snapped me out of it. I saw what had happened, what I was doing; it wasn't some bedroom game -- it was the real thing.

"I just turned around and walked away. I didn't say a word. I didn't ask if she was OK. I didn't apologize. I didn't do anything -- I just left. I found a bar and ordered a round. When it was done I left and kept on walking. I did that more than a couple of times -- I don't know how many. Eventually the bars closed so I had to walk home. I wanted to die. I tried to kill myself. I really tried, but I just couldn't do it.

"The next morning the call came and I was offered the job, I took it. I didn't think about it, I just said 'yes.' I ran away from everything, and didn't look back.

"And that's it," I said.

I was done.

There wasn't anything else left to tell. I just sat there with my eyes closed and holding my head in place -- fighting the urge to curl into a ball. I could hear Betty take a long drag off her cigarette and then another. I imagined that she was trying to decide what to say, or passing judgment. I started to feel awkward. I opened my eyes and put my hands in my lap. Breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth -- I got my breathing under control and made a scan of the crowd. Betty was finishing another cigarette. She put butt down in the ashtray.

"Hey," she said. "You beat yourself up pretty good, but I don't think you got too."

I watched as she reached out and put a loose strand of hair back in place.

"You ain't a bad man," she said, "and I don't care what ya tell me. I think I know what's in your head right now. You think you ain't all that different than Vance."

That stopped me cold. I don't think I had ever made that comparison to myself -- at least consciously -- but she was right. Maybe I did see all of my sins in him. Maybe that was why I had seen him as the Bad Guy from the beginning. None of it was founded when I first learned of him, but I was more than willing to believe the worst of him. He was a canvas I had painted my sins upon. The fact that he actually was all of those things doesn't mean I got there the right way.

"Maybe," I said. "I don't know. I don't honestly know I would have stopped if Wilson hadn't come along."

"I do." She said it with such a conviction that I ached to believe her. "You would've stopped."

"How do you know?" I asked.

"When you run out of ways to think it though, you have to go with your gut," she said. "You wouldn't do it. I got faith in that.

"Look," Betty went on, "everyone's got the darkness in them. All of us want things we can't have -- some shiny thing, your best friend's boyfriend, or girlfriend for that matter. I ain't been above it. I don't know no one who can live without screwing up like that.

"Now see Vance, he would have just taken. Vance wants and Vance takes. That's all there is to write about him. He'd never have felt bad about it. He'd never have given it a second thought. Sure as hell he wouldn't have done anything like what you did to try and make it right. If I thought you were a bit like him, you wouldn't be sitting there.

"Way I see it is that when you get there, you gotta make sure you've done more good than bad. After everything you've said, the worst thing you did was to run away."

"Yeah," I said. "I think I started to figure that out down there."

"Good," she said, "keep figuring it out. You spent too long in suspended animation and it just made everything worse to you. Maybe things can't be put right with her, but you tried. Hell's bells, I don't think I know anyone who would do what you did, or take it that far. That counts for something." She gave me a mock-punch on the chin. I smiled when she did. "At least with me it does. You ain't a bad man and you ain't scared me off yet."

"You are a doll." I said. I meant it.

"Don't ya forget it either," I thought she was being extra serious, and then I saw her smile come out again. It really was quite addictive.

Betty had given me a lot to think about. I wasn't sure I could justify the faith she gave me, but I wasn't going to disagree with her until I had a chance to think it through. She couldn't give me redemption, but she'd given me a big dose of perspective.

I'd done everything I could with Becks. Any more would just make things worse. I was going to have to get on with being back and then just see what happened. No noble waiting this time. If she wanted me back in her life, then she'd let me know. I'd just have to wait and see. The hardest part of doing is the doing.

"Hey! Know what?" Betty said suddenly.

I was grateful for the change the of subject. I had said all I could bear on that subject for one night. I never found out what she was going to say next. She made a face and reached into her pocket. She pulled out a small phone and looked at it. It hit me then -- that was how they got the word around so quickly, and how my next drink had been ordered.

I hadn't seen headsets, so I had assumed they were using some kind of hand signals. They probably used those as well. Betty was smart enough to know she couldn't completely rely on technology, but I'd lay down money that every member of the staff had a phone on them and that they were texting one another as they needed. Betty's phone was so small it could fit in her hand and not get a second look. Clever.

"What's the matter?" I asked. She had become serious and professional, scanning the crowd.

"Vance." She said.