Sometimes he would be at the bar in the early afternoon, when the place was silent like some drafty old church and the daylight was smashing through the windows in thick, filthy beams with all this constellated dust hanging in them, no activity besides muted baseball highlights. And he would look down the bar at someone who he had seen probably a thousand other times in his life, guys who had disappeared without ceremony and had been gone for weeks, but then their new routine out there had been punctured by some unforeseen event, some work that had dried up, the girl they were staying with in another town had kicked them out, and now they were back, sitting in this wounded hunch, waiting for the crisis of their lives to be interrupted and mended.