Backup Men

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HE DIDN’T look old enough. Not old enough to order a martini at eleven forty-five in the morning, so when I got the small headshake from Joan, the cocktail waitress, I left the bar and a slightly hungover reporter from The Washington Post and went to see whether the youthful morning drinker had anything to prove that he was at least twenty-one.

It was still too early for the luncheon trade and the reporter and I had been trading diet tips over a bottle of beer and reminiscing about an infantry replacement training center in north Texas where we’d both spent a few months a long time ago, hating every minute of it.

Even close up he didn’t look old enough. I guessed him for nineteen, possibly twenty, but that may have been because of the pale blond, almost white hair that covered the tops of his ears and which he had carefully brushed and combed back into a revolutionary ducktail. The 1776 revolution, not the current one.

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