This Enemy Town by Marcia Talley Page A

who managed the restaurant for his brother, appeared at our table. He was clutching a sheaf of papers, the first of two trivia quiz sheets, each bearing fifteen questions. “Eight P.M .,” Fintan announced, laying a quiz sheet on the table in front of us. “Your team’s playing tonight, right?”
    Paul slipped his wallet out of his pocket and laid a ten dollar bill on the table. “The Puddle Ducks are ready!” he announced.
    The previous week the Puddle Ducks came in second, losing out to the Sea Dogs by one question when the Sea Dogs knew that topless saleswomen were legal in Liverpool, England, but only in tropical fish stores. All the money went to charity: soup kitchens, needy local families, the SPCA. That week it was the Box of Rain Foundation that honored Lee Griffin, a local sailor, who had been brutally murdered during a senseless car jacking just a short block away from where we were sitting.
    Paul, our resident brainiac, moved his beer to one side and spread the sheet out on the table in front of him. He started filling in the blanks, while Ruth and I chatted about some renovations she was planning for Mother Earth. Her shop was a perpetual work in progress.
    Paul looked up. “What color is Mr. Spock’s blood?”
    Ruth and I had been discussing carpet tiles versus wall-to-wall, so alien blood was a huge leap. We looked at each other. Ruth shrugged. “Ask me about native island cultures,” she suggested blandly. “I got an A-plus in cultural anthropology.”
    It’d been ages since I’d seen an episode of Star Trek , but I couldn’t imagine alien blood being anything but green. Blue maybe; red in some galaxies. “Green?” I guessed.
    â€œIs that your final answer?” Paul asked.
    â€œFinal answer.”
    Our three heads huddled over the quiz sheet, and we had moved on to puzzling over what a turkey was in bowling alley slang when Hutch arrived, reeking of cigarette smoke and full of apologies. “Sorry, got caught outside my office by a client. Wanted to tell me all about this idea he has for investing in the company that’s going to start developing Parole.”
    Parole was Annapolis’s first shopping center, long ago deserted by the department stores and specialty shops where my daughter and I used to shop for her school clothes. Sears had been the last holdout, moving to an anchor spot in nearby Annapolis Mall in the mid-nineties. Once Sears was gone, poor Parole had become a blot on the cityscape as deal after deal with its out-of-state owner had fallen through. In recent days, the bulldozers had been busy, pulverizing Sears, flattening Woodward and Lothrop, demolishing Hickory Farms and the Hallmark store, loading their remains in dump trucks and hauling them away. Old Parole was only a memory.
    Hutch’s lips brushed Ruth’s cheek and he sat down. Ruth slid an ale in his direction. Hutch took a long sip, sighed, and smacked his lips. “So, where are we?” he asked, referring to the quiz.
    â€œâ€˜Who was the first U.S. presidential candidate to attempt the macarena in public?’” Paul read out loud.
    Hutch knocked back another slug of ale before answering with some confidence, “Al Gore.”
    Paul wrote “Al Gore” in the blank. “Okay,” he forged on. “How about this? What game begins with a corking?”
    â€œYour fiftieth birthday party.” Ruth laughed.
    I shrugged. “Don’t have a clue.”
    Darts. The word buzzed around the restaurant like gossip about the latest scandal on Capitol Hill. Darts. Darts. Darts. Everyone, it seemed, had arrived at the question simultaneously.
    â€œDarts,” I said with confidence.
    Paul scribbled darts in the blank. “What soft drink, introduced in 1982, was the number three U.S. seller within two years?”
    Ruth raised her hand for this one. “Diet Coke,” she said. “I remember it came on the