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"  Rodney Sheets couldn&amp;#039;t stop thinking about deforestation. He&amp;#039;d seen three separate documentaries on three different networks, and thus concluded that there must be a connection between innumerable acres burning on two continents and the reason why the temperature outside hovered at 100 for three weeks straight. He thought, Those narrators and scientists and actors are right -- I can change my daily habits and help save the planet. He&amp;#039;d finished his fourth bourbon. No one else populated Gus Bingham&amp;#039;s bar on the Saluda River. Gus said he had to go check out a smell in the crawl space. He set a bottle in front of Rodney, along with a pen and cocktail napkin. He said, &amp;quot;Hatch off your tally. Anyone else comes in, bang the barstool for me. I got to get some lime.&amp;quot; Rodney nodded. He marked four lines at the top of the napkin, then a fifth. He unfolded it and wrote, &amp;quot;Plant trees in yard. Buy recycled products. Promote constipation -- save TP.&amp;quot; Then he stalled.  The door opened and a woman limped in. She carried a filled canvas satchel. Her matted hair reached past her shoulders, and not in the I&amp;#039;m-a-white-hipster way that Rodney saw on a whole other documentary about the unfulfilled lives of ex-Deadheads. The woman plopped down indelicately two stools away and placed her heavy bag between Rodney and herself.  She emitted an odor of week-old perspiration and moldy Roman Meal bread. Rodney said, &amp;quot;Hey. Gus&amp;#039;ll be right back.&amp;quot; He didn&amp;#039;t get off his stool and bang it on the floor. Gus wouldn&amp;#039;t be happy to emerge from a fouled crawl space only to have a homeless drifter woman plead for alms.  The woman said, &amp;quot;Buy me a drink.&amp;quot; She looked at the bottle.  Rodney said, &amp;quot;What you got in the bag?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I have money. Shit, man. Whatever happened to men buying women drinks in bars? In New York and L.A., there&amp;#039;re still men buying.&amp;quot;  She reached in her back pocket and pulled out twenty one dollar bills. Rodney said, &amp;quot;You turn in some aluminum at the recycling place down the road? Good. I was just sitting here making a list of ways I could recycle paper products.&amp;quot;  The woman reached below the counter and grabbed a plastic cup. She said, &amp;quot;You could write on your hand, instead of cocktail napkins.&amp;quot; She sneered at Rodney. She shook her lice-likely head. &amp;quot;Write that on down, Bozo. For your information, I have better, higher-calling things to do than collect cans off the roadside.&amp;quot; She leaned in Rodney&amp;#039;s direction and took the bottle from him. She didn&amp;#039;t slide it back.  Beneath them, Gus bellowed out, &amp;quot;Oh, goddamn,&amp;quot; and wretched audibly in great, measured wails. &amp;quot;Oh, goddamn, this one&amp;#039;s bad.&amp;quot;  Rodney said, &amp;quot;That seems like an appropriate segue. So. If you don&amp;#039;t clean up the environment\u2026You&amp;#039;re not from around these parts, are you?&amp;quot;  The woman opened her bag and sighed. She pulled out a number of Advance Reader&amp;#039;s Copies. She stacked them up and balanced her cup atop the uncorrected proofs. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t expect you to know the journal. I don&amp;#039;t expect you to understand anything about anonymous criticism.&amp;quot; She downed a shot and poured another.  Like Gus below, Rodney didn&amp;#039;t cotton to sighing, eye-rolling, melodramatic people in the bar. He said, &amp;quot;You need to take a bath. How&amp;#039;s a little of that for not being anonymous? If you&amp;#039;re as smart and haughty as you&amp;#039;re trying to come off, you should know about the secret life of bacteria. What&amp;#039;d you do, get a merit badge in Alternative Lifestyles, then quit the Girl Scouts?&amp;quot;  Then he wrote on his cocktail napkin, &amp;quot;Eradicate anonymous critics.&amp;quot; Who are you to be so presumptuous? he started to say, but didn&amp;#039;t. He thought to ask her if she&amp;#039;d ever read Salinger, Yates, Carver, O&amp;#039;Connor, or Hannah, like he did daily. But his thoughts strayed.  Gus came in through the back door, clapping lime dust from his hands, smiling.  George Singleton has published four story collections, including Drowning in Gruel. His fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper&amp;#039;s, Playboy, Zoetrope, The Georgia Review, and New Stories from the South. His new novel, Work Shirts for Madmen, will be published by Harcourt in the September of 2007. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a3331/napkin-singleton/>