Empty Leather

Danny Rivera was not going to look at the back booth. That was the actual work of the evening.

He looked at it all night.

The neon came on at seven and said what it always said. BR KEN SP KE, pink and buzzing into a sky that hadn't finished going dark. Danny stood in the gravel with a keg on the hand truck and gave it a second and a half, the way he had a thousand times. Then he got the keg up the ramp and through the door. Nobody had ever paid a man to look at a sign.

Inside it smelled like it smelled. Thirty-one years of smoke in the wood under the bleach. Fryer oil. Cold beer and the wet-rope end of the mop. Somebody had already put a quarter in the jukebox and Loretta had let it play. One of the songs she permitted, then. Not one of the ones she did not. The two old men at the far end had their cribbage board out. They had it out every night of the world.

Danny had four things written on the back of his left hand in ballpoint.

4 MEN. 200 EA. COUNT TWICE. DON'T SIT.

He knew all four. He'd known all four since the second Friday of his first summer. He wrote them anyway, every Friday, standing at the shop sink with the pen in his teeth. A rule you wrote down was a rule you couldn't get clever about later. A prospect who got clever got a year added to his clock. Ridge had told him that once. Danny could still say it back word for word, and had, at midnight, on his mother's step on Fenner Street, without looking at his hand.

By nine the room had forty-some people in it. In a town of eleven hundred that was a crowd. First Friday of September, the yard crews paid, the pass still warm at night for maybe another two weeks. Four Kings on the door at two hundred each, plus Deacon's cut of the room, and none of the four was Danny. Prospects didn't work a door. Prospects worked everything else. He hauled. He iced. He carried three crates of empties out to the dock and came back with two of full and dropped neither. He took a Coors bottle off a bench seat where a man had wedged it and got beer down his own wrist for the privilege.

He was not looking at the back booth now, either. He knew everything in it anyway.

She'd been in Coldwater eight days. Corrine Hale, though the only person who called her Corrine was Loretta and only when she wanted something. Cory to everyone else, if everyone else had the nerve. So far that was about three people. She sat in the back booth with a green ledger, a bank box, a calculator that was older than Danny, and a glass of water she had not touched since eight o'clock. That booth was understood to be club business. Ma had given it to her on purpose and in front of the room.

She was tall. It kept being the first thing about her. Square through the shoulders like a woman who had lifted somebody heavier than herself, more than once, for a long time. Dark red hair up in a clip that was losing the argument on one side. Fair enough to burn under a bar light. Freckles going down out of the collar of a grey shirt that had been washed until it had stopped having an opinion. Big hands, and the sleeves shoved back off her forearms, and something in Danny's chest dropped a floor every time he came inside the reach of that table. She wrote with the pen held down close to the paper, and she wrote fast, and every so often she stopped, went back three lines, and did the whole column again without any expression crossing her face.

Forty men in a room and half of them wearing a cut and she never looked up to check where anybody was.

Danny could not get past it. Everybody checked. Everybody who wasn't from here came into this bar and did the thing — the count of the doors, the little pause at the sight of the leather hung two deep on a hook by the pool table. Rochelle had done it. The county woman had done it. Cory Hale sat in a room full of outlaws with a bank box open in front of her like it was a laundromat at four in the afternoon.

"Prospect."

Ma had her glasses shoved up in the iron-grey and a rag over her shoulder and the till drawer open. Danny came.

"Bag."

He got the canvas bag. He counted the door take onto the mahogany in fifties while Loretta watched his hands and not his face, and then he counted it again, because COUNT TWICE wasn't Ridge's rule, it was hers, and hers were worse.

"Six hundred and forty," he said. "Plus the two-eighty out of the jar."

"Nine-twenty."

"Nine-twenty, ma'am."

"Take it back there." She didn't say to who. She snapped the rag off her shoulder. "And don't stand over her while she writes. Nobody can add with a boy breathing on them."

Danny carried the bag the length of the bar with his ears going hot. He set it at the edge of the booth table. That close she smelled like soap and the cold air off the lot, and it went down through him like a swallow of something. He stepped back the length of a bar stool. He'd figured out on Tuesday that this was the distance at which she stopped being able to feel him there.

"Nine-twenty," he said. "Six-forty door, two-eighty jar."

Cory finished the line she was on. Then she looked up.

Grey eyes, and a mouth that didn't move. He'd worked out on about day three that this was what she looked like when something was funny to her. A horrible thing to learn about a person. It meant you never got to know.

"You counted it twice," she said.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Did you get nine-twenty both times?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Good." She wrote it. "Then one of us can stop."

She went back down the column. Danny stood there one second longer than he had any business standing there. Long enough to see that the ledger was ruled in her own hand, not printed. Long enough to watch the tendons shift in the back of that hand while she wrote. That was not what he had stayed for. It was why he had. Whatever Ma had been keeping the last thirty-one years wasn't a book, and this woman had sat down eight days ago and started building one out of nothing. Then he went and got the crate of empties he'd left by the pool table, because DON'T SIT had a wider meaning than sitting.

At ten a yard hand named Kruse's nephew got tall about a game he'd lost and brought his hand down in the middle of the table with the balls still on it. Rivet came off his stool the way weather comes over the ridge, without hurrying, and stood there. Six foot four of him and a left hand that hung not quite closed, and the nephew found somewhere else to be. Danny had the cue back in the rack before the man reached the door. He caught an elbow in the mouth doing it, off a fourth party entirely, and tasted copper, and said nothing. Getting hit at a bar for reasons that had nothing to do with you was not an event. It was Friday.

Rivet looked at him. Didn't ask. Rivet never asked. He just handed Danny a bar rag off the mahogany and went back to his stool. Danny held it against his lip and thought, not for the first time, that there was one man in this club he could have said anything to. Saying it would have been the same as asking for something. He had gone five years without asking anybody here for one single thing.

Two things he wanted. Two.

The first was on the wall by the pool table in nineteen versions and none of them his. The top rocker, the bottom rocker, the crown between them. The thing that went on the back of a man and made the sheriff cross the street, and made Yolanda Rivera's son somebody instead of a kid off a bad road in the Ellery flats. Two years he'd been carrying a denim vest with a bottom rocker and a whole lot of empty leather above it.

The second one was in the back booth doing arithmetic and hadn't looked up in an hour.

He had never asked out loud for either.

It went bad at twenty past eleven, and it went bad the way things go bad in the Spoke. Loudly, and all at once, and with somebody already pouring.

Torch had a chair turned backwards near the end of the bar, watching the lot the way he always watched the lot. He was thirteen deep into telling the room about a man in Verlon who had tried to sell him a frame with the numbers ground off it. Then he swung round on the chair, delighted, the way he got.

"Ma. Hey. Ma." He pitched it to reach the pool table. "Are you paying her, or is she doing that for love? Because there's a woman in the back of this bar with a bank box and a calculator, and it's a Friday night, and half these degenerates think she's the entertainment—"

Somebody laughed. Somebody at the pool table said something Danny didn't catch and didn't need to, because he could see the shape of it. There was a low warm roll of it around the room. It wasn't cruel — nothing in this room was ever cruel about a woman, Deacon had spent thirty years making sure of that. It was easy. Easy, and easy was how the room decided what a person was.

Loretta set the bottle down.

She didn't set it down hard. That was the thing about Ma. She put it on the mahogany the way you put down a pen you might want in a minute. The room heard it anyway. The jukebox got to the end of a line and there was nobody talking over it.

"That's Gene Hale's daughter," she said. "Wheels' brother's girl. Which makes her mine."

Nothing. Forty people, and the cooler humming.

"So here it is once, and I'm saying it to the room so nobody has to come and ask me privately and waste my evening." Loretta picked her glasses out of her hair. She only ever did that to look at somebody properly. She looked at the room, all of it, every corner. Danny felt the look come across him and go past. "Nobody wearing a cut puts a hand near her. And nobody waiting on one puts a hand near her. That's not a house rule and it's not a favour to her, it's arithmetic, and I've done it before and I know how it comes out."

Torch said, "Ma—"

"You I'll deal with at home." She put the glasses back up in her hair. "Somebody feed that jukebox."

And that was it. Twelve seconds, maybe. The cue balls started again and the two old men pegged out a hand and a man at the door laughed at something else entirely, and the Broken Spoke went back to being a bar.

Danny stood by the ice well with a rag in his hand and his lip swelling, and understood it with a completeness that was almost restful. A room of forty people had just heard a rule about a room of forty people. Exactly one man in it had been told something.

Nobody wearing a cut.

And nobody waiting on one.

There was one of those in the building.

He looked at the back booth then, because there was no longer any point pretending he had a reason not to, and Cory Hale had her pen down flat on the ledger and she was looking at Loretta. Not at Danny. At Loretta, with that mouth that didn't move, for about as long as it takes to decide whether a thing is worth the argument.

Then she picked the pen up and went back to the column.

They emptied the place by half twelve. Danny stacked the chairs he was allowed to stack and left the rest for morning because chairs went up at close and came down at noon and that was not his to change. He carried the last two crates to the dock. He wiped the burn ring on the windowsill where a hundred cigarettes had been set down and forgotten. Nobody had ever asked him to do that. He did it every Friday. Then he stood in the doorway with the screen propped on its beer crate and watched her cross the gravel to a Corolla with a bad alternator. Ledger under one arm, bank box under the other, not hurrying, in a lot full of bikes and men.

She didn't look back at the bar. She got in. The Corolla thought about it for three long seconds and then caught.

Danny went the other way, across the flat worn place in the gravel where a dozen bikes were nosed in along the wall, half what there would be on a Sunday. Over to the church, and up the side steps into the nave. The coffee urn was still on and Tap had the deed folder open under the light, because Tap always had the deed folder open under the light now.

The chapel door stood ajar.

Danny stopped with his hand on it and looked past it into the room. Three of them in there, and the table, and the light on over the table. Then he crouched and set the wooden wedge with his heel and stepped back out of the doorway.

Nobody had ever had to tell him that one twice.

He went and got the mop, and washed his hands at the shop sink after. The ballpoint on the back of his left hand came off in four grey lines and went down the drain, the way it did every Friday, and would again next week.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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