5. Tangled Truths #2
Inside it's all dark wood and low light.
A long bar somebody put real hours into, oiled smooth, a brass rail worn bright where the boots go.
A carved back bar gone near-black with age, a tall mirror spotted at the corners, bottles climbing to a pressed-tin ceiling.
Leather booths soft from forty years of use.
A wood stove in the corner against the May cold, and the warm comes off all of it — the wood, the bottles, a string of low bulbs the color of whiskey held up to a lamp.
Ranch brands burned into a board over the taps.
A coil of rope on a nail, a length of old tack on the wall — nothing hung to be looked at, hung because somebody had it and it belonged.
A country pub that walked a long way west and made itself at home.
I've sat in bars on four continents. This is the first one that ever felt like somebody's front room.
She doesn't smile when she sees me. Doesn't look away either. Holds it the length of a breath — deciding something, the way she did crossing the street that first morning — then goes back to the pour in her hand like I'm an order she'll get to.
I mean to take the stool at the end, the one that lets me see the room. I don't get the chance.
"There he is." Ed's voice, from a round table in the back corner under a hanging lamp — a spread of cards, a scatter of chips, three men already in it.
He's got a beer and a look that says he's been waiting all evening to be proved right.
"Told you he'd turn up. Sit down, Mathison.
We're a man light, and Dale here's been winning, which is an offense against God. "
So much for the stool.
I cross to the table. The room watches me do it the way this town watches anything new — a beat of frank, friendly interest, then back to its own business, because a stranger in Coldwater isn't a threat, he's the evening's mild entertainment.
Fifteen years I cataloged every face in a room for the one wrong one. Here they pull out a chair.
Three at the table besides Ed. A big loud rancher he calls Dale — one of the Cooper brothers Eleanor ran the whole saga of past me over pie, two brothers and one fence line and forty years of being wrong.
A leaner, quieter one I take for the other Cooper.
And a man in a good shirt nursing a Diet Coke like he's presiding over a courtroom, who Ed introduces, dry, as "the judge — don't take his money, he'll hold it against you from the bench. "
I sit. Ed deals me in without asking if I want to be. The cards come easy — I learned poker in places where it was the only thing to do that wasn't dying, and it comes back to my hands the way wiring did under the Bronco.
"You play like a man who's played," Dale says, watching me drag a small pot. "Where's a Navy boy learn cards?"
"Same place everybody does. Boredom and bad company."
The judge snorts. Ed grins into his beer. "Careful. He's quiet. Quiet ones take your house."
And then a draft tap hisses across the room and my eyes go to it before I can stop them, the way they've been trying to go since I walked in.
She's behind the bar, running it.
Five minutes at this table and I've lost the thread of the game twice, because she keeps pulling my eyes off my cards. I've run men in places where a wrong call got somebody killed; I know command when I'm looking at it, and I'm looking at it.
She runs sixty people like a roster she's had by heart for years.
Knows the drink before the order clears the lip.
A kid down the bar leans too far over at the quick girl's back, and before he's got the lean committed she's there, both palms flat, eyes level with his, and whatever she says puts him back on his stool grinning and thanking her for it. Never raised her voice.
She lifts her chin a quarter inch at the big man working the floor — Bo, square in the shoulders, ex-something, an operator I made in four seconds because I am one — and he sets down his rag and drifts that way without a word passing between them.
Down the bar she sends a plate to a thin man in a worn coat who didn't order one, and waves his wallet off before it clears the wood. Pete, Eleanor's voice supplies in my head; lost his place two springs back. Comes in for the warmth and the noise and his own name in a room.
"You in or out, sailor?" Dale, impatient.
I look down. I've got nothing and I bet it like nothing and fold, and I'd be lying if I said I knew what was in my hand.
Ed's watching me over his cards with the particular nothing-look of a man who sees everything and saves it for later. He doesn't say it now. He just takes the pot Dale should've had and lets the quiet carry the point.
My phone goes off against my leg. I check it under the table out of fifteen years of habit. The thread's the three of us that are left.
HAGEN: Reyes says you met a woman in a town nobody's heard of
ME: Reyes talks too much.
REYES: he's at her bar RIGHT NOW. playing cards with the locals. I'd put my truck on it
ME: How.
REYES: because you haven't told us to fuck off. you always tell us to fuck off.
He's not wrong. I pocket it. Somebody racks the cards and for a second the two worlds sit in me at once — the one in my pocket, behind me and gone, Holt's seat empty in the thread the way you leave a chair — and the one at this table, warm and loud and dealing me back in like I belong to it.
Nobody trains you for the part where you've got a foot in each.
Around eight the front door goes, and the weather of the table changes.
Walt Mercer hangs his cap on the hook by the back hall, draws a coffee he won't drink, and takes the empty seat at the table — his seat, the one they left open, I understand now, the way you leave a chair.
He nods at the judge. He nods at the Coopers.
He looks at me a half-second longer than a nod, and sits down directly across from me.
Now I'm playing cards under the eye of the man who told me whatever I thought I saw, I didn't.
And I cannot keep my eyes off his daughter.
I try. God knows I try. I play three clean hands and watch my cards like they're the only thing in the room.
Then she laughs at something the quick girl says — low and surprised, like it got out before she meant it to — and my eyes go to her before I've decided to send them, and when they come back to the table Walt Mercer is looking at me.
He doesn't say anything. He deals.
I lose the next hand to him. I lose it because I bet a good hand like a distracted man, which is what I am, and he takes it without a flicker.
"You play cards," Walt says, gathering the pot, not looking up, "like a man with his mind somewhere else."
"Yes sir."
"Mm." He squares the deck. "Costs you."