Someone pulled the plug on the patio lights, a string of fat bulbs that fell from the eaves, to see the satellite better. From the frequent flare of matches the smell of sulfur had gathered and stuck, and glass bottles hung empty between the middle and index fingers. Lloyd moved behind the rough line they formed, placing his fifteen-pound head on various shoulders, licking sweat from the backsides of sunburned ears.
Standing with her thumbs hooked into the waist of her overalls, Fay imagined Vincent behind some hulking telescope on a neat patch of sand, an olive cardigan pushed up to his elbows, the men around him sober and well equipped.
The feeling couldn’t have been more feverish outside Charlie’s, the men less certain. A ladder leaned against the far side of the building for reasons immediately forgotten, abandoned tumblers sat in clusters on the porch railings. Although it would signify a failure and a threat and the obsolescence of an era over which they had reigned, when it came it was easy to love, particularly under the desert’s primitive covering of beige, where nothing could truly glow. Like debris raised up by a gathering wave, they lifted an inch off their heels as Sputnik gave its last detectable winks.
Inside, after, the mood was hot and finicky, the course of it hard to determine, and Charlie, smelling the money that might slump out her door, announced half off the next two rounds.
“And anyone,” she said, her torso swaying to reach different parts of the room, “who can tell me the exact percentage of piss in the ocean gets a free kiss on the ass.”
She always spoke this way, around these men, an outsized simulacrum of the bravado that had made her. Alone with Fay she would be monosyllabic, eaten by her own performance, upset by the smallest sound, but now she was on the piano, her elbows in flight. It was a song they all knew and that hardly needed playing, so engraved was it in the collective memory. Someone’s sneakin’ ’round the corner—is the someone Mack the Knife?
At the register, a pen behind her ear, Fay followed suit, doing her own part in massaging the collective morale, speaking like an auctioneer. “Nineteen forty-five. Bud’s got a shiny silver 1945. Who can go lower? Have I got a 1944, 1943?” With the pads of their fingers, the men scraped their coins around on the bar, creating piles, squinting.
“’Thirty-nine!” someone yelled from the far end.
“’Eight.”
“’Thirty-fuckin’-two.”
“’Thirty-two, we’ve got ’thirty-two. Can anyone here top Tom’s lustrous, golden ’thirty-two penny?”
Tom was squat and silent with long eyelashes, a man who seemed unnecessary even to himself. He held the coin in his closed fist, grinning in a way that seemed private. There was the scratching sound of twenty of them double-checking, then a lull through which Charlie’s singing voice stabbed—a cement bag’s drooping down.
From the center of the bar Rusty shot a hand up and held it there until all eyes had climbed up to meet it. He would not say the number, she realized. He would make her go to him, touch his scorched fingers to retrieve the dime.
“Nineteen eleven,” Fay said, knowing he would be there the next six days, redeeming his free shot of whiskey, memorizing the length of her fingernails, the placket of buttons on her shirt, for some use of his own.
The rest of the night passed easily, rearranged by the familiar models of contest and loss. “You’re my fireworks girl,” Charlie said, kissing Fay on an ear on her way out. Fay played gardener to the last few men, taking from them what they didn’t need, presenting them water. She stacked pint glasses fifteen high, twenty, until the last customer had gone. An hour poured in around her as she mopped. Only in killing the lights of the bar did she understand the lamp in her room was on.
Atop her unmade bed Rusty was as pink and naked as the just born, far into sleep and a peace that seemed real. She looked at her things as he must have, the Mexican candles Charlie had brought her, deep red and blue, melted onto the floor, the cotton panties she had kicked off in the night crumpled like rotting blossoms. The feeling in her body was some crucial omission, an organ she’d been born without, a place where bone should be but was not. She was gone in ten seconds, waiting out the time he would leave from a room across the way, watching the pink and silver come vicious to the sky. It was the first morning of the space age, and her life most resembled an accident.
FAY DIDN’T KNOW WHY SHE told her sister the lie she did, that the wooden handle on the older chopping knife had splintered, that they needed to order a new one from the puckered Sears catalog Charlie kept in her personal bathroom. It was in fine condition where she’d slipped it between her cot and the floor, handle side out.
She worked her shift with the lump under her bed not far from her mind, waiting for Rusty to return and redeem his prize. He would leave money on the table for her, she imagined, a large tip that was a substitute for an apology, and she would take it. She listened to the president’s address as she mopped, in his promise that America would not fall behind the implicit admission that it already had. Brawls broke out without their customary circling, the rising bridge of insults. What she heard instead was the hollow note of a toppled chair, the liquid thud of a gut against a wall. She saw the tallest of them spitting blood from his mouth, as he floated out the door, so casually she believed, at first, it was a nutshell or a seed.