Clyde looked from Nikki’s frozen expression back to Jackson. “Well, Nikki did all the hard work,” he said, picking up her name from Jackson. “So grab his feet. I don’t like having bodies cluttering up the place.”
“Statements like that make me worry about you, Clyde,” said Jackson and walked forward to pick up Carhartt’s feet.
“You go back to your burger, Miss,” said Clyde.
Nikki sat down on the barstool and stared at her burger. She took a bite because it wouldn’t do to have Jackson think she was upset. She chewed mechanically while they moved Button-Up to the porch as well. She took a gulp of her drink as Jackson sat down next to her.
“The usual,” said Jackson to Clyde, who nodded and went back into the kitchen.
He was bigger than she remembered. Or maybe he wasn’t. In high school, he had been small, only a few inches taller than Nikki—just enough so that when she wore heels for a dance he was still an inch or two taller. Everyone knew that he was small. They had been the cute little couple. No one could change his height, so why did he look bigger? Nikki squinted at him, trying to place the difference.
Dark blue T-shirt, naturally faded jeans, shit-kicker working cowboy boots, and dark hair that stood up at the cowlick in back. Same as forever. He hadn’t changed the uniform much since they were twelve. The scar on his face was new. It started below his left ear and cut to the mid-point on his jawbone. It looked like someone had taken a razor blade and sliced it down his face. He was tan and his hazel eyes had a few early wrinkles around them from squinting into the sun. Always strong for his size, his forearms now looked as if they had been carved from oak. His hands, large and callused, curled loosely around a glass of beer. He was leaner than she remembered. He had taken on the compact, wiry look of a Thai boxer. There was nothing but muscle to the man. All the excess had been trimmed away. And at last, Nikki nodded. This was what the difference was. She was seeing Jackson for the first time with nothing in the way.
“Were you planning on just sitting there?” she asked.
“You had it under control,” said Jackson, looking around the room, as if surveying her work.
“I meant, were you going to sit there, without saying hello or anything?”
“Oh.” He looked sheepish. “Hi.”
There was a silence after that and Nikki stared at Jackson. Jackson stared back. For years, she’d been carrying around a speech in her head, a litany of the pain he had caused, and now faced with the chance to speak, she found the words wouldn’t come. The person she was sitting next to wasn’t the same person who had hurt her. The Jackson she remembered could never sit still. He had been a chair swiveling, toe-tapping, paper tearing, bundle of energy. This Jackson never twitched. He didn’t even twist the bar stool back and forth.
“So what have you been doing with yourself?” asked Nikki. “You broke up with me, dropped out of college, then what?”
Jackson blinked. Whatever he had been expecting her to say, it hadn’t been that.
“Short story or long?”
“Short,” answered Nikki decidedly. She wasn’t sure how much she wanted to torture herself. If he turned out to be happily married to a blonde with tits the size of pumpkins and three doe-eyed children she might have to go back home and slit her wrists.
“I ran away and joined the rodeo.”
Nikki nodded. That fit.
“I won a few things, but it got to the point where I could see I wasn’t going to be the best.”
“And that would never do for you,” said Nikki.
He grinned. “But I was hard-headed and I found I’d developed a taste for blood and bullshit, so I became a rodeo clown.”
“How’s that working out for you?”
“Not too bad,” he said in his old, understated way.
“Are you the best at it?” prodded Nikki.
“I do all right,” he said and took a sip of his beer.
“Meaning you are or close enough to the best,” said Nikki. Jackson shrugged again, which Nikki took to be an agreement with her statement.
“How about you?” asked Jackson, setting down his beer. “I talked to Donny earlier this week. Said he ran into you down in LA and that you looked good.” Nikki kept her body language relaxed, but she felt a nervous tingle in the base of her spine, and wondered what else Donny had told Jackson. And if any of the things he had mentioned were Z’ev.
“He didn’t say much more than that,” said Jackson, “but I got the impression that he was worried about you.”
“About me?” said Nikki with a disarming smile. “Can’t think why.”
Jackson looked pointedly at the table that Button-Up had crashed through. It was still laying on its side. the chairs pushed away at awkward angles.
“Neither can I,” he answered. There was a glimmer in his eye that Nikki remembered, and it occurred to her to wonder what he was seeing in her for the first time.
Nikki took a quick stock of herself. Red hair, grey eyes, maybe a few more muscles. There reached a point in a girl’s life where the metabolism of high school turns to the ass of college and she must either hit the gym or buy larger pants. Nikki had gone for the workout and although her pants size had remained virtually unchanged, the soft quality that characterized Nikki’s appearance in high school and college had disappeared. Nothing else had changed. Had it?
“So…” said Nikki.
“So,” agreed Jackson and that annoyed her.
“That’s all you have to say to me?” she asked, feeling a flare of the old anger. “That really is it?”
“It?” repeated Jackson warily, and Nikki rolled her eyes.
“I think your last words to me were, let me see if I can get this right… Oh yeah… ‘I can’t see you anymore. I just can’t talk to you.’ End quote. I begged to see you and you said no. And then I went over to your apartment and you had moved out the night before. You broke up with me over the phone and said we could no longer speak. And now we’re just gonna sit here and shoot the breeze?”
“And another country. Not only did I break up with you over the phone, I was calling from Canada. They had an open call for bronc riders at a rodeo up there.” She could see by his smile that he was hoping she’d laugh, but Nikki didn’t laugh.
“But we can talk now? Or should I move to the other end of the bar?”
“It’s been nine years, Nikki.” She continued to stare, not sure what to say. “Come on, I can’t change my mind in nine years?”
She remembered a far-away day. It had been sunny with a sky like an upturned blue bowl over their heads. Jackson and Donny had found two oversized sets of boxing gloves in the shed and were wailing away at each other.
“It’s my turn!” Nikki yelled.
“Girls don’t box,” said Donny, the enormous gloves dangling at the end of his skinny arms.
“You let me play or I’m telling your mom!” she said, hands on her hips.
“Better let her,” said Jackson.
Nikki pulled the gloves off Donny and started jamming her fists into them. He helped her with the second one. “Now tell me what to do,” she said to Donny, squaring off with Jackson.
“You just try and hit Jackson in the face,” said Donny with a shrug.
“I’m the bell,” said Jackson. “When you hear me yell ‘ding’, that’s the start or end of the round. Ding!” Then he swung for her head. Nikki felt the entire glove along the side of her face, and automatically kicked Jackson in the shin.”
“You’re supposed to punch!” yelled Donny.
Nikki swung her left and then her right. It was hard to land the gloves where she wanted. Especially with Jackson swinging back. She finally started making progress—first her left glove hit him in the eye and then her right hit him in the mouth. She was lining up for another punch when –
“Ding!”
“Ding,” she said. “You always were the bell.”
“What?”
“When we were ten, you and Donny were boxing in the backyard, but we didn’t have a bell or anything to signal the end of rounds, so you would yell ding. Took me years to realize that every time I started to win, you’d yell ding.”
He laughed. “I don’t remember that, but it makes sense. If I’d beat you up, your mother would have beat me senseless and you were probably too good.”
“But you’re doing it again. You always do. You don’t like the game, so you cheat.”
“You’re going to hold me to something I said when I was twenty? And be mad at me for something I did when I was ten?”
“Yes!” exclaimed Nikki. “It’s not what you said or when. It’s you and me. I know you, Jackson. Everyone gets a fair deal from you. Everyone but me. I loved you. And beyond that, we were friends and I want to know why the hell some stranger gets better from you than me?”
“You only hurt the ones you love?” he asked with his idiot grin.
Nikki growled. She’d been aiming for a Marge Simpson murmur, but it came out more like a pissed off Z’ev.
“Because I couldn’t ever win,” he said at last.
“What?”
“Nikki, I hated college. I hated the pretentious neo-hippies living off daddy’s money and thinking they were so much better than the blue-collar slob working in the paper mill. I hated the professors. I hated all of that and I didn’t fit in. You, on the other hand, fit like a glove. You knew what the teachers wanted to hear. You could have dated any guy on campus. You were where you belonged and I wasn’t.”
“You could have told me that!”
“No, I couldn’t. I could barely explain it to myself. I’ve barely got it figured out now. But even if I’d been able to put it into words, it wouldn’t have mattered. If I’d stayed to talk to you, you would have talked me into staying. You always got your way with me, and I needed things to be my way for a while. There was too much you and not enough me. I didn’t even talk to Donny for a couple of years. I only came home at Christmas for three years in a row. My mom kept asking what she’d done wrong. And there wasn’t anything. I just needed to be on my own.”
Nikki opened her mouth to say something hurtful and then closed it again.
“Yeah, OK,” she said. She drank the last of her gin and tonic and stared at the neon signs above the bar for a while. Alison Krauss was playing on the jukebox. The bartender came back in followed by the Sheriff.
“Jackson,” said the sheriff with a sigh, “I thought you’d given up picking on things that didn’t outweigh you by at least a ton.”
“Wasn’t me,” said Jackson.
“It was the girl,” said the bartender.
The sheriff looked speculatively at Nikki.
“Hello. I’m Sheriff Mervin Smalls. Is there a reason you took such a violent dislike to our friends Milt and Pedro, young lady?”
“I felt threatened,” said Nikki. It probably would have sounded more convincing if she had actually looked scared.
“Right,” said Merv.
“They were drunk,” said the bartender.
“Thank you, Clyde. I would never have guessed.”
“They came in with a girl and when she got up to leave, one of them grabbed her, so then Nikki said they should let the girl go, but they didn’t want to and one of them took a swing at Nikki, so she defended herself.”
“Again, thank you, Clyde, for that stirring narrative. Now, how about we let the young lady tell it?” Merv was a little over fifty and, while not exactly in fighting trim, had a comfortable beefy look that said he could toss a few drunks or small cows around without any problems. He was looking at Nikki with a set of hard, dark brown eyes, from under a set of bushy eyebrows, and Nikki wasn’t sure that he was at all pleased with her.
“They wouldn’t let the girl they were with leave, so I said they should let her go and one of them took a swing at me, so I defended myself,” said Nikki. “The one in the Carhartts,” she added, since the sheriff seemed to want specifics.
“Milt,” said the sheriff, shaking his head.
“And the other one tried to jump her from behind,” said Clyde.
The sheriff raised an eyebrow at Clyde, who smiled awkwardly and looked at Nikki.
“The other one attacked me while I was dealing with Milt,” said Nikki, confirming Clyde’s story.
“That sounds like our Pedro, tsk. And where is the other young lady now?” The sheriff looked around the room, as if she might suddenly appear.
“She took off,” said Nikki.
“To be honest,” said Clyde, “I think she might have stolen their car.”
“We don’t know that,” said Nikki. “It might have been her car.”
“The keys were in his pocket,” argued Clyde.
“Well, considering how abusive he was, that would be in keeping with his personality.” Clyde shrugged as if to say he did not agree, but wasn’t planning on arguing further. “Anyway,” she said turning back to the sheriff, “they attacked me. I defended myself.”
Merv collected a handful of bar peanuts from the dish on the bar and thoughtfully chewed a few. “You paint a moving picture of fear. I feel that you were indeed threatened and acting in defense of your person. But just so the paperwork is tidy can I have your name and where you can be reached?” Merv pulled a pen and small notebook out of his breast pocket and clicked the pen at Nikki expectantly.
“Nicole Lanier,” she said. “L-A-N-I-E-R.”
“Ah,” said Merv, flipping his notebook closed, without writing anything. “I should have recognized the hair. Just like your father’s. Up visiting, are you? I had heard that you were living down in Los Angeles these days.”
“Uh, yes,” said Nikki. She’d forgotten how much people knew about each other in small towns.
“Good, I’m sure Peg will be happy to have you around.” Nikki couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so she said nothing. “Staying very long?”
“Just a week or so,” said Nikki, frowning.
“Mm-hmm. Good. Thanks, Clyde,” said Merv, taking another handful of peanuts. Clyde waved his dish-towel in Merv’s general direction as acknowledgement. “Jackson, I can assume you’ll make sure the young lady gets home without further incident?” Jackson nodded and Nikki fumed.
“Without further incident?” repeated Nikki, when Merv had ambled out the door. “What did he mean by that?”
“I think he meant that he didn’t want to arrest anyone else tonight and I should keep you out of trouble.”
“I can keep myself out of trouble,” snapped Nikki.
“Really?” asked Jackson.
“This wasn’t trouble,” she said firmly.
Jackson shrugged. She could see he was trying not to smile.
“It wasn’t!” she protested, trying not to laugh herself. “OK, it was a little trouble, but not a lot of trouble.”
“Well, maybe your definition of trouble and mine are different,” he allowed and Nikki did laugh.
“Was it worth it?” she asked, turning the subject back to where it had been.
“Was what worth it?” he asked, returning her smile easily.
“Leaving us. Donny, your family, everyone. Leaving me. Was the pain you caused worth it?”
“I didn’t want to hurt anyone,” he said.
“I believe that, but knowing that you did, and knowing how much—because believe me, it was no small amount—would you do it again?”
“Yes,” he answered without hesitation. “I had to. I couldn’t continue pretending to be what I wasn’t.”
Nikki hesitated and then nodded. “Yeah, I figured.”
Jackson was staring at her, a bemused expression on his face. Nikki stared back, waiting for him to speak.
“Hi,” he said at last, putting out his hand as if to shake, “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Jackson Tyrell.”
“New and improved?” asked Nikki with a laugh.
“Old enough to know what can’t be improved. Now who the hell are you?”