County Line Breakdown

The heat had come to stay sometime around the middle of July, and by the third week of it Marnie Dane had stopped pretending she could sleep anywhere with a roof she paid for. She was twenty-nine years old, had grown up on a ranch four miles from the county line, and had never once left the Panhandle, which meant she knew exactly how the wind off the Llano Estacado behaved in August, which was to say it behaved like a hair dryer held by somebody who hated you personally.

The window unit in the fairground office had died on a Tuesday, wheezing once and then going quiet the way old machines do when they decide they've done enough, and the landlord, who was also the county, took eleven days to send anybody out to look at it. So Marnie had done what any sensible ranch hand with a drum kit and no attachments would do. She'd dragged a cot into the mechanic's bay on the far side of the fairgrounds, where the concrete stayed cool until noon and the big roll-up door could stand open all night, and she had slept there for nine nights running, waking up once or twice to a coyote testing the fence line and going right back out.

The bay still had a workbench along one wall, greasy and full of sockets nobody had inventoried since the late seventies, and somebody had left a dorm fridge that only kept things cool if you didn't open it, so she'd stopped opening it. The drum kit sat against the east wall because it was the only wall long enough, and she played on it in the evenings when the fairgrounds were empty, which they always were in the off-season, and the sound rolled out over the parking lot and across the empty cattle pens and came back to her a half second late, like a bad echo with good timing.

Her band, the Three Strands, had a gig ending in ten days, the bar in Dalhart closing down for good, and after that she'd told Doreen Creighton she'd probably just keep punching cattle and let the drumming go quiet for a while. Doreen ran the rodeo, had run it for years, had hired Marnie for summer gigs back when Marnie was twenty-four and still thought she might leave, and Doreen had said then what she always said, which was that the county keeps what the county wants, and Marnie had laughed and stayed.

It was on the ninth night in the bay, with the roll-up door open to a sunset the color of a rusted truck, that Fenton Mercer came around the corner of the building with his clipboard under his arm and his surveyor's vest still on, looking as if he had walked eight miles of section line and regretted every one of them.

"There you are," he said. "I've been looking all over the grounds. I heard drums from the north forty, if that's what you call it, and I thought, well, either the fairgrounds have come alive or it's her."

"It's me," Marnie said, laying her sticks across the snare. "The north forty is cattle country, Fenton. This is just the north parking lot."

"I've been out here two years and I still can't keep your compass points straight." He came into the bay and stood by the workbench, not quite sitting, the way he always did, like he was waiting for permission to exist in a room. He was thirty-four, a cartographer by trade, out here on a mapping contract that had kept him in the county longer than anyone expected, and in that time he and Marnie had become the kind of friends who drank one beer too slowly and told each other true things.

"Rough day?" she asked.

"Brutal. Six sections of caliche road that all look identical from the air, and I mapped the same windmill twice by accident." He set the clipboard down and finally sat, on a plastic crate that creaked under him. "Also I got my transfer paperwork confirmed today. Lisbon. I fly out Saturday."

Marnie picked up a stick and turned it over in her hands. "Saturday. You've been telling me for six months you might get shipped out and now it's this Saturday."

"Six months of maybe, then one email and it's real. That's how it always goes." He rubbed his thumb along the crate's edge. "Which is actually why I came looking for you. I have a favor to ask, and it's an odd one, so let me get it all out before you react."

"Go on."

"You know I'm leaving, and you know I don't have anybody here, and the woman I dated briefly a couple years back, before all this, ended things so amicably that we've never spoken since, which tells you something." He laughed a little at himself. "Anyway. Here's the favor. Before I go, I'd like one night that's actually mine. Not a going-away party at the VFW with potato salad. Something I'll remember. And the thing I keep coming back to, the thing I've thought about asking you for weeks and never had the nerve, is that I'd like to watch you perform. Really perform. And I'd like it to be more than a show, if you follow me."

Marnie set the stick down and looked at him properly. "You're asking me to put on a show for you, and by more than a show you mean a group scene. You, me, and whoever I'd bring in."

"If you follow me," he said again, "yes. I've thought about it for years, honestly, and never had the chance or the nerve, and I figure I've got a few days and one friend in this county who plays drums and doesn't scare easy. If the answer's no, then no harm done, and I'll buy you a beer at the going-away thing and call it even."

She was quiet for a moment, not because she was shocked, because she wasn't, she'd heard stranger asks over pickup tails than this one, but because she was doing the arithmetic of who she'd even ask. Doreen Creighton, forty-five, divorced longer than Marnie had been drinking, who had told Marnie once over cheap wine at the stock show that her years as a stock contractor had made her hard to shock. And Herman Lincoln, the veterinarian, fifty-two, widowed four years now, who helped Doreen run the chutes every fall and who Marnie had known since she was old enough to hold a horse for him, though nothing between them had ever been anything but neighborly until recently, when neighborly had started to feel like it had a door left unlocked.

"Okay," Marnie said. "Here's how it would work, if it works. I'd ask Doreen and Herman. Both of them know me, both of them are adults who can say no without the world ending, and I'd tell them straight what you're asking for so nobody walks in halfway through a surprise. And it happens here, in the bay, because I sleep here and it's the only room in the county with good airflow and a door I control."

"Here is perfect," Fenton said. "I don't need anything fancy. I need real."

"And one more thing," Marnie said, standing and picking up the stick again, pointing it at him the way she pointed at bandmates who rushed a tempo. "This is one night. You leave for Lisbon, I stay here, and neither of us turns it into a goodbye we have to keep apologizing for. It ends at dawn and we both mean that."

"Ends at dawn," he agreed. "I can promise that. I've gotten good at leaving things where I set them down."

She smiled at that, because it was the truest thing he'd said all evening, and the sun was going down behind the cattle pens and the first hint of a breeze had finally come through the open door, not a cool breeze, but a moving one, which in August on the Caprock counted for something.

"So I ask them tomorrow," she said. "Doreen's got the barn dance setup all week, I'll catch her at the grandstand in the morning before it gets hot. Herman comes by the fairgrounds Thursdays to look at the barrels, he'll be around. And you, Fenton Mercer, go home and sleep in whatever motel room has a working AC, because one of us should be comfortable on Thursday night."

"That's tomorrow night."

"Tomorrow night," Marnie said, and rolled the stick across her knuckles, and thought about how strange and good it was that after twenty-nine years in one county, the county could still hand her something she'd never done before.

The phone calls took less time than Marnie had expected, which either meant she'd sized both of them up correctly over the years or meant the heat had cooked everybody's judgment down to the same soft consistency. She caught Doreen at the grandstand at seven in the morning, before the sun had finished climbing over the grandstands and turned the aluminum benches into griddles, and Doreen listened to the whole thing without interrupting once, which was itself a kind of answer.

"So a cartographer," Doreen said at the end, and Marnie could hear her squinting. "He draws maps for a living and he wants to watch you drum and then he wants to watch the rest of it too."

"That's the shape of it. I'd understand a no, Doreen. It's a strange ask and I'm asking strange."

"Honey, I ran a stock contractor outfit for eleven years and then ran a rodeo for longer than that. Strange is a Tuesday. You're twenty-nine, I'm forty-five, everybody's grown, and you want it at the fairgrounds after midnight so nobody wanders in. That's better planning than half my dance committees." A pause, and then Doreen laughed, a short bark Marnie had heard over loudspeakers a hundred times. "I'll come. After midnight. I'll bring my own beer because I know what you keep in that fridge."

Herman was harder to find and easier to convince, which surprised her, since he'd been a widower for four years and mostly talked to her about horse teeth and barrel rust. He was under the bleachers when she found him, and he straightened up slow, the way fifty-two teaches a man to straighten up, and listened with his hat in his hands.

"You're sure about this," he said. "Not asking if I'm sure. Asking if you are."

"I wouldn't be asking if I wasn't." She'd rehearsed it and then thrown the rehearsal out, because Herman had held her hand at her father's funeral and you didn't rehearse things with a man like that. "It's one night. Fenton flies out Saturday. After that it's just a story I'll tell badly at barbecues."

"Well," Herman said, and put his hat back on, which Marnie took as a yes before he even got to it. "I've been coming out here Thursdays for six years to look at barrels, and I can't tell you the last time Thursday was interesting. Count me in. I'll bring the good beer, the stuff Doreen pretends not to like."

* * *

By eleven that night the bay was arranged the way Marnie wanted it, which took longer than she'd figured because everything in the bay had to be moved twice. She'd rolled the drum kit out from the east wall and put it near the center, on the piece of carpet she slept on, so the drums sat under the one hanging work light like a stage that had wandered in from a much smaller venue. The cot went to the corner. The folding chairs came out of the office, two of them, one for Fenton and one she couldn't explain and set up anyway. The dorm fridge held the beer Doreen was wrong about, and the roll-up door stood open to a night that had finally dropped below ninety, the air moving through the bay in a slow tide that smelled like creosote and the dry pond at the south end of the grounds.

Fenton arrived at half past eleven looking as if he had ironed a shirt for an occasion that had no dress code, and Marnie laughed at him for it and he took it well, hung his surveyor's vest over the back of his folding chair like he was claiming territory.

"How do you want to do this," he asked, sitting down and then standing back up because nobody had said sit yet. "Is there a script? I don't need a script."

"There's no script. It's the Panhandle, we improvise." Marnie had changed into her only clean shirt and a pair of jeans with the knees gone soft, and she'd kept her boots on all day on purpose, a superstition she'd never once examined. "They get here after midnight. We talk first, we drink a little, and if anybody at any point wants to stop, they say so and that's all there is to it. You watch unless somebody invites you in, and if you want in, you say it out loud like a grown man and not like a hint."

"Out loud," Fenton repeated. "I can do out loud. I've been practicing out loud for six months, apparently."

Doreen's truck came up the gravel at twelve-ten, headlights sweeping the cattle pens, and Herman's pickup rolled in behind it with its familiar tick in the engine, and Marnie stood in the doorway of the bay with her arms crossed and watched two people she'd known most of her adult life climb out into the dark holding grocery sacks of beer like this was a cribbage night.

"Well, I'll be," Doreen said from the doorway, taking in the drum kit lit up in the middle of the mechanic's bay, the open door, the folding chairs. She was forty-five and built like the work she'd done her whole life, in a sleeveless denim shirt, and she looked around the bay with the eye of a woman who had staged a hundred events in worse venues. "You've got a stage. You actually built a little stage."

"It's a carpet and a work light, Doreen."

"It's a stage if the drummer says it is." She came in, kissed Marnie on the cheek the way she had at every stock show since Marnie was twenty-four, handed her a sack of bottles, and then turned to Fenton and put out her hand. "Doreen Creighton. You're the cartographer. You're leaving my county."

"Fenton Mercer, and yes, Saturday morning, and I already regret it some."

"Good answer." Herman came in behind her with his own sack, nodded at