Swinging at the Record Store

I was twenty-three that fall and I'd been working at the coffee roastery in Ford's Crossing for almost two years, which in a town that size made me practically a veteran. The place empties out after Labor Day. The summer people pack up their sandals and their paddleboards and the whole estuary goes quiet, and what's left is the year-round crowd, maybe four hundred people who all know each other's business. Off-season Ford's Crossing is a good place to be bored. I ended up at the Last Spin Record Shop on a Thursday in October, digging through the blues crate with no intention of buying anything.

The Last Spin was closing. Everybody knew it. Gordon had run the place for thirty years and his knees finally quit on him before the tourists did, so he'd put a hand-lettered sign in the window in August and had been selling everything down to the fixtures ever since. The bins were picked over pretty bad by mid-October, but I still liked going in there after my shift. It smelled like dust and old cardboard, and Gordon would tell you the story of any record you picked up whether you asked or not.

I had the blues crate half pulled out onto the floor when I saw it. A live album, B.B. King, recorded at a small club in 1966, the kind of pressing that doesn't show up in a town like this more than once a decade. I'd been hunting that record for months. Gordon had told me back in the summer it was in the store somewhere, and I'd gone through the crates two and three times since then with no luck. Now here it was, sitting under a stack of discarded Christmas albums like it had been waiting.

I reached for it and my hand hit another hand.

I looked up. The hand belonged to a man I'd seen around town but never actually talked to. Tall, somewhere around forty-nine, give or take, gray coming in at his temples, forearms like he worked with a rope in his hands all day, which I later found out was basically true. He washed windows. I knew that much. I'd watched him hang off the side of the bank building on Main Street one morning that summer with his squeegee going, thinking he looked like he was enjoying himself more than any man hanging off a building should.

He knew me too, or knew of me. I could tell by the way his eyebrows went up.

"You were reaching for this," he said.

"I was absolutely reaching for this."

"You had your fingers on it first."

"Then take your hand off it."

He didn't take his hand off it. Neither did I. We stood there in the aisle like two dogs with one bone, and I could feel my jaw setting itself into that stubborn thing my mother always told me about. The record was fifty bucks, marked down from eighty. It wasn't about the money. It was about the fact that I'd earned this one, dug through every bin in the shop over four months, and this stranger had just walked in off the street two weeks before closing and was going to pluck it out from under me.

"Gordon," I called over my shoulder. "Tell this man I've been after this record since July."

Gordon looked up from his cash box. "Can't do that, Cora. First come, first served. Store policy since the day I opened."

"Whose side are you even on?"

"Nobody's. I'm retiring."

The man smiled at that, and I hated that it was a decent smile. "Hans," he said, shifting his grip so I could shake his other hand, which I refused to do, on principle, with my left hand occupied by vinyl warfare. "You're the roaster. On Water Street."

"Cora. And I was here first, in spirit, if not in body."

"Strong argument. Doesn't hold up."

We stood there a while longer, and I'll admit I was running out of moves. I'd been outmaneuvered by a window washer and there was nothing to do about it. Then his eyes drifted past my shoulder to the shelf behind the counter, where Gordon kept the weirder items, the stuff that didn't fit in crates. Old radios, a jar of guitar picks, a brass lamp, and a red fire extinguisher, the old copper and brass kind with a carrying handle and a hose, the kind you see in photographs of gas stations from the fifties.

Hans let go of the record.

I snatched it to my chest before he could change his mind, and he was already walking past me, already pulling the extinguisher off the shelf like it was a package addressed to him personally.

"That thing doesn't even work," I said. "It's forty years expired. It's a decoration."

"It's a period-correct accessory for a 1974 VW van, is what it is."

"You're going to mount a dead fire extinguisher in a van."

"I'm going to mount a beautiful dead fire extinguisher in a beautiful van. There's a difference." He turned it over, checked the gauge, which was pegged at zero, and nodded like the gauge had told him good news. "It's original to the era. The van came with a bracket for it. The bracket's been empty for a year and it bothers me every time I open the back doors."

"You wash windows for a living and you're worried about period correctness."

"A man can have standards."

I looked at him, holding my record, looking at him holding his extinguisher, and something about the whole picture struck me as funny, though I wasn't going to let him see that. Gordon rang us up together at the counter, fifty for the album, twenty-five for the extinguisher, and Hans paid for both before I could get my wallet out, which was either courtesy or a move, and I hadn't decided which.

"You didn't have to do that," I said outside on the sidewalk. The wind off the estuary had that bite in it that October brings, and the water past the rooftops was the flat gray color the water gets when the season's over.

"It seemed fair. I took your record and then your dignity in the same minute."

"You didn't take my dignity."

"Then I took your record twice."

* * *

The thing you should know about me, the thing that matters to this story, is that I swing dance. Not competitively or anything, but seriously enough. There's a hall in the next town over that runs a social night every Wednesday, and I've been going since I was twenty-one, after a thing with a barista named Devon ran its course and I needed somewhere to put my evenings. Six months with Devon, it ended fine, no hard feelings, he moved to Halifax. But the dancing stuck. Lindy hop, some Charleston, a little balboa when I'm feeling brave. I'm good. I'm not going to be modest about it, because modesty in this particular argument would have cost me.

And the thing about Hans, which came out of him in pieces over the next ten minutes of sidewalk, was that he used to teach ballroom. For three years, starting when he was twenty-four, at a studio in the city, before he packed it in and started traveling and eventually washed up in Ford's Crossing washing windows. He said it the way people say things they've put away a long time, casual, brushing it off, but I caught it.

So naturally, being me, I said the worst possible thing.

"Ballroom's not dancing. Ballroom is walking with a scorecard."

Hans stopped halfway to his van, which was parked at the curb, an honest-to-God brown and cream seventy-four VW panel van with a ladder rack on top, and looked at me.

"Say that again."

"Ballroom. Walking. Scorecard. You can dance a foxtrot at a wedding and nobody in the room will be able to tell the difference between that and a slow walk with good posture."

"That's the point of a foxtrot."

"That's the point of nothing."

He leaned against the van and crossed his arms, and I could see the old instructor coming up through him like a tide. "All right. What do you dance?"

"Swing. Lindy hop. Real dancing, where you actually move."

"Swing." He said it the way my grandfather said the word hip-hop. "The flailing one."

"The flailing one takes eight counts and a brain. I'd offer to demonstrate but there's no floor out here."

"Is that an invitation?"

It wasn't, not yet, but it became one about four seconds later, in the way these things do, where a joke gets said out loud and then you're stuck living up to it.

"There's a flat spot at the river ford," I said. "The campsite past the bridge. Grass is packed down hard enough to dance on, and it's, what, quarter mile from here. You put your extinguisher in your van, I put my record in my bag, and we settle it. I'll teach you eight counts of lindy. If you can keep up, maybe ballroom gets some respect. If you can't, you admit swing is the superior dance and you tell Gordon so in front of witnesses."

"And when you can't keep up with me, Cora, what do I win?"

"Respect. Dignity. The knowledge that you once lost to a roaster half your age."

He was quiet a second, looking out at the water, and I watched him decide. People decide like that, all at once, and you can see it land.

"There's no music at the river ford," he said.

"There's a speaker in my bag."

"There's no floor."

"There's grass. Real dancers dance on grass."

"Fine," he said, and opened the back of the van, and set the extinguisher in its empty bracket as a man puts a trophy on a shelf. "But when you're eating grass, remember I offered you the chance to walk away."

The campsite at the ford was exactly as advertised, which I was glad about, because I'd talked a big game on that sidewalk and if the grass had been soggy I'd have had to eat some of it. Packed down hard, level, the river running low and quiet beside it, the water gone that late-afternoon copper color. Hans parked the van with the back doors facing the flat spot like a stage, which I suspect was a joke and I suspect he thought was subtle.

I dug the speaker out of my bag and put on the B.B. King, which felt right, paying for itself a second time in one afternoon. Live recording, 1966, crowd noise baked into it. Good beat for eight counts. I kicked off my shoes and set them by the fire ring, and Hans watched me do it with his arms crossed.

"Barefoot," he said.

"Grass is dry. You want to feel the floor, this is how you feel the floor." I walked out to the middle of the flat spot and turned around. "Okay. Basic eight count. Watch first, then you copy." I did it slow, rock step, triple step, triple step, arms doing what arms do when you're alone and showing off a little. "That's it. Weight stays low, knees soft. Most people bounce, which is the tell of an amateur, so don't bounce."

He copied it and it was, annoyingly, not bad. His timing was fine. But I watched his frame, and his frame was all wrong, shoulders up around his ears, weight back on his heels the way a ballroom man stands when he's waiting for a judge.

"You're stiff," I said. "Loosen the knees."

"Your posture is the problem," he said, walking over. "You're leaning forward. Whole upper body's tipping into the step like you're about to sprint."

"I am not leaning."

"You are." And then he put his hands on my hips, both of them, plain as anything, and squared me back over my feet. "Weight back. Chest up. There."

Here's the part I'll be honest about, or as honest as I get: I noticed the hands. Of course I noticed the hands. He was forty-nine and had gray at his temples and washes windows for a living and his hands were warm through my shirt and they stayed there one beat longer than the correction needed. Two beats. I did the step again and it was cleaner and I didn't say anything about the hands and he didn't move them until I'd finished the phrase, and then they came off casual, like nothing had happened, and I decided nothing had.

"You felt that?" he said. "The difference."

"I felt something."

"Your balance was over your back foot the whole time. Now it's centered. You'll spin faster."

"I spin plenty fast."

"Prove it," he said, and that was the trap, and I walked right into it, because I put out my