The Last Welder Standing

Jacqui turned forty-four on a Tuesday.

She didn't tell anyone. Why would she. Her mother was gone, her father had been gone longer, and the closest thing she had to family was a crew of welders who couldn't remember their own birthdays, let alone hers.

So she bought a bottle of cheap whiskey at the liquor store on Kern Street. The good stuff cost more and tasted the same after the third glass. She climbed the stairs to her apartment above the garage, kicked off her boots, and sat at the kitchen table with the bottle and a jelly jar.

The apartment was a mess. It was always a mess. Welding magazines in stacks. Empty beer bottles lined up on the windowsill like little soldiers. A calendar from the supply house, three months out of date, still on the nail where it had hung since January.

She poured two fingers and looked at her hands.

Calloused palms. A burn scar across the back of the left one, white and shiny now, twenty years old. Knuckles like walnuts. Hands that had held a torch since she was twenty-two, back when she could work a ten-hour shift and still go dancing after.

Twenty-two years at the same fabrication shop. Same corner of the same building. Same lunchroom with the same broken vending machine.

She flexed her fingers. They flexed. That was about all she could say for them anymore. Her right wrist ached in cold weather. Her shoulders popped when she rolled out of bed.

Forty-four.

"Hell of a birthday, Jacqui," she said to the empty kitchen.

The whiskey burned going down. She poured another and thought about the woman she used to be. The one who could drink till two and weld at seven. The one men bought drinks for and women watched across the room. The one who never once sat alone on a birthday, because there was always somebody, some bar full of somebodies.

That woman was gone. What was left was a broad with sore shoulders and a jelly jar.

She drank to her. To the gone one. Then she drank to herself, the current model, and by midnight the bottle was a third lighter and she was asleep in the chair with the lamp still on.

---

Friday night was contest night at The Rusty Rail.

The Rusty Rail sat on the shabby end of Millbrook's main drag, wedged between a pawn shop and a laundromat that had closed sometime last century. Sticky floors. A neon beer sign in the window that buzzed and flickered and had said "OPE" for two years now. College kids wandered in during the semester and got outmatched by the regulars and wandered back out.

Jacqui parked her pickup out front and sat a minute with her hands on the wheel. The whiskey from Tuesday was long gone but the mood it left behind had stuck around, sour and slow. She needed this. A contest, a crowd, something to win.

She pushed through the door at eight.

"JACQUI!" Stuart bellowed from behind the bar. Stuart was fifty-two and built with a broad, sturdy frame, bald head, forearms like hams, an apron that had never once been clean in fifteen years of running the place. "Birthday girl!"

"How'd you even know that?" She took a stool at the end of the bar.

"Perry told me. Kid's got a big mouth." Stuart slid her a beer without asking. "On the house. First one anyway. You're paying after that, I'm not made of money."

The regulars turned and raised their glasses. Rick from the feed store. Donna and her wife, both in matching flannel. Old Nathan, who claimed he'd arm-wrestled a trucker in Tucumcari in 1979 and only lost because of the altitude.

"Happy birthday!" Donna called.

"Forty-four and still the prettiest welder in the county," Nathan said.

"Nathan, I'm the only welder in the county."

"Which makes you the prettiest."

Jacqui laughed. First real laugh all week. The bar did that for her. The noise, the sawdust smell, the jukebox playing something with a steel guitar in it. For an hour she was just a woman having a beer with her people, and her shoulders didn't pop once.

The table came out at nine. Stuart hauled it from the back room every month, a solid old oak thing with a padded bar bolted down the middle. He set it up by the pool tables and the crowd gathered around it like it was a fight.

"Rules!" Stuart announced, like he did every month. "No elbow lifting. No two-out-of-three unless I say so. No betting with Nathan because Nathan don't pay."

"I pay," Nathan said.

"You don't."

The early rounds were warm-ups. Rick beat Nathan. Donna lost to her wife, which caused an argument about whether that counted. A couple of grad students from the college got eliminated in about four seconds each and retreated to the pool tables, defeated.

Then Stuart looked across the room and grinned.

"And now. The match everybody came for. Jacqui, get up here."

Jacqui set her beer down and rolled her shoulders. Three years running, the final round had come down to her and one other name. She walked to the table to the sound of hollering and boot stomps.

And there was Pia, already leaning on the table like she'd been waiting all night. Which she had.

Pia ran the bar three nights a week. Thirty-eight years old, six years in Millbrook, tall and dark-haired with a smile she used like a weapon. Jacqui had watched her walk in here six years ago, a stranger, and had watched her take the town apart piece by piece until nobody remembered her not being in it. Pia was a woman who belonged places. It was one of the things Jacqui couldn't stand about her.

It was one of the things she liked about her, too, though she'd have welded her own hand off before saying so out loud.

"There she is," Pia said, smirking. "The birthday girl. Heard you're forty-four. Want me to go easy?"

"Go easy and I'll put you through the jukebox."

"Oh, I'm counting on it."

They sat. Elbows down. Hands up. Pia's grip was warm and dry. Jacqui's was a callous sandwich.

Pia looked good tonight, and Jacqui noticed it the way she always noticed it, with a small internal irritation that she never examined too closely. Black shirt, sleeves rolled, forearms on display. Pia knew exactly what she was doing with those forearms.

"Ready?" Stuart called. "Three. Two. One."

The room roared. Jacqui threw everything into it, all two hundred pounds of shoulder and stubborn, the whole first move, the move that had ended three previous contests before Pia's butt left her stool.

Pia didn't move.

"Come on, Pia," somebody yelled.

Jacqui strained. Her arm trembled. Pia's arm was a post planted in the earth. Pia looked bored. Pia looked like she was checking her nails.

"Having trouble over there?" Pia asked.

"Shut up and wrestle."

"I am wrestling. You're the one grunting."

Jacqui shifted her hips, tried the top-roll Perry had been teaching her, and Pia read it like a billboard. Her hand came around smooth and heavy as a falling beam, and she took Jacqui down, knuckles to the pad, one clean motion.

The room exploded.

"PIA! PIA! PIA!"

Pia released her hand and stood, arms up, taking the applause like a champion. Jacqui sat there staring at her own reddening palm.

Three years. Three years of monthly finals and Jacqui had taken her twice out of nine. Lately not even that.

"That's a wrap," Stuart announced. "Pia takes the belt for the fourth straight month."

There was an actual belt. It was a child's karate trophy belt spray-painted gold. Pia wore it out of the bar some nights. It was the stupidest thing Jacqui had ever seen and she hated that Pia looked fantastic wearing it.

"Good match," Pia said, leaning down over the table. Her voice dropped a little, just for Jacqui. "You almost had me on that top-roll. Almost."

"I didn't even almost."

"Okay, you didn't even almost." Pia grinned. "Next month, though."

"Next month," Jacqui said, and meant it like a threat, and Pia took it like a promise, and this defined the rhythm of them, three years of it, two women circling a bar table in a town that had exactly one bar table.

Jacqui went back to her stool. Her beer was warm. Perry appeared at her elbow, twenty-six years old, eager, holding two fresh ones like a man offering flowers.

"I had money on you," he said.

"Never bet against Pia, kid. How many times."

"I know, I know." He set the beer down. "You looked good out there, though. Real good. For..." He stopped. Wisely.

"Finish that sentence and I'll weld your locker shut."

"Wasn't gonna say anything."

He was a good kid. Too earnest by half, and the way he looked at her was a thing she'd been politely not seeing for two years. Tonight she didn't have the patience for even the polite version.

She drank. The crowd broke up around the table. Pia wore the belt over one shoulder behind the bar and poured shots for people, and the neon sign buzzed "OPE" at the street, and Jacqui sat in the noise feeling forty-four in every joint she owned.

It stung more than it should have. Losing to Pia always stung, but tonight it sat deeper, down where the Tuesday whiskey had pooled. She wasn't the woman she used to be. The contest had been supposed to fix that. It hadn't.

"Last call's at one, but you look like you're staying till one," Stuart said, refilling her peanuts.

"Yeah. I'm staying."

She looked down the bar at Pia, laughing at something Donna said, gold belt slung over her shoulder like it weighed nothing.

Four straight months. Jacqui drained the beer and started on Perry's.

Somebody was going to have to do something about that.

Rick from the feed store bought a round for the table. Nathan told the Tucumcari story again, the one about the trucker in 1979, and Donna's wife groaned at the part with the armadillo like she always did. Jacqui half listened. Mostly she drank.

She drank faster than she should have. She knew it while she did it. Forty-four years of knowing her own limits and she was blowing past them on purpose, watching Pia pour drinks and trying not to watch Pia pour drinks.

Her left hand throbbed. The old burn scar on the back of it, twenty years old, always flared up when she'd strained something. She rubbed it with her thumb and thought about being twenty-two again, first year at the shop, thinking her body was a machine that would just keep being a machine forever.

Ha.

"Refill?" Stuart asked. He was already pouring. The apron had a fresh peanut crumb line on it. Stuart's apron never had a clean day in fifteen years and Jacqui respected that in a way she couldn't explain to anyone.

"Sure. Why not. It's my birthday month."

"Your birthday was Tuesday."

"My birthday month, Stuart. Stretch it out."

"You're gonna hate yourself Saturday morning."

"Saturday Jacqui is a coward and I don't answer to her."

Stuart laughed and moved down the bar. Jacqui stared at the neon. OPE. Two years that sign had been missing its B and nobody had fixed it and nobody ever would. There was something almost nice about that. A town too stubborn to finish a word.

Pia closed out a tab at the far end. Jacqui watched her take the belt off and hang it on the coat hook by the register, like it lived there. Which, at this point, it did. Four straight months. Pia had been in Millbrook six years and she owned the place now. The bar. The contest. The whole room turned toward her when she laughed.

Jacqui had been here twenty-two years, since she was twenty-two, and she was the one drinking alone at one end of the bar feeling like a stranger.

The whiskey sat in her chest like a weld gone bad.

Then Pia slid onto the stool next to her. Just like that. Belt still on the hook, sleeves still rolled, a fresh beer in each hand. She set one down in front of Jacqui.

"I didn't order that."

"You didn't have to. You're nursing Perry's leftover like it insulted your mother."

"It went flat."

"It went flat because you're on your fourth and a half and slowing down." Pia took a pull of her own. "Big night for me. Drink with me properly."

Jacqui looked at the beer. Looked at Pia. Pia's face had that smirk on it but something softer underneath, the way it always did when she came over after a win. Three years of this. The win, then the taunt, then the quiet half hour at the end of the night when the taunting stopped and they just talked like two adults who liked each other and would die before admitting it.

"Fine," Jacqui said. She picked up the beer. "To your fourth belt."

"To your forty-fourth birthday."

"That's not a thing people toast."

"It is tonight." Pia clinked her bottle against Jacqui's. Held her eyes while she drank. Jacqui drank.

They sat in the noise for a while. Rick was arguing with Nathan about whether the trucker story counted if the trucker was parked at the time. Donna and her wife were doing the last slow dance of the night to nothing, just the jukebox humming between songs.

"So how mad are you," Pia asked.

"I'm not mad."

"You're mad. You've got your mad face on. Same one from February."

"I don't have a mad face."

"You absolutely have a mad face. It's this." Pia pointed at Jacqui's whole head. "It's that."

Jacqui snorted despite herself. "Okay. Fine. It stung. It stings. It's supposed to sting, that's how you know the contest matters."

"It matters?"

"Course it matters. It's the only thing in this town that changes."

Pia tilted her head at that. Looked at her a moment too long. Jacqui felt it and pretended not to.

"You almost had me," Pia said again. "The top-roll. That's new. Perry's been teaching you?"

"Two years of coaching and tonight I finally used it in public."

"It's good. It needs speed you don't have, but it's good."

"Gee, thanks."

"I'm being honest. Speed comes back. You want to know a secret?" Pia leaned in, elbow on the bar. "I've been training. Actual training. Grip trainer in the back office. Stuart thinks I'm doing inventory."

Jacqui stared at her. "You've been doing grip training in secret. For months. To beat me."

"To beat everybody. But mostly you."

"Mostly me."