Two-Timing the Turntable

Clarence Greene was twenty-three years old and he figured that gave him about six more months of being allowed to make dumb decisions without anybody calling it a midlife crisis. He'd been in Fort Rekka six months as of last Tuesday, which was long enough to know the bar crowd but not long enough to know anybody's last name, and that was exactly how he liked it.

The Drop Zone sat on the main strip between a pawn shop and a taco stand, and across its cracked parking lot was the Rekka Inn, a motel that survived on soldiers from the base who needed a bed for a weekend of poor choices. Clarence hauled his crates of gear in through the side door at four in the afternoon, before the Friday crowd showed up, and started setting up his decks.

He could hear the whispers from the bar. Two women sitting at the end of the counter, watching him work like he was a race they'd already bet against.

"Word is the new DJ thinks he's better than the last guy," one of them said, not quiet enough to actually be private.

"Last guy played Nickelback unironically," the other said. "A goldfish thinks it's better than the last guy."

Clarence kept coiling cables and didn't look up. He'd learned in his last town, the one he didn't talk about, that responding to the peanut gallery just bought you a longer show. He plugged in his controller, checked his levels, and cued up his opening track. Then he turned around and gave the two of them a wave, all fingers, real friendly.

The tall one, blonde, raised her glass at him. The short one with the dark hair smirked like he'd just confirmed something for her.

He got through the first set of the night without incident, which in Fort Rekka meant two fights started and one guy got carried out the side door by his friends while the DJ kept the beat going. By midnight the floor was packed and the two women from the bar had migrated up to the booth railing and planted themselves there like they'd paid rent.

"Your playlist is a crime," the dark-haired one said. She had a bar towel over her shoulder and a name tag that said BRYNN, which was convenient, because Clarence had been calling her Bartender Number Two in his head all night.

"It's a crime that it's good," he said into the mic between tracks, then killed the mic and leaned on the booth edge. "And you're the one serving drinks to it all night, so what does that make you?"

"An unwilling accomplice," Brynn said.

The tall one laughed and stuck out a hand. "Rosie. I run the motel across the lot, so if your speakers keep me up past two again, I'm billing you."

"Speakers face the other way, sweetheart," Clarence said. "What keeps you up is the soldiers."

"Oh my God," Rosie said, turning to Brynn. "Did you hear this."

"I heard it," Brynn said. "He's brave. Stupid, but brave."

"Look," Clarence said, "I've been here six months. The last DJ lasted four. Somebody's gotta say the quiet parts."

"He lasted four because he got engaged to a girl from the base and moved," Rosie said. "But go off."

Clarence felt that one land a little and covered it by queuing the next track. The women didn't leave. They hung on the railing through two more songs, heckling his transitions, and he heckled back, and somewhere around one in the morning he realized he was having more fun arguing with the two of them than he'd had in Fort Rekka total.

When his set ended at two, he packed up slow, hoping they'd get bored, and of course they didn't. They followed him out to the parking lot, Rosie still carrying her beer, Brynn still in her work apron, and the three of them stood between his beat-up van and the motel sign buzzing overhead.

"You know what your problem is?" Rosie said.

"I'm about to find out."

"Your problem is you're good and you know it and you want somebody to fight you about it."

"That's not a problem, that's a brand," Clarence said.

Brynn snorted. "God. He even talks like a guy with a brand."

"What's yours then?" Clarence said, leaning against the van. "You shake drinks and judge people, that's the whole résumé?"

"My résumé is two years of Vegas cocktail service and a five-year plan that ends with me owning a bar that doesn't have a jukebox, thank you very much," Brynn said. "Rosie's is losing the volleyball tournament every summer."

"I got benched last season, which is different from losing," Rosie said, "and I'm winning it this year, and also, Clarence, is it, you have the exact face of a guy who got cheated on and moved to the desert about it."

Clarence stood there for a second. The parking lot light buzzed. Somewhere down the strip a soldier was yelling happily at nothing.

"Okay, wow," he said. "That got specific."

"I'm a front desk clerk," Rosie said, shrugging. "People tell me things at two a.m. when they think they're being mysterious."

"I don't tell the front desk things," Clarence said.

"You told the front desk things. Night three. You were on your second tequila and I was doing paperwork and you told me about a girl in your old town and a shared record collection and how she 'made it weird.' Your words. Made it weird."

"She did make it weird," Clarence said. "She made it weird with my roommate. And my backup hard drive."

Brynn laughed so hard she had to grab Rosie's shoulder. "No. The hard drive?"

"The hard drive," Clarence said. "Six years of crate digs. Gone. So yes, I moved to a town where the biggest attraction is a gas station with a casino, and I'm fine."

"You're not fine," Rosie said, "you're cocky, which is what fine looks like on men with no friends here yet."

"And what are you two?" Clarence said. "You've been heckling my booth for three weeks straight. Every Friday. Like little groupies with a grudge."

"We are not groupies," Brynn said, stepping closer, and Clarence noticed she'd stepped closer. Rosie had too. The three of them were suddenly standing in a triangle in the middle of the parking lot, close enough that he could tell Brynn smelled like cigarette smoke and citrus and Rosie had been drinking since ten.

"You keep coming back to a booth you hate," Clarence said. "Every week. Two women who tell me they hate my set, standing at my railing, all night, drinking my bar dry."

"We drink the bar dry because we work here, genius," Brynn said. "It's called a social life."

"Is it?" Clarence said. "Because it looks a lot like showing up."

Rosie looked at Brynn. Brynn looked at Rosie. Something passed between them that Clarence wasn't invited to, and then they both looked back at him and he got the distinct feeling he'd walked into a room where the furniture had been rearranged while he wasn't watching.

"Say what you're thinking, motel girl," Brynn said.

"I'm thinking," Rosie said slowly, turning her beer bottle in her hand, "that it's two a.m., I know for a fact Brynn's room is a disaster, my shift ends in ten minutes, and neither one of us has any intention of going home and sitting with that."

"Sitting with what?" Clarence said.

"The obvious," Rosie said. "Jesus, do I have to draw it?"

Clarence looked from one to the other. Six months of no strings, no names, no mess, sitting right there in the parking lot where he worked, waving at him.

"Well," he said. "This is a new playlist."

"Okay, hold on," Clarence said, holding up both hands. "Six months in this town. My whole thing is no strings. I came here specifically to not do whatever it is you're about to propose with your faces."

"Who's proposing anything," Brynn said. "It's Friday. We're standing in a parking lot. Nothing has been proposed."

"You're proposing something with your faces."

"She does have a proposal face," Rosie said, pointing at Brynn with her bottle. "I've seen it at the desk. It's how she talks me into covering her shifts."

"That's my friendly face, you absolute slander machine," Brynn said. "This is my face."

"That's the same face," Clarence said.

"It is not, and anyway, nobody's proposing. I'm saying a thing out loud near you, which is different."

Clarence looked up at the motel sign, which buzzed and flickered like it was deciding whether to stay lit. Down the strip, a group of soldiers came stumbling out of the taco stand place, laughing about something. One of them was carrying somebody's boot. Fort Rekka on a Friday night, the whole circus of it.

"Here's my concern," he said. "I've done the two-women-at-once thing exactly zero times, and the one long-term thing I did ended with my record collection being held hostage, so my judgment in romantic situations is, and I say this with full self-awareness, garbage."

"See, that's the most honest thing you've said in three weeks," Rosie said. "And it's almost attractive."

"Almost."

"I'm a generous scorer."

Brynn finished her beer and set the bottle down on the curb with a click. "Okay. Real talk, both of you. We don't do anything tonight. We're drunk, I've been on my feet since four, and Clarence looks like a man who needs to sit with an idea before he ruins it by talking."

"He does do that," Rosie said.

"So here's the pitch. Next Friday. Same booth. Same heckling. And if everybody still thinks it's funny in a week, we figure out the rest."

Clarence blinked at her. "That's suspiciously reasonable coming from you."

"I have a five-year plan. I don't do impulsive."

"You moved to the desert to work at a dive bar."

"Planned impulse," Brynn said. "There's a difference."

Rosie drained her bottle and crushed it slightly, which Clarence felt was theatrical but effective. "Fine. Next Friday. And nobody says a word about this to anybody, because this town has a mouth the size of the base commissary and I have to win a volleyball tournament in peace."

"Deal," Brynn said.

They both looked at Clarence.

"Sure," he said. "Next Friday. If I don't die of curiosity first."

"You'll live," Rosie said. "You're too cocky to die."

She walked off across the lot toward the motel office, and Brynn pulled her apron off over her head and followed, and Clarence stood there in the parking lot with his van and his buzzing thoughts, thinking that was either the best or worst negotiation he'd ever been part of, and that he'd find out which in seven days.

* * *

The week crawled. Clarence dug through the record store two towns over on his day off and found a Latin funk pressing that made him actually yelp in the aisle, and the owner told him to calm down. He drove back to Fort Rekka with the windows down and didn't think about the parking lot conversation at all, which was to say he thought about it roughly every eleven minutes.

Friday came around like it always did, and so did the soldiers, and so did Brynn and Rosie.

They didn't mention it. Not once. They heckled his set, drank his bar dry, argued about volleyball scoring at the railing, and by one in the morning Clarence was starting to wonder if the whole thing had been a group hallucination brought on by desert heat and cheap beer.

Then the trouble started.

A specialist named Deke, third tequila in, decided Clarence needed to prove himself. "Yo, DJ," he hollered from the floor, waving a rolled-up bar towel. "Anybody can mix with eyes. I bet you can't keep the beat blind."

"Deke," Brynn said from the well, warning in her voice.

"No, no, hear me out," Deke said, weaving slightly but grinning huge. "Blindfold him. He keeps the mix clean for three tracks, I buy the bar a round. He blows it, he plays country for an hour."

A cheer went up from about thirty soldiers who would have cheered anything at that point. Clarence leaned back from the decks and looked at the crowd, then at the railing, where Rosie had gone very quiet and Brynn had gone very interested.

"I want in on this," Rosie said. "Brynn. Five bucks says he chokes on the second track."

"Five says he does it and makes it look easy," Brynn said. "Guy's arrogant enough to practice being blind."

"You're betting on me?" Clarence said.

"I'm betting five dollars. Don't flatter yourself."

Deke's buddy tied the bar towel over Clarence's eyes, and the room went black and loud. Somebody handed him headphones. His hands found the decks by muscle memory, the crossfader, the pitch slider, the little scuffs on the table that told him where he was without looking, and he thought, absurdly, of six years of crate digs gone into a hard drive, of every hour he'd spent learning this craft until his fingers knew it better than his eyes ever did.

First track, clean. He rode the transition by feel, heard the crowd roar when the drop landed, felt the floor shake through his sneakers.

Second track, and Rosie was yelling something at him from the railing that was either