Lea nodded and pushed her empty across the bar top.
Margo had named the Toproll in honor of her first love, arm wrestling. Dozens of framed photographs of arm-wrestling greats decorated the walls: Duane “Tiny” Benedix, Moe Baker, Cleve Dean, John Brzenk. For years, Old Charlie and his cohorts had amused themselves by hanging a framed picture of Sylvester Stallone and seeing how long it took Margo to notice. When she finally did, Stallone wound up on the curb out front and the game began anew.
Margo competed in the West Virginia women’s over-forty division. She’d been runner-up to the state champ two years running, something Lea found hard to imagine. Margo was an obsessive CrossFitter; she rose at five a.m. every morning to drive to a Box over in Charleston and had biceps thicker than Lea’s thigh. Her long blonde hair hung between her powerful shoulders in a thick Valkyrie braid. One time, Margo had demonstrated a toproll on Lea, and her fingers had ached for a week. Lea didn’t much want to meet the woman who could beat Margo.
Lea couldn’t imagine Niobe without the Toproll. It was better attended than church, and Margo was the pastor of its thirsty congregation. The Toproll was Margo’s place, but if you asked her, she said it belonged to the bank. Then she’d smile, wink, and say, “But they’ve been nice enough to let me stay on until they find new management.” It was about 20 percent joke, 80 percent truth. Like a lot of businesses in Niobe, Toproll was barely hanging on.
Lea decided to give the interview another read. Maybe she’d missed something. She adjusted her earbuds and clicked to the next song on Mule Variations. Tom Waits seemed tailor-made for West Virginia dive bars, although he’d have started a riot if she played him on the jukebox.
“Whatcha reading?” asked a skinny white guy as he slid onto the stool next to her.
Lea had been bartending at the Toproll for two years, and there weren’t ever new faces, but she didn’t recognize him. He was part of a group that had been drinking hard since before she’d arrived. He smelled stale, like a case of empty beer bottles, and a cigarette hung long from the corner of his mouth. It bounced as he talked. Not bad looking, all told: a young thirty or an old twenty-two. Chances were he was somewhere in the middle, like Lea herself. He wore a close-cut, sculpted beard that was clearly his pride and joy. On his head, a camouflage-style New York Yankees cap canted at a weird left-leaning angle. He’d been looking over at her for twenty minutes, trying to catch her eye, but like a fish that had been hooked once and released, Lea’s eye was very hard to catch. She turned the magazine enough so he could see.
“Finance magazine,” he read aloud. “What’s it about?”
“Finance,” she said and reopened the magazine to her page. She was fairly sure her body language was visible from space, but this guy was looking at her like she’d just put her hand between his legs.
“Cool, cool. That’s really interesting. Listen, I’m Tommy. People call me Smokestack.” He extended a heavily tattooed hand. “What’s yours?”
So here she was, poised on a familiar precipice. Go on ignoring him and get called a bitch. Tell him she just wanted to be left alone. And get called a bitch. Or be her mother’s version of a good girl, stop what she was doing, and invite the inevitable small talk with some guy who assumed the right to interrupt her because he was a man and she was a woman. And call herself a coward. None appealed.
She shut the magazine again, removed the earbud closest to her unwanted companion, and stared at him. “What?”
“I said, my name’s Tommy—”
“I’m meeting someone,” she said. It was technically true, just not today.
“Cool, so I’ll just keep you company until they get here.”
“Christ, Tommy,” Margo snapped. “Girl couldn’t be saying ‘leave me alone’ any louder if she had a megaphone.”
“I’m just trying to talk to her.”
“She’s reading a magazine.”
“It’s a bar, Margo.”
“What? Everyone comes to bars to talk to you?”
“Yeah, why not? Why else she here?”
“Maybe eat her food and read her magazine like she’s doing?”
“What the hell?” he asked rhetorically.
“Come down the other end of the bar, and I’ll buy you a shot.”
Old Charlie perked up at the prospect of free shots, Tommy less so.
“Why you defending this stuck-up skank? I didn’t do nothing.”
There it was. She’d gone from girl he wanted to meet to skank in less than sixty seconds. All for the sin of reading in a public place. The bar went perversely, expectantly still. Lea could feel her temper wake and uncoil with reptilian malice. There was a good chance she was going to regret this, but she had no more give for the Tommys of the world.
“Hey, Tommy, tell me something,” Lea said.
“Yeah? What?”
“What do guys with big dicks say in the morning?”
“Huh?” The question confused him. “What?”
Lea nodded. “Yeah, I didn’t think you’d know.”
She said it loud so everyone could hear, then swiveled slowly back to the bar and reopened the magazine. For its part, the bar let out a collective “oh” as it registered what she’d said. The ones that missed it asked their friends like they’d missed a line in a movie. There were a couple of ways this could go. Lea didn’t see anyone leaping to her defense. One time in four, a friend would intercede and cool the situation down, but Lea knew better than to count on those odds. She’d been working here for almost two years, but she wasn’t from here; these weren’t her people.
Someone laughed. Could have been laughing about anything, but there was only one way Tommy would interpret it, and that would narrow his options considerably. Lea heard him curse and felt his fist close in her hair, wrenching her head back and up. She let out a yelp and stood up on her tiptoes, following his hand like a marionette. Anything to keep her scalp from coming off. The pain forced tears into her eyes, but it was the yelp that really bothered her. Don’t do that again, she admonished herself.
A baseball bat came down hard on the bar and then pointed at Tommy.
“Don’t make me come out from behind the bar.”
“You hear what she said to me?”
“Do I look like The People’s Court?” Margo asked. “I don’t care what she said, or if it gave you diaper rash. I don’t want to deal with the sheriff today. Do you? How long you been out anyway? Two days? You really miss a cell that much?”
“This is some bullshit,” Tommy said.
Lea felt his fist tighten. She was right; she definitely somewhat regretted it, but this is what came of leaving her gun upstairs.
“Let loose of her,” and when that didn’t work, Margo yelled, “Thomas Edward Hillwicky, let my bartender go, or I will knock your one good memory out of that dumbass head of yours.”