The QQ Pt. 01

Enterprise is a ranching town with two stoplights and three bars. Saturday night, payday, there's traffic backed up all the way through town from Walmart to the highway and fuck you if you want to park a reasonable distance from where you're going. The bartenders at the Red Dog park nose-to-tail in the alley behind the bar and hope for the best. More than once they've come back to a farm truck backed up into the alley with the driver long gone, or with the windows fogged up. When that happens, they play rock-paper-scissors to determine who gets to go and knock on the glass. Inside the Dog it's all wood panels and cigarette smoke, whiskey/beer/tequila breath, soap and cologne and the smell of clean weekend hats. Snake-hipped ranch-hands with calluses and baby-smooth cheeks pink from their weekly shave, stiff new jeans, shirts with bright snaps. Women with Dr Quinn hair, moving in clouds of scent and talc, armpit sweat and lotion, bright smiles and jacked-up weekend eyes.

Behind the bar, Rusty and Tate and Livvy, a windmill of black t-shirts and beer glasses, into the washer and out, dried, refilled, emptied, slopped out into the drain tray, tottering towers of shot glasses and whiskey tumblers and, now and then, someone just plain ornery or thick as mud slowing down the flow with an order for margaritas or, Jesus Christ, a fucking Shirley Temple and where are the fucking cherries, come on. Over all of it the right-heeled piston stomp of something loud from the jukebox, couples getting showier on the beach-towel-sized dancefloor as the alcohol goes on. There's a few weeks when Johnny Cash's cover of Rusty Cage is unaccountably popular until a fistfight breaks out between a drunk visiting Floridian who insists it's shit and a drunker cowhand from the Double Z who insists it's not, and he's bigger, so it's not. After that, Tate takes the option out of the jukebox and there are no more fistfights until a couple of years later when something similar happens because of Taylor Swift. That's a strange moment for everyone.

It's pretty much the same every night for most of the year. Quiets down a bit in winter, but that's only because the weather's sometimes too shit for half the people to get into town. That's when murders happen, jokes Rusty, who went to school in California, got kicked out, and came back death-obsessed. Bored dumb people who just stay home drinking with the same three faces -

Bored dumb people my ass, says Tate, who has never been further away than Montana. You talk like your family ain't some of the dumbest, most boring -

Guys, says Livvy, because they're blocking the doorway and she's trying to drag a keg through. You want to have this argument elsewhere, maybe?

It's a strangely dead night at the ass-end of January, forty-two degrees outside, dark by five, a thin scrim of snow dead on the tarmac. Wind down out of Canada like wet newspaper, but the night's clear. Livvy, going out to kick the jammed door loose again, stops in the doorway to look around outside. Main Street empty and wide enough that you could safely open fire; the teenage boy at the gas station across the road sitting warm and bored in his little yellow-lit booth; lights at the top of the radio towers blinking tirelessly in the indigo sky. Way off, the tangled fishtank glow of the gas plant. It would probably have some sort of rugged beauty if she wasn't stuck here, but she is, so it's depressing. She lives in a double-wide dragged round the back of her ex-brother-in-law's house on the outskirts. He's a dentist. Her sister, bored to gnawing the doorframes after just four years, took off for home six months ago. Home is Michigan. Livvy moved up here after a bad breakup she won't talk about no matter how drunk you get her. She doesn't have the money to go just yet. Leroy doesn't seem to mind; he prefers having another person around the place, even though she won't move into the house. When she left for work at four she saw him in his office, blank-faced behind a mask as he took out someone's molars. He has the same look even when he isn't wearing a mask. Livvy has some experience of how being numb starts being the safest way to live, so she's leaving him to it.

You're letting the heat out, yells Tate from the bar. One of the guys sitting in a booth in the corner laughs at nothing and gets up, hitching his pants as he walks over to the jukebox. His friends are murmuring to each other. She hasn't seen them before. One of them has a Make America Great Again hat on, which she has a problem with, which she keeps quiet about. It took three days to clean up properly after the election-day party. Livvy kept her head down.

"Hey," someone outside says sharply. "You guys open or not?"

"Not," snaps Livvy. Then, kicking the door sharply to budge it, "Yeah, we're open. Come on in."

"Not if you're not open."

"Private party!" yells one of the guys in the booth.

"We're definitely open," says Livvy. "Ten am to two a.m., same as always."

"So I might come in and have a drink."

"You might if you ever actually get your ass inside."

"I'm just fucking with you."

Livvy looks up at the slat-sided cowboy who's decided to have his little joke, and sees, with a sort of shock, that it's a woman. But the shock's transitory.

"I can tell that you are," she says, "and I tell you that even if it's still early, I'm already over quota with being fucked with."

"Noted," says the woman, narrow-framed, looking borderline gaunt despite a bulky jacket, long dark eyes amused even while her face is blank. She goes to the bar and orders a whisky. Tate, giving Livvy a curious look over her shoulder, gets out a glass and carefully pours the shot. Livvy finally shakes the door loose enough to open and close easily and goes back to the bar, ducking under the hatch and disappearing into the back. She's pissed and she doesn't know why, exactly. She wants to punch something. Someone. For half her shift she's grinding her teeth, biting down on something, monosyllabic. It gets busy around eleven p.m. and when she remembers the skinny woman from earlier, and looks at that spot at the bar, she's long gone.

But she's back a few days later, on a busy night, and then after that, a little quieter. That time she sits in a booth with a book and gathers a small crowd of dirty glasses, leaves a little unsteady. Back again after that, and then it snows and they don't see her for a few days. Livvy never sees her talk to anyone except in a hi-how-are-you kind of way, and for the most part people seem to leave her alone. Not a snub, exactly, just a sort of courteous avoidance. A few times, here and there, Livvy catches her eye and feels that small shock in the chest, as if someone has hit her lightly between the breasts with their knuckles.

And then, about a month after she's first come in, it's another half-full night at the Red Dog. Table of out-of-towners in one corner with some pitchers of beer, three or four old birds from town scattered here and there, a drunk and miserable gas-plant employee getting ready to slide under the table on a scrim of rum and self-pity, still in his uniform. Saturday night is still two days off; Livvy, by some miracle of scheduling, has the next night off. The strange woman comes in at around eleven - where the hell is she earlier? She seldom seems drunk when she comes in, but she never comes in early, either - and walks up to the bar where Livvy is sitting with order sheets and a calculator.

"Sorry," she says, laying one hand flat on the bar with a quarter held between her index and middle fingers. Livvy sets aside her pen.

"What can I get you? I don't think we've got anything for a quarter."

"Hah. No, just a shot of vodka." She produces a wallet from somewhere inside the giant jacket. "And one of whatever you'd like."

"Thanks," said Livvy, who only ever drinks club soda if she's working. The woman's accent is a little strange, definitely American but with a heavy dose of something else stirred in. Up close she doesn't look all that local, although she has the calloused, nicked hands of someone who does ranch work, and she has the right windburned look. Her ears are pink with cold. But her hair's definitely not local, and in her not-quite-a-year here, Livvy hasn't seen that look on a woman. The look she's getting now. She slides the shot glass over the bar and watches the woman drink it, then stand there lightly tapping the tin-top bar with the quarter, as if thinking. Her lashes are long, her eyes some indeterminable shade of brown, her hair the colour of dark honey in the jar. Under the jacket she's wearing a black long-sleeved t-shirt, with a thermal shell peeking out of the neck.

"Anything else?" Livvy asks, realising she's basically just staring.

"Nah." The woman bites her lip, looks away, then back, away, and back. "What time do you end your shift here?"

"Midnight."

"Mind if I wait for you?"

Livvy's too surprised to even laugh. She stares. "You could be a serial killer."

"I am not a serial killer."

Nobody's listening. Livvy checks. Rusty and Tate are arguing about some movie or game.

"This is a little strange."

"I know."

"I mean." A laugh bubbles out of her. "It's really fucking strange."

"Okay." The woman lifts her hands, defeated. "Okay. I'm sorry. It's weird. Forget I said anything. Sorry." She turns to go. Livvy lets her get nearly all the way to the door before she finds a way to speak.

"Hey, wait!" she shouts over the music, drawing glances. The woman pauses, looks around, her face uneasily halfway between badly pissed off and embarrassed to death. Livvy motions her back over. The woman walks reluctantly back, past the gas-plant guy with his elbow in the ashtray, past an old man in a Shell Oil cap, doing the newspaper crossword, past two empty booths and up to the footrail of the bar where Livvy is standing.

"Midnight," says Livvy.

The woman nods, frowning.

"What did you want to do?"

The woman shrugs, a little surly now. "Nothing. Never mind."

"Nothing?"

"I don't know what got into me. I shouldn't have said anything."

"Don't - say that."

"I don't know you from a bar of soap. It's fine. I never should have...Just - forget it." She turns away again.

"It's a blue Ford," Livvy says then, to the back of her head, low and urgent. "Parked in the alley out back here. Midnight."

The woman shrugs and keeps going.

But she's waiting at the car, leaning against the cold metal in the pitch dark so that Livvy senses her rather than sees her, shifts her keys between her fingers to the stab position before realising who it is.

"You got to be anywhere early tomorrow?" the woman says, dead quiet in the dark. It's freezing. Livvy is shivering. "Like, before lunch?"

"No," Livvy says.

"Come to my place, then?"

"Uh..."

"Or, yours. I don't care."

Livvy thinks of her place, stacked with laundry and newspapers. It's clean but untidy and in clear earshot her brother-in-law's insomniac ears.

"No. Yours."

"Where's that?"

"Double Q. About - do you know where it is?"

"No, never heard of it."

"No?"

"I'm not from here."

"Oh. It's about - say thirty minutes out. Can you leave your - truck here?"

"Yeah, but I'm going to drive behind you instead."

"Okay. I'll wait for you on the main road. Red truck, a bit dirty."

In her car, Livvy sends a text to a friend telling her where she's going, sits with the engine idling to warm the cab. The woman's truck is waiting at the mouth of the alley, hazards on, exhaust curling low to the ground in the cold. She drives slowly so as not to lose Livvy, stops at the lights even if there's nobody else around. They go through town, past the WalMart lit like a cruise ship in a sea of parking lot, out onto the flat land south of town, mountains rising black against lighter black on the horizon. The wind's fierce out here, whacking the truck and driving snakes of dust and dirty dry snow across the road. They turn down a narrow gravel road, through a belt of cottonwoods, across a vast pasture. Then another turn, with a white-painted sign swinging in the wind so that its "QQ" winks like eyes. Another few minutes. Across a creek bed, down a slope, up another, through some trees. The farmhouse rears from a stretch of lawn, one light on downstairs. A yard light behind it illuminates the front of outbuildings, but she can't see much. There's a tin-sided carport beside the house, empty. The woman slides into one space. Livvy parks outside the house. Waits in the car for a second, getting a grip on what she's just done.

One person, maybe two or three by now, know where she is. It's the middle of the night. There's nobody for miles but her and this total stranger. There may be nobody else in the house. There may be men with knives. Alligators. A family of cannibals. She feels like her body cheated her mind out of a sensible decision, but then there's her body to think about: her flesh knows what it wants, even if her mind's got reservations. Her body's been made to wait for too long.

They kiss inside the front door, in the freezing hall. She twists her hand into the woman's hair and presses her mouth closer, starving for it, ravenous for it, unprepared for the animal amazement that floods her at the taste of this woman's mouth, her lips, the smell of her skin. Flat-out red-hot desire rushes up through her like sap through a tree. But the woman is slow, deliberate. She holds Livvy's face and kisses her deeply, sweetly, inexactly, drawing her close, sliding her thigh between her legs. She can feel the heat of her, the length of her, the strength in the narrow limbs, the quiver running through her flesh. She runs her hand over the woman's belly to her groin, feels her sigh, feels her hands tighten across her back.

They kiss again at the top of the stairs, at the turn of the corridor, a confused tangle of limbs and hands. There is the shock of naked skin, a ripple of goosebumps, the flare of ribs and shoulderblades and collarbones under the cotton, and her breasts, full to the hand and tipped with hard knots. She sighs again when Livvy brings her mouth to them through the cloth, slides her palm across them. Her own hands are busy, deft, drawing Livvy tight and molten, inarticulate. Livvy undoes her belt, guides her hand in, opens her thighs to her fingertips. She hums with pleasure, slouched against a wooden wall in a stranger's house with the stranger's hand, slick and expert and fantastically warm, against her, stirring up a handful of sweater and fire, making her tremble, making her itch. She splays her hands against the wall for support, weak with longing. They've set up a rhythm; her hips shift against the hand in time with the hitch of her breath, the woman's breath matched to hers, her mouth against her neck, the flutter of her lashes against her cheek, no sound in the house but their breath and the whisper of fabric against fabric as the woman strokes her, wet and hot, winding her into a sweet taut knot, half agony, which all at once snaps. The woman catches her cry in her mouth, laughs through it, low and exultant, licking blood from her lip where Livvy bit it, her hand steady and warm between her legs. She kisses the angle of Livvy's jaw, her mouth. In dark of the corridor Livvy sees her smile. In the dark she reaches for the knob of the bedroom door.