It was twenty seconds past nine o’clock when the customer arrived for his bar fight.
Unforgivable if he were a regular, but he was a tourist, and one with that combination of embarrassment and eagerness in his apologies that was all clumsily earnest. There was traffic, he’d lost reception on his navigation app, he’d hit five red lights in a row and he hadn’t checked the weather last night so the messy half-snowfall had caught him off-guard Doug forgave people like that, deserved or not.
“There’s no harm done,” he said, which was a lie but only on a very small scale. A little sloppiness and corrosion to the sense of timing and precision he’d be trying to maintain today, this year, this decade, this life. Life was full of those, one more or less was as harmful as any other. That was how they got you. “Now please, take your seat.”
Tourist, embarrassed, cursed by traffic or more, the customer was only so ignorant or slow on the uptake. He followed Doug’s cue perfectly and took the quiet-type seat at the bar, just near the far end, spaced double from its neighbours. A good position for an amateur, which meant he was one of the sorts with self-awareness. “The seat is comfortable?”
The customer shimmied quickly, rocked it sharply forwards once, twice. “Yep. All set and secured.”
“Then we shall begin.”
So speaking, Doug reached below the bar – a carefully pre-pitted and ancient slab of cheap wood – and withdraw a spray bottle. His arm moved in a broad, sure sweep, spritzing everything across the countertop with a thin shimmer of stale beer and sour sweat. The customer twitched, but only slightly, trusting in Doug’s aim to avoid his eyes as he donned the present from Doug’s other hand: a battered baseball cap, tattered from front to back. You couldn’t help but slouch under a hat like that, and so he did, back naturally relaxing into a shallow slump in the tireless fist of gravity. He took the third gift offered almost by reflex: the tall, smeared glass mug, brimming with half-drained yellow dregs and the last foam of the pour.
Doug slipped beneath the hidden cut-out of the bar, hinges in perfect oiled silence, and interrupted this moment by stepping beside the Fella and slapping one palm down on the counter.
“You lookin’ at me?” he demanded.
The Fella looked up. Slow on the uptake, but that was expected, and that it was accidental made it better to any except the most refined witnesses. “Huh?”
“I SAID, you lookin’ at me?”
The Fella shook his head. “Don’t want any trouble, bub.”
“Then why you lookin’ at me like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like you got a PROBLEM. You the kinda fella that’s got a problem with me?”
“No.” Short and surely, only a hint of eagerness expressed in the speed it came out at. Acceptable, could also be read as nerves.
“Then why. You. Lookin’. At. Me.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You callin’ me a liar?”
“I’m not calling you anything. Got wax in your ears?”
The Bub grabbed the mug. “Say WHAT there bigmouth?”
“Got glass in your ears?”
“Wh-” and just like magic, up came the Fella’s hand, right on cue, clenched and on target to the thickest part of the Bub’s chin, where impacted dead-on the target pad.
The squib in his mouth gushed red. The tonguebite was flawless; visible without gushing messily over them both. The Fella was slowing down though, almost too lost in admiration, and so the Bub slurred out (hand retreating to his mouth): “guh.”
The Fella took the cue, took the mug, and smashed it over the Bub’s face. He swore, spun, tripped over his own feet, and did a grasp-down kneecracker against the Fella’s chair.
The chair came up. The chair came down over his back. He went limp.
Good timing. Some slightly uncontrolled splinter spray from the chair’s legs, but that was the reason the Fella took the quiet-type seat: if you mishandled your setpiece, there wasn’t much else around you to suffer the consequences.
He held his breath. He released it.
“The moment is over,” said Doug.
The customer exhaled too, shakily. “God damn,” he said, blowing out his cheeks with the force of his sigh. He took off the cap and handed it back double-gripped to Doug, hands shaking just a little. “God DAMN. How do you do it? I know how, I’ve seen the interviews, but seeing it in action…”
“Practice,” said Doug, same as he’d said in every interview. And then, offhandedly, same as he’d said every time in-person: “and a metronome helps. Keep one in as much of your life as you can until you ignore it, then start paying attention. Timing is everything, and if you get that under control, the rest follows.”
“And maybe the red lights too,” the customer said – but a little sheepishly already, balking at the gulf that separated them. He paid in awe and left with a smile.
Doug stopped smiling when the man left, and wasn’t pleased with himself for it. Faking a good mood was for retail employees; his job was his art and his art was a pleasure, and expressing that pleasure was expected only insofar as he was doing this because he enjoyed it.
That had taken a while to figure out, when dad was going over the charts with him. Patiently, slowly, explaining every barstool, every step, every angle of approach, every usable tool and its substitutes.
“This is insane,” Doug had told him. “Half of these don’t do anything. Half of them are functional equivalents. All of them have two names each, and there’s six naming schemes that don’t agree with each other. Why make it so hard?”
“Dougie,” his father said – a little irritably, because dad had saved his patience for his craft – “Squabbling being hard is the whole reason I do it.”
It had taken him years to reason that out intellectually. But he’d had the time to think about it because he’d accepted it on a lower level a long time earlier, in the way his limbic system sang and his nerves fizzed.
(At the time. Familiarity didn’t breed contempt, it didn’t, it couldn’t, not this kind. But he was old now, and it was more humming and twitching)
Jenny had never gotten it. Maybe she would’ve, if she hadn’t been a little more like dad than Doug was, a little less willing to speak sharp.
***
The second person to walk into the Squabble studio was not a customer. They were a peer, and this was their sixth year visiting.
“Sorry for the weather,” they told Doug. “I know it’s not ideal for the plan.”
“It’s nothing,” he said, and he meant it. “I’ve done this knee-deep in plow backwash before. Hard on the knees, but what isn’t? The human body isn’t built very well.”
“You got that right,” said the peer, rubbing their back. And so they talked about aging as they walked outside, as they visited the shed and selected the bike (a fine middle-of-the-lane priced device, worn but adequately-if-erratically cared-for, the sort of thing he’d nod at and call good inside his own head as well as outside it), as they went out to the curb installation out back and swept back just enough slush to chain the bike to the post with a lock the peer had brought themselves.
“Buddy, I think,” they opined.
“Asshole,” he replied.
A brow raised, but only a little, and followed by a firm nod before they turned on their heel and marched back to the rear entrance. They were good enough to know just how good he was.
He didn’t make the count before he approached the bicycle in numbers. Nothing he counted in the studio happened in numbers anymore, or even biorhythms – heartbeats, breathes, the clench and unclench of muscle groups of any size. He just knew when to scuttle up to the bike, knew how long to fiddle at the padlock, knew when to pick it up and start smacking it against the post, knew the words a half-breath before they arrived.
“Hey asshole!”
He jerked his head upright, schooled the surprise on and off his features. “Who, me?”
They stamped over – the slush fountaining a bit with every angry step, no sign of slippage (good traction they’d worn for this weather). “See any other sticky-fingered shitheads out here with their hands. On. My. Bike?!”
“Buddy, I wasn’t touching your bike,” said the Asshole. “I was just looking at the lock.”
“Why the fuck you looking at my lock?”
“Some shithead’s broken it! Take a peek, see if I’m lying!”
Good mix of fury and bewilderment and curiosity, near-marred by a half-step short – a lunge would be tricky from this distance, ankle-deep in the drift.
But tricky wasn’t, so the Asshole not only cleared the drift but made it look natural – his legs felt longer, and acted the part, and the lock in his hand slapped into Buddy’s middrift with a sharp flat THWAK, distributed as evenly as anything while sounding like a cannonball being fired into a beef warehouse.
“Gwurk!” choked Buddy, doubled over, nose almost brushing their boots, and as the Asshole reared back and raised a doubled-fisted blow Buddy reached out, grasped the Asshole’s just-barely-shaky leg, and yanked.
“SHIT!” he shrieked on the way down, and as he fell he flailed, and as he flailed his grip shook loose, and so the lock and chain swung wildly, popping him one right in the eye and smeared a fat black bruise from the dye he’d palmed onto the mechanism’s base. He choked, flopped, rolled around clutching at his face, curled up around two boots to the midsection from the rallying, half-stooped form of Buddy, and then, one hand swinging wildly, he pulled in the bike by the spokes with his foot and ran it straight into Buddy’s backside.
Over went Buddy, a full two-twist somersault (a little showy, but why not shoot for your best?), and over went Asshole’s leg, and down the curb and the road he went, peddling hellbent until the moment was right and he was around the corner.
He held his breath. He released it.
“The moment is over,” said Doug. “And good work on the somersault.”
“Thanks,” said the peer, who’d come over to check the tires. “Sorry,” he said, “but my assplate shifted a bit when I dropped the first time and I want to be sure… yep. Nothing’s dented.” He patted the bike affectionately. “Apologies. Metal shrank in the cold.”
“If it takes a few knocks too many I can always shift the whole panoply down by one and get a new Brand New,” Doug said with a wave of his hand. “Not like I’m in the poorhouse just yet.”
“Yes, but the guilt.”
“You’ve told me twenty times you can’t feel that because you have no conscience.”
“Yes, but my husband does, and he’ll nag me ‘till past death’s door until I’ve bought you two bikes a bike shed and a snowblower.”
Doug laughed, and found himself startled by his own startlement at its genuineness. He accepted thanks, and he made promises, and he said goodbyes, and he still felt he was one step off. Just one piece of himself not quite there.
It had been like that, when Jenny left. If dad hadn’t skipped breakfast. If she’d not had a sleepless double-shift from the other mechanic running sick. If Doug had been a little firmer on asking them to back off.
Just one little thing off and nothing went right. And once it went wrong, it stayed wrong.
***
The third person to walk into the studio was a long-booker, someone with the patience to wait a full year for his schedule to settle and sift and solidify and another six months for their appointment to arrive.
She was also his niece.
For the first time in forty-three years, Doug wasn’t sure what expression he was making. “Ally,” he said instead. Like an idiot.
“Uncle Dougie,” she said. Like a smartass.
“You’ve gotten older.”
“Not as much as you have. You still doing this? Because I’m here for Look At My Fender, in case you’ve forgotten that.”
His brain snapped off his current course of action and onto one where it still knew what was going on. “Right. We can move it indoors, switch the fender to the shoe –”
“The hell we will. You going to let the weather tell you what to do?”
Nobody had spoken to Doug like that inside his studio in twenty years.
None of his family had spoken to Doug inside his studio in twenty years.
They went outside.
“I’ll bring my car around,” said Ally. And the problem with letting himself operate in professional mode was that it short-circuited the part of his brain that said things like “fucking hell are you insane?” so by the time he’d sorted his mouth from his ass she’d already turned on the – less-than-a-year-old, reasonably-nice, perfectly-undented sedan to the back of the building and parked it on the curb right next to where he’d shoveled the snow for the bicycle five milliseconds ago.
“Waiting,” she said, voice flat and humourless as dad’s pancakes. Doug shook himself off and let his gut pick his own car – went for the Clunker. Pulled on the coke-bottle-thick spectacles and the greasy wig, stopped to check and – oh god, she was already reaching to put the blinkers on.
He could stop and ask her questions she seemed to already have answers to. Or he could keep his timing.
So he fired up the engine, edged forwards, and – by reflex and feel – slammed bumper-first into the fender.
Which shrieked in a tone of metal that was NOT setpiece and went from one pole of his spine to another. Had she really-?
“What the FUCK!” screamed Ally, already outside his window. “Are you BLIND, you dense motherfucker?”
Those weren’t the words he’d expected. Not from whoever drove that car.
Dense Motherfucker peered out the window, goggling with entirely too-close-to-real bewilderment, and saw…
Downer. She was going full Downer. She must’ve had the outfit in the car and done a quickchange, because it was straight from halfway through the fall of the ‘90s, white shirt and tie, sweaty jacket, desperate and strung out and bug-eyed so you could almost see the cubicles reflected in the glaze in the back of her eyes.
“Say something, asshole!”
He smacked his lips and ran his tongue excessively and mumbled a string of syllables that would’ve made a kindergarten teacher disappointed.
“Speak WORDS!”
“Ididn’tseeanything,” he slurred out.
She yanked his door open.
Wait. That wasn’t Downer at all. That was Crazy.
A hand fisted his jacket, the other crunched into his nose. Red spurted extravagantly – she must’ve held at least two squibs and she’d squeezed them like a four-year-old with their first ketchup packet. It was warpaint as she screamed in his face about driving back home and coming back with her shotgun (crazy) and blowing his whole dense motherfucker (downer) family to hell and back (crazy).
And the outfit didn’t fit any of it, but it didn’t fit RIGHT. If she’d worn a good businesssuit or gone High Karen maybe it would’ve been laughable, it would’ve been parodic, but coming from her marooned-out-of-time Dilbert-on-my-wall Clinton-and-Bush burnout it was right, it was correct, and god above she’d braced her back and stabled her stance, legs wide.
That wasn’t Dense Motherfucker’s cue. It was from Fuckin’ Moron’s part.
It wasn’t called for, but it was correct. He took the groinshot – one knee, then the other. She hit a high C then took it higher still, pitched forwards, her skull dusted his gut and they went down in a mutual tangle, legs flailing, heads bouncing once at the very center of the asphalt pitch. His heel jerked. Her mouth gasped once. Stillness.
He’d held his breath. He released it.
“I’m retiring,” he said.
“What?” said Ally. She scrambled up on one elbow, genuinely appalled and concerned. “I go to all this time and effort to show up and make you take me seriously, and the second I do-”
“-you show me what I’m missing,” Doug finished. “Everything I can do I can do perfectly, the timing’s precise. Just now you showed me something I hadn’t done before, and I nearly screwed it up sixteen ways in sixteen seconds. I AM taking you seriously, and what that means is admitting I can’t show you anything you don’t already know.”
“I’m sorry I made you bust my fender for real,” said Ally miserably, retreating to less troubling ground. “It’s just, mom was sure you wouldn’t talk, and then when I was almost ready the first time grandpa was gone, and then I had that SHITTER of a year, and I wanted to be sure you’d get it, you’d really get it, and…”
“…and I got it,” said Doug. He patted her arm once, firmly. “But not the studio. You’re getting that.”
And everything was just where it had to be.