Page 19 of The Drifter

He was standing in the middle of a building full of exits and he was looking at me.

"What would you be doing," he said, "if you weren’t?”

"If I weren't what?"

"Standing there."

And the floor went out from under me.

I have been asked for a thousand things across that marble. I have been asked for late checkouts and early check-ins, for restaurant tables that did not exist, for discretion, for lies, for a bottle of Krug at midnight, for a rug to disappear. I have been asked to hold a room with no name on it for a man who would not tell me who he was.

Nobody had ever asked me what I’d rather be doing.

I stood there with my hand flat on the folio and my heart going and my whole careful, decorated, load-bearing life stacked up behind me like a wall I had built one brick at a time. And this man—this stranger, this Dane in dead boots with nothing to his name but a bag and a pistol I would have bet the condo he was carrying—stood on the other side of my counter with his hands empty and waited for my answer like he had until the end of the world.

I'd like to sleep in, I thought. I'd like somebody to burn dinner for. I'd like to go out to Wadmalaw and stand in the marsh and say mine out loud where somebody could hear me.

"I'd be somewhere else," I said.

He looked at me a moment longer.

Then, he picked up the pen, and signed the folio. I didn’t look at the name, because my hands were shaking and I didn’t trust them to turn the page.

6

CLINT

Iput the pen down on the folio and didn't move.

She'd said I'd be somewhere else. Then, she'd stood there behind that counter like a woman who'd walked into a room and forgotten why.

She was beautiful. Dark eyes, a long throat, and a mouth that she'd been holding in a shape for so many years that the shape had started to look like her. Somebody had ironed a pale pink blouse to within an inch of its life and buttoned her into it. She wore it the way a soldier wears a uniform.

But that wasn't what stopped me.

What stopped me was the four seconds after the question. She'd gone somewhere. Something came up in her face and got about halfway and then got put down. I watched her put it down.

I know that move. I've done it in a lot of rooms.

There was a whole sentence sitting behind her teeth. She'd swallowed it, and I wanted it. That was the trouble. Standing at that marble with my hand still on the pen, what I wanted to say was:

Then let's go. Right now. I'm the best there is at being anywhere but here. Get your bag.

I didn't say it. A man doesn't say that to a woman he's known ninety seconds. And anyway, it wasn't true the way she'd need it to be true. I'm not good at going somewhere. I'm good at leaving. Those are different, and I've only ever had the one.

So, I put the pen down.

I ought to have taken the key and gone upstairs. That was what she was standing there waiting for. I could see it in the set of her shoulders—the small brace, the readiness for me to be finished with her.

I've gotten good at asking questions.

That happened somewhere out on the road, even though I didn't plan it. When you don't talk much and you don't want anything and you're never going to see the person again, people will tell you things. They tell you things they haven't told their own families. A trucker at three in the morning in a Waffle House outside Lubbock told me about the daughter he hadn't spoken to in nine years. He cried, and shook my hand, and got up and drove away. Nothing in this world got fixed. But something came out of that man, and he went down the road lighter than he came in.

It's bloodletting. That's the closest I've come to a word for it. You open a small place and let the bad blood run and the fever comes down.

Nobody had opened one for her. That much was written all over that lobby. She was the one who did it for everybody else, all day, every day. She'd been doing it so long that her own arm had gone hard and white with scar.

And I had nowhere to be. That's not a small thing. It's the only real currency I've ever had.