Angels Fall

silly trying to get out of the room where I saw a spider."
    "Put that ice pack on your head, like Joanie said to. Bet you've got yourself a big fat spider-sized headache."
    "I guess I do. But Pete—"
    "You fainting like that scared Pete so bad he forgot how bad his hand must've hurt. So that's something."
    "A good deed."
    "And Joanie's worried enough about both of you she hasn't gotten pissed yet that she's going to have to find somebody to fill in for him until the stitches are out. Two good deeds."
    "I'm loaded with them."
    "You want to go out for a beer later to toast your good deeds?"
    Reece took another cool sip of water. "You know what, I would."
     
    THE BAR FOOD at Clancy's wasn't bad, at least not washed down with beer. But more important to Reece was she'd taken another step on her journey back.
    She was sitting in a bar with a friend.
    A very strange bar, to her East Coast sensibilities.
    There were trophies hanging from the wall. Mounted heads of bear, elk, moose and mule deer adorned the knotty pine paneling, along with what Linda-gail identified for her as a couple of whopping cutthroat trout. They all stared out into the bar with what Reece thought of as a little shock, a little annoyance.
    The paneling, with its lower section of logs, looked as it it had soaked up a generation of smoke and beer fumes.
    The floors were scuffed and scarred and had probably been hit with kegs of spilled beer over time. Part of the area, just in front of a low stage. was sectioned off for dancing.
    The bar itself was big and black, and lorded over by Michael Clancy, who'd come to Wyoming straight from County Cork some twelve years before. He'd married a woman who claimed to be a quarter Cherokee and called herself Rainy. Clancy looked like what he was, a big, bluff Irishman who ran a bar. Rainy tossed nachos and potato skins, and whatever else she might be in the mood for, in the kitchen.
    The bar stools were worn down on the seat and shiny from a dozen years of asses. There was Bud and Guinness on draft, and in long-necks a few local brews including something called Buttface Amber, which Reece had declined. Other options were Harp by the bottle, or if you were female—or a pansy in Clancy's opinion—Bud Light. The crowded display of liquor behind the bar leaned heavily to whiskeys.
    The wine Clancy poured from a box, Linda-gail had warned Reece, was cheap and tasted like warm piss.
    There were a couple of pool tables in another section, and the sound of balls clacking earned through the music piped through speakers.
    "How's the head?" Linda-gail asked her.
    "Still on my shoulders, and probably feeling a lot better than Pete's hand."
    "Seven stitches. Ouchie. But he loved how you fussed over him when he came back in. Making him sit down, serving him that fried trout yourself."
    "He's a sweet guy."
    "Yeah, he is. And speaking of guvs, now that I'm plying you with al-cohol, spill. Just how hot is Brody?"
    If she was going to have a girlfriend, Reece decided, she was going to act like one herself. She leaned in. "Combustible."
    "I knew it!" Linda-gail banged a fist on the table. "You can just tell. The eyes, the mouth. I mean, there's the build and the rest of him, but the mouth especially. Biteable."
    "It is, I must admit, it is."
    "What other parts of him have you bitten?"
    "That's it. I'm thinking about the rest."
    Mouth open, eyes wide. Linda-gail sat back. "You have superhuman control. Is it learned or inherited?"
    "It's what you call a by-product of abject fear. You've got the story on me by now."
    To give them both a minute. Linda-gail sipped at her beer. "Does that bother you?"
    "I don't know. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it's a relief."
    "I didn't know whether to say anything about it or not. Especially after Joanie…" She trailed off and took a sudden, keen interest in her beer.
    "Joanie what?"
    "I wasn't supposed to say she'd said. But since I already have, sort of, she gave the bunch of us the what-for when Juanita started chattering about it. Juanita doesn't mean anything by it; she just can't keep her mouth shut. Or her skirt down, come to that."
    Linda-gail took another sip of beer. "Anyway. Joanie pinned her ears back good about it. And she made it plain and clear that none of us were to poke at you about it. But since you kind of brought it up . .
    "It's all right." And wasn't it, well, amazing, to have the inimitable Joanie Parks standing as her champion? "It's just not something I like to talk