And then he was grabbing her by the arm. And shaking her hard. And screaming into her face.
“You get the hell out of here and leave me alone! You understand that! You don’t belong in here!”
He had no idea how hard he was shaking her. He was suddenly so drunk that he had lost control of himself.
But a guy he didn’t know stepped up and grabbed his arm and said, “Hey, Richie, you’re hurting her, man.”
Richie was still shouting. “She doesn’t belong in here!”
And Richie lunged for her again. He had no intention of hurting her. He just wanted to make his point emphatically.
The guy, obviously interpreting Richie’s lunge as a very violent act, put himself in front of Darcy.
Richie ran into the guy’s chest.
For the first time, Richie realized how big the guy was. Six-five, maybe 270, 280, with hard blue eyes and a fist-broken nose.
He obviously was not intimidated in the least by the town hero.
“Lay off her, man.”
“Richie’s right,” the bartender said. “She don’t belong in here.”
“That doesn’t give him any right to push her around,” the man said. “She’s just a kid.”
Richie was sobering up again. That was the kind of drunk he was, phasing in and out of his booze.
For the first time, he saw the scene clearly, saw what he’d done, and felt embarrassed. He’d way overreacted. He should have taken her aside and told her nice and quiet that she didn’t belong here. And, in fact, didn’t belong anywhere Richie was. He was way too old for her in every sense of the word.
Calm, rational, adult.
That’s how he should have handled it.
Instead, looking around, he now saw what a scene he’d created.
“I’m sorry, Darcy,” he said. “I didn’t handle that very well.”
Darcy startled him then. She had a terrible temper and a foul mouth.
But you could never underestimate Darcy’s cunning.
She started crying. And if you didn’t know her, you’d swear that her tears were the real thing. The sweet, innocent tears of a fifteen-year-old girl.
“I guess I just thought you meant all those things you said to me, Richie,” she said.
Now, after such magnificent emoting, she even had the women on her side.
How could you take advantage of a little lost kid like this? the stares said now.
Bad enough that you’re screwing around with an underage girl. Do you have to break her heart on top of it?
Little bitch.
She was some piece of work, she was.
But she wasn’t done. Oh, no.
She just started shaking her head miserably and saying, “I guess I shouldn’t have let you do any of that stuff to me. I was real stupid.”
The bartender said, “Richie? Why’n’t you take her over in the corner booth and talk to her, huh? I mean, I got a business to run. Boss comes in and sees this, he’ll kick my ass.”
She’d done it beautifully, conveyed to the crowd the sense that Richie had not only slept with her but made her the kind of promises young lovers have been making to each other for thousands of years.
“All right, Richie?” the bartender said.
What choice did he have but to play through this charade?
He looked at the bartender, looked at the crowd, sighed, then said, gently, “Let’s go over to that booth, Darcy.”
He led her through the hushed crowd. Now, without the jukebox playing, the place was eerily silent.
He got her seated on one side of the booth, then sat down across from her.
The jukebox boomed back to life. You had to shout to be heard.
Darcy looked at him and smiled. “I put on a pretty good show, didn’t you think?”
“You little slut,” he said, all his rage back again. “You little slut.”
Darcy, who was tucked into the booth so that nobody could see her, just smiled her cute little ass off.
3
The old Hartford barn had been built in 1912. At the time, it was the showplace of the entire valley. Not only were the house and the barn and the outbuildings all state-of-the-art; Hugh Hartford hired a chemist full-time. Hartford wanted his milk cows to be the most productive in the entire state, and that included the farmers on the Wisconsin border to the east. Those boys had long been reputed to have the best dairy cows outside of experimental laboratory farms. Six weeks after the Hartford house was built, it caught fire and killed Hartford, his wife, and their three children. Nobody could afford to rebuild the place and restore it to its former self, so it stood empty until a Crystal Falls man had the idea to put on dances every Friday night in the barn. World War II, Korea, Vietnam, hippies, yuppies, boomers, and X’ers... all the generations came and went... and society changed so much a fella could hardly recognize it sometimes... but by God every Friday night there was a dance out at the Hartford place.
Amy could hear the music when she was still half a mile away. As usual on warm nights, all the doors and windows of the white two-story barn were open and the recorded country music poured out into the night and the countryside. Also as usual, the parking lot was so crowded that cars had to park alongside the road, stretching back a quarter of a mile on a night like tonight.
She parked and walked up to the barn, passing all sorts of couples, young, old, heavy, thin... all having one thing in common... western clothes. Amy wore a simple red checkered western shirt with white piping, jeans, and cordovan cowboy boots. Everybody she passed smiled and said hello. This was a nice place, the old barn, and it brought out the best in most folks. Wedding receptions, anniversary parties, square-dance clubs... the good old Hartford barn was the right place for just about every kind of festivity. It had been refurbished half a dozen times over the stretch of the century... and would be refurbished again to make sure that it lasted well into the next century.
There was a crowd around the front door, mostly men having their smokes and drinking their beer. A year ago, the owners of the barn had posted No Smoking signs inside. There’d been the predictable fuss, but by now the old dogs had taught themselves some new tricks. They went outside when they wanted a smoke.
The speakers inside blared a very bouncy, upbeat song. Those were the fun ones to dance to.
“I don’t believe it,” a familiar voice said behind her.
She turned and saw Sally standing there.
The man with Sally was tall and trim and very handsome in a slightly empty sort of way. He looked uncomfortable in his western getup, which included a fancy red kerchief and just about the fanciest cowboy boots Amy had ever seen. They had everything except electric lights on them.
“This is Hal,” Sally said.
Hal leaned forward to put his hand around Amy’s. He surprised her by having a steely grip.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” he said.
Amy smiled. “Don’t believe everything she tells you.”
Hal smiled, too. “Don’t worry. I don’t.”
“He’s inside,” Sally said.
“Oh,” Amy said, trying to sound nonchalant. “That’s nice.”
“God, what a faker she is,” Sally said with a laugh. “As soon as I mentioned Sam, her heart started hammering away. But she has to play it nice and cool.”
“She loves drama,” Amy said.
“Yes,” Hal said, “I’ve noticed that.”
“Well, don’t just stand there, Amy.”
“How about giving me a minute to relax?” Amy said.
“She’s scared,” Sally smirked. “Scared, scared, scared. Just like a seventh-grade mixer. Afraid to go up and ask the cute boy to dance.”