Grease has a way of embedding itself into the whorls of your fingerprints so deeply that no amount of pumice soap can ever scrape it out. Clayton James stared at his hands under the harsh, flickering yellow light of the barn. Blackened knuckles. A jagged, poorly healed scar cutting across the back of his left thumb. He smelled burnt wiring and ancient diesel, the distinct metallic stench of a combine harvester giving up the ghost.
The heat of the July evening pressed down on his shoulders like a physical weight. Out in the fields, the cicadas screamed in a steady, deafening drone. Clayton dragged a rag over his hands, doing nothing but moving the grease around. The alternator was shot—sizzled into a useless lump of copper and iron. A replacement was $500. He had exactly $83 in his checking account, a mortgage payment due on the 1st, and thirty acres of winter wheat that wouldn’t harvest itself.
He didn’t want to go to town. He wanted to sit on his porch, drink a cheap domestic beer, and let the quiet ringing in his ears—a parting gift from a mortar shell in Ramadi twelve years ago—lull him to sleep. But the wheat didn’t care about his fatigue. It would rot in the fields while he slept.
Thirty minutes later, Clayton’s rusted Ford truck crunched onto the gravel lot of the Iron Horse Tavern. It wasn’t a tavern in any traditional sense. It was a corrugated steel pole barn sitting right on the county line, reeking of stale cigarette smoke, spilled draft beer, and the sour tang of nervous sweat. On Friday nights, Russell Cobb cleared away the pool tables. "Rusty"—a man whose gut hung over his belt like a sack of wet laundry—ran an unsanctioned, bare-knuckle-adjacent fight club for the local farmhands, off-duty deputies, and anyone stupid enough to think they had a chin.
Clayton walked through the heavy wooden doors. The air conditioning was broken, replaced by two massive industrial fans that just circulated the humid, swampy air. The noise hit him first: a chaotic wall of shouting, glass clinking, and the heavy bass of the jukebox fighting against the roar of the crowd. He stood near the back, keeping his shoulders rolled forward, making his six-foot frame look smaller. He wore faded Carhartt pants stiff with dried mud and a plain gray T-shirt stained with engine oil.
He walked to the bar and ordered a club soda.
“You look like hell, Clayton,” Rusty grunted, sliding the sweating glass across the sticky plywood counter.
“Combine died,” Clayton said. His voice was a low, gravelly rasp. He took a sip. The carbonation burned the back of his throat. “Need cash.”
Rusty let out a raspy laugh, wiping down the bar with a rag that looked dirtier than the counter. “You ain’t going to find no loans in here tonight, just bad decisions.” He nodded toward the center of the room. “Though if you’re feeling suicidal, there’s always the open challenge.”