Mostly

By seven in the evening the feed store had emptied out except for two people who were each pretending they didn't notice the other was still there.

Clark Edwards worked best after dark. He'd discovered this in his twenties and built a career around it, the long quiet hours when the phones stopped and the Slack went still and he could finally do the part of the job that wasn't reacting - the part that was thinking. He had the new client's history open on one monitor and the brief on the other, and he was doing what he always did, which was reading three moves past where everyone else had stopped reading.

Travis was at the far end of the floor, at his own desk, doing the thing Travis did in the evenings, which Clark had never fully been able to categorize. Not quite working. Not quite not. Reviewing something, or sitting with something. The lamp was on at his desk and off everywhere else, so the long room had two pools of light in it and a lot of dark between them, and the two men sat in their separate pools and did not talk, and the not-talking was its own kind of conversation.

Clark respected Travis. That was the truth, and it was a truth that complicated everything, because it would have been so much cleaner to not. If Travis were a fool, or a coaster, or a man who'd stopped trying, Clark could have wanted what he wanted without the friction in his chest. But Travis was none of those things. Travis was good. Travis had built this - the clients, the trust, the culture, the unglamorous building and the genuinely good work that came out of it. The city was real, and Travis had laid every stone.

And Clark thought it could be more.

That was the whole thing, the entire engine of him, and he had never once said it out loud. He looked at the division Travis had built and he didn't see a finished thing to defend. He saw a foundation. He saw the next ten years. He saw a version of this place that wasn't just good but unmissable, that didn't just keep its clients but redefined what its clients thought was possible, and he saw - with a clarity that he kept very carefully off his face - that Travis was not the person who was going to build that version. Travis was the person who had built this one. Those were different jobs. Different men did them.

He had a theory about the new brief, and the theory was the kind of thing that, if he was right, would matter. Everyone else on the team had read it as a production problem - a hard shoot, a complicated logistics puzzle, a thing to execute well. Clark had read it as a positioning problem. The client didn't need a better campaign. The client needed to be told, by someone they'd believe, that they were aiming at the wrong target entirely. That was not a thing you could do from the producer's chair. That was a thing you could only do from the front of the room.

He could be the one to say it. He could see exactly how. He'd worked the whole argument out longhand on a yellow legal pad under the lamp, page after page in his small even script, and the pad sat there in the one pool of light like the only bright thing in the room. And the seeing of it, the having of the move, sat in him like a held breath.

Down the room, Travis's lamp clicked off. Footsteps. Travis came up the dark center of the floor, keys in hand, and paused by Clark's pool of light.

"Still at it," Travis said. Not a question.

"Reading into the new one." Clark didn't look up right away, and then he did. "Good brief."

"Yeah." Travis stood there a second longer than the conversation required. Something moved behind his eyes, and Clark watched it move and could not read it, which almost never happened to Clark. "We mostly see this one the same way, you and I."

"Mostly," Clark said.

It was a small word. He let it sit. He watched Travis decide whether to pick it up, and watched him decide not to, and watched the deciding cost something, and then Travis nodded the way men nod when they've agreed to leave a thing alone for one more night.

"Don't burn it down," Travis said. "Go home eventually."

"I will."

Travis went. The big door scraped open and shut. Headlights swept the windows - the VW bus, coughing twice and catching on the third - and then it was just Clark, and the two monitors, and the long dark room, and the held breath, and the theory that was right.

He did not go home for another hour.

This entry is part of The Marfa Mavericks, a daily fiction podcast from The Marfa Strategy.

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