He Went Alone

The building was on a block of Commerce Street in Fort Worth that had been trying to become something for fifteen years without quite making it - a couple of repurposed warehouse fronts, a coffee shop that was too good for the rent, a parking lot that charged too much and was always full. The Wagoneer was at the meter with forty-two minutes on it when Alexis saw the calendar entry.

She wasn't looking for it. That was the thing she would think about later. She'd pulled up the shared calendar to check a delivery window for the shoot equipment, and there it was: Clark Edwards - External mtg - 8:00-9:30 AM, no location, no participants listed, no description. Which was not unusual for Clark on its own. Clark kept his calendar lean. But the timing was wrong for a client meeting, wrong for anything operational, and the external tag was one he almost never used, because almost everything Clark did was external in some sense and he'd never bothered to specify before.

She mentioned it to Rachel in a half-sentence, the way you mention weather.

"He had a thing this morning," Alexis said, not looking up from the equipment inventory.

Rachel, who was sorting through the lens cases and had approximately zero tolerance for ambiguity when she was working, said, "What kind of thing?"

"Calendar said external."

A pause. Rachel turned a lens case over in her hands, checked it, set it down. "Clark doesn't tag things external."

"I know."

That was the whole conversation. Rachel went back to the cases. Alexis went back to the inventory. Between them, in the unsaid space that the two of them had developed over months of working in the same room, was the same shape - not alarm, not conclusion, just the specific quality of attention you give a thing you've decided to keep watching.

Clark came back from Fort Worth just before noon. He came through the main room like he'd been to a dentist appointment - present, returned, unremarkable. He asked Cole about the shoot day Wednesday and made a note in the margin of his own notebook in the handwriting nobody could read except him, and that was all. The notebook stayed open on the corner of his desk for the rest of the afternoon. Alexis did not read it. She was not the kind of person who read other people's notebooks. But she saw its weight - the way it lay on the desk like something that had been added to, not like something that had been finished.

In the truck on the way to the location scout, Rachel and Alexis didn't talk about it. They talked about the light on the site and the wind forecast and whether the talent Travis had booked could handle the physical requirements of the concept. They were professionals and the work was the work.

But on the way back, when the topic had run out and the high desert was going past at sixty-five, Rachel said, apropos of apparently nothing, "He went alone."

Alexis said, "Yeah."

Neither of them elaborated. Per their established practice. They watched the road and let the thing they'd seen accumulate the way all honest observation accumulates - without conclusion, without pressure, in the way of people who have learned that the best seeing is done before you decide what you're looking at.

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

Listen daily. Apple Podcasts · RSS

Follow the world. @marfamavericks on Instagram · TikTok · X · Threads · Bluesky