Is This What I Want

Cole Harrison locked up the office at seven-fifteen on Friday, after everyone else had gone, because he was always the last one and had been the last one for as long as he'd worked here and did not expect that to change.

He stood at the front door with the key in his hand and the truck in the lot and the desert going dark in the way the desert went dark - fast, and then completely, like a decision made and kept.

The week had been good. He had made it good, in the way he made everything good: by doing the invisible work, by being where the problem was before the problem became a thing anyone else had to manage. The shoot on Wednesday had gone clean. The equipment returns were accounted for. The client was happy in the particular way clients were happy when a team anticipated them, which was the way Cole thought all clients should be managed and almost none of them were, because anticipation required knowing what you were doing before you needed to do it, which required a kind of preparation that most people found boring.

Cole did not find it boring. Cole found it clarifying. There was a version of the work that was just putting out fires, and there was a version that was building the room so carefully that the fires didn't start, and Cole had been doing the second version so long that the first version felt, to him, like evidence of a failure that had already happened.

He stood with the key.

The question came in these moments, the way it came in all the quiet moments this season - in the truck, locking up, driving home. The question was simple: Is this what I want, or did I just get very good at it? He had been turning it over for weeks. Not in a panicked way, not in the way of a man who was going to do something sudden and irreversible. More the way you turn over a rock to see what's under it, and what's under it is more rock, and you're not sure yet whether that's an answer or just geology.

He almost called Travis. He had the phone out, Travis's name right there, and then he put it back. Not because he didn't trust Travis - he trusted Travis the way you trust the person who has always shown up - but because the question was not yet ready to be handed to another person. It was still in the stage where it needed to be his. Saying it out loud would change its shape, and he wasn't sure yet what shape he wanted it to be.

He locked the door.

The truck started on the first try, the way it always started, because Cole maintained the truck the way he maintained everything - ahead of the problem. He drove the long way home because the long way had a stretch where there was nothing but the road and the sky, and some nights that was the only thing that helped.

Inside the office, through the window, Clark's notebook sat on the corner of the desk where it had been all week. Alexis had walked past it six times without reading it. Cole hadn't noticed it.

But he noticed, pulling out of the lot, that the Wagoneer was still parked across the street. Which meant Clark was still somewhere in Marfa, doing something Clark was doing. That was not unusual. It was also not nothing.

Cole turned onto the long road and let the dark come up on both sides and did not ask the question out loud. He would know when it was ready. He was good at knowing when things were ready. It was, in fact, the thing he was best at. Whether that was an answer to the question or just the question restated, he could not yet tell.

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

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