Train Wreck Girl by Sean Carswell

down at the bar like she’s being coy. Within five minutes, Joe and the woman are talking and laughing and doing shots.
    You try to keep busy and give them space. You wash some glasses. You wipe the linoleum bar. You dust the bottles in the well. You fill the ice bin. You keep your head down and work.
    The cow bell on the front door bounces off the glass. You look up to see who’s walking in. You can hardly believe it.
    It’s Libra.
    She saunters in like it’s nothing. Like she’s been here a thousand times. She’s wearing her winter clothes: pink parka and gloves and everything. Last you checked, we were still in Florida in the springtime. Things are making less and less sense.
    Libra sits in a stool away from Joe and the women and even Paddy and the pinball machine. You walk up to see what she needs, even though you’re certain that she’s dead. You saw the corpse.
    Libra reaches under the bar and snaps her leg off her hip. She slams the leg on the bar and says, “What the fuck, Danny?”
    And the night sweats come back.

16
Ripping Off Guernico
    Bart told me he’d take me to Joe. I knew what he meant, but I was still down for it.
    He picked me up at work at around one-thirty. I’d been working at a metal shop that was about ten blocks from the duplex Bart and I lived in. Bart wanted to check it out before we hit the road.
    I introduced him to my boss—a guy named Duane. Duane and I had worked together out at the Space Center a decade earlier. He’d been working in a crane about fifteen feet away from me one day inside the Vehicle Assembly Building, which is the warehouse where rockets are built. We were indoors, but about five hundred feet off the ground. It was a one of a kind type situation, working in there. You heard all kinds of crazy statistics about that huge warehouse, like that you could fit Yankee Stadium and all its parking lots on the roof of the VAB. Or that the VAB had more square footage than Vatican City. Crazy things like that. I don’t know if any of it was true. It was a weird joint to work in, though, because you’d have to work higher than anywhere else locally. Like, if you built a condo on Cocoa Beach, you generally wouldn’t get any higher than about seven stories, but when you were up seventy or eighty feet, there’d be a pretty mean wind blowing in off the Atlantic. It’d be easy to lose your balance. There was no wind inside the VAB. It was easier to walk the beams there. But if you fell, you fell five hundred feet, not eighty. The result of either fall would probably be the same, so I guess it shouldn’t have mattered much to me.
    Only, one day Duane and I were working. He was safe in his crane and I was out on the beams, welding. I leaned over a little too far and my tape measure fell out of my tool belt. At first, I tried to reach for it and almost lost my balance. It freaked me out. My heart started racing. I could feel my blood fill with adrenaline. I squeezed my thighs tight on the beam and breathed as slowly and deeply as I could and I watched that tape measure fall and fall and fall for what seemed like forever. The whole time, I was thinking: that’s me. That’s me falling all that distance. And that’s the difference between falling eighty feet and falling five hundred. You’re gonna die either way. Either way, you’re gonna think about dying for the rest of your short life. But five hundred feet gives you a long time to think about dying.
    I finished welding that beam, walked over to Duane, said, “I quit,” and rode the elevator down.
    A few years later, Duane opened this metal shop in a warehouse off Brevard Avenue and found a way to keep his feet on the ground, too. When I got back to Cocoa Beach, Duane was the first guy I went to see about a job. He hired me as a freelancer. I could use his tools and he’d pay me by the job. Most welders wouldn’t work like