Some of those McKinley boys have been talking about your writer, Mabel said on a Thursday morning, refilling Clara's coffee with the particular energy she had when delivering information she'd been sitting on, saying things. What kind of things? The kind men say when they don't like that someone has something they want. Mabel set the pot down. Ray Decker's been running his mouth the most.
Big man, red beard. You've seen him. Clara had seen him. Hard not to. Decker was the kind of large that occupied space aggressively.
And he'd looked at Clara twice in the street in a way she'd filed under unpleasant but ignorable. About Ryder specifically, about Ryder being an outsider who came from nowhere and has no business being where he is. Mabel's voice was dry and precise. Meaning with you, meaning in this town's good graces. You know how that goes.
She did. It was an old story. Stranger earns. What local men feel entitled to. Local men decide the problem is the stranger rather than their own entitlement.
The logic was circular and stupid and occasionally dangerous. Has Ryder heard any of this? She asked. I expect so, Mabel said. Hard to miss Ray Decker when he's talking.
Clara carried that home and set it down in the back of her mind and tried to leave it there. She told herself it was talk and talk in Silver Creek usually stayed talk. She told herself Ryder was a grown man who had navigated difficult situations long before he came here and would navigate this one without her managing it for him. She told herself a lot of reasonable things, and they worked tolerably well until Friday evening when she heard it happening outside her back door. She'd been closing up the shop, the last lamp turned down, the worktable cleared, when the voices came through the alley.
She recognized Decker's voice first, the particular volume of a man who drank to get louder. There were at least two others. And then Ryder's voice lower. Even one short response she couldn't make out. She went to the back door.
Through the gap, she could see the alley behind the shop in the failing light. Three men from the lumber crew had Ryder partially backed against the opposite wall, not touching him yet, but arranged in the specific geometry of men who intended to. Decker was in front, a head taller than the other two, rolling his shoulders in a way that was preparatory and obvious. Ryder stood with his back not quite against the wall, his hands loose at his sides, his face carrying the exact same expression it carried when he worked with difficult horses. Watchful, unhurried, not performing calm, actually calm, which was different and more unsettling to the men opposite him.