The Marfa Deal

And I had done it, I had created something genuine, something good, and I thought I’d succeeded and made something lasting and done something cool with my life: I owned a nightclub in Austin.

Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Unpublished Books

It was the spring of 2021 and already garbage-hot in Austin. I was meeting my two business partners downtown, I had a whiskey hangover, and with my wrinkled DFA Records shirt and sweaty hair, I looked it.

I still called myself a nightclub owner then, though I had no reason to. Together with my two partners, Jeff Beatty and Brandon Chatigny, I had owned a nightclub. The Conrad was a live music venue I’d put everything into, all of my thirties, and which after years of work and love had folded immediately under covid. Now all we had left was our dive bar in East Austin, the Lighthouse Social Club, which had just scraped through the pandemic. But that spring the first vaccine was out and the city was reopening, the world was reopening, and my partners wanted to rebuild.

I thought a walk might help the hangover so I parked at the far end of Red River Street. The smell of urine filled the warm air and every hundred feet an overturned rental scooter blocked the sidewalk, a homeless man stood motionless as I passed. Some of the old strip of nightclubs remained: Mohawk, Barb’s, Cheer Up Charlie’s, and Stubb’s were all still open. But then I passed Beerland, where once I had sat dead-drunk, the only person in the place, and let a guitarist play his entire set for me; Sidewinder, where I saw some of Mitski’s and the Black Pumas’ first shows and where I’d watched a man get his head rammed through a wall; Barracuda with its stained glass windows . . . These clubs had made Austin into what the world knew it for, they had existed alongside my own, and in the last year so many were ground out and gone, boarded up or sold to property management companies to be rebuilt as coffee shops and gyms. Out front of the Swan Dive a man wearing a black garbage bag cocked an imaginary rifle; another slept by the front door of the Elysium; another pounded on the plywood windows of Better Days. Beyond us was downtown, the new hotels bright in the morning sun, the skyscrapers and cranes leering over us. On a dumpster, someone’s stencil: Do Not Move Here, Austin Is At Capacity.

35 rumbled with cars and the air was full of their sounds. Below the overpass I walked around the piles of trash and the tents and the people sleeping on the ground, the camps waiting to be cleared away by the police. No one noticed me. Waiting at the crosswalk I stood next to a shirtless man with leathery skin who held up his middle fingers to all the passing traffic, before I crossed to the east side.

The Lighthouse didn’t open to the public for an hour so I let myself in through the back. On the patio the trees muffled any sounds from the highway. The metal card tables were empty and the lights were off, everything still and cooler in the shade of the trees.

The music inside was too loud, some California psychedelic revival echoing in the empty bar. Ruby, the bartender, was arranging glasses and turning on the paloma machine. We hadn’t done much with the space since we bought it: we wanted “cantina,” so we left the rough adobe walls, dragged in some thick wood tables, hung vintage posters and tagged shit with sharpie and stickers. We tried some potted ferns, but most of them died.

Beatty and Brandon were in the back corner working on grant applications. They didn’t look up at me as I went to the bar and smiled at Ruby.

“Hi Everett,” she said without turning away from the paloma machine. She had one arm around the back of the machine and was shaking it. “The Bandidos were back last night.”

“They’re really starting to like you. How many of them?”

“I dunno. Eighteen. Twenty.”

“They fuck anything up?”

“The toilets were a little gnarly but other than that, no.” She banged the side of the machine with her palm and the paddles came to life, churning the pink slush inside. I liked Ruby. A big, tattooed girl from Minneapolis, she’d been with us for three years and the whole time had been saving for a condo that she wasn’t any closer to buying. She turned around and crossed her arms. “We came out of it fine, but they went after this poor girl. I guess she’d been flirting with one of them, and his ‘wife,’ this black-haired wolf of a woman got up in her face and was gonna kick the shit out of her. But then she got the idea that all the Bandidos – like, twenty of them – should put their drinks on the girl’s tab. The Bandido chick was ordering rounds of shots for them all for an hour. She was having fun with it. The poor girl couldn’t get away, she just had to sit there till they left, the woman wouldn’t let her go.”

“Jesus. How much they ring up on her card?”

“Four hundred-ish.”

“Poor girl.”

“I wanted to talk to you about it. Can we help her out? Do we hafta run it through? I haven’t closed it out yet.”

I looked away from her. “It’s four hundred?”

“Yeah. Maybe a little over.”

“How much did we do other than that?”

“Five?”

“That’s a big hit, Ruby.”

“This girl was trapped, Ev. You shoulda seen her – I felt awful. There was nothing she could do about it, and I couldn’t really help her.”

I glanced back at Brandon and Beatty. “They know about it?”

“No. I wanted to tell you first.”

“They know how much we closed last night?”

She shook her head.

“Charge her two-fifty,” I said. “Don’t mention it to them, okay? Just say it was a slow night.”

“Okay, Ev. By the way, Beatty brought coffee.” She pointed to a paper cup down the bar.

“Thanks. Any breakfast to go with it?”

She laughed and got a bottle of Jameson from the bar. I opened the coffee, the lid dripping condensation onto my hand, and poured in two shots. Ruby took the bottle and I carried the coffee to the back.

Brandon closed his Macbook as I sat, an inked hand gripping the laptop. “We were just triple checking the SAVES application. I think we’re good. I’ll send it to the lawyers to review and we can start on the federal grant.”

Next to him Beatty was frowning. I watched him cross one leg over the other, brown leather boots tucked into his jeans. He brushed a strand of hair away from his face, his fingers covered in the same turquoise and silver rings he’d worn since I met him twenty years earlier. I knew this body language and waited for him to say something.

“Tell Everett what you told me,” he said.

Brandon sighed and then smiled at me. “The SAVES money has to go toward the Lighthouse, which is good – we can catch up on back rent and get the walk-in cooler fixed. But the federal grant is gonna be a lot more money than what the city’s giving us, and with fewer strings attached to it. I think this is a chance to really push ourselves.”

“And this is where he loses me,” said Beatty. He grinned at me but his eyes were serious.

Brandon turned to him. “Someday I would love for you to accept the fact that we’re a business. We own a bar. We buy bars. It’s what we do.”

“Two years ago I’d have said we’re in live music,” said Beatty. “The bar was an afterthought.”

“Well, it shouldn’t have been an afterthought. And now live music’s been dead for over a year,” said Brandon.

“This guy owns two nightclubs in Austin and he says live events are dead.”

“I owned one nightclub, and now I don’t,” said Brandon.

I’d heard this argument before. Brandon had always found the live music component to be the sketchiest part of our business: the touring costs and how inconsistent our revenue was across the year, while our rent wasn’t getting cheaper. He wasn’t wrong that, outside of South By Southwest and ACL, the beer sales were what kept the doors open. If we embraced that, he’d say, if we focused on alcohol, we could make a lot more money year-round. But then Beatty would tell us how live music will always be a thing in Austin, there will always be people who want to go out to a show, who want that experience, that it’s never going away. Then we’d reach an impasse, should we reopen a nightclub and get back into music now that the city was reopening, or should we really be in bars and hospitality, make our money there? It was a question we’d been asking each other for six months, and we’d gotten nowhere with it.

And today, my head killed. “So what’d y’all wanna talk about?”

“Venues,” said Beatty.

I groaned. “I’m not sure I have the bandwidth for that.”

“What else do you gotta do today?” said Beatty, grinning. “Come on, you love it.”

“I’ve started looking at spaces. For bars and for music, there ain’t really shit available at a good price. Almost everything that closed has already been bought up, and what’s left is way overpriced. We’d have to turn a profit immediately for it to work out,” said Brandon. “But then I started to look outside Austin.”

Beatty and I looked at each other.

“Outside Austin, like Round Rock? Or like San Antonio?” said Beatty.

“Neither. Frankly, the other cities are just as bad. We missed our window. But there’s still a lot of Texas that no one’s really gotten to yet.”

Beatty laughed. “You sound like Daniel Day Lewis.”

Brandon ignored him. “I’ve been thinking about Marfa.”

No one said anything, so after a moment Brandon continued.

“It’s still pretty cheap there, but it won’t be forever. More and more people know about Marfa; there’s money starting to flow into it. In ten years it’s gonna be Palm Springs, or Taos. We could buy a bar now for basically nothing and get out ahead of that.”

“You’re joking,” said Beatty.

“Jesus Christ, no,” said Brandon. “Are you even gonna hear me out? You’re fighting me on everything today.”

“You’re roleplaying as a real estate developer,” said Beatty.

Brandon rolled his eyes and looked at me. “You’ve been to Marfa?”

“No,” I said. I swallowed some coffee and felt acid rise in my throat. “It’s on my list.”

“Neither have I, but I’ve read a lot. What do you know about it?”

I gave him a helpless look. “Art?”

“It’s a small town in the middle of the desert – probably no more than two thousand people. Classic western town, adobe houses and all that, but at some point it became an artists’ colony. Artists and painters and sculptors and shit all flocked there in the eighties and nineties, I guess for the isolation, or maybe it’s the landscape, they were ‘inspired by the desert.’ The town morphed from this West Texas little shithole, it rebuilt itself around art, so now it’s full of galleries, people go there for residencies, all that. And then that scene brought rich people who’re drawn to the culture, and a cottage tourist industry sprang up, so it’s this destination way out by the Mexican border.” He turned to Beatty. “Sound about right?”

“I mean, it was an artists’ colony twenty or thirty years ago. Then everyone heard about it.” Beatty laughed. “Even when I was growing up it was already losing its charm. There’s maybe some authentic scene there, but it’s buried by influencers and people buying second houses. Rich people use Marfa as their little private Burning Man: they go out there thinking they’ll figure shit out about themselves or just cause they need something to do, spend a lot of money, do their drug of choice, look at some art, and pretend that their life is more interesting and exciting than it really is. They have their weekend adventure, change up their environment for a few days, and then they go back to their cities and live their normal, rich lives again.”

“Do you have a canned speech like this for every town in Texas?” said Brandon.

“Look, if y’all grew up here you’d get it. I’ve had to listen to people talk about Marfa my whole life,” said Beatty. “The last time I was there was when I went camping at Fort Davis, in like 2010 or 2011, after we moved back from New York. I stopped there for a night, and I was bored after about two hours.”

My eyes tingled. “So what’s your idea?”

“It’s not fleshed out yet, but it’s not complicated,” said Brandon. “Beatty’s being melodramatic, but yeah, from what I can tell all people do in Marfa is paint and drink and buy shit, and there are only a handful of bars in the whole town. We know how to run a bar better than anyone in Marfa. We’d clean up.”

I wanted to step in before Beatty picked another fight, but I couldn’t think of something to say.

Beatty sighed. “This isn’t us. We’re not investors.”

“Of course I wanna do this with integrity. But it’s been a shit year for us, man, and we need to get back on our feet,” said Brandon. “Let’s table this for today. All I wanted to do was put it out there. I’ve been thinking on this for a while now, but I know it’s new for you two. Just think about it. We don’t need to make a decision immediately, but we need a plan soon. The grant money is coming and people are gonna be snatching up leases. I’m open to other ideas, but I don’t hear anything more compelling than this.”

We spent the rest of the meeting on loan paperwork, bank shit, ops, vendor contracts, the walk-in cooler repairs, Brandon wanted an espresso machine for the day crowd. I didn’t think about Marfa again until a week later, when Brandon texted us: this bar isnt renewing its lease, lets talk more.

He’d sent a link to a townie bar in Marfa, the Broke Mule. It had no website; on its Facebook page were pictures of middle-aged women in cowboy hats, men with red faces. Before I could react, Beatty texted back “lol,” and I agreed: a run-down watering hole that had nothing to do with our scene or skills, of Austin, nightlife, music. What was Brandon thinking?

But he wouldn’t let it go. The next day he was texting us an article about West Texas from a travel magazine, and then 36 Hours in Marfa, and then a longform writeup on the Trans-Pecos Music Festival. Beatty had a rebuttal for all of it – it was all just performance for influencers and tourists, a gimmick, there was no soul to it – but as I listened to Brandon and read what he sent, I began to understand what he saw in Marfa. It looked like a strange place, a weird creative gathering point far out in the wilderness. Even if it was propped up by outside money, it had artistic bona fides: I read about Chinati, I read about Donald Judd, I read about Paul Thomas Anderson and the Coen Brothers. I read about the locals, too, about the real-life, small-townness of it, the lore. Brandon had compared it to Palm Springs, but I wondered, was Marfa now what Austin had been forty years ago? A strange, incomplete place, full of potential?

Or was Beatty right, and it was all bullshit?

I told Brandon I’d keep an open mind. Good, he said, cause we gotta act NOW, if we dont move on this someone else will.

Beatty’s the one you hafta win over, I texted back.

Let me worry about Beatty.

The two of them met a few days later. I don’t know what Brandon told him, but by the end of their meeting Beatty agreed to go to Marfa and scout it out.

“Jeff still isn’t home.”

Through a slit in the blinds I could see the gray sky, the sun not yet risen above the steel frame of the condos being built across the street. My room was dim and a cake of dust fell from the ceiling fan. I looked at my phone. Not even 6 AM and she was already calling me.

“He still isn’t home, Ev.”

I closed my eyes and sighed. “Alright.”

“Something’s wrong. I know something’s wrong,” Sheena said.

“It’s okay. I’m sure he’s fine.”

“Then why hasn’t he called?” she said, her voice breaking.

“His phone probably died. Or he’s on the road somewhere without service. Texas is like that – you lose service twenty miles out of Austin.” I had no idea if that was true.

“I know – I barely talked to him the last few days, he called me when he had service, but I guess Marfa’s a dead zone or something.” She inhaled. “I’m just glad the kids aren’t up yet. What am I gonna do?”

I wanted to go back to sleep, but soon the construction crews would arrive at the condos and my room would be filled with the sound of their trucks and their voices, the jackhammers and nailguns. There was no point in staying in bed. “So when’s the last time you heard from him?”

“Wednesday. His last text was Wednesday.”

I already knew all this, though it was hazy. When Beatty hadn’t come home from Marfa on Thursday night his wife, Sheena, had called me. I’d tried to reassure her, he was probably just taking his time, enjoying being away from the city, but she didn’t buy it. Over a few frantic calls I’d drunk a quart of whiskey and convinced her to give it till the morning, everything would be fine, he’d probably get back while she slept.

He hadn’t.

“Shit.” On the floor next to the bed was a pair of jeans I must have thrown off the night before. I picked them up and sniffed them. “Give me a sec to think.”

“I tried calling the Marfa police station.”

“You called the cops?”

“Yes, Ev. My husband has been missing for two days. That seems like the correct time to call the cops,” she said. “Not that it did anything – I couldn’t get through to anyone. The number for the police station just loops a Hall & Oates track.”

“Don’t do anything else,” I said as I pulled on the jeans and took the phone with me into the bathroom. Splashing water on my face the sound of footsteps came through the ceiling, my upstairs neighbor getting home from third shift. Water rushed through the pipes as he turned on the shower, and I went back to my bedroom to find a shirt.

“Jeff is fine,” I said after a moment. “But I’m gonna go find him.”

Sheena called again an hour later; I could hear her kids playing somewhere in the background. Still nothing from Beatty, his phone went straight to voicemail.

“I’ll hit the road after I shower,” I said. “It’s an eight-hour drive; that’ll get me in by three or four. I’ll have Jeff on the phone with you and driving back to Austin by dinnertime.”

“Please be right,” said Sheena. She sounded different than earlier: now that the kids were up and she was managing them, the fear that Beatty was gone had turned to frustration that he wasn’t there.

“Can you think of anything else to tell me? Where was he staying?”

“He rented an airstream at El Cosmico. It’s the big campground everyone stays at.”

“Okay, I’ll start there. Which car did he take?”

“The CR-V.”

“Honestly, Sheena, I bet it’ll be parked right there when I pull in.”

“I mean, that’d be nice.”

“When you guys talked, did he tell you what he was doing? Anywhere he went that I could look for him?”

“I dunno, Ev. He told me a lot of places, but it’s hard for me to focus on them now.” She took a deep breath. “Like, I can’t remember names or anything.”

“That’s fine. Not a big deal,” I said. “What types of stuff was he gonna do?”

“He said the point was to scout out that venue y’all were looking at, and he wanted to get a feel for the town – to see if it’d changed at all since the last time he was there. He went to some galleries, I think. Shopping. And he’d mentioned wanting to drive out to the Lights and the observatory, but that was on Tuesday. I don’t know if he ever did.”

“The Lights?”

“Some tourist trap. I guess if you drive to this one spot at night, you can see lights floating in the desert.”

“I wouldn’t think he likes that kinda stuff.”

“He doesn’t. But he was really trying to give Marfa a fair shot. He was gonna do everything. He wanted to see if he could like it,” said Sheena. I heard her close a door, and the kids’ voices went quiet. “The last place I know he went was a bar. I can’t remember the name. He said they were having a grand reopening party after shutting down for covid.”

“Cool – that’s specific. I should be able to figure out which bar it was.”

I was in the kitchen. The counter and sink were covered with a week of dishes and takeout. “This is all helpful, Sheena,” I said. “How was he acting when he left? He seemed totally fine when I saw him last week.”

“Well,” she said, and paused. “We had an argument the morning he left.”

“Mm.”

“I was just stressed. He was leaving me to solo-parent all week. Like, I have a job too,” she said. “It wasn’t anything major, we weren’t screaming at each other or anything. I was just being bitchy with him, and I could tell he was pissed when he left. But I feel like he got over it! He seemed fine when he was texting me. You know Jeff. Everything bounces off him. He doesn’t hold a grudge.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“I’m sure he’s fine.” Her voice broke a little and she paused. “Just keep me updated, okay? Text me when you get there. If you have service, that is.”

“Of course.”

I had no clue what to pack, so I just threw some clothes in an old duffel bag, pulled on my Cons, and stood in my dark living room. The cat rubbed up against my shin, and I poured her a pile of food to last a few days. That was it. Nothing to prepare for and nothing to leave behind.

I knew one person in Marfa. Lowell Green was a friend of Brandon’s who I’d met a few years ago. A lawyer who had retired young, he had houses in both Marfa and Austin. Before I left, I texted him.

Hey Lowell gonna be in Marfa tonight. If your in town lets grab a drink

I waited a minute to see if he’d reply. When he didn’t, I turned out the kitchen light and stepped into the warm morning air.

I went west. The sky over 290 was gray and distant as I left the city and drove through the pass-through towns, Dripping Springs and Henly, and then I was into the hill country. The road rose and fell. Yellow and white and red wildflowers grew thick under the fenceposts alongside the road, and here and there the wooly trees broke open into small goat pastures. At an intersection in Johnson City I noticed a hand-painted sign outside a general store: Marfa, 428 Miles.

Near Fredricksburg the hills leveled into fields where grazing horses and longhorns were penned in by wire fences; the ranches flew faded Trump/Pence and Back The Blue flags. There were dozens of wineries set back in the fields but it was too early to stop at them. Instead I pulled into a bakery at the end of town and got a kolache and a styrofoam coffee, then filled up at a gas station across the street. Already my service was going in and out, from a few bars to nothing, and as I filled the tank I screenshotted the directions.

I’d meant what I said to Sheena: Beatty was probably fine. What I hadn’t pointed out but assumed she knew was that I couldn’t do much if something really was wrong. I was not a detective or a cop, I was a club-owner without a club; I could barely change a tire. There wasn’t really any reason I should be doing this, I had no skills to track someone down or to get them out of danger. The questions I’d asked Sheena might have reassured us both and made it sound like I had a plan, but I was essentially just repeating cliches, what I imagined someone would say in the noir movies I’d never seen. I’d agreed to go because if I was the one finding Beatty, if we didn’t call the cops, then it wasn’t serious. It wasn’t real.

After Fredricksburg everything was ranch roads and trailers for a long time. Bare trees. It was a long drive, eight hours, and my attention went in and out of the work ahead of me. If Beatty wasn’t just waiting for me at his campsite I’d need to have my shit together, I’d need to focus, but as I drove there wasn’t much point thinking it through. I knew so little.

I got to Junction, the midway point of the drive, where the hill country turns to plains. The sky ahead was pale blue and full of cloudbanks, and close to the road were dry brown plateaus spotted with grass and scraggle. The occasional windmill was the only sign of civilization. This was the Texas of my lost imagination, how I’d pictured it in childhood, before I’d moved to Austin and it became something else. This was the frontier. There were plastic bags caught in the trees and blown out tires lay alongside the highway. Wind turbines chopped the sky and the plains bobbed with oil wells, some new and industrial, others old black steel still going somehow. Far off an oil stack burned. The road was long and straight, now carved through the hills instead of going over them.

A storm was coming to the south. Out one window the cloudbanks had thickened and lightning flashed regularly. But further down the horizon I could see pale blue sky. A few pellets of rain hit my windshield and then I was through it.

When I reached Fort Stockton I was low on gas and my GPS showed another hundred miles to drive. This was the first town I’d seen in a few hours and I pulled into a dusty Valero to fill up and get a bag of Skittles. It was almost 1:00 and the sun lit up the sheet metal houses across the street.

I got on 67. The small brown hills were replaced with far-off hazy mountains. They were miles and miles beyond me and yet their folds and creases were perfectly clear, how the sun lit their peaks and where shadows went deep into them. The road was lined with wire fences held up by sticks. I passed a roadkill javelina, its round back facing me. The sun came hot through the right of the car, warming my arm and cheek.

An hour later I was in Alpine, under the shade of a mountain. I knew I was close to the end, so I stopped at a Stripes for gallon of gas and a six pack, I didn’t know what’d be open in Marfa and wasn’t interested in spending the night sober. And so there I was, five hundred miles from home, my foot tired, my eyes tired.

In all our meetings in the months before, as Beatty and Brandon argued over the next move and the future of our partnership, whether to get back into Austin music or buy another bar, I never really told them what I felt: I heard them out, nodded, went along with both of them. Like them I had given all of myself to the Conrad, my whole life had led up to opening that club and it had been everything to me. And I had done it, I had created something genuine, something good, and I thought I’d succeeded and made something lasting and done something cool with my life: I owned a nightclub in Austin. But now the Conrad was gone, and I’d been crushed. Now, in the middle of my life, I was exhausted. Both Beatty and Brandon were asking me to start again, to put all the work of my thirties behind me and do it over, throw myself into it again, to give myself to something again. I could not. I had told Brandon I would give him a fair shot on this Marfa thing, I had agreed with Beatty that we should be in it for more than just money, but in truth, I didn’t care about either. As I got into my Corolla and pulled back onto the last stretch of road before Marfa, I thought of our next meeting. What I would tell Brandon, and what I would tell Beatty when I found him, was that I was out. I would do this last thing, this strange pursuit for my missing partner. Then I would sell my shares and be done.

Stuart Ziarnik’s chapbook, The Vulture (Kennesaw State University Press), won The Headlight Review’s 2021 Chapbook Contest. His fiction has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, Third Wednesday, Space City Underground, and Suddenly, And Without Warning. He won the 2024 George Dila Memorial Flash Fiction Contest and was awarded a 2024 Poet & Author Fellowship by the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and daughter.