5. Stormy
Stormy
The first woman through the gate is named Dutch and she is about five feet tall and she is carrying a casserole dish and a shotgun.
"Move," she says to Claw, who is standing in the side door like a load-bearing column. "Move, you enormous idiot. It's twelve degrees."
He moves.
There are four of them. Dutch, who I later learn is sixty-eight and has been an old lady since Carter was president, and Berry, and Peach, and a woman everyone calls Sunday who does not tell me her real name either.
They come into the office with grocery bags and an armload of clothes and they fill the room in about four seconds.
I get up. I put my back to the wall by the desk without deciding to, and I have both hands free and my eyes on the door and I am doing math about the window I already know is welded shut.
Dutch clocks all of it in one pass.
"Sit down, honey," she says, and she puts the casserole on the desk and turns her back to me while she does it. "Nobody in this room's going to touch you. Berry, give her the boots first, her feet are worse than her middle."
The boots are lined, one size too big, broken in by somebody else's feet. There is a coat. There are three sweatshirts and two pairs of jeans and a bag of socks with the tags still on and, at the bottom, a hairbrush.
I stand there holding a hairbrush and something behind my sternum starts coming apart.
"Don't," Dutch says without turning around. "You cry now, we all cry, and Peach gets ugly when she cries."
"I do," Peach agrees.
"She really does."
The sound that comes out of me is a wreck. Half laugh, half something else. It is the first noise I have made in eleven weeks that had no fear in it.
They stay two hours. They do not ask me one single question about where I came from.
Zero. Nobody even walks near it. They talk about a truck transmission and somebody's daughter's wedding and whether Rooster's chili is a war crime, and Dutch tells a story about the time Claw fixed her furnace at four in the morning and would not come inside for coffee after, and Sunday says he has been like that since he was seventeen, and Berry says he was worse at seventeen.
When they go, Dutch stops in the doorway with her hand on the frame.
"You want to leave," she says, "any hour, day or night, you say so and I will drive you myself and no man in this club will stop me. That's not a thing I have to check on. That's just true."
"Okay."
"And if you want to stay, you're stayed. That's also just true, and it's already done, so quit standing on the edge of it."
She leaves. The gate motor runs. The building goes quiet.
I sit down on the cot with a hairbrush in my hands and I cry for about forty minutes, ugly and silent, the way you learn to do it in a room with other people sleeping.
Claw does not come in.
But when I finally open the door at midnight there is a mug of coffee on the concrete outside it, cold hours ago, sitting there like a stone somebody left at a grave.
I start going out into the bay on the fourth day after that.
It happens in stages so small I only see them looking backward.
First I stand in the doorway. Then I sit on an upturned bucket twenty feet from him.
Then I move the bucket to ten. Then one afternoon he is on his back under a Softail with his arm buried in the frame and he says, without any particular emphasis, "Three-eighths.
Deep well," and I get up and find it and put it in his open hand.
Our fingers do not touch. He makes sure of it, and I notice him making sure, and that is somehow the thing that undoes me.
After that it is easier. I hand him tools.
He tells me their names. He is a patient teacher in the way of a man who genuinely does not care how long anything takes, and I learn the difference between a box end and a crescent and why he sneers at the crescent, and I learn to hear when a bolt is about to strip.
I stop counting to four.
What I do instead is the hatch. Twice a week he says the word bunker out loud with no warning at all, in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a sandwich, and I go, and he stands over the hole and calls the number down to me and says nothing else about it.
Neither of us has ever once said out loud what we are practicing for.
I still wake up sitting. That has not changed and I do not believe it ever will.
But there is a night in the second week when I wake up and I hear him breathing on the floor across the room and my heart rate comes down instead of going up, and I lie there in the dark and understand that a very dangerous thing has happened to me.
He gives me the knife on a Tuesday.
He comes out of the machine room wiping his hands and he sets it on the parts counter and slides it toward me and then puts both his hands in his pockets, which is what he does when he is about to say something that costs him.
It is beautiful. That is the wrong word for it and it is the only word. The steel has a satin finish that eats the light. The handle fits my hand like it was built around a mold of it, which, I realize a half second later, it essentially was.
"You made this."
"Yeah."
"For me."
"Yeah."
I turn it over. There is no decoration on it anywhere. It is a tool made by a man who thinks decoration is a lie.
"Why."
He is quiet for a second.
"Because you keep putting your back to a wall," he says. "Every room. Every time. And you'll keep doing it whether I'm standing there or not, and if that's how it is, then you're going to do it with something in your hand."
I hold the knife and I look at him across four feet of concrete and I am aware, with total clarity, of the exact shape of the space between us.
"I don't know how to use it."
"You do," he says. "You just don't know it yet. Thumb goes here." He does not reach for me. He holds up his own hand and shows me on his own grip. "Never overhand. Never throw it. If it comes out, it comes out because you already decided, and you don't stop deciding until they're on the floor."
"That's the whole lesson?"
"That's the only part that matters. The rest is arithmetic."
I put the knife on my hip that night and I have not been without it since.