Chapter 2
Bear
The rune-stone is in the chapel wall and the chapel is full of men pretending they aren't looking at it.
Hal set it there himself six weeks ago, mortared it in at chest height with Elin standing over him telling him he was doing it wrong.
It's grey and pitted and about the size of a bread board and it has nine names on it, and everybody in this room has spent every day since walking past it like it's a dog that bit somebody once.
Mine's second.
"Read it again," Tor says.
"You know what it says."
"Read it again, Verse."
Verse sighs the sigh of a man who has read something eleven times. He's got a pencil behind his ear and ink up both forearms and a paper cup of coffee he's been holding for an hour without drinking.
"'Nine oars. Nine debts. I set them turning.'" He taps the stone without touching it. "Then the names. Halvard. Sten. Torvald. Kjell. Bo. Rurik. Three we can't read. Then hers. Solveig."
"Debts," says Ghost.
"Debts."
"What's the debt?"
"If the woman had wanted us to know," Verse says, "she'd have carved a receipt."
Rurik, down the end, raises a hand like he's in school. He's twenty-four and prospecting and has the survival instincts of a moth.
"Question."
"No," says Hal.
"It's a good one."
"It won't be."
"If we're all on the list," Rurik says, "and Bear's second on the list, and the order means something — does that mean the order's, like. A schedule?"
The room does a thing. A little settling, like a house at night.
"See," Rurik says. "Good question."
"It's a horrible question," I tell him.
"It's a good horrible question."
"Those are the worst kind."
Hal's looking at me. He's been looking at me for six weeks, on and off, in the way a man looks at a gauge he doesn't trust. Halvard Reidar, president, forty-four years old, one scar through the eyebrow he still lies about.
"Bear," he says. "You've been quiet."
"I'm always quiet."
"You're funny quiet. That's different."
"That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me."
"Sten."
And there it is. The old name in his mouth, the way he said it on a boat, and something under my sternum turns over like an engine catching.
I put both hands flat on the table.
"I don't know what the debts are," I say. "I know she was on that beach. I know she watched. That's it."
Which is a lie so clean I almost believe it myself.
Church breaks up at six and I go out to the lot because the lot is where I go when a room gets small.
March in Ash Harbor. Fog coming up off the water and the sodium light over the fence buzzing, and Rurik out there with a bucket and a sponge doing prospect things to Ghost's bike very badly.
"You're going to take the paint off."
"It's a sponge."
"It's a scouring pad, you absolute—"
"It's a sponge with ambition," Rurik says.
"Give it here."
"No, I've been assigned this. This is my assignment. I'm doing personal growth."
"You're doing eight hundred dollars of damage."
He grins at me. He's got a kid's face on him, the kind that's never had anything real happen to it, and I have exactly ninety more seconds of him.
That's the part I'd change. If I could go back and move one minute of my life, I'd take those ninety seconds and stretch them out into an afternoon.
There are three of them and they come over the back fence, which means they've been sitting out in the trees off the access road for a while, waiting for the lot to empty.
Fenrir Kings. I clock the cuts before I clock the faces. Two I don't know. The third is a kid — a prospect, no rockers yet, seventeen or eighteen with a wispy attempt at a beard, and he's got a length of pipe.
And he goes for Rurik.
Rurik has a sponge.
I remember shouting. I remember that clearly, and I remember it not being words. I remember starting to move and the ground being further away than it should be.
The pipe comes down on Rurik's forearm and I hear it. That's the sound that does it — not the shout, not the fence. A sound I have heard exactly once before in two lives, a wet green-branch sound, and the cellar door under me comes off its hinges.
Then the hallway.
Grey at the edges. Soft. Unimportant.
Down at the far end there's a boy with a pipe.
That one next.
What comes back first is sound.
Not gulls. A car alarm somewhere down the hill, and the sodium light buzzing, and somebody breathing very fast about four feet away.
I'm standing.
My hands are full.
I look down and there's a fistful of denim and a boy in it — the prospect, seventeen, eighteen, the wispy beard, and I have him off the ground against the fence with his toes six inches clear of the gravel and the pipe is way over by the shop door where it did not get to on its own.
His face is a mess. Some of that's mine.
His hands are up over his head.
And he's saying something. Small, fast, cracked all the way through, and I hear it, I hear it the way I heard it a thousand years ago on a deck with an oar in my hands, and it's the same word, it's always the same word.
Please.
Behind him the fence rattles. The other two are already over it and gone. One of them is dragging a leg. I do not remember doing that.
And I can feel my arm not putting him down.
That's the thing. I want to be exact. It isn't that I don't want to put him down. It's that the message goes out from wherever I am and doesn't arrive, and I stand there in my own body like a man shouting up a well at his own hands.
"Bear."
My name. From the side. Four feet away.
Not shouted. Not Sten. Not the way Hal says it, which is a rope thrown to a man in water.
Just — said. Flat. Ordinary. The way you'd say it across a table.
"Bear. It's Marisol."
I turn my head.
She's standing in the middle of the lot in scrubs and a jacket with a folder of paperwork under one arm and a set of car keys in her fist, and she is five foot three, and she has one hand out toward me, palm down.
Flat. Out where I can see it.
"That's Ghost's discharge stuff," she says, and her voice does not do a single interesting thing. "He never picked it up. I was driving past."
I don't say anything. I can't.
"There's a kid attached to your arm," she says.
"...Yeah."
"Is he yours?"
"No."
"Then let's put him down."
Nobody moves for a second. Rurik's on his knees on the gravel holding his arm against his chest and making a noise through his teeth, and the clubhouse door is banging open behind me, and Marisol Reyes stands in the open with her hand out and does not come one inch closer.
That's what does it, I think. Later I'll decide that's what does it.
She doesn't come closer.
Everybody comes closer. Everybody I've ever known, when it's bad — they crowd in, they grab, they get their hands on you, they mean well and it is exactly, precisely the wrong thing, because a man in the hallway who gets grabbed has only one available response and it is a bad one.
She stands four feet off and lets me be the one who moves.
My fingers open.
The kid drops, scrambles, gets his feet, hits the fence hard enough to bounce, goes over it and is gone into the trees, and somewhere down there a bike starts.
My hands stay up in the air where he was, empty.
"Okay," Marisol says.
"I didn't—"
"Okay. Hands down now."
I put them down.
"Good," she says. "Rurik, is it? Sit on the ground, sweetheart, all the way down, that's an ulna and you're going to faint in about eleven seconds."
"I'm not going to f—" says Rurik, and faints.
Hal is out. Tor's out. Ghost, Verse, half the club, boots on gravel, and Marisol is on her knees in it in a pair of shoes that were clean four minutes ago with two fingers on Rurik's wrist.
"Somebody get me a magazine and tape."
"A magazine—"
"A magazine, an oil catalogue, I don't care, something that rolls. Nobody move the arm."
"Ma'am—" says Verse.
"Do you have tape?"
"We have a whole tape situation—"
"Then it's a good night for everybody," she says. "Bear. Sit down."
"I'm fine."
"You're grey and you're about a minute out from an adrenaline dump that's going to put you on your face, and I've got one guy on the ground already and I'm not lifting you." She doesn't look up. "Sit."
I sit down on the gravel.
Hal comes and stands over me. He doesn't crouch. He stands, so nobody watching sees him check on me, which is the kindest thing about him and the worst.
"How long were you gone?" he says quietly.
"Don't."
"Sten. How long."
"I don't know."
"Two minutes," Marisol says, without turning around. "Give or take. I pulled in and it was already happening."
Hal's silence goes on a while.
"You saw it," he says.
"I saw a man with a pipe hit a kid with a sponge," she says. "Then I saw a lot of things very fast. Then I saw him put somebody down when I asked him to." She holds out a hand behind her without looking. "Tape."
Verse puts tape in it.
"Thank you." She glances up at Hal, and for the first time there's something in her face with an edge on it. "You want to ask me if I'm calling this in. Ask it and let's get it over with, because I've got to get that arm in a splint before it swells and I don't like doing two things at once."
Nobody says anything.
"Nobody's asking," Hal says.
"Everybody's asking," she says. "You're all just doing it with your faces."
They take Rurik in Tor's truck. Marisol goes ahead in her own car because she's on again at eleven and, in her words, is not spending her one free evening in an emergency room she also owns a locker in.
She stops beside me on the way to the car.
Close now. A foot away, which after four feet feels like something.
"Hey," she says.
"Yeah."
"Hand."
"It's fine."
"You split the third knuckle again. I can see it from here and I've had a long week and I would love for one thing tonight to go how I planned."
I hold out the hand. She takes it, turns it to the light, makes a small disgusted noise that I will think about later more than I should.
"Two of them are gone," she says. "You'll come in and I'll redo it."
"Yeah."
"Bear."
"Yeah."
"That thing," she says. "Where you went."
I look at the gravel.
"I've seen it before," she says. "Not like that. But — I've seen guys go somewhere and come back. I know what it looks like from the outside."
"What's it look like from the outside?"
She thinks about it. She actually thinks about it, standing there in a lot full of men in cuts at seven in the evening, and gives me the honest answer, which I'll learn is the only kind she has.
"Like there's nobody home," she says. "And then like somebody came home and found out what happened while they were out."
I don't have anything for that.
"Yeah," I say.
"Okay." She lets go of my hand. "Ten days of antibiotics."
"I've got four left."
"You have four—" She stops. Closes her eyes briefly. "The drawer."
"There's no drawer."
"There is absolutely a drawer, and I want you to know that I know," Marisol Reyes says, and gets in her car, and drives out of the lot.
I sit on the gravel a while longer.
Verse comes and sits down next to me eventually with two beers and doesn't offer me one, which is his way of asking, and I take it out of his hand, which is my way of answering.
"You know what the worst part is," he says.
"What."
"I've got a poem about that nurse already and it's only been six minutes."
"Verse."
"It rhymes."
"Verse, I will put you in that dumpster."
"'She came upon a night of harm,'" he says, "'and splinted up the young man's arm.'"
I drink the beer.
Second on the stone.
Two minutes gone, and I only know it because somebody with a folder of discharge papers happened to drive past.
"Verse."
"Mm."
"That kid was seventeen."
Verse stops with the bottle halfway up.
"He came over a fence at a patched club with a length of pipe," he says.
"He was seventeen."
"Bear—"
"I had him off the ground," I say. "His feet weren't touching. And I was still going."
Verse sets the beer down on the gravel.
He's the smallest man in this club and the only one who ever gets anywhere with me, and I've never worked out why until this exact minute, when he says:
"You want me to tell you it's fine."
"No."
"Good. Because it's not, and I'd have to lie, and I'm a poet, we don't do that, we do a much fancier thing." He rubs his face. "You want to know the actual number that scares me?"
"Go on."
"Two minutes," Verse says. "Not the kid. Not the fence, not the face, not the pipe. Two minutes, brother, and eleven of us were inside a building forty feet away and not one of us knew anything was happening until a nurse pulled into the lot."
I don't say anything.
"That's the bit I'd fix," he says. "If I got a vote."
"You don't get a vote."
"I never get a vote," says Verse. "I get rhymes. It's a terrible arrangement and I've been raising it for eleven years."
He picks the beer back up. Down the hill the sodium light buzzes and the fog comes over the fence in slow handfuls, the way it does, the way it has every night since before either of us was anything.
"Hal's going to ask you again," he says.
"I know."
"He's going to ask you tomorrow, and he's going to do the thing where he stands too close and says your old name."
"I know."
"What are you going to tell him?"
I finish the beer.
"That I don't know how long I was gone," I say.
Verse looks at me sideways for a second longer than is comfortable.
"That's not an answer to the question he's asking," he says.
"No," I say. "It isn't."