Chapter 7
Marisol
The Anchor on a Thursday in April has about forty people in it and a karaoke machine nobody has been brave enough to start.
We're there for Ghost's birthday, which Ghost has attempted to prevent for eleven consecutive years and has never once succeeded in preventing. There's a cake with his face on it. Verse had it made. It doesn't look like him. It looks like a man being described to a police artist.
"That's not me."
"It's an impression."
"It has one eye bigger."
"That's you, brother, that's your actual face."
"I've been alive forty-eight years," Ghost says, "and this is the worst thing that's happened."
There's a pool table and a bad pool game and Rurik out of his cast three days and using both arms like a man showing off a new car.
Elin's at the bar arguing about a boat with a fisherman.
Hal's got his hand on the back of her chair, not touching her, just there, and I've started noticing things like that now, which I resent.
And Bear is beside me with a beer he's had for forty minutes, laughing at something Tor said.
I want to lock this bit in before it goes.
Because for about an hour and a half it is the nicest night I've had since I was thirty. That's all. Bad cake, worse pool, a man the size of a door laughing at a joke about a differential, my hand on his knee under a table, and the actual physical sensation of not being on call for anything at all.
An hour and a half.
Then the door opens.
There are five of them.
Fenrir Kings. I know the patch now, which is a thing about my life that has changed. Wolf head, red on black, and the top rocker, and they come in like men entering a room they've measured.
The one in front is about fifty-five. Grey ponytail, reading glasses pushed up on his head, which is such a specific and human detail that it makes everything worse. He looks like somebody's uncle.
I feel it go through the club before I see anybody move. Tor's hand goes flat on the table. Ghost slides one seat left. Verse — Verse, who is a poet with a bicycle's build — stands up and puts himself in front of Elin so smoothly you'd think he'd been rehearsing.
And Bear doesn't move at all.
That's the thing I'll remember. Everybody else in this bar adjusts, and the only man who doesn't is the only one who matters, and he sits there with his beer in his hand and goes completely still, like an animal that's decided it's a rock.
"Halvard," the grey one says.
"Ivar."
"It's a birthday."
"It is."
"Whose?"
"Not yours."
"Shame." Ivar takes off the reading glasses, folds them, puts them in a pocket. He's looking past Hal. He's been looking past Hal since the door. "Sten."
Bear doesn't answer.
"Sten Kova?."
"That's not my name," Bear says.
"It was."
The bar has gone quiet, and it's the wrong kind of quiet. Not everybody-shut-up quiet. Just — the volume of a room dropping about thirty percent as forty civilians who came out for a beer start to sense weather.
There's a family at the corner booth. Two adults, a girl about eleven with a phone.
I'm counting exits. That's an ER thing, you can't not.
"You know we've got a boy," Ivar says pleasantly, "seventeen years old, who's got four screws in his face."
"He came over a fence with a pipe," Hal says.
"He's a prospect. Prospects are stupid, that's their function." Ivar spreads his hands. "Nobody's crying about a prospect. I'm making a different point."
"Make it and go."
"I'm making it to Sten."
He takes three steps forward. Not fast. Nobody stops him, and I understand, watching it, that there is a whole grammar to this that everyone in the room speaks and I don't.
"Four screws," Ivar says, to Bear. "In about two minutes. And they tell me you weren't even breathing hard."
"Ivar," says Hal.
"I'm complimenting the man."
"You're not."
"I am. I know exactly what he is. My grandfather knew exactly what he was too.
" Ivar smiles. He's got a good smile. That's the worst part; he's got a warm, easy, uncle's smile.
"There were nine of you on that boat and only one of you ever needed to be shot with an arrow from forty feet, because nobody was ever going to get closer than that. "
Bear's beer bottle is on the table.
His hand is around it and I watch two of his knuckles go white and then, deliberately, go back.
"He remembers," Ivar tells the room, delighted. "Look at him. He remembers all of it."
"What do you want," Bear says.
"I want to know what it takes."
I don't understand for a second. I'm the only person in the bar who doesn't. I can feel Elin go rigid two chairs down and Tor stand up and I'm still a full beat behind.
"He wants you to go," Elin says quietly, to Bear.
"In front of people," says Hal.
And then I get it, all at once, cold, the way you get a lab value.
They've brought this here. To a bar with forty civilians and a karaoke machine and an eleven-year-old in the corner booth. They didn't come to fight. They came to film.
"That's it," I say out loud, and about six men look at me. "That's — that's what this is. Bear. Look at me."
"Ma'am," Ivar says, turning, and it's the ma'am that does it, said exactly the way I said it to Bear the first night, and the resemblance makes me want to be sick.
"You've got someone on a phone," I tell him.
Ivar's eyebrows go up.
"Two of your guys came in and neither of them sat down and one of them is standing at an angle to that booth that makes no sense unless he's framing it," I say. "Nine years of triage, sir. I look at rooms for a living."
There's a pause of maybe a second and a half.
Then the guy by the booth puts his phone in his pocket, which is a full confession, and Verse says, "Ohhh," in a voice of pure poetic satisfaction.
Ivar doesn't lose his temper. That's the professional thing about him. He just recalculates, right there in the open, and comes back at it from the other side.
He turns to Bear and he says, quiet, almost kind:
"How many was it, in the end? Six?"
And Bear stands up.
The whole bar moves an inch. I don't mean a person; I mean the bar, forty people, one small collective flinch, like a field of grass.
He's very slow about it. He gets up out of that chair the way you'd get up if you had a sleeping baby on your chest, and he sets the beer down, and he does not look at Ivar at all.
"Hal," he says.
"Yeah."
"I'm going out the back."
"Okay."
"Tell Ghost happy birthday."
"Sten—"
"Tell him," Bear says, and walks out through the kitchen door.
Ivar's people are gone eight minutes later, because there's nothing left. Hal says four sentences to Ivar that I don't hear and Ivar puts his reading glasses back on and leaves like a man who's finished the crossword.
And the bar starts up again. That's the strangest part. Somebody puts money in the jukebox. The family in the booth gets their check. Within four minutes there is a woman singing "Islands in the Stream" badly, and it is exactly as if nothing happened.
I find him in the back lot behind the dumpsters.
He's standing in the middle of it with his hands at his sides, in the rain, with his back to the building, doing nothing.
I stop six feet away.
"Bear."
"Don't come over here yet."
"Okay." I put my hands in my jacket. "How long do you need?"
"...Minute."
So I stand in the rain for a minute and I count it, because it turns out I need to be doing something, and I get to about seventy before his shoulders come down.
"Okay," he says.
I go over.
He doesn't touch me. He stands there and lets me put my arms as far around him as they go, which is roughly to the side seams, and I feel him shaking — not the way you shake when you're afraid. The way a truck shakes at idle.
"It cost you," I say.
"Yeah."
"How much?"
"I don't know how to tell you the number."
"Try."
He's quiet. Rain on the dumpster lids.
"I got up out of that chair," he says, "and there was a hallway.
And it was open. It's been closed since the lot and it was open again the whole way to the kitchen door and I could see the end of it and there was a man standing there and I wanted it, Marisol.
That's the number. I wanted it more than I've ever wanted anything and I went out the back door instead. "
I hold on.
"Six what," I say.
He doesn't answer.
"Bear. Six what?"
"Not here," he says.
We find out about the film at eleven the next morning.
Somebody in that bar had a phone up, and it wasn't a Fenrir King, it was a twenty-two-year-old at the pool table who thought a bunch of bikers squaring up was content.
Fourteen seconds. Ivar three steps in, the club standing, and Bear rising out of that chair with his face doing something no jury on earth would find comforting.
It's on the internet by nine and at the sheriff's office by ten-thirty, because a deputy's daughter tagged it.
Hal calls me himself, which he's never done.
"He's not in trouble," he says. "Nothing happened. There's no charge in fourteen seconds of men standing up."
"But."
"But it's got his face in it," Hal says, "and Ivar wanted a face on the internet, and now there's a face on the internet."
"What does that get him?"
"Next time," Hal says. "It gets him next time. When there is one, everybody's already seen what Sten Kova? looks like right before."
There's a pause.
"Marisol," he says. "We're sending him up the Sitkum for a few days. There's a cabin. It's ours, it's off the county map, nobody goes up there in April."
"Okay."
"He won't go."
"He won't go?"
"He says he's not hiding, and then he says a bunch of other things, and the actual reason is he doesn't want to be alone in a cabin," Hal says, "which he will not say, so I'm saying it for him, because I've known him since he was nineteen and I'm tired."
I look at my kitchen calendar. Three twelves. Sunday's Mom's. A brother in Sacramento. One hundred and sixty-eight hours, all of them spoken for.
"When do we leave," I say.
There's a pause on the line long enough that I check the screen.
"You," Hal says.
"Me."
"Marisol, I called you to ask if you'd talk him into going. I did not call you to ask you to go."
"I'm aware."
"There's a difference between—"
"Hal." I put the phone on speaker and set it on the counter so I can keep looking at the calendar, because if I stop looking at the calendar I'll lose my nerve. "Can I say a thing?"
"Go ahead."
"Your club has a policy about him."
Silence.
"You've all got one," I say. "Nobody's ever written it down but it's a policy.
It's 'don't ask Bear about it.' I sat in that shop for four hours in March and he told a joke every ninety seconds and not one of eleven men asked him a single question, and I thought at the time that meant you already knew. "
"We didn't know."
"I know that now."
"Marisol—"
"I'm not accusing you of anything," I say, and I mean it. "I've got a mother who won't say the word 'pain' out loud and a brother I've stopped asking about the money, and I've got a closet, Hal. I'm not standing anywhere clean. I'm just telling you what I saw."
The line's quiet. Somewhere behind him a roll-up door goes.
"Nineteen years," Hal says. "He's had that patch nineteen years and I've known him since he was a kid with a paper route, and I have never once in my life been able to ask that man a direct question and get an answer."
"Have you tried asking a bad one?"
"...What?"
"A stupid one," I say. "A small one. The direct ones are a door with a lock on it. Ask him what he had for lunch."
Another pause.
"Is that a nursing thing?"
"It's a people thing," I say. "It works on eighty-year-olds and it works on toddlers and I have no reason to believe a sergeant-at-arms is a separate category."
Hal laughs — one syllable, tired.
"Friday," he says. "Tor'll bring the truck round at ten. There's a road, there's a gate, there's a key under a fish."
"Under a fish?"
"It's a metal fish. It's on the wall. It's a whole thing, Elin's already made a joke about it, I didn't understand the joke."
"Okay."
"Marisol." His voice changes. "One more."
"Yeah."
"You've got three days up a river with no signal," Hal says. "If he's going to tell anybody the rest of it, it's going to be up there, and it's going to be you."
"And if he does?"
"Then you'll be eleven miles from anywhere with a man who's just said the worst thing he knows about himself out loud for the first time," he says. "And I need to hear you understand that before I let Tor start that truck."
I look at the calendar. Three twelves. Sunday's Mom's. A hundred and sixty-eight hours.
"I understand it," I say.
"All right."
"Hal."
"Yeah."
"Ask him what he had for lunch," I say. "I'm serious. Once a week. It'll take a year and then one day it won't."
I get Ana to take my Friday and Saturday, which costs me two of her nights in June and a favor I will be paying off until Christmas.
I get my mother's groceries in on Thursday and I tell her I'm going to the coast with a friend, and she says "which friend," and I say "Mom," and she says "which friend," and I hang up on my own mother for the first time in thirty-four years.
Then I pack a bag, and stand in my kitchen looking at it for a while, and add the good shampoo.