8. The Shovel
THE SHOVEL
The Ozarks come up under the truck around sunset like a rug wrinkling — flat, flat, flat, then all at once the world's made of hollows and ridgelines and hairpins, oak shadow closing over the road, creeks running loud under one-lane bridges.
Home. My chest does something complicated about it.
This is the only dirt I've ever belonged to and every mile of it wants me dead now, and both of those are true at the same time, and that's basically the whole biography of everyone I grew up with.
Somewhere beyond all of it, up the holler behind the foothills, is the mountain, and the mountain belongs to Grim the way weather belongs to God.
Nobody says the clubhouse; you say up the mountain, and everybody in three counties knows what you mean and drops their voice a notch.
Wire and dogs guard a gate that has opened exactly twice in my life for unpatched men, both of them being carried.
Grim's house sits above the clubhouse, and above Grim's house there is only forest and the pine flats.
That is Hell's Reckoning from top to bottom: the king, the church, and the ground.
The Chapel sits where it's always sat — foothills west of the mountain, a long tin-roofed roadhouse with the pole barn behind it and a gravel lot the size of a fairground.
We don't go anywhere near it in daylight.
Rook's got us at a fishing camp nine miles off, cash cabin, boat ramp, nobody's cousin at the desk.
Day three since Wells, and I can feel every hour of it in my teeth — the state lines, the sleep we didn't get, the light already spending itself toward dark — because the pack beds down at the Chapel tonight, and after tonight there's no Chapel, there's only the gate.
Then he does his thing with maps — real paper maps, the man travels with a library — and I do my thing, which is pour out everything I know onto them.
And I know everything. That's what nobody in Hell's Reckoning ever priced right: the mascot has been in every room.
I mark the Chapel's back lot where the barn drains to a creek gully.
The propane pig on the north wall. The room off the kitchen where Grim beds down when the pack overnights, and where he'll keep Shep, because it's the room with one door.
Dogs: two, both fat, both bribeable, I've been bribing them since I was sixteen.
The sober watch — because Rook's right, Grim will keep guns awake — will be nomads and Bones, because after Tallboy, Bones will want to be awake.
Bones sits up in the kitchen with coffee and his shotgun on funeral nights. I've seen it. I poured his coffee.
It does something to me, watching my whole childhood turn into targeting data on a stranger's map.
Every mark I make is a betrayal and a mercy at the same time — that's the math I can't get out of — because the same X that tells Rook where the sober guns sit is the X that gets Shep out the one door alive.
I draw the gully where I floated my first stolen beer.
I draw the porch where Grim taught me to play dominoes for cigarettes I wasn't allowed to smoke.
My hand knows all of it without asking my head, and somewhere in the middle of the drawing I stop feeling like a rat and start feeling like what I actually am, which is the only living index of a library that's about to burn.
And Shep's in it tonight. That's the part I keep having to set down and pick back up.
While forty men howl Tallboy into the next world, Shep'll be in the one-door room off the kitchen, listening to it through the wall, doing that thing where he holds his own hands to keep them still.
He grew up nowhere, no club, no noise — a wake like this is going to sound like the gates of hell to him, and the worst part, the part that makes my chest hurt, is that some of it is going to sound like belonging.
Grief that big has gravity. I know exactly what it pulls in, because it pulled me.
I tell Rook how tonight will go inside that barn, too, because it matters and because I can't stop myself: the wake before the wake.
Tallboy in his box in the war wagon, and forty men drinking themselves down through the loud part — the war stories, the toasts, somebody's gonna fire a pistol into the ceiling and Grim's gonna let him — into the low part, three a.m., where the meanest men in four states sit on the barn floor holding each other's necks and crying like the world ended, because for one of them it did.
My club grieves like it does everything.
At full volume, with its whole chest, and completely for real.
That's what makes them worse than monsters, if you want to know.
Monsters would be simpler. These are men who will hold you while you cry and then hand you a shovel, and both things are them, all the way through.
Rook takes it all in like a drain takes water. No notes. It goes somewhere behind those weighing eyes and files itself.
"Ask you something," I say, when the map's done and the dark's come up full outside the cabin windows, cicadas going like a power line. "The grave thing. You never asked what I meant. Everybody always — well, no, nobody knows, actually. But you didn't ask."
"You'd tell me when it stopped costing you."
"See, that." I point at him with a plastic fork; we're eating gas-station chicken like kings.
"That right there. That's the most expensive sentence anybody ever said to me, I hope you know that.
" The cicadas fill up the space where my voice usually goes, and then I hear myself do it — pay it out, the thing I've never said.
"I was twenty-three. There was a guy, Dell, hangaround, sweet dumb dude, sold a little of everything off the back of his Sportster.
He shorted the club. Not even — like eight hundred bucks, man, a nothing number.
And Grim had me drive Dell out to the pine flats, 'to talk,' and when we got there Bones was leaning on a shovel, and Grim handed the shovel to me.
" The fork's stopped moving. I watch it not move.
"And I dug it. That's the part I don't say.
Everybody figures I watched — I didn't watch, I DUG it, cause I was scared, and Dell sat on the tailgate watching me dig with his hands zip-tied, telling me it was okay.
He kept saying it. 'It's okay, Cricket.' Like I was the one needed comforting.
And then Bones did the part Bones does, and Grim put his arm around me on the drive home and said now you're family, and I threw up out the window of a moving truck, and Grim laughed, and that laugh is the sound I hear now anytime anybody says the word family.
So." I make the fork move again. Chicken.
Kings. "That's who's sitting up sober in that kitchen tonight. That's who has Shep."
Rook doesn't say sorry. Thank god for the things this man doesn't say.
What he does — he reaches into his gear bag, and he takes out the compact pistol I've watched him carry as a backup since Wells, and he checks it, and he sets it down on the map, on the Chapel, and slides it across the table to me grip-first.
"Rounds are subsonic," he says. "It'll still be loud. Everything is. You know how it works?"
"I'm HR-raised, man, I could field-strip that drunk in a creek.
" My hands are doing something embarrassing so I put them around the gun to give them a job.
Fourteen months a prospect and my club never once armed me — prospects fetch, prospects dig, prospects don't carry.
There's doctrine behind it, Grim explained it to me once, expansive, arm around my neck: a scared boy with a gun is a coin flip, little man, and I don't gamble in my own house.
The executioner they sent to delete me just gave me a loaded gun and turned his back to pour coffee.
I watch his back while he pours. Broad, unbothered, six feet from a man holding a pistol whose whole club would pay to see him dead.
It's not carelessness. Nothing about him has ever once been careless.
It's a statement, made the way he makes all of them, in placement instead of words: I know exactly what you are, and I'm not watching you, and those two facts are the same fact.
Nobody in my life has ever trusted me and been right. Feels like a thing I should get to sit with for a minute. I get about forty seconds.
"Rook."
"Yeah."
"Why's it feel like this is the part where I should talk you out of it? Trap's still a trap even hungover. You could drop me at a bus station, mail Ledger's dirt to some journalist, disappear. You're built for disappearing. Why are we still going?"
He comes back with two coffees and sets mine down, and thinks it over openly, visibly, no performance to it — and when the answer comes it's slow, like it surprised him on the way out.
"Seventeen years, through the Army and this club, I delivered every man I was sent for.
The first time I didn't, my hand shook." He looks at me without the weighing distance he usually keeps between himself and everyone else.
"Shep gets out breathing or the tremor was only a malfunction.
I need it to have been the first order I ever gave myself. "
Cicadas. Coffee steam. A twenty-two-hundred-pound sentence sitting in a fishing cabin.
"Cool," I say, because if I say anything real I'll come apart and we have a war in the morning. "Cool cool cool. New club's got a mission statement."
He walks the plan once more before he lets the map get folded — vehicles, timings, the gully, the fallback, my piece of it and his — and I listen to my childhood get turned into an operation order in that flat voice, and the strangest thing happens, which is that the fear changes weight.
Not smaller. Distributed. Like a load coming off one hitch onto two.
Outside, the cicadas keep sawing away at the dark, same song they played over every bonfire and every burial I ever stood at, and for the first time in my life I'm on the other side of the sound, looking in.
Nine miles east, my family is drinking a dead man home.
At four forty tomorrow morning, we go take theirs back.