Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
Njal
A rag in your hand and another man's chrome in front of your face will quiet a man down.
I've got Tor's Dyna up on the stand in the clubhouse yard.
I'm working a cloth into the spokes one at a time, getting the road grime out of the places you can only reach if you're willing to get down on the concrete and stay there a while.
I'm willing.
That's the whole job of a prospect—being willing, over and over, for the things nobody else wants to do.
You clean the bikes. You take out the trash. You clean the toilets.
Hell, you run for cigarettes and beer and whatever else the patched men decide they need at midnight, and you say yeah, sure and you go, and you don't keep score where anybody can see you doing it.
A few years ago, the man I was would've put a fist through somebody for handing him a rag.
I rest my forearm on the seat and look at my own hands, black to the knuckle with somebody else's dirt, and I feel nothing but steady.
I came up here for her. That's the thing I keep coming back to, down on the concrete with the chrome.
Two weeks ago, I didn't have a single reason in the world worth getting on my knees for, and now I've got one asleep in a bed an hour south, and I'd clean every bike in this yard with my tongue if it bought her one safe night.
There's men inside who'll never know what it took to get me back to this yard with a rag in my hand and my mouth shut.
They knew the version of me that came up here in the spring seven years back, the one who couldn't sit still in a room, who flinched at sounds that weren't there, who had a certainty riding him so hard it ended with three men in the ground.
Some of them voted on whether I was worth the risk of letting back in at all. I know which ones. I don't hold it against them. They were right to ask, and to be leery.
So I clean the bikes. I take the dirt. I earn my place back one degrading task at a time, and every inch of it is proof—to them, and to me, and to the man I have to be for the woman down south—that I'm not who I was.
"Well, would you look at this?"
I know the voice before I turn. I came out of the same body as that voice.
Bjorn's standing at the mouth of the yard with his weight cocked over one hip, the new leg taking it the way the old one used to, and a grin on his face that I want to wipe off with the dirty rag.
"They've got you on bike detail." He whistles low. "Down in the dirt with a rag. Somebody get a picture. Ma'll want it for the wall."
"You could grab a cloth," I tell him. "There's a whole other side to this thing."
"I'm patched, brother." He taps the flash on his chest slowly, savoring it. "I did my dirt. This here's a spectator sport for me now."
He folds himself down onto an overturned crate anyway, because that's the thing about Bjorn. He'll needle you to the bone and then sit down in the dirt beside you while he does it.
We don't talk for a minute. We don't have to. That's the other thing about a twin: there's a whole language that runs underneath the words, and most of what passes between Bjorn and me has never once been said out loud.
He waits until I've moved to the back wheel.
"You didn't call the table down here for a paint job at a coffee shop," he says, quiet now, the grin set aside.
"Dag doesn't get Runes out of bed for small shit.
So whatever this is, it's not small. And whatever it is, it's got your name wrapped around it because you don't get on your knees for a stranger. "
I keep my eyes on the spokes.
"There's a woman," I say.
"Yeah." He says it gently. "I know there's a woman. I knew the second Ma said you've been cooking. You don't cook for people, Njal. You barely cook for yourself."
I sit back on my heels.
And because it's him, because it's the one person alive who was in the room before either of us could talk, who watched me come apart in the spring and watched them lock the door and waited for me to come out of that damn place—I tell him.
Not all of it. The important bits.
A woman, a lie built to bury her, a campaign too clean and too funded to be what it's pretending to be, and the thing under it I haven't said to anyone yet.
I care, that it's real, how I have feelings for her.
Bjorn listens the way he listens, which is all the way down.
When I'm done, he's quiet for a while.
"You sure?" he asks. "And I'm not asking the soft way. I'm asking the way only I get to ask you. You sure it's the real thing, and not?—"
"Not the other thing." I meet his eyes. "I'm sure. I run the check every day, Bjorn. There's no lift. No racing heart. I sleep. I eat. I take my pills with my breakfast. It's just a woman, and I want her, and it's the plainest thing I've felt in years."
He studies me for a long moment, my own face looking back at me older, harder, and kinder than I ever see it from the inside.
"Okay," he says finally. "Then let's go see our Prez."
Runes takes me in the chapel with the door shut.
He doesn't sit behind the table.
He leans against the edge of it with his arms crossed, and he lets me stand there a while in the quiet.
"Dag laid it all out," he says. "The letter. The fake messages. The photo. I've seen the work somebody did on this girl." He tilts his head. "It's good work. Ugly, but good. Somebody knew exactly what they were doing."
"I was thinkin’ the same thing, Prez."
"Esperanza's got her teeth in it. She'll make that school board produce what they can't, and it'll come apart." He uncrosses his arms. "I'm not worried about it. Dag and Esperanza could win this in their sleep. So that's not why I called you in here."
I wait.
"I called you in here," Runes says, "because the last time you were certain about a woman, I had three bodies to think about and a prospect on a locked ward.
There was a time I sat at that table and wondered if I'd ever get you back.
" He says it flatly, laid on the wood between us.
"So I'm going to ask you one question, son, and I want you to look at me when you answer it. Who is this woman to you?"
There it is.
The question I knew was coming since the porch, since Dag's text in the dark.
The one I've been turning over the whole ride up, an hour of highway with the wind taking the words out of my mouth before I could practice them.
The honest thing is I've been afraid of this question.
Not because I don't know the answer. Because I do, and saying it out loud to the one man whose opinion can end my road back makes it real.
I look at him.
"She's the first thing since I got well that I've wanted and known I was allowed to want," I tell him. "I checked it, Runes. I checked it the way they taught me. It's not the sickness. It's just a woman, and she's good, and somebody's trying to destroy her for no reason I can find, and I?—"
My voice catches and I let it.
"I want to help her the right way," I say.
"The clean way. Dag's way. Not my hands.
I know what my hands do when I let the certainty drive.
I'm not letting it drive. I'm asking the table instead of going down there and handling it myself, and the fact that I can make that decision, even if it kills me, is the whole reason I'm standing in front of you a man and not a problem. "
Runes looks at me for a long, long moment.
Something moves in his face that he doesn't bother to hide.
"That," he says quietly, "is the answer of a man who came back.
The Njal who went up to that place couldn't have said that sentence.
Couldn't have wanted the clean way. Would've had blood on him.
" He pushes off the table. "You want the table behind this girl, you've got it.
We do it Dag's way. We bring our weight where it helps, and we keep our hands where they belong.
And if it ever needs to be more than that—" his eyes go flat and old "—then it'll be the table's call, made cold, not yours made hot. You understand the line I'm drawing?"
"I understand it."
"Good." He almost smiles. "Then go finish Tor's bike. You're still a prospect, certainty about a woman or not."
* * *
I'm back in the yard with the rag when my phone goes off against my hip.
I almost don't look. You don't pull your phone out in the middle of a job, not as a prospect, not with half the table still milling in the lot.
But it buzzes again.
And then again, fast, three times, four, the way a phone does when it's not one message but a flood of them coming in all at once, and something in the back of my neck goes cold before my hand's even moving.
It's Sophie.
The first thing is just words.
Njal. Njal, it's everywhere. She put it everywhere.
Then the images start loading.
Screenshots of screenshots.
A Facebook post shared four hundred times before noon.
The fabricated messages I already know by heart, except now they're not in a sealed folder at the school board, they're out in the open with a thousand comments stacked underneath.
A town group with her name in the subject line.
The words people are using.
Predator.Around our kids.
The deacon's own daughter.
Somebody's made a graphic of her school photo with a word stamped across it I won't even think in the same breath as her name.
The rag's still in my other hand.
I look down at it like I don't know how it got there, and I set it on Tor's seat slowly, deliberately, because I want nothing more than to kill these bastards for doing it to her.
I stand up off the concrete slowly.
"Njal." Bjorn's already reading my face. "What is it?"
I hand him the phone.
He looks. His jaw works.
He passes it to the man next to him without a word, and that's how it goes—hand to hand, around the lot, the prospect's phone passed up the chain it's got no business traveling up, except this one's earned its way there.
Runes reads it. His face goes to stone.
And then it gets to our father.
He's been standing at the edge of the lot the whole time the way he stands everywhere, taking up space without trying, gray coming in heavier at his temples than it was a year ago.