10. Claw
Claw
The plate is off.
That is what I see when I come through the machine room curtain with my arm hanging useless and my ears roaring and a dozen of my brothers still clearing bodies out of my bay behind me.
The bunker hatch is open. The eye bolt I set in that floor myself is lying ten feet from the hole with a chunk of concrete still hanging off it.
I have killed nine men tonight and felt exactly nothing, and now something goes through me that takes my legs out from under me for half a second and I have to put my hand on the lathe.
I get to the hole. I do not have the sense left to call down first. I just go, both boots off the top rung, eight feet, and I land hard in the dark and blood and my knees fold and I come up swinging with nothing in my hands because I dropped the rifle at the top and did not notice.
She is standing against the wall by the ladder.
There is a body at her feet with a hole in the side of its neck and its blood is all over the floor and all over her boots and up her forearm to the elbow.
She is holding my knife.
Her hand is steady.
"Claw," she says.
I go down.
There is nothing graceful in it. My knees hit the concrete and I get my good arm around her hips and I put my face into her stomach and I hold on, and I feel her hand come down on the back of my skull, and I stay there like that for a long time, kneeling in a stranger's blood in a hole under my own building, shaking hard enough that she has to take a step back into the wall to hold me up.
"You came down the ladder wrong," she says, somewhere above me. "You didn't even look."
"I know."
"I could have put this in you."
"I know that too."
Her fingers work into the back of my neck.
"He thought I'd go in the corner," she says.
I turn my face up. Her jaw is set and her eyes are dry and there is something new all the way through her, hammered in, permanent.
"No," I say. "He didn't know a damn thing about you."
Three months.
The snow came off the north field in April and the ridge has gone green all the way to the rock and the bay doors have been up since Tuesday because it finally broke seventy.
Viktor's operation went into the ground in pieces.
Two warehouses closed, and fourteen names came off the phones we pulled out of that bay, and every one of those names got walked down by somebody wearing a Canyon Vipers patch.
As for the folded photograph in my back pocket, I did the arithmetic on all four of the other faces on it by the end of May.
Three of them are home now. One of them was already gone before I started, and I will carry that one.
The county wrote off the fire in my alley as a scrap barrel that got away from a careless man.
A state investigator came out in April, called me Mr. Horsley six times, and stood in my rebuilt bay asking questions nobody in this valley had answers to, and Dutch fed him a slice of pie in the clubhouse and sent him home confused and full.
The side door is new. Six inches thicker than the last one.
Stormy runs the front office.
That was not my idea and I fought it for about a day and a half, until she took the invoice box off the parts counter and dumped the entire thing on the desk and said the words "you have receipts in here from the Clinton administration" in a tone that ended the discussion.
Now there is a computer in there. There is a filing cabinet with actual labels.
She books the work, she orders parts, she talks to customers in a way I have never once been able to, and last month she caught Rooster short on a bill and made him pay it, which no man alive has managed since 1988.
She sleeps through the night about four nights out of seven now. The other three she comes awake sitting, and I put my hand on her back and say nothing at all, and she comes down out of it in about ninety seconds and goes back under.
She still keeps the knife on her hip. She always will. That is fine with me. That is more than fine with me.
Today she is out on the gravel apron in the sun with Dutch and Peach, and she is wearing a cut.
Black leather. Her own size, made by a woman in Missoula who does this work for the club, and across the back it says PROPERTY OF CLAW, and I am aware that there are people in the wider world who would have opinions about those words.
They can have them. I know what the words mean out here and so does she, and when Dutch pinned the last of it on her in the clubhouse last month with forty people in the room, Stormy laughed so hard she had to sit down, and I stood against the wall with a beer I did not drink and I understood for the first time what people mean when they say a man is content.
I come out of the bay wiping grease off my hands.
She turns around, and the sun catches her, and she has her hair up and there is a pen behind her ear and a smear of ink on her thumb from the invoice printer that jams.
"Two o'clock is here," she says. "The shovelhead. I told him three weeks and you're going to tell him two and I need you to not do that."
"Three weeks."
"Thank you."
I get my hand around the back of her neck and pull her in and kiss her on her forehead, right there in the gravel, in front of everybody.
Dutch says something filthy. Peach laughs.
Stormy leans into me for a second with her forehead against my sternum, and then she pulls back and taps my ribs twice with the flat of her hand, which is a thing she started doing in the spring and never explained.
"Go work," she says.
I go work.
Behind me the office door stands open all day now, and there is nobody sleeping on the concrete outside it, and the only locks on this property are the ones on the gate.
She holds a key to that too.
BEFORE YOU GO!
THANK YOU so much for reading!