Prologue #2
He says, "Tonight. You eat tonight?"
I have not. I shake my head.
He says, "Get on."
I look at him. I look at the three men on the ground. I look at my hands. I look back at him.
"Why?"
He says, "Because if I leave you in this lot you are going to do this again next week and the week after, and one of these nights you are going to do it to the wrong man on the wrong night and you are going to do thirty years in Eddyville for it. And I think that would be a waste."
I say, "You don't know me."
He says, "I know enough."
I get on the bike.
His name is Knox. He runs an MC out of a small town in the Blue Ridge called Clover Ridge that I have never heard of.
He is fifteen years older than me. He has a voice like a flat tire and eyes like a man who has buried friends.
He buys me a plate of eggs and toast at a 24-hour diner outside Berea and he watches me eat the whole plate and then orders me another one without asking.
He does not lecture me. He does not ask about the men in the parking lot.
He asks me where I'm from. He asks me what I'm running from.
He asks me, finally, after the second plate, "What do you want? "
I have not been asked that question in my life. Not once.
I do not have an answer. I tell him I don't know.
He nods. He sips his coffee. He says, "Come work for me until you figure it out."
So I do.
That was six years ago. I have not left.
—
I learn the road. I learn the run. I learn the codes the brothers use, and the routes through the mountains that the cops don't know about, and the names of the bartenders in three states who will pour you a beer and never ask your last name.
I learn that an MC is not a gang — at least not this one, not this brotherhood.
It is a family that has chosen each other on purpose, with leather and grease and silence and ritual, instead of by the accident of blood.
I learn that the men around me have all walked their own kind of long dark road to get here, and that the patch on my back, when I finally earn it, is the first thing in my life I have ever wanted to be worthy of.
Knox makes me a prospect at twenty-four.
A patched brother at twenty-six. The youngest patched brother the Iron Thorn has ever taken.
He doesn't tell me he's proud. He doesn't need to.
He puts his hand on the back of my neck the day I sew the patch onto my cut and he holds it there for one count, two count, three count, and then he lets go and walks away and that is the closest thing to a good job, son I have ever been given.
The brothers nickname me Colt because I came in young and skittish and ready to bolt.
I have answered to it for so long now that Rhett feels like another man's name when I hear it.
My mother still uses Rhett. Lawrence does too.
Everyone else in the world calls me Colt, and that is fine.
Colt is the better version. Colt has somewhere to belong.
But the thing inside me — the switch that flipped when I was sixteen years old in a kitchen in Wilkes County — has not gone away.
I have not outrun it. I have not outridden it.
I have not outdrunk it, outworked it, or outprayed it.
It is still there, behind my sternum, waiting.
The brothers know. Knox has told every one of them in his quiet way: Colt is loyal to the bone, but you do not put him in a room with a man who has hurt a woman.
Not unless you want to read about it in the paper.
They call it my touch-her-and-die setting.
I have heard them say it across the clubhouse, half-joking, half-warning.
I have heard new prospects laugh nervously when Hawk explains it to them: Colt's fine, brother.
Just don't lay hands on anybody soft when he's in the room.
He goes flat behind the eyes. You'll see it before you feel it.
It is not a joke. It is the truth of me. It is the only piece of Grady's house I brought with me when my mother and I drove out under those summer stars, and I have spent twelve years failing to put it down.
—
So I come up here.
I come up to the roof of the clubhouse at sunrise more mornings than I want to admit.
I bring a coffee. I sit with my boots on the metal lip.
I watch Clover Ridge wake up — the diner light flicking on, Briar Holloway unlocking the flower shop with a basket on her arm, old Mr. Cobb walking his ancient retriever down Main, the steam rising off the river.
I watch this town that does not know me, that I would die for anyway, that I have decided is mine to keep safe.
I let the memory come, the way I let it come this morning.
The trailer. The drywall. My mother's mouth bleeding.
The purr in my chest. Grady's eye closing.
The whiskey bottle breaking. The motel Bible.
The car nights. The years. The men on the ground in the Lexington lot.
Knox's voice — because I think that would be a waste.
I let it all come and I let it all go.
And I sit on the edge of this roof and I ask myself the question I ask every morning, the question I cannot stop asking no matter how many years I patch into this club, no matter how many brothers call me family, no matter how many times Knox puts a hand on my neck:
Will I ever be more than a weapon?
I do not have an answer. I am not sure there is one.
The sun comes up over the ridge. The last of the dogwood petals lift off the trees on Main and drift down the street like a soft slow snow that has gotten the season wrong.
The bells at St. Anne's stop ringing. Somewhere down on Linden, somebody starts a lawn mower.
Clover Ridge yawns, stretches, opens its eyes.
I drain my coffee.
I do not know it, sitting up here in the gold half-light, that two weeks from this morning a woman in a cardigan with ink on her thumb is going to walk through the gate of the Iron Thorn clubhouse for the first time in her life and ask me — me, the weapon, the brother with the flat eyes — to fix a shelf.
I do not know that she is going to look at me and not flinch.
I do not know that she is going to recommend a book to me, and write a small careful note inside its front cover in handwriting like calligraphy, and that I am going to read it in one sitting on the roof of this clubhouse with my heart in a strange new place.
I do not know that the question I have been asking up here at sunrise, every morning, for years — will I ever be more than a weapon — is about to be answered by a soft-spoken librarian with auburn hair in a braid who stutters on words that start with s and who will treat me, from the first word she speaks to me, like a man instead of a threat.
I do not know any of that yet.
I only know the sunrise. The dogwood petals. The coffee gone cold in my hand. The weight of twelve years inside my chest.
I stand up.
I go down to start my day.