Chapter 4
Birdie
Nobody tells you that the fastest way to know a man is to hand him one end of a fence wire.
Four days. That's what it took. Four days of the two of us on the low field with a spool of high-tensile and a come-along and eleven posts that had rotted at the ground line, and by the end of it I knew more about Roman Kade than I know about men I've slept with.
Things I learned about Roman Kade from fencing:
He doesn't complain. Not once, not even as a joke, which turns out to be unsettling.
He measures twice. Every time. Even when it's obvious. Even when it's a gate.
He can't whistle. Not one note. He tried on day two and produced a sound I described at the time as "a kettle giving up," and he did not attempt it again for the rest of the week, which tells you as much about him as anything else in this chapter.
He counts. Out loud, under his breath, when he's carrying something heavy — one to eight, then starts over. I asked him about it on day three.
"It's from moving furniture."
"Whose furniture?"
"Anybody's. I did two summers of it at nineteen." He set the post down on eight. "You count to eight because eight's the far side of a doorway. You get to eight, you've cleared the frame, you can put it down."
"And you still do it."
"I do it with everything," he said. "It's the only reason I've ever finished anything."
Which is the kind of thing a man says at three in the afternoon holding a fence post, not knowing he's told you his whole life.
And when a thing goes wrong — when the come-along slipped on the third post and the wire came back across his forearm and opened four inches of it — he did not swear. He looked at it, and he said, "Huh," and then he said, "Don't tell your grandmother."
"You need stitches."
"I need a rag."
"You need stitches, that's fat, I can see fat—"
"You a nurse?"
"I'm a vet tech."
He held out his arm.
"I'm a vet tech, Roman."
"You got a needle?"
"I've got a needle, I've got lidocaine, I've got a suture kit in my duffel because I am a professional and also because the last time I traveled without one a man's dog ate a fishhook in a parking lot in Zanesville—"
"Then you've got a needle," he said, and sat down on the tailgate.
I put nine stitches in the president of a motorcycle club on the tailgate of my grandfather's truck. He watched the whole time. Most people look away. He watched, with a kind of mild professional interest, like a man watching somebody else parallel park.
"You're good at that," he said.
"I'm okay at it."
"No, you're good."
"It's a cow arm. You have a cow arm. Anybody could—"
"Take the compliment, Scarlett."
"Birdie."
"Birdie," he said.
"Where'd Birdie come from?" he asked, on number four.
"My grandfather. I was four and I wouldn't eat, apparently. Ate like a bird. It was meant to be an insult and it stuck, which is how all the good ones happen."
"You eat like a thresher."
"I know. That's what makes it funny." Number five. "What about Wolf?"
His arm went a fraction tighter under my hand.
"That's the patch."
"That's not an answer."
"There's a wolf's skull on the club. That's where it comes from."
"Roman."
"It's not a good story."
"I've got four more stitches."
He looked out at the low field for a second.
"Deacon named it," he said. "The club. Somebody asked him if we were the wolf or the king, and he said—" He stopped.
"Said what?"
"He said we're the ones that ate him," Roman said. "And I was seventeen and I thought that was the single greatest sentence anybody had ever come up with, and I have spent about twenty years since finding out what it costs to be in a club named after the last thing you did to somebody."
I put in number six without saying anything.
"So no," he said. "Not a good story."
And there was a whole thing in my chest about the way he said it and I stabbed him slightly harder than necessary on number seven.
The horse was worse than the fence.
She's got one. Twenty-six years old, name of Petunia, blind in the off eye, and my grandmother has been feeding her a diet composed principally of apples and lies. Day three I found her down in the run-in shed with her flank going like a bellows and gut sounds you could describe as absent.
"That's colic," I said.
Roman came in behind me. "Bad?"
"I don't know yet. Get her up."
"Get her up how?"
"With your hands and your voice and your entire personality," I said. "She's twenty-six and she's blind on that side, so come at her from here, and talk the whole time, and if she goes over on you get out of the shed, do not be a hero in a shed."
He got her up. He talked the whole time. And I'm sorry to report that what he talked about, in a low steady voice, to a blind elderly horse, at eleven at night, was the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates.
We walked her for four hours.
Somewhere around two in the morning, in the yard, in the cold, going in circles, he said:
"Ask me."
"Ask you what."
"Whatever it is you've been chewing since Tuesday."
I switched the lead to my other hand.
"How broke are you?"
He laughed. It came out of him in one piece, surprised, and Petunia flicked an ear.
"That's the one?"
"That's the one."
"Why that one?"
"Because everybody's lying to me about everything," I said, "and money's the only thing anybody ever tells the truth about, because it's checkable."
So he told me.
All of it. The nineteen hundred a month. The eleven patches. The widows' fund. The forty thousand for a man named Kasimir who I hadn't met yet. The number in the club account, which I'm not going to write down, but I'll tell you I said "Roman" out loud in the dark.
"Yeah," he said.
"That's not — Roman, that's not broke, that's—"
"That's broke."
"That's a bad month at a laundromat."
"It's been a bad eleven months at a laundromat."
We walked. The horse blew out. The gut sounds had started coming back around one and I'd stopped being scared around one-thirty and started being tired around one-forty-five.
"Can I ask you one," he said.
"Go."
"Why'd nobody come with you?"
"What?"
"Three Sundays with no phone call. You've got — what. Cousins?"
"Two."
"Aunt?"
"One."
"And none of them got on a bus."
I walked about thirty feet of that before I answered it.
"They all called each other," I said. "That's what happened.
There was a whole — there was a group text, Roman, with fourteen messages in it, and eleven of them were has anyone heard from Odile and three of them were I'm sure she's fine, and then it stopped, and everybody went to bed feeling like they'd done something. "
"And you."
"I left the group text and cracked my stator."
"That's not what happened to your stator."
"It is not," I admitted, "but I like how it sounds."
He laughed. Somewhere in the dark, Petunia sighed the sigh of a horse who has heard all this before.
"My aunt's not bad," I said, quieter. "That's the thing, they're not — nobody's a villain.
They're just three hundred miles away and they've got jobs and kids and a whole entire life happening to them, and my grandmother is a thing they love and a thing they'll get to.
And I've got no kids and a lease that ended in August and a boss who told me in June I was hard to schedule. "
"Are you hard to schedule?"
"I'm impossible to schedule."
"Why?"
"Because I keep going where the emergency is," I said, "which is a personality trait people find very admirable right up until it's Tuesday."
"Why'd you tell me?" I said.
"You asked."
"People ask you things constantly. Cricket asks you six things a minute."
"Cricket's twenty and he asks me things so I'll look at him.
" He rubbed his jaw. "You asked me the one thing that's true.
Nobody does that. Everybody comes at me sideways — how's business, how's the club, is the club all right — and what they want is for me to say yes so they don't have to hear no. "
"So you tell me the number because I asked straight."
"I tell you the number," he said, "because you're standing in a yard at two in the morning holding my problem by a rope."
And then, because I am who I am, I said:
"I know what you are, by the way."
"That so."
"You're the guy who handles people. It's your whole — it's the strip mine thing.
It's the do you want to see my tattoo thing.
You put people in the right chair and you do it so gently they think they picked it, and I want to say now, out loud, on the record, before anything else happens: I'm not getting handled. "
He stopped walking.
"Okay," he said.
"That's it? Okay?"
"You want me to argue?"
"I want you to — yes! A little!"
"You said a true thing about me," Roman said. "I'm not going to stand in a yard and tell you it's false. That'd be handling you."
"Oh, that's slick—"
"That's the trap, though, isn't it." He was smiling. In the dark. I could hear it. "Anything I say now is either agreeing with you, which is suspicious, or arguing with you, which is worse."
"So say nothing."
"That's Kasimir's move. I can't pull it off."
"Try it."
He tried it. For eleven seconds. Then he said, "It's very boring," and I laughed so hard the horse spooked and I had to apologize to her for a while.
The fourth night my grandmother made pie.
I want to note this, because it's how she operates. Four days of a man on her property and she'd said maybe nine words to him, and then Friday she made a pie and put it on the table between them and said, "Eat that," and went to bed at eight-forty like a woman who's done a day's work.
We ate it. It was very good and neither of us said anything about the fact that it was clearly a conversation.
"She likes you," I said.
"She fed me."
"She feeds the mailman."
"Does she?"
"She has a coffee can with his name on it. Roman, she has coffee cans with nine people's names on them, it's a system, there's a hierarchy and nobody's ever explained it to me." I pushed crust around. "You've got a can."
"I don't have a can."
"You've had a can since Tuesday. It's behind the flour. It says R.K. and it has fig bars in it and she thinks I haven't seen it."
He didn't say anything for a second.
"Fig bars," he said.
"Fig bars."
"I ate about four hundred fig bars in that barn in 1998."
"Well," I said. "There you go."
"She locked you in the cellar," I said.
Roman put his fork down.
"She tell you that?"
"You told me that. You walk around that door every time you come in. You did it just now. You went a foot and a half out of your way to get to a chair."
He looked at his plate for a long time.
"1998," he said.
"Okay."
"I was sixteen."
"Okay."
"That's — Birdie, that's the whole thing, that's not a story I've got a short version of."
"So tell me the long one."
"No," he said, and it wasn't a wall. It was a door with a hand on it. "Not tonight. Not in her kitchen."
"When?"
"Soon."
"That's not a—"
The dogs went off.
Not our dogs. My grandmother doesn't have dogs. The Vaughn place has dogs, or had, and now the Vaughn place is Vane's, and the dogs still bark at the same things they always did.
Then the pump house door.
You wouldn't think you could hear a padlock hasp from a kitchen at a hundred and forty feet. You can, if the night's cold and still and everything else in the county has stopped.
Roman was up before the sound finished. He didn't run. That's what got me — a big man crossing a dark kitchen fast without hurrying, hand going back under his cut, and he put one palm flat on my sternum on the way past and said, quietly, "Stay in the house."
"That's not—"
"Stay in the house, Birdie."
Reader, I did not stay in the house.
I got as far as the porch, which is where I was standing when the kitchen window over my left shoulder went orange and my grandmother's voice came out of it like the wrath of a small God:
"WENDELL PIKE, YOU GET OUT OF MY PUMP HOUSE."
She was at the top of the porch steps in a nightgown, a cardigan, boots, and my grandfather's Ithaca 37, which she had told me for six years she did not own anymore.
"Grandma—"
"Get behind me."
"Grandma, that's loaded—"
"Of course it's loaded! What's the point!"
Wendell came out of the pump house doorway with a flashlight in one hand and a pry bar in the other, and Roman had him at forty feet and closing, and the whole yard was blue-black and orange from the kitchen window, and Wendell laughed.
Actually laughed. Held the pry bar up like look at this.
"Miss Odile," he called. "You got a bad hasp."
"I'll give you a bad hasp—"
"Odile," Roman said, "don't."
"He's in my pump house—"
"He wants you to."
And that stopped her. That's the only thing that would have. She stood there and I saw her run it — a woman doing arithmetic at two in the morning in her nightgown — and I watched her get to the end of it and hate the answer.
"Prez," Wendell said, pleasant. "You're a long way up a driveway you don't use."
Roman said nothing.
"Man asked me to look at a floor," Wendell said. "That's all. I'm looking at a floor. Floor's still there."
"Take the cut off."
"Sorry?"
"Take it off," Roman said, "and set it on the ground, and walk down the drive, and I'll let you."
"That's generous."
"It's the most generous thing I have ever said to anybody."
And Wendell Pike smiled with Pike's chin under Deacon Ross's collar and said, "Nah. I like how it fits."
He walked. Right past Roman, close enough to touch, down the drive, four hundred feet, and a car door shut somewhere out on the road and an engine went away north.
"You let him walk," I said.
"Yeah."
"He had a pry bar—"
"He had a pry bar and a car on the road with somebody in it and a phone in his pocket," Roman said, "and if I put him on the ground in this yard, then by Sunday there's a photograph of a seventy-nine-year-old woman's property in a folder on a desk somewhere with the word incident on it.
He was never here to open that door, Birdie.
He was here to be seen not being stopped. "
"That's insane."
"That's Tuesday."
"It's Friday."
"It's been a long week," he said.
Nobody moved for a while.
Then my grandmother lowered the shotgun, and I heard her breathe out, and it was the first time in my life I'd ever heard that woman sound seventy-nine.
"Well," she said. "That's the clock started."
"Yeah," Roman said.
"What clock?" I said. "What clock. What is in the pump house?"
And Roman Kade turned around in the dark yard and looked at my grandmother, and my grandmother looked back at him, and after a second she said, to him, not to me:
"Show her the tower first."
"Odile—"
"Not in my kitchen," she said. "I've told you people that for twenty-eight years."