Prologue #2
That's the part nobody warns you about, because nobody warns you at all. I got a compliment, remember. I didn't get a manual.
The first year was a carnival. I talked my way into a job I wasn't qualified for and out of a fight I'd started and into an apartment with no deposit.
I talked a woman named Renata into a weekend in Chicago and I talked her out of being angry about it on the Monday, and somewhere around Tuesday I sat on the edge of a bed in a Days Inn and thought: she didn't choose that.
She didn't choose me. She didn't choose the weekend. She got told, in a voice she had no defense against, and her body went along and made up reasons afterward because that's what bodies do.
I threw up in a gas station bathroom outside Rockford and then I drove for eleven hours.
You want to know the rules I ended up with? Because I built rules. Everybody builds rules.
I don't use it on women I want. That's rule one and it's cost me plenty and I've kept it, mostly, which is the most honest sentence in this whole account.
I don't use it on friends unless somebody's going to get hurt.
I don't use it in church.
And I never, ever ask anybody a question I actually need the answer to, because the horrible thing about being believed by everyone is that it makes you profoundly alone. If every room agrees with you, you've never been in a room.
There's a game I used to play with myself and then stopped, because it got answers.
I'd walk into a diner and pick a booth and say something small and stupid and untrue to the waitress — my brother used to work here, something like that, something with no profit in it — and then I'd watch her face and try to catch the exact frame where she bought it.
There isn't one. That's the answer I got. There's no moment of purchase. It doesn't cross her face, because it never has to travel: the sentence arrives already true, the way the temperature of a room arrives.
I did that in eleven states and then I stopped, in Ely, Nevada, when a woman named Dot said, "Oh, honey, which one was he?" and started listing men she'd known.
I sat in that booth for forty minutes trying to think of a way to give her back something I'd never actually taken.
I left ninety dollars on a four-dollar check, which is the coward's version, and which is a thing I have now done in probably two hundred restaurants, and which — I want to be honest — is the single most consistent behavior of my adult life.
My wife does the same thing for a completely different reason.
We found that out in Deadwood and neither of us said anything about it for a week.
Wolf Kane found me outside a bar in Sioux Falls when I was twenty-four, bleeding, having just talked three men out of killing me and into feeling bad about it, which is a worse outcome for everyone.
He looked at me with that pale eye of his — I didn't know what it meant yet — and he said, "Say something."
"Something."
"Say something that isn't true."
"I've never been arrested in my life," I said.
He watched me for a while. The eye did whatever the eye does.
"Huh," he said.
"What."
"Nothing." He handed me a rag for my face. "You want a job, or you want to keep doing whatever this is?"
"What's the job?"
"You'd talk to people," Wolf said.
"That's not a job, that's a condition."
"It is here."
I looked at him standing under a bar sign in South Dakota with blood on his knuckles that wasn't his either, and I did the thing I do, which is find the angle.
There wasn't one. That's what got me. There was a man offering me work and not wanting anything back that he hadn't said out loud, and I'd been on the road four years by then and I could not find the seam.
"Why me," I said.
"Because you talked three men out of killing you," Wolf said, "and you're standing here looking like you lost."
That's the only time in fifteen years anyone's looked at me and known. He never told me what he saw and I never asked, and that's the closest thing to a friendship I've had, which tells you everything about how I've been living.
They gave me a patch and a road name inside a year. Road captain by twenty-nine. I plan the runs, I talk to the sheriffs, I talk to the other charters, I talk to the customs guy in Portal who thinks I'm his nephew's godfather. I am extremely good at my job.
Nobody in that clubhouse can be sure they like me. Including me.
Fifteen years and not a word from the good suit. Not a glimpse. I stopped looking for him around year six. I decided he'd forgotten. I decided I'd been a Tuesday afternoon amusement for something that had a lot of Tuesdays.
Then last spring, Bram Oakes died in a parking garage in Bismarck, and the chair at church stayed empty, and Wolf married a woman who talks to crows, and the whole charter started walking around with the specific stiffness of people who've all agreed not to say a word out loud.
And on a Thursday in May, I was standing in the lot behind the Havregard clubhouse with a clipboard and a route map, and a woman I had never seen before was sitting in the back of Deke's truck with a zip tie on her wrists and blood on her knuckles that wasn't hers.
She looked up at me.
"You the one who decides?" she said.
"No, ma'am. I'm the one who talks."
"Great," she said. "Then here's a true thing so we can skip a step. I didn't know whose money it was, I tried to give it back, and the fence ran away from me so fast he left a shoe."
And I believed her.
I want you to sit in that with me for a second, because I couldn't. I stood in a gravel lot in North Dakota with a clipboard in my hand and the sun on the back of my neck and I believed her, completely, in my chest, the way you believe a thing you've watched happen.
Fifteen years of standing in rooms full of people agreeing with me. Fifteen years of never once having to wonder.
And it went the other way.
She lied about something later that same hour — small, stupid, about a phone — and I believed that too, and she saw my face when I did, and something went across her expression that I've spent a lot of time since trying to name.
I think it was recognition.
Somewhere, I knew, a man in a very good suit was leaning against a railing, checking his watch, waiting for the last fifteen years to finish setting up.
Because the thing about a joke is that it has to land.
And the thing about this joke is that it needed two people.
I just didn't know yet which one of us was the punchline.