Chapter 4
Ghost
They find me at dawn, which is how I'd have done it.
Ray Delgado knocks on the diner's back door at twenty to six, which is a thing that has never happened, and says only: "Highway. Three of 'em. Been sitting up there since dark, I think."
"How long's dark?"
"Ghost," Ray says, "they've been up there all night."
All night. Four hours on a shoulder in August with the engines off, not coming down, because coming down at two in the morning would have meant knocking on doors in a town where a strange knock at two in the morning is the worst sound there is.
They waited for a decent hour.
That's Hal. That's Hal all over, and it's the reason I have to stop halfway up the hill and put my hands on my knees for a minute.
I walk up because there's no point not walking up. It's a mile and a half and the sky goes from grey to pink on the way and my legs hurt in a way I've decided to enjoy.
Hal doesn't get off the bike. Bear does, and Tor does, and Bear stands there with his arms folded like a man holding himself closed, and Tor puts his hands in his pockets and looks at the view.
"Nice town," Tor says.
"It's not, really."
"No, it's terrible. I was being polite."
"There's a llama," I say.
"A what?"
"There's a llama. It's in the parade."
Bear says, "What parade," in the voice of a man who's driven four hours to have a different conversation.
"Christmas."
"It's August, Ghost."
"They're proud of it year-round."
And then nobody says anything for a while, because the small talk was a bridge and we've come to the end of it.
I want them to be angry. I have been rehearsing angry for eleven days, ever since Ray told me a man from Ash Harbor had called the motel looking for a name. I know how to stand in front of angry. Angry has edges you can hold.
They're not angry.
Hal takes his glasses off and rubs his eyes and says, "You didn't call."
"No."
"Thirty-one days."
"Yeah."
"Bear thought you were dead."
"I didn't think he was dead," Bear says. "I thought he was taken. There's a difference, and the difference is that one of them I can do something about."
"He rode to Portland," Tor says. "Twice."
"Shut up, Tor."
"He talked to a guy."
"I said —"
"He cried in a Denny's."
"I did not cry in a Denny's, I had a reaction, it was three in the morning —"
And that's when it lands, the thing I've been outrunning since the rest stop: they weren't furious. They were scared. Thirty-one days of a man who's never been out of contact for more than forty hours, and my brothers spent it sitting in parking lots at three a.m. wondering which ditch.
Angry I could stand in front of.
"I'm sorry," I say.
Bear's head comes up like I've hit him. "Say that again."
"Don't."
"No, seriously, I want it for the record —"
"Bear."
"Thirty-one years I've known you, you've never once —"
"Bear."
He stops. He looks at me properly for the first time.
And whatever's on my face, it takes the last of the heat out of him, and he comes over and puts his forehead against mine for a second the way he does, big idiot hands on my neck, and says quietly, "You look better.
That's the worst part. You look better than you've looked in ten years and I want to strangle you for it. "
"Yeah."
"What's her name?"
"How do you —"
"Ghost. My brother. My beautiful stupid brother. You are standing on a highway at six in the morning wearing an apron."
I look down.
I am, in fact, wearing an apron.
Tor says, "It's got a chicken on it," in the tone of a man narrating a documentary.
"It's a rooster."
"It's got a rooster on it."
Hal finally gets off the bike.
He walks past all of it, over to the guardrail, and stands looking down at Cold Fork with his hands on the rail, and when the president does that everybody shuts up, including the birds, apparently.
"Elin translated more of the stone," he says.
And the morning goes cold.
"Okay."
"The nine names on the front. We had those.
You know we had those." He doesn't turn around.
"There's a second face. It was down in the packing.
Took her four months to get the salts out of it without lifting the surface, and she's been at it every night since March, and last Tuesday she got the last of it. "
"And?"
"It's the same nine names. In the same order."
"So it's a copy."
"It's not a copy. It's a ledger." Now he turns. "Front face is the promise. Back face is what happened to each of us. Nine names, nine words after them. Eight of the words are fell."
Bear is looking at the ground.
Tor is looking at me.
"And the ninth," I say.
Hal doesn't answer right away, and in the silence I can hear a truck downshifting somewhere out past the grain elevator, and I remember with perfect clarity that gravel is bad footing.
"Níeingr," he says.
I know the word. I've never learned the word. That's how it works with us — the language comes up out of the floor of you like water in a basement, and you find yourself knowing a thing you can't source.
Oathbreaker.
"Say it in English," Bear says. "For those of us who don't get the dreams in Norwegian."
"You get the dreams in Norwegian," Tor says.
"I get the dreams in noise, Tor, I've explained this. I don't get sentences. I get the feeling of a sentence and then I wake up chewing the pillow."
"Níeingr," Hal says. "It's not coward. Everybody translates it coward and it's wrong. A coward's a man who was afraid. Nobody carved a word on a stone for being afraid — half of Norway was afraid, that's why the wall existed in the first place."
"Then what."
"A man who swore, in front of witnesses, and then didn't." Hal's voice goes flat and academic, which is how he sounds when a thing is costing him.
"It was a legal status. Elin found it in three other inscriptions.
You could be declared it at a Thing, in public, by name, and afterward you had no standing.
Couldn't hold land. Couldn't be avenged.
Anybody could kill you and it wasn't murder, it was tidying. "
Bear says, "Jesus."
"They didn't have a worse one," Hal says. "Elin looked. There isn't a worse one in the language."
Not coward. That's the mistranslation everybody makes.
Coward is about fear, and fear's forgivable, fear's human.
Níeingr is about a man who took an oath in front of witnesses and then didn't keep it.
It's the worst word they had. It was a legal category.
You could kill a níeingr and it wasn't murder, it was maintenance.
"Whose name," I say.
"She hasn't got the placement yet." Hal's voice is very careful. "The eighth line's damaged. The word's clear. Which name it sits beside isn't."
"That's convenient."
"Ghost —"
"That's convenient, Hal, that's a hell of a thing to ride four hours to not tell me."
"We didn't ride four hours to tell you about the stone," Tor says quietly. "We rode four hours because you disappeared. The stone's just what we brought instead of flowers."
Bear laughs, one syllable, and it dies.
And here's the thing.
I could tell them. Right there, on the shoulder of Highway 26, with the sun coming up over a town with a llama in it. I could say: it's mine, it's my name, I've known since I was six, I've dreamed the twelve seconds four thousand times and I have never found the frame where I decided.
Four words. The name is mine. Four words is my whole range, it's what I'm known for, I could do it in under a second.
I look at Bear, who rode to Portland twice.
And I run the whole thing forward, the way I've run roads forward for eleven years, because that's the one talent I have — I can see a route before anybody's on it.
I say it. Bear doesn't believe me. Bear says no, immediately, out loud, because Bear is constitutionally incapable of hearing a bad thing about somebody he loves, and he'll argue it for a year, and it will make him smaller.
Tor believes me and forgives me inside of four seconds, which is worse, because Tor's forgiveness is a thing you have to then carry.
And Hal. Hal takes his glasses off and cleans them and asks a question I can't answer, and then he does the arithmetic — thirty-nine men, forty years apiece — because Hal is the only other one who does arithmetic, and he was on that beach at the center of the line with his shield up, and his wife watched him die.
There's no version where the club survives that intact. Not because they'd throw me out. Because they wouldn't, and then they'd have to live inside the not-throwing-me-out, all of them, forever.
And I don't.
"You should meet her," I say instead.
Hal's eyes narrow, because Hal has known me for thirty-one years and one lifetime before that and he can hear a door closing from a mile off. But he lets it go. That's the thing about Hal. He always lets it go exactly once.
"Yeah?"
"Tonight. She closes at nine."
"She know what we are?"
"She knows what the patch is."
"She know the rest?"
"She knows about the beach," I say. "She knows about the nine names. She said, and I'm quoting, that the Viking thing explains a lot."
Tor makes a small sound of appreciation. "I like her."
"You haven't met her."
"I like her already. Do you know how long it took me to tell Freya? Four months. Four months and a Norwegian shipping manifest."
"Marisol threw a pan at me," Bear offers.
"She did not throw a pan at you."
"She threw a pan near me. It was a controlled pan."
We stand there on the shoulder, four men, the sun coming up.
"There's one more thing," Hal says. "And I'd have opened with it if you'd been dead in a ditch, so take the order as a compliment." He puts his glasses back on. "Fenrir Kings moved two crews out of Idaho three weeks ago. Nobody knows where they went. Skarde's people don't do quiet."
"Cold Fork's got nothing."
"Cold Fork's got you."
"I'm nobody's leverage, Hal."
And all three of them look at me, and not one of them says the obvious thing, which is that a man who has stopped is the most leverage-able object on God's earth, because now there's something to take away.
"Nine o'clock," I say.
Bear catches me before I go. He does the forehead thing again, and then he holds on about two seconds longer than the format calls for, and says, quietly, so the others don't get it:
"Whatever it is."
"Bear."
"No. Listen. Whatever it is." He's got his hand on the back of my neck.
"I've known you since we were nineteen. There's a room in you I've never been in.
That's fine. I've got rooms. Everybody's got rooms." He lets go.
"But you don't get to be in there alone anymore, that's all I'm saying, that's the only thing I came up here to say and I've been rehearsing it since Boise and I think I did it wrong. "
"You didn't do it wrong."
"I did it a little wrong."
"You did it a little wrong," I agree, and he looks pleased, and gets on his bike.
I walk back down the hill.
The apron's still on. I take it off about halfway and carry it, and then I put it back on again before I reach the parking lot, and I couldn't tell you why except that it belongs to a specific hook, on a specific wall, in a building with a dead man's name on it, and for thirty-one days that hook has been the closest thing I've had to an address.
Georgia's out front with a bucket, doing the windows, because the windows are the one thing she won't let me do.
"You were up early," she says.
"Yeah."
"Where'd you go?"
"Highway."
"Uh oh, we're back to one-word answers. What'd the highway do?"
"Sent three men."
She sets the bucket down.
"Your club."
"Yeah."
"Are they coming here?"
"Nine o'clock."
Georgia Boone looks at me for a long moment. Then she picks the bucket back up, and she says, briskly, in the voice of a woman doing arithmetic in her head:
"Then I need a hundred and twenty dollars of ground beef, and Kiki's going to have to work, and Ghost —"
"Yeah."
"— will they eat the lemon meringue? Be honest."
"Bear would eat a hubcap."
"Perfect," she says. "That's my demographic."
Then she stops with the bucket half raised.
"Ghost."
"Yeah."
"Are they coming to take you back?"
And that's the question, isn't it. That's the one I've been chewing since the shoulder of the highway.
"No," I say. "They're coming to look at you."
"At me?"
"They'll say it's about the stone. It's not about the stone. Hal rode four hours because a man who's never stopped anywhere stopped somewhere, and he wants to see what did it."
Georgia looks down at the bucket. At the windows. At her own hands.
"Well," she says. "Then I'd better wash these damn windows."
"Georgia —"
"Ghost, they are going to walk into a building with no front trim, a boarded pie case light, and a rooster apron, and I would like at least one surface in my life to be gleaming when they do."