CHAPTER FIVE
?
VICTORIA
I put my left boot back on beside the couch. The clock over the shop door said five past five. Wednesday had happened around me while I slept.
Seventeen. I counted the spaces in the gravel twice from inside the roller door and got seventeen both times, and there had been nineteen bikes parked out there the night before.
Nobody had told me what the vote had cost.
Luca had the forge going at the far end of the shop.
Two gaps at the end of the row. The oil under them still looked wet.
Boots came across the concrete behind me, heavy enough that I felt them through my shoes before I heard them.
“Victoria. Take the plate.”
He had it in my hands before I finished turning around. Bread, peppers gone black at the edges, something in oil that was still spitting off the hot plate.
Nobody had told me a number. Nobody had told me anything since the door of that back room shut at two o’clock with nineteen men behind it, so I had stood in the roller door with the harbor haze coming in off the water and counted the ones I could still see, and the yard gave me the same answer twice.
“I didn’t ask for—”
“Nope.” Luca was already walking away from me.
He went back to the bench at the far end of the shop, picked up a wire brush, and put it to a rotor. He said nothing about food. He did not turn around to see whether I ate.
The floor was still holding the day’s heat through my shoes. Past the one caged work lamp on its swing arm, the whole building went blue.
I ate standing up, faster than I meant to, and my hands were not steady doing it.
Two of them had not come back. I wanted that to have been something bad. Not an errand — something with blood in it, done last night, on my account.
Something turned over under my sternum while I chewed. Not hunger, and not fear. A pull, low and off to the left, like a hand taking up the slack in a wire behind my ribs.
Bex came through with a keg on her hip, cut straight across the floor, and went out the side door without slowing down. Nobody in this place had looked at me squarely since two o’clock.
Out on Rosewood a bike came onto the throttle and went away north, and the sound of it thinned out and left nothing behind it.
I set the plate down beside his elbow with half of it left.
“Something happened in that room this afternoon,” I said. “Everybody in this building has been not-telling me about it all day.”
The wire brush kept going. Cooking oil off the plate, scorched brake dust, and that metal taste at the back of the throat that comes off a forge that has been running all day.
“Just say it.”
He stopped brushing.
“It doesn’t go into words good. Stand by the bench, trouble.”
“That isn’t an answer,” I said.
“It’s the front half of one.” He set the rotor down. “Eat that. I’m gonna be no use to anybody for ten minutes and I’d rather you were sitting down.”
“I’m not sitting down,” I said, and I did not sit down.
“Then stand where I put you.” He took me by both arms and moved me — lifted, turned, set down at the end of the bench, the way a man moves a ladder out of his way. He let go and went on as though he had not.
He pulled his shirt off with one hand at the back of the collar, the way men do it.
Then he folded it. That was the part I could not get past. He squared the sleeves in against the chest, folded the whole thing in half, and set it on the bench like it was going back into a drawer at his mother’s house.
He sat on the bench, unlaced his boots, and set them underneath. His belt came off next. “I get tired of buying buckles,” he said, as though that explained anything.
My eyes went to his forearms and I caught up with them late.
Burn scars, both arms, wrist to elbow. Ridged where the skin had pulled and shiny where it had healed flat, running the length of the bone in long overlapping streaks.
“That’s the forge,” he said. “Iron doesn’t care how big you are.”
He did not cover them and he did not wait for me to be done looking.
“It’s gonna sound bad. It always sounds bad.”
“What is?” I said. “Say the noun.”
He walked out under the lamp, set his feet, and breathed out through his nose.
Then it started in his back.
His shoulders came up and kept coming, and a sound came out of him like a man setting down something too heavy, and then his knees went and he caught himself on his hands.
His spine did not lengthen. It stacked. One thing sliding past another underneath the skin, and I heard it happen.
He made a noise then that I am going to hear for the rest of my life. Not a growl. A man being hurt with his teeth shut on it.
“Luca.”
He did not answer, because by then he had a lot going on.
His jeans went at the seams, both legs at once, and came off him in pieces. One brass rivet skittered across the concrete. I watched it because it was the only ordinary thing in the room.
Brown hair came up through him. Not laid over him — out of him, out of the arms I had just been looking at, the scars going under it and gone.
“Stop,” I said, to nobody, to the room. “You can stop.”
He could not stop. That was plain even to me, and I had known this existed for about four seconds.
The face was last and it was the worst. The jaw pushed forward, the skull drew long, the ears slid up the sides of his head. There was nothing savage in it. It was surgery he was doing to himself with no hands.
I counted. I count when I am frightened and I do not decide to. I got to eight, and then to ten, and then it stopped.
There was a brown bear standing on the shop floor between me and the roller door.
His boots were still there on the concrete. Upright, laces open, waiting for him.
That was the thing my head would not take. Not the animal. The boots.
He filled the space under the lamp the way a car fills a lane. The head came around toward me, low and swinging, and what came with it was hot iron and animal and the soap off his neck.
His eyes were the same eyes. Brown, a little bloodshot, set close, and tired. They were the eyes that had been looking at me over a plate of peppers.
He made a sound. It came up out of the chest and it had a shape to it, rising at the end, and nothing in it would ever go down on paper. I understood that it was not language. I understood at the same time that he was talking to me.
“Okay,” I said. My voice came out wrong, thin and reasonable, a woman confirming an address. “Okay. That’s you.”
I walked toward him. Four steps, which is four more than a sane woman takes, and there were no words in my head while I did it.
I put my hand flat on his shoulder.
The hair was coarse on top and softer underneath, and he was warmer than a person. Much warmer. There was a whole working body under my palm, ribs going out and in, something enormous holding absolutely still on purpose.
He stood there and let me.
The thing that had turned over under my sternum went quiet under my palm. Flat quiet, the way a building goes when a machine somewhere in it shuts off and the silence is the first anybody knew it had been running.
“I’m not going to scream,” I told him, which was a stupid thing to promise a bear, and I heard the breath go out of him anyway.
I have gone my whole life without putting my hand on a strange dog. I did not take it back, either, not for a long time, not until my arm started shaking from being held up.
?
Coming back took as long as going had, and it was worse to watch, because now I knew what it cost him.
He came out of it on his hands and knees, naked, breathing like a man off a staircase, hair stuck flat to his forehead. He got his back against the bench and sat down on the floor with his legs out.
“That’s the shift,” he said. “Shifter. There’s your noun. It doesn’t get better and I’m not gonna pretend it does. Ten minutes and I’ll have a brain again. Don’t ask anything smart.”
I handed him the plate.
He took it out of my hand and the width of his hand went past my wrist doing it, warm along the inside of my arm, and it was not on purpose and I felt it anyway.
Then he ate with his fingers. All of it, bread dragged through the oil, and he did not apologize for any of it or look up.
I sat down across from him with my back against the bench leg and the roller door in front of me, because I do not sit with a door behind me.
The inside of my wrist was still reporting the plate. Where the width of his hand had gone past it, the warmth stayed on after the warmth was gone, and for a second I was not on that floor at all. Then I was, and he was still chewing.
He said it with his mouth full, without looking up from the plate.
“Hand.”
“I’m not going to,” I said.
He took my wrist and put my palm on his chest and went back to eating with the other hand. He did not ask and he did not explain, and my hand stayed where he had put it.
It came while he was chewing. Low in me and sideways, under the sternum, the way a drawer slides open on a runner. Something going out of me toward something else.
I pressed the same hand over my own sternum, which did nothing at all.
“There’s something wrong in my chest.”
He stopped. He looked at me for longer than the question was worth.
“Yeah.”
Then he went back to the plate.
“That’s it. Yeah.”
“I told you not to ask anything smart.”
He set the plate down empty and dragged the back of his hand across his beard.
“Ask me the other thing. You’ve had it in your mouth since yesterday.”
“The book.”
“The book.”
“It’s a ledger. I’ve carried forty ledgers.” I could hear my own voice getting hard and I let it. “Estate inventories. A private register out of Boston with two centuries in it. Leather, thread, rag paper, foxed at the gutter. I know what I was carrying.”
“It’s not a record of what’s owed. It’s a lid.”
“A lid,” I said.
“Yeah.” He set his knuckles on the concrete and turned the hand over, like a thing being held down and then not. “Every name in there is holding something. You write the name, the thing quits being loose. It stays in the shape it had when the pen came off the page.”