CHAPTER EIGHT
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LUCA
I had a wheel bearing in the press and both hands on the arm, riding it down slow, because a bearing that goes in fast goes in crooked. Bex leaned out of the bar door and hollered, “Luca, the coffee’s dead again,” and I did not answer her.
I was watching a woman cross the yard in the chrome of a primary cover lying on the bench, and I was taking a lot longer on the job than the job needed.
She had her hair up in the clip. She walked the gravel like she was counting it, one foot and then the other, and she did not look at the four guys on the picnic table by the roller door.
They did not look at her either. She had come back in through that gate this morning on her own and nobody had brought it up. Around here that passes for manners.
The glare outside was white and mean. Inside it ran twenty degrees cooler and the world past the door looked like a hole cut in the light. Hot iron, cutting oil. My two favorite smells on earth.
I got the bearing seated and left my hands on the arm anyway, doing the thing I do.
A chair for the corner by the forge. Wide seat, low arm, something she could hook a knee over, because she never sits all the way down.
A step under the sink. Four inches, oak. Five feet three is a design problem and nobody in this building has bothered to solve it.
A bed frame that does not talk back when a person moves on it.
That is what is wrong with me. Every other man in this club looks at a woman and thinks about tonight. I look at one and start pricing lumber.
She came in under the roller door and I got the scent of her at ten feet, farther out than I want to be able to do that. Marcus was on her. Not on her clothes. On her.
I kept my hands busy and my mouth shut and decided it was nobody’s business, starting with mine.
There is a word for what she is to the three of us. Mate. Nobody in this club has said it in front of her and nobody is going to.
“Your coffee’s dead,” she said.
“Bex killed it. Bex kills everything.” I wiped my palms down my jeans and shifted my grip on the rag. “Sit down. There’s a sandwich in there with your name on it and I’ll fight you about it.”
“I ate.”
“You ate because I put a plate under your face. That’s not eating, that’s surrendering.”
She leaned a hip on the bench, which for her counts as sitting.
“It had four kinds of meat on it.”
“Three. The fourth one was a garnish and you hurt its feelings.”
“Does anybody ever get a word in around you?”
“Not once in my whole life. Ask anybody, they’ve been trying since I was born.” I set the rag down. “Sit all the way down, trouble.”
“Coffee,” Bex said from the bar door.
“Bury it with honors,” I said. “Say a few words. Something about how it never complained.”
Victoria almost smiled. Two nights of no sleep and that was still worth the whole afternoon.
Then the chain on the gate went.
Nobody rattles that chain. There is a bell on the post and it works. The chain means somebody wants to be heard.
A white van sat at the curb on Rosewood with the engine running and the side door slid open. The driver kept both hands on the wheel and never turned his head, which told me he had a very short list of things he was allowed to see.
The man who came up to my gate came alone. Bald, heavy through the chest and the gut, a nose flattened and reset by somebody in a hurry a long time ago.
He had a nail gun on a shoulder strap, riding across his front the easy way a guy carries a camera. A yellow air hose ran off the butt of it, back into the van.
I went out into the glare wiping my hands and I did not put the rag down. Six hours back a Marchetti and Ward van had fed a sealed envelope through that same fence and pulled away. This was not a surprise. This was the appointment.
He stopped a foot off the chain-link and read my chest the way you read a shipping label.
“Mor-oh,” he said. “That right?”
“Moreau.”
“Sure.”
He did not try it again and did not care that he had it wrong.
“What’s in the van?” I said.
“Compressor.”
“That all?”
“That’s all of it that’s yours.”
“Hell of a hose,” I said. “Fifty feet? He buy that for you, or is that yours?”
“It’s the company’s.” He shifted the strap on his shoulder. “I’m here for the woman who carried the book. Mr. Crane can collect the rest when she comes. He isn’t fussy about which of you sends her out.”
Gravel behind me. Adrian came up on my right and stopped at the fence with his hands loose, and out from under the roller door behind him came Victoria, because of course she did. Adrian had not told her enough since church. He was running out of room to keep doing that.
“No,” Adrian said.
“That’s not a no you get to make.”
“A pickup,” I said. “Like a parcel.”
“Like a parcel.”
“You got a form for me to sign, or is this more of a verbal arrangement?”
“There’s no form.”
“See, that’s sloppy. Man sends you eleven miles with a hose and doesn’t give you paper.” I leaned on the gate post. “I’d quit. We’re hiring, by the way. Terrible money, but the coffee’s already dead so nobody can hold that against you.”
“He doesn’t need paper off you.” He looked past me into the yard, and he found her, and he took his time about it. “He knows what she is. He’s known longer than she has.”
The gravel moved behind me, four guys coming off a picnic table at once. Bex stopped in the bar doorway. And there was a half second in there where Victoria did not breathe.
Her breath went out and came back. Awareness, I called that.
“What am I to him?” she said, from the gravel behind me.
“The hand that can release him,” I said. “Not a parcel. Not a payment. Don’t let this man turn you into either.”
“Say one more word about her,” I said.
“I’ve got two more lines and then I’m gone. They told me you people are bears and wolves and I don’t know what all.” He said it pleasantly. “Doesn’t change where a nail goes.”
“That the second line?”
“That’s the first. Second one is he wants a demonstration. He says your kind takes a thing in better that way.”
Her boots came two steps closer instead of one back. I clocked that. Trouble.
“And that’s it?”
“And I’m to say he isn’t angry,” he said. “He wanted that in there. He isn’t angry with anybody here.”
Adrian got quieter. He does that. Our alpha goes quiet the way weather goes quiet right before it does the thing it came for, and every man in that yard read it right and stopped moving.
“Victoria. Behind the wall.”
“No.”
I want this next part written down the way it happened, because I have heard three versions already and they all give me too much credit.
I did not decide.
There was no moment where I stood in that glare and weighed a woman I have known since Tuesday night against a hole in myself.
No arithmetic. Nothing brave. I was in one place, and then I was two steps to the left, square in the lane between the muzzle of that thing and her, and my body had it finished before my head showed up to have an opinion.
My head got there late and found the work already done. That is fine. It has never been the useful one.
The compressor in the van cycled up.
The gun coughed. Flat, cheap, a sound like a heavy stapler. The nail went through the top of my left shoulder until its point struck the gate frame behind me. The head stayed buried against my shirt.
Then the air smelled like exhaust and hot oil, which is what a nail gun smells like after it fires, and which I will be smelling for the rest of my life.
I stayed up. I want that on the record too, because staying up was the only part of it I chose.
There was blood at the back of my throat and it was mine and it did not worry me.
Here is a thing my brothers know that she did not know yet. When I am angry, I talk. I will narrate a man’s entire stupid afternoon back to him while I take his bike apart.
And then there is the place past that, where it stops.
The yard came with me. Bex quit breathing loud. Somebody by the picnic table started a growl and Adrian killed it with a look, and after that there was nothing out there. No chain, no engine, no gulls off the harbor. The flattest quiet this building has ever held.
Rennick let the gun hang down along his thigh and watched me not talk.
“Go on and say something,” he said.
I did not.
“Suit yourself.”
For the first time since he got out of that van, he checked the distance between us.
I put my right hand through the chain-link and left it there, open, at the height of his face.
“Put a hand on her and I’ll take the hand. I’ll take it slow, so you can watch.”
That was all of it. That was the whole speech.
Some men make a claim in a warm room with their brothers standing around them. I made mine through a fence, to a stranger, with a nail through my shoulder, in front of Adrian and Bex and four patched members and her. Nobody said a word after it. Nobody made it smaller later, either.
Rennick looked at the hand a while. Then he thumbed the hose coupling, the way a man checks a fitting before a long drive, and walked back to the curb at the speed he had come up.
“You want him,” Adrian said. It was not a question.
“Yeah.”
“Not today.”
“Say when, then.”
I priced him out while he walked. Three steps to the chain, and I know what a shoulder sounds like coming out of a socket, because I have done it and was not sorry. Not today is not the same as no.
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Bex got me onto a stool at the long table just inside the roller door, because I wanted the street in my sight line. She cut the shirt off me and swore in two languages the whole time.
The nail head sat against the front of my shoulder; its point showed at the back, and it was warm. That is the part I kept. Warm, like a bolt backed out of an engine that has been running.
“Bottom drawer,” I said, and pointed with my chin, because the arm had stopped taking requests. “The pliers with the tape on the handles. Not the needle nose, they’ll fold on you.”
“Don’t watch me do it, that’s so much worse—”
“Then don’t look at my face. Look at the nail. It’s not going anywhere, it’s having a great day.”