Chapter 1
Crash
The truck was insured. That's the first thing I want on the record.
The second thing is that I've read the police report and it says driver appeared unharmed and was arguing with the fire, which is a lie.
I wasn't arguing with the fire. I was telling it to hurry up, which is different, and which any reasonable man would have done, because it was a Ford and it owed me money.
Here's how it went.
We had a run north to move a load of legal, boring, aggressively documented farm equipment, because the Wild Hunt has been legal and boring for two years now and Wolf gets a look on his face if you say otherwise.
Ash Company remnants had been sniffing at the county line for a month.
I was tail. Somebody put a truck across the road with its lights off.
I had a choice between the truck and the ditch.
I picked the ditch. I always pick the ditch. The ditch has never once killed me, and at this point we have a relationship.
Two rolls, a fire, and then the door came off in my hand, which I'd like to say is a thing that happens, except it isn't.
And then the woman.
I'll come back to the woman.
I walked into the clubhouse at four in the morning with my eyebrows partly gone and my right hand wrapped in a rag, and Deke Marsh looked up from the stove and said, without any preamble at all:
"Eleven."
"Don't."
"Eleven, Ivar."
"Don't say it in that voice."
"I don't have another voice." He turned a burner down. He was making a coffee cake at four in the morning, which for Deke is not unusual and is in fact a warning sign, the way a barometer dropping is a warning sign. "I've got a laminated sheet now. Did I show you the laminated sheet?"
"You showed me the laminated sheet."
"I laminated it because of you."
"You laminated it because you bought a laminator."
"I bought a laminator because of you." He pointed a wooden spoon at me. "Sit down. Show me the hand."
"It's fine."
"Show me the hand or I'll wake Doc, and Doc's been drinking, and you know what he's like when he's been drinking and he's needed. He gets emotional."
I sat down. I showed him the hand.
Deke's the size of a shed and moves like one now, since the thing with his hip two years back, and he'd weaponized the cane before the swelling went down. He leaned on it to look at my palm and made a low noise in his chest.
"That's a burn."
"Thank you."
"That's a bad burn."
"Thanks, Deke."
"You want cake?"
That's the whole club, right there, in four exchanges. Somebody nearly dies, somebody offers cake, everybody agrees not to look directly at the part in the middle.
Here's the thing about being Sergeant-at-Arms.
Everybody thinks it's the fun job. Everybody thinks you get to be the one who hurts people, and there's a certain kind of nineteen-year-old who joins a club specifically hoping to find out whether he'd enjoy that.
He would, is the answer. That's why you don't let him.
I've been S-A-A for nine years. Before that I was a guy who was good at it, which is not the same qualification and is in fact the opposite of one.
The job is not hurting people. The job is deciding.
The job is standing in a room where six men want something ugly to happen and being the one who says how much of it happens and to whom and when it stops.
Mostly it's stopping. Ninety percent of the job is stopping.
The other ten percent I don't talk about, and I don't sleep about it either, and I've made peace with the trade the way you make peace with a bad knee.
Wolf came down at six.
He'd been up. He's always been up. Nine years I've watched that man not sleep and he keeps offering explanations, and they're all lies, and everybody lets him have them.
He does that thing where he looks at you with the good eye first and then the pale one, and the pale one is the one that itches when somebody lies, so I've learned to just say the true thing immediately and save us both the theater.
"Somebody blocked the road," I said.
"On purpose."
"Lights off, engine running, backed in. Yeah. On purpose."
"Ash?"
"Ash is broke and Ash is stupid. Whoever paid for that truck was neither."
Wolf sat down across from me and turned my hand over without asking, which is a president's privilege.
"Eleven," he said.
"I swear to God, if one more person—"
"I'm not making the joke."
"You were absolutely about to make the joke."
"I was considering the joke," Wolf said. "I decided against it because I've got a bad feeling and you're at the center of it, and Wren says when I get bad feelings I should say them out loud instead of chewing them for six weeks."
"How's that going?"
"Horribly. I hate it. She's right." He let go of my hand. "Eleven's not luck."
"It's not not luck."
"Ivar."
Nobody calls me Ivar except Wolf, Deke, and my mother, and my mother's dead, so it's a small and unpleasant club.
"I'm fine," I said.
"That's the part I'm noticing," he said, and went to find coffee.
The clubhouse at that hour is the best version of itself.
Everything smells like flour and chain lube. Sunny Pell's got the register open counting yesterday out, and she does it with a pencil behind her ear like a woman in a movie about a bar, and if you tell her that she'll charge you for it.
"You're bleeding on my floor," she said.
"It's a rag. The rag's absorbing."
"You're bleeding through the rag onto my floor, Ivar, that's the definition of the thing you're saying it isn't." She didn't look up from the register. "There's a pool going, you know."
"On what?"
"On you."
"On me what, Sunny."
"On the next one." She turned a page in the ledger book. "Ozzy's got August. Wick's got the first snow. Deke won't play, which honestly I found upsetting, because Deke plays everything, Deke bets on the weather."
"Deke won't play."
"Deke says he doesn't bet against family," Sunny said, "which is a beautiful sentiment, and it also means he thinks he'd win, and I'd think about that if I were you."
I did think about that. I've thought about it since, at length, in the small hours, which is where all of Deke's best work lands.
Renny Fauk came down at seven with his hair wet, wearing his prospect cut like it was a wedding suit, and looked at my eyebrows for four seconds too long.
"Say it," I said.
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You've got a whole face happening. Say it."
"It's just — " He gestured at me. "You look like a lit match."
"There it is."
"A handsome lit match," he said, and then went red to the ears, because he's nineteen and everything he says arrives about a second before he's finished building it.
Renny's my problem. I mean that in the specific sense: I sponsored him, so he's mine, and in the general sense: he wants to be me, and I have spent four months trying to talk him out of it using the only argument I've got, which is look at me.
It isn't working. It never works. Every kid who wants this looks at the wreckage and sees a man who survived it.
"You eat?" I said.
"No."
"Eat. Then go help Deke with the flour, and don't let him lift the bag, and if he tries to lift the bag—"
"Tell him you said so."
"Tell him Wolf said so. He'll ignore me. He's ignored me since 2019."
"Since the thing with the—"
"We don't talk about the thing with the goat," I said.
That afternoon I had to go see a man in Steele about a debt.
I bring it up because people have opinions about what that means and they're usually wrong in one direction or the other. So here it is in full.
His name is Larry. He owes the club eleven thousand dollars from a thing that predates me. He's fifty-six, he's got a bad back and a worse business, and he opened the door and went grey when he saw the cut.
I came in. I sat down at his kitchen table. I turned down coffee because taking a man's coffee while you're doing this is worse, not better.
"I don't have it," Larry said.
"I know."
"I've got maybe six hundred—"
"Larry." I put my hands on the table where he could see them.
"Here's the whole conversation. You've missed four.
Four is when I show up. That's all four means.
I'm not here to do anything to you today.
If you'd missed eight I'd still be sitting in this chair, and if you'd missed twelve I'd be sitting in this chair and it would be a much worse afternoon, and there's a version of this club where all of that happens on the first one.
That version's not on right now. I'm telling you what the schedule is so you can plan. "
He stared at me.
"That's it?"
"That's it."
"People say—"
"I know what people say."
"They say you put a guy through a windshield in Jamestown."
"That's true," I said.
He didn't have a follow-up. Nobody ever does.
That's the mechanism: you tell them a true bad thing about yourself and you say it flat and then you say two hundred a month and they take the two hundred a month, and everybody goes home, and nothing happens, and nothing keeps not happening for years, and that is the job working correctly.
I got two hundred a month. I drove back listening to a radio station that plays the same eleven songs.
And I want it noted that I sat in my truck outside my own house for twenty minutes afterward, which I always do, and which I have never told anybody, and which is the actual price of the two hundred a month.
Now. The woman.
I want to be careful here, because I've had four days to arrange this in my head and I'm aware that when I lay it out flat it sounds like a man building a case for something he'd already decided.
Six years. Eleven wrecks. Green on the laminated sheet, all of them.
Flight medic. Same one. Every time.
I noticed her at the Hanson bridge, which was number four, because she was crouched next to a man named Petey Lund who was dying, and she wasn't working on him.
She had two fingers on his wrist and her head tilted and she was listening to him, and I remember thinking, that's a hell of a bedside manner, and then Petey died, and she stood up and wrote something down and looked absolutely serene about it.