Chapter 3
Crash
Six weeks out, though I didn't know it was six weeks out, which in hindsight is the only reason those were good weeks.
Here's how you court a woman if you're me: badly, in public places, at inconvenient hours, over food neither of you eats.
"She anticipated me," she said.
"That's a waitress."
"It's presumptuous."
"It's a waitress, Sol."
"I've been coming here for four years and she's never done it before."
"You've been coming here four years?"
"Twelve," she said, and drank her tea, and did not elaborate, and I let it go, because I'd learned by then that if you let one go she'd hand you two later.
That's the thing about talking to her. Every conversation was a normal conversation with one degree of wrong in it, and the wrong was never in the same place twice.
I asked her once whether she owned or rented.
"Neither."
"So you live—"
"I have a room. There's a house attached to it. I don't know who owns the house."
"You don't know who—"
"It's never come up."
"Sol, that's a mortgage. Somebody has a mortgage."
"That's the word," she said, snapping her fingers, actually pleased. "That's the money one. That's the one where the bank owns your house but you're the one who has to fix the roof."
"That's — yeah. Broadly."
"It's a beautiful racket," she said, with real admiration. "I've watched a lot of gods take a lot of tithes and none of them thought of amortization."
I said, "You're doing a bit."
"I am not doing a bit."
"You're doing a bit where you're from somewhere else, and it's very committed, and I want to say I respect it."
"What would the somewhere be?"
"That's the problem," I said. "I've had six weeks on it and I've got nothing. Every country I pick, you've got a wrong fact about it."
"Name one."
"Norway."
"Which one," she said immediately, and then caught herself, and drank her tea, and I sat there with a fork halfway up thinking which one.
Another day it was the church rummage sale in Havregard, which I go to because Deke goes to it, and Deke goes to it because he's been buying the same woman's bundt pans out from under her since 2011 in a rivalry neither of them has ever acknowledged out loud.
Sol picked up a hymnal.
"This is the wrong order," she said.
"It's a hymnal."
"They've moved the harvest ones." She turned pages, frowning. "You can't put the harvest ones after the funerals, the whole point is that they come after the—"
"Sol."
"It's a small thing," she said. "I'm being small about it."
"You're being small about the running order of a Lutheran hymnal."
"Yes."
"That's the most North Dakota thing anyone's ever done," I said, "and you told me last week you'd never been to church."
She put the hymnal down very carefully, like it had gotten hot.
"I said I'd never been to one," she said. "I've been in a lot of them."
And I let it go, and she handed me two later, like she always did.
Another time we were driving out past the old rail crossing and she said, "Take the bridge," and I said, "What bridge," and she pointed, and there is no bridge. There's a berm and a county road and a sign about culverts.
She looked at the berm for a while.
"They took it out," she said, in a voice that was not quite a question.
"Before my time."
"In '61," she said.
"How do you—"
"I'd like to go back now," she said, and that was the whole of it, and I turned the truck around, and neither of us said anything for eleven miles, and then she said, "You're not going to ask," and I said, "You're not going to answer," and she said, "That's fair," and put her boots on my dash, which she'd never done before and did every time after.
I'm not stupid. I want that clear too.
I ran it. Every scenario I could build. Witness protection. A twin. A very committed liar with a research habit. Some kind of long con on the club, which is not a paranoid thought in a club that got conned last year by a woman who's now married to our road captain and does our books.
None of them fit, because none of them explained why she looked at me like a clock.
I saw her work once. Really work.
Two-car outside Driscoll, a Friday. I got there because I'd been eight miles out, and by the time I arrived she was on her knees in glass with both hands inside a man's shoulder.
Different woman entirely.
I've seen people go competent under pressure.
This wasn't competent. This was fluent. She was talking the whole time in that flat calm voice — you're going to feel me push, that's fine, keep talking to me about the dog — and the man was telling her about a dog, and there was a deputy holding a light who looked like he wanted to applaud.
He lived. I checked. He's got a limp now and a dog.
And when it was over she stood up in the ditch and stripped her gloves and looked at the wreck for four seconds too long, and I understood that she was checking something in the second car, the one that had already been covered up, and that whatever she was checking was not medical.
She caught me watching.
"Don't," she said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You're doing your inventory face."
"You just saved that man's arm."
"I did nothing of the kind," Sol said. "I held two things together. The arm did the rest. That's not a modesty, that's anatomy."
"Sol—"
"It's not the same," she said, and got in her rig, and that's when I knew she had two jobs, and that the one with the gloves was the one she'd made up.
Meanwhile the club had a problem.
Church, a Tuesday. Wolf at the head, Trick at his right with his boots on the table until Wolf looked at them, Deke by the door because he doesn't like his back to it, Doc Marrow half asleep and fully upright, which is a skill.
"Ash Company's got new money," Wolf said.
"Ash Company's got new management," Trick said. "That's different and it's worse. Money's just money. Somebody bought the shell and kept the name because the name still scares people in three counties."
"Who bought it?"
"That's the fun part." Trick spun a coaster. "Nobody. It's a holding company out of Fargo owned by a holding company out of Delaware owned by a name that doesn't exist. I looked. I'm good at looking. There's a floor to how deep a real person can bury a thing and this goes past it."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning either it's a very expensive lawyer," Trick said, "or it's not a person."
Nobody laughed. Two years ago somebody would have laughed.
"They've got the '48 paperwork," Wolf said.
The room changed temperature.
"Say that again," Deke said.
"Bram's copy. The one that was in the safe at the old roadhouse.
It wasn't in the safe. It hasn't been in the safe since—" Wolf stopped.
"Since before Bram. We don't know how long.
Wren's been through the county records for nine months and there's a chain of custody that ends in 1987 with a storage unit outside Jamestown that got auctioned. "
"Auctioned," Trick said. "Somebody bought our founding document at a storage auction."
"Somebody bought a box," Wolf said. "Somebody with new money spent eleven months finding out what was in it, and now they want to trade it."
"For what?"
"They haven't said. That's what worries me."
Wren came in at that point with a legal pad and no shoes, which is a thing she does when she's been reading, and Wolf's face changed by about four percent, which for him is a parade.
"Say the storage unit thing again," she said.
"Jamestown. 1987. Auctioned."
"That's wrong."
"Wren—"
"No, listen, that's wrong, and I've been trying to say it for a week and everybody keeps handing me pie instead of listening.
" She dropped the pad on the table. "A storage unit in Jamestown that auctioned in 1987 would have been paid up through 1986.
Somebody was paying rent on that box for thirty-nine years and then stopped.
That's not a lost item. That's a deposit.
Somebody parked it and then somebody else died and the payments stopped. "
The table sat with that.
"Who parked it?" Deke said.
"That's my whole life now," said Wren. "Thank you for asking.
I've got a name from a 1953 receipt and it's a name that also appears in a county death record from 1949, which means either it's two people or somebody's been signing paperwork four years after his own funeral, and I want everybody to note that I said that out loud in a room and nobody laughed. "
"Nobody's laughed at anything in here since 2024," Trick said.
He looked down the table at me and I already knew, and I nodded before he asked, because that's the job.
"Take two," Wolf said. "Get it. Don't hurt anybody you don't have to."
"Understood."
"Ivar." The pale eye. "Don't hurt anybody you don't have to."
"I heard you the first time."
"You heard me. I want to know you understood me, because you've been walking around for three weeks like a man who's decided something and hasn't told anybody what."
The table went quiet in a way I did not enjoy.
"I'm fine," I said.
Deke, from the door, not looking up: "He's been eating."
"Deke."
"He's been eating regular," Deke said. "Three weeks. Like a person. He had a salad."
"It came with the sandwich."
"He ate the salad."
"I'm going to kill you with your own cane."
"He's in love," Deke told the table, "and it's making him healthy, and I don't like it."
I want to say the meeting recovered from that. It did not.
Nadia caught me in the hallway on my way out of church.
"You're doing the pie place."
"How do you—"
"Deke has a scanner, a laminator, and no hobbies, and now he's got a woman to think about, and I want you to understand that this club has not had a new person to think about since I turned up and it did not go well for me either." She fell in beside me. "Two things."
"Nadia."
"Two things and then I'm done." She held up a finger.
"One. She's not what she says she is. I know because I wasn't either, and there's a way of answering questions where you never technically say a false sentence, and she does it in every single conversation, and I have not heard anyone do it that well since I looked in a mirror. "
"And two?"
"Two, I don't care," Nadia said. "Neither should you. I married a liar and it's the best decision I ever made. The question's never what she's hiding. The question's what it costs her to hide it, and honey, whatever it is, she's paying full freight."
Renny cornered me in the lot after.
"I'm riding with you."
"No."
"You're taking two. Take me as the third."
"There's no third."
"There's always a third, you always take a third, you took Wick to the thing in Minot—"
"Wick's patched."
"So it's about the patch."
"It's about you being nineteen," I said, "and it's about me being the guy who has to explain it to your mother, who I've met, who scares me."
He got that look. The one I've been failing to talk him out of for four months.
"You know what nobody ever says out loud?" Renny said. "You take everybody's worst job so nobody else has to have it, and then you act like it's a personality trait instead of a shift somebody could relieve you from."
I stood there in the gravel with my keys in my hand.
"That's a good line," I said.
"I've been working on it."
"How long?"
"Two weeks." He scuffed his boot. "I had a better ending but I got nervous."
"You want to know why it's you?" I said. "It's not because you're weak. You're not. It's because I've watched you at three things now and every single time you looked at me before you moved."
"That's called respect."
"It's called waiting for permission to be somebody's worst day," I said. "And the day comes when I'm not there to give it, and you'll give it to yourself, and it'll be easier the second time and easy the fourth, and there's no bottom to that stairwell, Renny. I've been down it. There's no bottom."
He stood there in the gravel.
"So who does it?" he said. "If not me. Somebody has to."
"Somebody who doesn't want it."
"Nobody wants it."
"Wick doesn't want it," I said. "Wick would hate every minute. That's the qualification. You've got it backwards because everybody in every movie has it backwards."
"Go inside, Renny."
He went inside. I want to be clear that he went inside, because it establishes that I told him to, which will matter later, and which will not help.
Here's the honest part.
I'm not afraid of dying. That's not toughness, it's just accounting — I've done the math on my life about a hundred times and the number comes out the same and it comes out early, and I made peace with that in my twenties in a parking lot in Sioux Falls and I've never had to renegotiate.
What scares me is the handover.
Somebody's got to be Sergeant-at-Arms. Somebody's got to be the man who decides how much ugly happens. And if I go without picking, the club picks, and the club will pick whoever's most willing, and whoever's most willing is always the wrong man.
Renny's willing.
That's what I lie awake about. Not the wreck. The nineteen-year-old with a good line and a bad idea about what I am.
I asked Sol to dinner that night and I did it so badly that I've had to be told twice by two different people that it technically happened.
We were on the shoulder of 200 at eleven at night.
Somebody's cattle were out. That's it, that's the emergency, that was the call — cattle on the highway, and she'd come out because she comes out to everything on that road, and I'd come out because I'd heard it on the scanner and I'm a grown man with a problem.
So there we were, leaning on a fender, watching four cows consider a county road.
"That one's thinking about it," she said.
"He's not thinking. Look at him. There's nothing happening in there."
"He's thinking about it. He's going to go left."
The cow went left.
"Okay," I said.
"I've watched a great many cows."
"How many?"
"All of them," Sol said.
The lights went by, red and blue, the deputy doing his slow patient herding, and the night was that specific summer black that only happens out here where there's nothing to interrupt it.
And I said: "There's a place off 200 that does a pie."
"I know it."
"They do a pie."
"You've said."
"So." I looked at the cows. "That's — I'm asking you to it. That's what this is. I've been building to it for about four minutes and I want to be honest, this is the good version, I had a worse one."
Sol didn't say anything for long enough that I turned my head.
She had her hands in her jacket pockets and she was looking at me the way she does, the clock way, except something in it had come apart at one corner.
"That's a terrible idea," she said.
"Yeah."
"For reasons I can't tell you."
"Yeah, I picked that up."
"It's not a small thing, Ivar. It isn't a pie."
"I know."
"You don't."
"No," I agreed. "But I know it's not a pie."
The last cow went off the road into the ditch and stood there in the grass looking pleased with itself.
"Thursday," Sol said.