Chapter 7
Crash
Six days out.
We got the paperwork on a Thursday, and it cost us four thousand dollars and a promise about a stretch of county road, which is the cheapest anything has ever been in the history of this club, and that should have told us something immediately.
They didn't want money. They wanted it out of their hands. The man who handed over the tube had a face like somebody returning a dog that bit him.
"You've had it eleven months," Trick said.
"Yeah."
"Read it?"
"Tried," the man said, and did not elaborate, and got in his car.
Trick tried to stop him. Got a hand on the door.
"Eleven months," Trick said. "You spent eleven months getting it and four minutes giving it back. Why?"
The man looked up at him through the window glass.
"Do you know what it's like," he said, "to own a thing that's waiting?"
"Waiting for what?"
"For the twelfth," he said, and drove off, and we stood in a gravel lot outside a machine shop in Steele with a cardboard tube and absolutely no idea that he'd just told us the whole book.
We took it to the clubhouse and put it on the table in church, and Wolf called Wren, and Wren came in with her hair still wet and three reference books under her arm and told everyone to stop breathing on it.
It's not a contract.
That's the first thing. Everybody in this club has spent eighty years saying the arrangement, the deal, the bargain, and my whole life I pictured something with clauses.
It's a list.
One sheet. Handwritten. At the top, four words, and Wren read them out loud twice and then sat down on a bench like her legs had gone.
Called to the Hunt.
Then eleven names, in eleven different hands, signed one at a time by eleven men around a fire.
Halvard Kane. Otto Fauk — and yeah, Renny's great-grandfather, and no, nobody in this room knew that, and Renny made a noise like he'd been elbowed. Marsh. Wick. Prine. Six more.
And under the eleventh name, a twelfth line.
Ruled. Empty.
"They didn't sell anything," Wren said.
"Wren."
"They didn't sell anything, Wolf." She had both hands over her mouth. "Everybody's been reading this backwards for eighty years. Nobody bought their souls. There's no purchase language, there's no consideration, there's no exchange — this is an enlistment document. This is a muster roll."
"A what?"
"It's a sign-up sheet," Wren said. "Your grandfathers volunteered."
"Read the top again," Trick said.
"Called to the Hunt."
"That's not an offer."
"No," Wren said. "It's a heading. That's what's been killing me since I saw the photograph — there's no second party.
There's no 'the undersigned agree.' Look at it.
It's not addressed to anybody. It's a heading and a list, and the only thing a document like that has ever been in the entire history of paper is a roll. "
"Muster roll," Wolf said.
"Muster roll."
"So who's the officer?"
Wren looked up.
"That's the question, isn't it," she said.
"Somebody wrote the heading. Somebody ruled the twelfth line.
Whoever holds this list is a recruiter, and he's been eleven riders short of a full column for eighty years, and nobody in this room has ever asked why an army would leave a seat empty that long. "
The room did not take that well.
"For what?" Deke said. He was in a chair with his leg out, three days out of surgery, having discharged himself against the advice of everyone including a woman with a clipboard who I think genuinely feared him. "Volunteered for what?"
"The Wild Hunt is a real thing and it's a thing that recruits," Wren said.
"That's — okay. Okay. The folklore's consistent across four countries and I always read it as metaphor.
A host that rides. It takes the dead, sure, but the older versions aren't about death, they're about muster.
It's a standing army. It always needs riders.
And in 1948 eleven men who'd just come home from a war that didn't want them anymore signed up for another one. "
"And in return?"
"In return you exist," Wren said. "Look at this club. Eighty years, no charter's ever folded, presidents die but the club never breaks, and every single one of you has a story about walking away from something you shouldn't have—"
She stopped.
Everybody stopped.
Everybody in that room turned their head and looked at me, all at once, and I want you to understand that I had already gotten there about ninety seconds earlier and had been sitting very quietly hoping nobody else would.
"Eleven," Deke said.
"Deke—"
"Eleven, Ivar."
"I know."
"Eleven wrecks and eleven walk-aways and I have a laminated sheet—"
"Deke. I know."
I put my hands on the table because they were doing something.
"I'm not lucky," I said. "I've never been lucky. I've been held. Somebody's been keeping me off a list for six years because they've got a use for me and they want me in one piece when they collect."
Nobody said anything.
"And the twelfth line's empty," I said, "because they've been waiting for somebody to put a name in it."
"No," Wolf said.
"I didn't say I was going to—"
"No, Ivar."
"I'm reading the room, that's all."
"You're reading it the way you always read it," Wolf said, "which is toward the version where it's you," and the pale eye did that thing it does, and nobody argued, because he wasn't lying.
Ozzy Prine, who had been silent for an unprecedented eleven minutes, said, "So we're soldiers?"
"Ozzy—"
"No, I'm asking a real question for once in my life and everybody can be surprised later.
" He leaned on the back of a chair. "Because if it's a deal, we broke it and we're thieves.
But if it's a muster, then eleven guys volunteered and none of us did, and we've been drawing pay on an enlistment we never signed. "
The room went quiet again, and Wren looked at Ozzy Prine the way you'd look at a dog that had said something.
"That's — " she said. "Yes. That's exactly the legal problem. How did you get there in eleven minutes."
"I've been in trouble a lot," Ozzy said.
Sol came in twenty minutes later.
She came in fast, and she stopped in the doorway when she saw the sheet on the table, and every man in that room watched a woman look at a piece of paper like it had said her name out loud.
"You've seen it," I said.
"No." She didn't look away from it. "I've not seen it. Once. From a hundred yards, in 1948, in firelight."
Wren made a small sound.
"You were there," I said.
"I was on the ridge."
"You were there."
"Ivar—"
"How long have you known what that paper was?"
"I didn't. That's the—"
"How long have you known what I am on it?"
And that's where it went bad, and I want it written down honestly, because in the version people tell later I'm calm and she's cruel and neither of those is true.
I was not calm. I put a chair through a wall.
I said things about what she was and what she wasn't and one of them was you knew the date, you've known the date since June, you sat across from me in a truck stop eating a steak you don't need and you knew the date, and she stood there and took it with her hands at her sides like a woman standing in weather.
"Say something," I said.
"I'm not permitted."
"Don't give me the—"
"I have tried nine times," Sol said, and her voice cracked, which I had never heard, which stopped me cold.
"Nine. I have found the edge of the rule nine separate times in four weeks and it is not a policy, Ivar, it is a wall, and I have put my hands on it until they bled, metaphorically, because I don't bleed, because I'm not for this, and I have been trying since June to find a door and last night in a closed diner a woman in her pajamas showed me one and I came here to use it. "
The room was silent.
"Okay," I said.
"You're angry."
"I'm furious," I said. "That's not the same as being on the other side of the table from you and it never has been, and if you knew one damn thing about clubs you'd know that."
"Nine times," I said.
"Nine."
"What happens? When you try."
"Nothing happens. That's what's obscene about it.
" She wrapped her arms around herself, which I'd never seen her do.
"There's no thunder. There's no hand over my mouth.
The sentence simply isn't there. I stand in a room with a man I — " she stopped, and started again — "with you, and I go to say a true thing, and where the words should be there's a smoothness.
Like reaching into a drawer you've used all your life and finding the drawer was never there. "
"So you told me about a smith."
"I told you about a smith."
"That worked," I said.
"It didn't work, it was—"
"Sol. That worked." My voice came out wrong. "I've thought about that man every day since June."
Deke, from his chair, quietly: "That's actually beautiful."
"Deke, I swear—"
Doc Marrow spoke for the first time in an hour.
"I want to say something and then I want everyone to forget I said it."
"Doc."
"Eighty years." He had his hands flat on the table to keep them still.
"Eighty years of this club burying men young and telling itself that's the life.
Bikes and bad luck and the road. And I have signed — unofficially, illegally, in a feed store — I have signed off on eleven of those in my time here, and every single one of them I wrote down as an accident, because that's what it looked like. "
"It was what it looked like," Wolf said.
"It was recruitment," Doc said. "That's what I'm telling you. If that sheet says what she says it says, then I've been the man who files the paperwork on a draft, and I want that in the minutes, and then I want to never say it again."
Nobody said anything.
"Put it in the minutes," Wolf said.
Renny's phone went off.
That's how it happened. That's the whole hinge of it. A prospect's phone buzzing on a table in the middle of the worst fight of my life.
Except Renny wasn't there.
Renny had gone out to get his mother's car back from the shop in Sterling at four o'clock, which I knew, because I'd told him to, because I wanted him out of the building while we opened the tube.
His phone was on the table because he'd left it charging.
And it rang, and Wolf picked it up, and a voice that wasn't Renny's said: We'd like the sheet back. Bring it Sunday. We'll tell you where.
Sunday.
Six days out.
Here's what a room full of men does when somebody takes a nineteen-year-old.
It gets loud, then it gets organized, then it gets loud again, and somewhere in the middle of that Wolf started drawing on the whiteboard and Trick started making calls to men in Fargo who owe him and Deke stood up on a hip that shouldn't have held him and said, "I'm going," and nobody had the heart or the physical capacity to stop him.
Here's what the plan was, for the record, since I've been accused of not having one.
Sunday, six a.m. Trick makes the call and talks, because Trick could talk a fence post into a career change.
Wolf comes in from the west with four men on the section road.
Deke sits in a truck at the mouth of the pit with a shotgun he will not fire, because Deke's presence is a weapon that has never required ammunition.
And me, out front, alone, hands empty, being the thing they're looking at.
Wolf hated it.
"You're the bait."
"I'm the thing they want to hurt," I said. "That's not bait, that's a job description, and I've had it nine years."
"Ivar—"
"They want the sheet and they want somebody to blame for the clinic. If I'm standing in the open, nobody's looking at the section road, and nobody's looking at a nineteen-year-old in a shed."
Wolf looked at the whiteboard for a long time.
"You've been planning this since Thursday."
"Since June," I said, and he didn't answer, and that was the end of the meeting.
And I went out to the lot.
Sol followed me. Of course she did.
"Don't," she said.
"Not tonight. Sunday. There's a plan. There's a whiteboard." I was checking my saddlebag. My hands were steady, which is the part of me I trust least. "But I'm going first and I'm going alone."
"Because that's what you are."
"Because that's what I am," I said. "Yeah."
"You know that's what they want."
"I know."
"You know that road is where it happens."
"I've known since the hangar," I said. "You told me in the first thirty seconds. You've never lied to me once, Sol, it's honestly been a real problem."
She stood in the gravel in the security light and she didn't reach for me, and I'll go to my grave grateful for that, because if she'd reached for me I'd have stayed.
"Renny's on that sheet," I said. "His great-grandfather signed it. He didn't know. Nineteen years old and he's third generation on a list he's never seen and he found out in a room full of men who were already yelling."
"Ivar—"
"You know what he said after? After all of it, after the phone, after everybody started planning?" I laughed, and it came out ugly. "He said, Does this mean I'm in?"
Sol closed her eyes.
"Yeah," I said. "That's the club. That's what we build here. Kid finds out his blood's been mortgaged since 1948 and his first question is whether it counts as belonging."
"There's a thing I can do," she said. "I don't know if it works."
"Does it cost you?"
"Everything I have."
"Then don't."
"That's not your—"
"Sol." I got on the bike. "In six years I have asked the world for exactly one thing and I'm using it now. Don't."
I have watched her face a hundred times since, in memory, in that bad orange light.
She said, "All right."
Which was the first and only lie she ever told me, and she couldn't have told it, and I've had four months to think about what it means that she managed it anyway.
Then she stepped back, and let me go.
She stood in that lot and let me ride out toward the thing that was going to kill me, and for one night — one single night in a thousand years — Solveig Aune was exactly what she was built to be.
I want that in the record too.
Because I know what it cost her, and I know she'd say it cost nothing, and I know that in the whole ugly arithmetic of the last eight weeks, that was the only time either of us did the right thing on purpose.