Page 4 of Iron and Ivory

I ease my bike into my spot, lined up with all the others, and kill the engine. The engine ticks and pops as it cools and then goes quiet and that quiet just sits there, settlin' down over everything like a tarp over a body.

Crickets.

An owl somewhere off past the fence line, low and patient.

A coyote answerin' nothin', just callin' into the dark 'cause that's what it does, that's what it knows.

Lonely things.

All of 'em scrapin' out a life in this hard, dry, forgotten stretch of eastern Montana dirt. Like they was put here specifically to remind you what persistence looks like when it's got nowhere else to go.

I swing my leg over slow, like if I move too fast something's gonna snap. My boots hit the dirt and I just stand there a second.

I let out a breath. Long. Worn down to the bone kind of breath, the kind that don't actually take the weight off, just reminds you the weight is still there.

Then I turn and face it.

The clubhouse door is heavy when I push through it. The air hits me first—cigarette smoke, and gun oil, and whiskey that somebody already opened and somebody else already drank too much of.

The smell of men who've been sittin' still too long, holdin' on to somethin' they're not sure they can keep.

They heard me come in. Course they did. Heard the bike all the way down the fuckin' road. Heard my boots on the porch boards, heard every last second of my return because that's what they've been doin'—listenin' for it.

And now here I am, and every single one of 'em is starin'.

A couple dozen men. Blurry-eyed and hard-jawed, outlaws every one of 'em, and they're all still holdin' weapons like they forgot they're inside now, like the threat followed us back through the door and is standin' somewhere in the corners of the room they haven't checked yet.

Maybe it is.

Shell-shocked is the word for it. All of 'em wearin' this mornin' on their faces like a brand that ain't finished coolin'.

What we did at church.

What I did.

And they came along for it. They came with me, every last one, and now they're standin' in the wreckage of that choice, lookin' at me like maybe I've got somethin' to say that'll make sense of it.

I don't.

I can feel their expectations like a hand pressin' down on the back of my neck. Their questions hangin' in the air like smoke that won't clear, heavy and patient, waitin' for me to breathe it in and choke on it or breathe it out and make it mean somethin'.

Half of 'em don't even live here—just rode in for the vote, just answered the call and showed up and did what brothers do—and now they're stuck. Stuck in this room, stuck in the wreckage of this choice just like the rest of us.

I don't look at any of those guys, I look at Diesel. Just Diesel. Because Diesel's the only man in this room who won't ask me somethin' I can't answer, the only man who knows how to stand in the middle of all this silence and not drown in it.

"Anything?"

He shakes his head. Slow. Deliberate. "Been quiet as fuck, Demon. Not even a phone call."

Quiet. He says it like that's a thing to report. Like quiet is neutral. But quiet out here on a day like this isn't neutral at all.

It's the messy fuckin' middle of nothin' and all we want is to see the other side of this.

Diesel wants to say more. He wants to ask if that's weird, if the silence means somethin' specific, if this is a bad sign, or a good sign or just the shape of the world right now before it rearranges itself into somethin' worse.

He wants me to reach into whatever dark place I keep my certainties and pull one out and hand it to him. Tell him somethin' he doesn't already know. Give him a direction to point all that readiness he's got coiled up in his chest.

Trouble is, he knows way more about this shit than I do.