Chapter 22: Hammer Walks
Hammer finished rehab the way he'd done everything since the crash: slowly, out loud, and with an audience he pretended not to notice.
The clinic in Great Falls discharged him on a Tuesday with a folder of exercises, a cane he'd already named, and instructions he announced he intended to follow "in the spirit, if not the letter." Rita drove him home sitting sideways in the passenger seat so she could watch his leg the whole way, like it might try something. Dutch followed in the chase truck with the crutches in the bed, because Hammer had refused to ride with them in the cab. "A man's got to arrive," he said.
The clubhouse did its pretending that Saturday. Word went around in the way word goes around the Iron Covenant, which is to say instantly and with total deniability: Hammer was going to walk the length of the floor without the crutches, after the meeting, no big thing, nobody make it a thing. So of course forty people arranged themselves along the walls with beers they weren't drinking, studying the pool table, the dart board, the ceiling — anywhere but the big man standing at the far end of the room with his hands flexing at his sides.
Rita stood at the other end. She didn't call to him. She just waited, the way she must have waited through the whole long autumn of hospital chairs.
He walked. It wasn't pretty. His left leg swung a little wide, the way it would from then on, and halfway across his face did something complicated, and Spike Rinaldi found the jukebox suddenly fascinating. But Hammer Kovich crossed that floor on his own two feet and took his wife's hands at the end of it, and the room exhaled like a tire letting go, and then somebody — Dutch, obviously — yelled, "He walks like a man who's seen the bill!" and the whole place came apart laughing, because that was the sound the room had been saving up for months.
"Leg's always going to argue with stairs," Hammer told me later, easing into his chair. "Argues with weather, too. Fine. I argue back. It's a marriage now."
Then he nodded at Rita, and Rita went to the back and came out with a flat box, the kind patches and cuts come in, and set it on the table in front of me.
I need to explain about rockers. Club patches mean things I am not part of and don't pretend to be. But the Iron Covenant has a small curved rocker that just says FAMILY. They don't sell it. They don't hand it to girlfriends or cousins or people who show up twice. It goes to kin — the ones who bled into the family's life and stayed. Wives have them. Mothers have them. In sixty-one years, Hammer said, the club had given out eleven.
"Mine makes twelve," I said. My voice did something unreliable.
"Thirteen," Rita said. She opened a smaller box and took out a miniature of the same rocker, stitched small enough for a backpack strap. "Micah's is thirteen."
Micah was at the pool table pretending to be extremely busy being twelve, but he'd heard his name, and he came over with the careful sideways drift of a boy who doesn't want to look like he's running. Hammer held the little rocker out. "Goes on the backpack," he said. "Right on the strap."
"That's against school rules," Micah said, in the voice of a boy reading a treasure map. He was already threading it on. "Mrs. Pruitt says nothing on the straps except the school pin."
"Mrs. Pruitt," said Hammer, "is a fine woman who has never once been right about the important things." Micah wore it to school Monday, and Tuesday it was still there, and by Friday three other kids had started asking where a person got one, which is how you know a thing is priceless.
I keep mine in the drawer by the register at the store, not because I'm hiding it. Because some days the store is slow and the bill drawer is loud, and I open that drawer and look at it, and the arithmetic of my life comes out different. I am not a member of the Iron Covenant. I am something they had to invent a word small enough to stitch.
Later, in the parking lot, Hammer leaned on his cane and delivered his review. "Leg held," he said. "Room held better." Rita unlocked the truck and said the leg held because it was terrified of the exercises folder, and Hammer said the folder could come at him whenever it felt ready. I watched them bicker their way into the truck like people who are going to be fine, and Micah, beside me, touched the strap of his backpack where the little rocker sat, the way you check a pocket for keys. Already a habit. Already his.