Chapter 3: The Sound in the Ditch
A horn. Not a good horn โ a dying one, the long blare a battery makes when it is giving up, two seconds on and fading, then again, like something trying to stay awake. Under the wind it should have been nothing. It was almost nothing. But I have worked eleven months of night-adjacent shifts in a diner full of truckers, and a horn in a white-out is a sentence with a person in it, so I stopped and listened until it came again.
Headlight, too, once I was looking. Off the road to my right, down in the highway ditch past the culvert โ one headlight burning sideways into the snow, tilted wrong, throwing its light up into the falling white like a searchlight on its side. Mile marker 114. I know that stretch of ditch: it is deep, it is steep, and in a blizzard it is the exact definition of a place nobody would find you until the thaw.
I should say what I thought, because I thought it clearly: *Not my problem. Two hundred yards. Foam pad. Sandwiches.*
My conscience beat me anyway. It usually does; it just files the paperwork slowly.
I went down the ditch on my backside mostly, sliding on the drifted snow with my coat bagged up around the sandwiches, and the light got stronger and the shape resolved: a motorcycle, a big one, chrome and black, lying on its side in four feet of drifted ditch with its front wheel cocked up the bank โ and under the downhill side of it, a man.
He was big the way furniture is big. Broad, gray-bearded, leather everything, half-buried in the snow the storm had already packed around him, and the bike was across his legs with its weight settled in like it intended to stay. His face was the color of skim milk. One arm was free. He had been using it to reach the horn, in bursts, on a schedule โ conserving the battery, I understood at once, because that is what I would have done.
His eyes opened when my shadow โ what passed for a shadow in that white dark โ crossed the headlight.
"Tell me you're not a hallucination, kid," he said. His voice was gravel under a door. "Hallucinations don't wear diner shoes."
"You know my shoes?"
"I know everybody's shoes. It's a pastor skill." He tried to grin and it turned into something else and he rode it out with his eyes shut, breathing through his teeth. "Bike's on my leg. Leg's broke, I figure. Ribs ain't thrilled either. You got a phone?"
"Mine's dead. Since Tuesday."
"Course it is." He said it without surprise, the way you note weather. "Mine's in the saddlebag. Left side. Under โ " he gestured with the free arm and stopped, "โ under the part of the motorcycle that's on me. There's an irony in that I'm too cold to appreciate."
"You got a name besides kid?" he asked, somewhere in there, while I was digging snow out from under the saddlebag side.
"Later," I said. "Names are for the warm part. Wiggle your fingers for me. The free hand. Can you feel them?"
"Feel 'em. Wish I couldn't." His teeth were chattering hard enough to chop the words. "Concussion protocol, that's what this is. Keep me talking."
"Then talk. Tell me what a man your size was doing out in this on two wheels."
"Riding home," he said, with enormous dignity for a man flat on his back in a ditch. "Like an idiot. Ask me anything except whether I'm cold."
I got down in the snow beside the bike and put my shoulder to it, out of optimism, and it did not move one inch, and he watched me do it with the expression of a man being polite about a child's magic trick.
"Name's Raymond Kovich," he said. "The world calls me Hammer. Don't laugh."
"I'm not laughing."
"You're thinking about it."
"I'm thinking about your leg." I dug snow out from around the saddlebag with my gloves until my fingers found the latch. "I'm Wren."
"Wren," he repeated, like he was filing it somewhere important, and for a second โ just a second โ something went across his face that was not pain and not cold. Then the wind took the moment apart. "Well, Wren. No pressure. But I have been composing my obituary down here, and it is coming out short."
The saddlebag latch gave. Inside: a rolled tarp, a tool roll, a small jack, and a phone with thirty-one percent battery and no signal bars at all, which he looked at the way I look at my envelope in the tire well โ as a fact, not a comfort.
"Keep it warm," he said. "Batteries lie when they're cold. Inside your coat. And Wren โ " The grin again, thinner. "If you're a hallucination, you're the best-dressed one I've had. Snow's getting in your shoes."