Cheated On by the Outlaw Biker President

Prologue

Sol

The tarp strap has been ticking against the headache rack for nine miles and I have decided not to fix it, because stopping means getting out, and getting out means admitting there is a version of tonight where I turn around.

Twelve crates back there. Long ones, blanket-wrapped, banded in threes the way Hollis bands anything he wants counted twice.

I did not look under the blankets. I know what a gun crate weighs when you get a shoulder under it and I know what it sounds like when you set it down wrong, and I did neither of those things wrong, because I have been listening to men load this truck since I was old enough to carry beer out to them.

The dash clock says four eleven. My hands are at ten and two like a girl taking a test.

“Ticking,” I say to the strap. “I hear you.”

It ticks.

The 379 south of Ivanhoe is a road that stopped being maintained sometime around when the state decided nineteen hundred people was not enough people.

The seams come every forty feet and the truck takes each one in the springs and passes it up through the seat, and the gun under my thigh shifts a quarter inch every time, and every time I put my hand down and move it back like it is a cat that will not stay off the counter.

I passed the motel at three fifty. Twelve units, nine dark, one with the bathroom light on because Room 4 sleeps with it on and has since the summer his wife left.

My mother’s window was black. She goes down at eleven and she does not wake for engines because she raised a daughter in a parking lot full of them, and I could have stopped, and I could have stood at the office door and knocked, and I know exactly what she would have said because she has been saying it since I was fourteen.

You knew what they were when you started pouring.

I did. That is the part nobody wants to give me.

I was not carried into that clubhouse over anybody’s shoulder.

I walked in with a case of Rainier on my hip and I learned every rule they have before I learned to parallel park, and I chose it, and for eleven years I have kept the half of it that does not get voted on.

Rustling Springs comes up on the right, and I take my foot off the gas without deciding to.

The pumps are dark. The window over the register is dark.

Ada goes to bed at nine and gets up at five and sees every vehicle that passes in either direction, and tonight she is forty minutes from her alarm, and I roll past her at a speed that would embarrass a bicycle with my lights off and my heart in my ears.

Nothing moves in the glass.

I put the lights back on a hundred yards past and my hands are shaking, which is stupid, because that was the easy one. That was a sleeping woman.

The road bends left and starts to climb and the shoulders come in, and then the shoulders stop pretending to exist at all, and the rock stands up on both sides of me like something clearing its throat.

The Neck.

Twelve miles. One way through. There is no other road, there has never been another road, and every man in that club has said so at that table like it is scripture, because it is the only thing they own that God put there.

Whoever holds the Neck holds the corridor.

I have heard Roan say it in his sleep. Not the words. The rhythm of them, the way a man recites a thing he has stopped hearing.

“Alright,” I tell the truck.

The truck says nothing. The strap ticks.

I have a scanner mounted under the dash that Fritz wired in three winters ago because he did not like me driving the 379 alone, and I turn it up now, and there is dead air on the club channel and dead air on the sheriff’s and dead air on the county fire, which is the sound of a hundred thousand acres with nobody in it.

Four in the morning out here is not quiet.

Quiet is a thing that happens where there is something to be quiet against.

I keep it on anyway. I want to hear it the second it stops.

Priest’s voice comes up in me instead, in his kitchen, three days ago, with his hand around a coffee cup that had a cartoon dog on it.

Thursday, sweetheart. It sits in the north bay till Thursday and then it is somebody else’s problem.

He said it to comfort me. I want that on the record, whatever record there is out here.

He said it the way you say a thing to a woman you have known since she was in braces, to show her the shape of the trouble the men are in so she does not think the world is only her trouble.

He poured me more coffee. He put his hand over mine.

He has no idea he handed me a door.

That is the thing I have been turning over since Ivanhoe, and it is better than turning over the other thing.

Nobody in that club has ever once thought about what I know.

Not one of them. I have sat in every kitchen on this corridor.

I have counted out bail in a bondsman’s office at two in the morning while a man’s wife screamed into my shoulder.

I know which of them is behind on his mother’s care home and which of them has a daughter in Reno he does not talk about and which of them cannot read a court date without help.

And in eleven years, not one of them has ever looked at me across a room and thought, careful, she is listening.

They looked at me and thought, coffee.

The road tightens. The rock comes close enough on the right that I could put my knuckles out the window and lose them, and I do not, and I laugh at myself, and the laugh comes out with a crack down the middle of it that I do not like the sound of.

“No,” I say. “Not in here. You can do that in Utah.”

Six miles in, the canyon opens into the wide part where the old grader turnout is, where two vehicles can pass if both of them are polite, and I check the mirror for the ninth time and it is black, and then it is not.

White. All of it. The whole mirror.

They come up out of the dark behind me fast, no run-up, no growing dot on the road, which means they came out of the turnout, which means they were sitting.

Sitting and waiting and dark.

My foot wants the brake. It is halfway to the brake before I get my leg back, and I hold the pedal down where it was and I feel the truck take the next seam and the crates take it a half second later and the strap ticks.

They close.

Fifty feet. Twenty. Then they are on my bumper so close that the light stops being two lights and becomes one white thing filling the glass, and the mirror goes to a hot smear, and I cannot see the shape behind it.

I cannot see a rack. I cannot see a bar.

I cannot see whether it is one machine or two.

I can see that they are not passing.

There is nowhere to pass. That is what the Neck is.

That is what it has always been, and every man who has ever said the sentence about holding it has said it about somebody else, about the Saints, about a cartel, about the state of Nevada, and not one of them ever said it about the road doing it to one of their own.

The light comes off the mirror onto the ceiling of the cab and onto my hands and my hands are white on the wheel and I watch them stay there.

“You want it,” I say to the mirror, “you come and take it off me.”

They stay at my bumper. Steady. A car length would be manners. This is not manners. This is a man showing me he can be that close whenever he wants, and I know that move, I have watched that move done to other people from a barstool for eleven years.

The speedometer says fifty-one. The wall goes past on both sides.

Six miles left of this and then the Junction and then the interstate and then a state where nobody has ever heard the word Ashfall, and six miles is nine minutes at this speed, and I do the arithmetic twice because it is something to do with the part of me that is screaming.

The strap ticks.

The light does not fall back.

And I think about the bar room on Sunday.

Not what was on the table. Not that. Just the sound of thirty men deciding at the same moment to stop talking, which is not a sound, it is a hole where the sound was, and how I stood in it with a tray in my hands and understood before I understood anything else that every single one of them had known before me.

That is the part I am driving away from. Not him. Him I could have survived. I have survived him before.

My right hand comes off the wheel.

It goes down past my thigh, into the dark under the seat, past the strap of my bag and the cold flat of a tire iron I have never used for a tire, to the thing that has been under there since Fritz put it there and told me it was not a gift, it was maintenance.

I get two fingers on it.

Then three.

The white in the mirror comes up one more foot, close enough now that I can hear it under my own engine, and I bring my hand up out of the dark.