Chapter 2 #2
Because the honest answer was: I wanted somebody to point at.
That's the truth and it's not flattering.
Thirty-one people, or twenty-four-year-old Teodor who wouldn't eat eggs because of the texture — my brain does one thing with that, which is start looking for a throat.
I'm not built with a second option. Nobody ever installed one.
Bishop can sit with a problem for three weeks and turn it over like a stone; Deacon can talk a man out of his own house; Judah can hold a room together with nothing but a look and a bad joke about his knees.
Me, I show up when the shape of the answer is stop him.
And Route 9 doesn't have a throat.
"I want to know what to hit," I said.
"And if there's nothing to hit?"
"Then I'm the wrong guy on the wrong road."
Emmett nodded slowly, like I'd said something reasonable, which was generous of him.
"You know what your trouble is," he said.
"I'd love to hear it, I've got nothing on till dark."
"You think being the hammer's a job." He wiped his hands.
"It's not. It's a tool in a drawer. Nobody's the hammer.
Bishop pulls you out when there's a nail and puts you back when there isn't, and the reason you're standing in my bay at eleven in the morning radiating is that there's no nail, and you've never in twenty years figured out what to do with yourself in the drawer. "
"That's very poetic for a man with a sandwich."
"It's ten forty," Emmett said. "That's not a sandwich, that's breakfast, and don't change the subject."
"There's no subject."
"There's a subject. The subject is a twenty-four-year-old kid who isn't anywhere and a man who'd rather stand alone on a road at two in the morning than ask anybody for help, and I've watched you do the second one about nine times and it's never once produced the first."
I stood there.
"That's the meanest thing you've ever said to me."
"I've been saving it," Emmett said.
"Take somebody," he said.
"Bishop wants it quiet."
"Take somebody anyway. Take the woman with the opinions."
"She's a civilian."
"She's a civilian who runs the phones for every wreck on that stretch," Emmett said, "which makes her the only person in this county who's been listening to that road for two years straight.
Meanwhile you've got a flashlight and a bad attitude.
" He picked the wrench back up. "But sure.
Do it alone. That's worked great so far. What are we at, thirty-one?"
"Thirty-two."
"Thirty-two," he said, and went back under the Softail.
I stood there in his bay another minute, radiating.
"Hey, Emmett."
"Mm."
"If a road wanted somebody," I said, "how'd it pick?"
The wrench turned twice.
"Roads don't want," he said. "People want. Roads just hold onto whatever got left on 'em."
I drove out at seven that evening in a borrowed truck, because my bike was still sitting in a lot behind a chain-link gate, and I want it on the record that I had every intention of going straight to Mile 61.
I made it as far as the turn.
The office had one light on. Same cinderblock. Same poster about hydraulic safety. And through the window I could see the top of a dark head bent over a desk and a headset and a hand writing something on a legal pad.
I sat in the truck with the engine running for a good forty seconds, which is a long time for me.
Emmett's voice, in my head, unbearable: take the woman with the opinions.
"No," I said out loud, to nobody, and put it in gear, and drove north.
Nine miles up, my headlights caught a shape on the shoulder that hadn't been there Tuesday.
I slowed. It was a cross. Two pieces of fence pine wired together, maybe eighteen inches tall, hammered into the gravel at an angle, with a bundle of grocery-store carnations at the base gone brown and papery in the heat.
There was no name on it.
I pulled over and got out and crouched down and looked at it for a while, engine ticking behind me, sky going that ugly bruised orange it does out here right before it commits.
There were more.
Once I knew what I was looking for, I could see them going up the shoulder ahead of me in the last of the light — one, then another a half mile on, then two close together, little pale sticks leaning at the edge of the asphalt like the world's saddest fence posts.
Somebody had been putting them up. Somebody had been doing it for years.
I got back in the truck and drove them slow with the window down, counting out loud like a fool.
Some were older than others. That's the thing that got me. The one at 61 had gone silver-gray and the wire had rusted through and been replaced with new wire, which meant somebody had come back. Two miles on there was one so new the pine was still yellow at the cut.
Whoever was doing it hadn't done it all at once and hadn't done it in a fit. They'd been coming out here for years, one at a time, with a hammer, and then coming back to fix the ones the weather got.
That's not grief. Grief is a bad week and a lot of flowers.
That's maintenance.
I counted eleven before it got too dark to count.
The mile marker beside me said 61.
And behind me, way back down the road, out past where the headlights quit, an engine started idling and did not get any louder.
I stood up slow.
I did not turn around.
"All right," I said. "You want to do this the hard way."
The idling stopped.
Not faded. Quit. Needle off the record.
I got back in the truck, and my hands were steady, because my hands are always steady, that's the one thing I've got. And I sat there in the dark at Mile 61 for a long, long time.
Then I turned around, and drove nine miles back south, and pulled into a gravel lot in front of a cinderblock office with one light on, and got out, and knocked on the glass.
She looked up.
She didn't look surprised either. Might be the only thing we had in common at that point.
She came around the counter and opened the door with her arms crossed against the cold, and she looked at my chin, and then, deliberately, at my face.
"You said no," she said.
"I did."
"What changed?"
"There's crosses on the shoulder," I said. "Somebody's been putting up crosses. Eleven that I could see and I ran out of light."
Sunday Marsh stood in the doorway of that office with the wind pulling at her coat, and something went across her face that I didn't have a name for yet.
"Thirty-one," she said.
"What?"
"There's thirty-one," she said. "I'd know. I put them there."