Chapter 5
Sunday
Here's a thing I didn't expect about riding on the back of a motorcycle: you can't see anyone's face. Not the driver's, not the world's. It's the safest place I've ever been and it took me thirty years to find it.
"You're grinning," Rafferty said at the gas station.
"I'm not."
"You've been grinning since Delmar. I can feel it through my back."
"That's not a thing."
"It's absolutely a thing," he said. "It's a documented phenomenon."
We went out at eleven, because everything happens between eleven and four, and we went northbound, because everything happens northbound, and by the time we hit Mile 61 my hands had gone quiet on his ribs and my grin had gone somewhere else entirely.
The plan was four passes. That was Bishop's number.
Ride the thirteen, turn around at 74, come back down the southbound side where nothing ever happens, turn again, go north.
Four times. Judah in a truck at the south end, two prospects and Marlowe at the north end with orders to stay out of it unless somebody said the word.
The word was carnation. Marlowe picked it. She said if she had to sit in a truck all night she was at least going to get one laugh out of it, and she was right, and it did the job.
Before we went, Judah made everybody check in on the radio in order, and when he got to me he said, "Dispatch," and I said, "Don't," and he said, "Dispatch, you are dispatch, this is the greatest day of my professional life," and Bishop said, "Judah," and Judah said, "Copy," in the voice of a man who has won.
Then Rafferty handed me a helmet and said, "Rules."
"There's rules?"
"Three. One: if you need to stop, squeeze twice, don't try to talk, I won't hear you. Two: if you feel it starting, squeeze three times and I'll have us off the road in nine seconds, and I will not ask you afterward whether it was a false alarm, because there's no such thing."
"What's three?"
"Three is that if I go down, you let go of me," he said. "Don't hold on. Everybody holds on. Let go and go loose and let the road have you, because the road's a lot cheaper than the bike."
"That's an appalling thing to say to a person."
"It's the only useful thing anybody ever told me," Rafferty said, "and I've been meaning to pass it on."
Pass one.
Nothing.
That's not fair. Thirteen miles of road at eleven-forty at night is not nothing.
It's black on both sides all the way to a horizon you can only find because the stars stop, and the headlight lays down about ninety feet of world at a time, and the crosses go by on the shoulder — mine, my handwriting on the little ones where I'd written a date and no name because I never had a name — one, then another, then two close together.
At Mile 74 he pulled off and we sat with the engine ticking.
"Anything?"
"No."
"Not even a—"
"Rafferty, if I get anything you will know," I said. "I don't have a poker face, I have an absence-of-face."
"That's a bumper sticker."
"It's a tragedy."
"It's a bumper sticker on a tragedy," he said, and turned us around.
Pass two.
It took longer.
There's a thing I noticed on pass two that I didn't have words for until much later, so I'm going to give it to you the way I got it, which is badly.
The crosses were in the wrong order.
Not wrong — out of order. I know that road the way you know a song. Going north it's Renata at 63.8, then the pair at 64.1 and 64.2, then a long empty stretch, then Aurelio at 70.1. I have hammered every one of those into the ground with my own hands and I could walk it blind.
On pass two I counted four crosses between 63 and 64 and there have never been four crosses between 63 and 64.
I turned my head to look back at them and there were two.
"Rafferty."
He couldn't hear me. That's the design of a motorcycle.
So I sat there at sixty-five miles an hour with my mouth against the back of a man's jacket and did the only thing available to me, which was start counting them out loud to myself, and I got to nineteen before the last one went by, and there are thirty-one.
I want to be careful here because this is where I stop being a reliable narrator, and I know it, and I'm telling you anyway.
Thirteen miles at sixty-five is twelve minutes. I know that. I've dispatched on that road for two years and I could do the math in my sleep. Pass one was twelve minutes and change.
Pass two was nineteen.
I know because I have a watch and I looked at it, and I looked at it again at Mile 74, and then I sat on the back of a stopped motorcycle doing arithmetic that wouldn't come out.
"Nineteen," I said.
"Traffic."
"There is no traffic. There has never been traffic. That's the entire personality of this road."
Rafferty checked his own watch and didn't say anything for a second.
"Huh," he said.
"Don't do huh. Emmett does huh. It's contagious and I don't like it."
"Nineteen minutes," he said. "Okay. Again."
"Wait." I got the radio out of my pocket. "Judah."
"Go for Judah."
"What time did we pass you northbound?"
"Uh." A pause with paper in it. "Eleven fifty-one."
"And what time is it now?"
"Twelve twenty-two."
"Judah, how long is thirteen miles."
"Twelve minutes," Judah said. "Thirteen if you're a coward."
"We just did it in nineteen."
The radio hissed for a while.
"Say again?"
"Nineteen minutes, Judah, and we didn't stop and we didn't slow."
Another pause.
"Marlowe," Judah said, "you getting this at the north end?"
And Marlowe's voice came back, flat and small and about eleven miles away: "I've been sitting here for half an hour watching a road that I can see all the way down, and I want somebody to explain to me why I never once saw a headlight coming."
Nobody had anything for that.
"Again," Rafferty said.
Pass three took twenty-six.
And on pass three, they started.
It came in the way weather comes in — not one thing, just a change in the pressure of the air, and then the first one arrived while I was looking at nothing at all, which is the part I still can't explain, because I have to look at a face, that's the rule, that has always been the rule.
There wasn't a face. There was a windshield.
A man in his fifties in a Buick, going north, with the radio up, and his hands came off the wheel and went up in front of him like he was fending off something coming through the glass, and then the front end went down into the ditch at seventy and everything after that happened in a way I'm not going to write down.
I made a sound.
"Sunday?"
Then a woman in a hatchback with a dog crate strapped in the back, and the dog was fine, the dog was fine afterward for eleven hours until someone came, and I want you to know that I have that. I have to carry the dog.
"Sunday. Sunday."
Then a kid on a dirt bike who shouldn't have been on the highway at all.
Then a man in a work truck with a lunch pail on the seat and a phone in his hand mid-sentence with somebody named Ro.
Then a woman my age with her seat pushed way up because she was short, like me, and I saw her fix her mirror and then never touch anything again.
They came faster. They started coming on top of each other, three and four at once, a stack of windshields, a stack of hands leaving wheels, and the road kept going and the road kept getting longer, and somewhere in the middle of it I realized I could see one that hadn't happened yet and I couldn't tell which one it was.
And then, right at the bottom of the stack, underneath all of it, in an old sedan with a cracked dash and a bench seat:
My aunt.
Reaching over to turn down the radio.
I think I tried to get off the bike.
I don't know that for a fact. I know that I came back to the world lying on the gravel shoulder at Mile 68 with my head on somebody's rolled-up jacket and my hands shaking so badly they were making a noise against the ground, and Rafferty Doyle sitting cross-legged next to me — not touching me, not holding me down, just sitting there — talking.
About absolutely nothing.
"—so the thing about a Panhead," he was saying, "and I want to be clear I'm not a purist, is that everybody who owns one becomes insufferable in about four months. It's chemical. Emmett's got a chart."
I made a noise.
"There she is. Don't move, you're fine, you're on the ground, that's the whole plan. Where was I."
"...chart," I said.
"Chart, right. So Delgado buys this Panhead off a guy in Winnemucca who swears it's a '65, and it is not a '65, it is a '65 in the way that my truck is a helicopter—"
I closed my eyes.
"Nope, eyes open, that's the deal. You can be a mess with your eyes open, I don't care, but they stay open." A pause. "You want to hear about the paint?"
"Yes."
"So he paints it green. Fine. Green's a color. But he doesn't sand it, because Delgado believes — and he has said this out loud, to Emmett, in front of witnesses — that sanding is for cowards—"
"That's not true."
"That is a direct quote. There is a man in this county who thinks sandpaper is cowardice."
"Rafferty."
"And Emmett looks at him, and Emmett doesn't say anything for like forty seconds, which if you know Emmett is the equivalent of somebody throwing a chair—"
"—and Emmett says, and I want you to understand this is a man who has never raised his voice in his life, Emmett says, Delgado. Son. Sandpaper is not an insult."
"Stop."
"And Delgado says — swear to God — Delgado says, then why's it so rough."
"That's not real."
"That's on the record. That's in minutes. Bishop wrote it down." He shifted in the gravel. "You want the dog?"
"What dog."
"Judah's dog can only turn left."
"That's not a medical condition."
"It's a choice, Sunday, that's what makes it so upsetting.
He can turn right. He's been observed turning right.
He just won't do it if anybody's watching, and he'll go all the way around a building instead, and Judah has spent four hundred dollars on a vet who told him, and I'm quoting, the dog is fine and this is between the two of you. "
I made a noise into the jacket that was almost the right kind.
He talked for forty minutes.
I've thought about it a lot since. He never once asked me what I saw.
He never asked if I was okay, which would have required me to answer.
He just sat down in the gravel on a road that was killing people and told me about a paint job, and about a dog Judah had that could only turn left, and about the time the club's treasurer tried to cook for eleven people and produced something that Bishop referred to afterward, formally, in chapel, as the incident.
Somewhere in there my hands stopped.
Somewhere after that I started laughing at the treasurer thing, and the laugh went wrong at the end and turned into the other thing, and Rafferty stopped talking and let it happen and still didn't touch me, and when it was done he said:
"Okay?"
"No."
"Okay."
And that was it. He didn't try to make it okay. Do you know how rare that is? People will do anything to make it okay. My mother has spent eighteen years making it okay through a window.
I sat up eventually.
"How long was I out?"
"You weren't out. You were talking the whole time."
"What was I saying?"
Rafferty looked at me.
"Names," he said.
I put my face in my hands.
"How many?"
"I counted twenty-six before I stopped counting."
"There's thirty-one."
"Yeah," he said. "I know."
The road at Mile 68 at two in the morning is the quietest place in the world. Behind us, the closed diner sat dark and enormous against the sky, the one with the sign that says DAWN'S with the apostrophe hanging off it, that I'd driven past eleven thousand times and never once been inside.
"I saw one that hasn't happened," I said.
"How do you know?"
"Because I've read every report for eleven years and I know all thirty-one of these deaths like I know my own address, and one of them was wrong.
One of them I've never read." My teeth were chattering, which was embarrassing, because it wasn't cold.
"There's a thirty-second one coming, Rafferty.
It's already in the stack. The road's got it queued up. "
He was quiet.
"Was it Teodor?" he said.
"I don't know what Teodor looks like."
He got out his phone and turned it around, and there was a kid with a bad haircut squinting into the sun with his arm around somebody who'd been cropped out.
"No," I said. "It's not him."
"You're sure."
"I'm sure."
"Then Teodor might—"
"Rafferty, don't."
"I'm just saying if he's not in the stack—"
"The stack is not a list of everyone," I said. "It's a list of everyone who died on the road. There's a lot of other places to die."
He put the phone away.
"Yeah," he said. "All right."
We didn't do pass four. He radioed Judah and said we were done, and Judah said carnation? in a voice with real fear in it, and Rafferty said no, we're just done, and I heard Judah exhale from six miles away.
Then Marlowe came on, and her voice had something in it I hadn't heard from her.
"Sunday."
"Go."
"You went by me at twelve nineteen and I've got you at 68 now and it's two eleven."
"Marlowe—"
"That's an hour and fifty-two minutes to cover six miles."
I looked at Rafferty. Rafferty looked at the road.
"Say again?" he said.
"I've been sitting at 74 with my eyes open the entire time," Marlowe said, "and I want somebody in this county to tell me where the two of you were."
Nobody answered her.
"I'm going to say the thing nobody's saying," she said.
"It's not that the road's long. It's that the road takes as much of you as it wants and hands you back whatever's left over.
Renata was on the phone for forty minutes on a flat and then she was in a wash two hundred yards north.
Nash rode thirteen miles and can't find the middle of them.
" A crackle. "It's not stretching distance, Sunday.
It's eating time. And I'd very much like everybody to come south now. "
Rafferty walked me over to the bike and then stopped, and turned around, and looked at the diner.
"Power's on," he said.
"What?"
"Look at the sign."
The sign was not lit. But there was a light in the back, way back through the glass — the kind of small dumb light that's over a range hood, that somebody forgot about in 2009 and has been burning ever since.
"Huh," I said.
"Don't do huh."
"It's contagious. You said."
He stood there looking at that closed diner for a second, and I stood there looking at the side of his face, which I could do, which I could do for as long as I wanted, because there was nothing behind it waiting to be found.
"Tomorrow night we're not riding," he said.
"No?"
"No. Tomorrow night we're doing something smarter." He handed me the helmet. "Get on. And Sunday—"
"Yeah?"
"Twenty-six names," he said. "You held onto all of them, in the middle of that, and you said them out loud so somebody else would have them too."
He got on the bike.
"That's not nothing," he said. "That's the opposite of nothing."
I rode thirteen miles south with my face against a stranger's back, where nobody could see anything at all, and I cried the entire way, and it took twelve minutes, because we were going the other direction.