Chapter One
Sol
The bondsman in Ivanhoe keeps his office at sixty-one degrees in August because he says the paperwork lasts longer, and he says it every single time, and I have learned to arrive with a cardigan instead of an opinion.
“Pankhurst,” I say.
“Which one.”
“Wade. There is only one.”
“There was two.” Dale pulls the drawer, which is a filing cabinet that has not filed anything since the Clinton administration and now holds a coffee maker. “His cousin had a whole thing in oh-nine.”
“His cousin is in Ely.”
“That is where the thing went.”
He finds the folder. He always finds it, and he always makes me stand there while he does, because I am the only person who comes through this door who does not swear at him.
“Four thousand,” he says. “Public intox, resisting, and he broke a window.”
“Which window.”
“Mine.”
I count it onto the counter in hundreds. He watches me do it and does not touch the stack until I am finished, because eleven years ago I counted wrong in front of him and he said something about it, and I have not counted wrong since.
“You want the receipt in your name or the club’s.”
“Mine.”
“Every time,” he says, “you say that. And every time it is not your money.”
“It is my handwriting.”
He stamps it. He slides it across.
“Marisol.”
“Dale.”
“Tell him the window was a hundred and ninety dollars and I did not put it on the paper because he has got a job.”
“He does not have a job.”
“He has got a job at the yard.”
“That is a chair,” I say. “They gave him a chair.”
Dale laughs the way a man laughs at ten in the morning in a room he cannot leave, and I take my receipt, and I go out into the heat.
Ivanhoe at ten in the morning is nineteen hundred people worth of nothing much.
The hardware store has the same three lawnmowers out front it has had since spring, chained together like they might get ideas.
The clinic sign says TUES THURS and somebody has been scratching at the THURS for a year.
Two deputies in the substation, both of whom I have known since school, one of whom I have driven home.
Wade comes out of the county holding door in yesterday’s shirt with his hands going into his pockets and then out of them.
“Sol.”
“Get in the truck.”
“I can call somebody.”
“You did call somebody.” I unlock it. “You called me at six twenty this morning. You said, and I want to get this right, you said Sol I have made an error of judgment.”
“That does not sound like me.”
“It sounded exactly like you. You were crying.”
“I was not crying.”
“Wade.”
“My eyes were doing a thing.”
I let him have it. He is thirty and he looks twenty-two and he has been patched for four years and he still stands like a boy waiting to be told which line to get in.
We are past the school before he says anything else.
“Does he know.”
“Does who know.”
“Don’t.”
“He knows,” I say. “Deacon knows. By now everybody at that table knows, because Dale calls the Yard before he calls me, and the Yard called me because they were not going to drive eighty miles for a window.”
He puts his head back against the rest.
“Deacon is going to say something.”
“Deacon is going to say one sentence and you are going to remember it for eleven years.” I check my mirror for a state truck that is not there. “That is not the part you should be worried about.”
“What is the part.”
“Your mother called me at nine.”
“Oh, Christ.”
“She has a nine o’clock and she used it on you.” I take the turn out to the 379. “She wanted to know if this was going to be like Denny.”
Wade goes very still in the seat.
“You do not have to say anything,” I tell him. “I told her it was a window.”
He looks out the side. The flats go by white and then the road starts to climb and the temperature drops the way it does, mile after mile, so that you can leave a town sweating and get to the Yard cold.
“It is not going to be like Denny,” he says.
“Good.”
“I mean it, Sol.”
“I said good.”
He does not cry this time. He does something worse, which is he laughs at himself, quietly, and turns the radio on so neither of us has to keep going.
The Yard shows itself the way it always does.
One road in, straight as a ruler, and the barns sitting up out of the acres of dead vehicles from three miles off so that anybody coming has to be watched coming the whole way.
Roan’s father built the road that way. Roan tells that story when he is drunk and he tells it like a joke and it is not one.
I let Wade out at the equipment barn and I do not go in.
Instead I take the truck back down the road and out to Dorrie Voss’s place, which is eleven miles the other side of Ivanhoe on a track that will kill a car, and I have a bag on the seat with four things in it and none of them are casseroles, because the casseroles come in the first two weeks and then nobody comes at all.
Dorrie’s husband went into the Sump in March.
Nobody has said that to her. Nobody will. What she was told is that Gene left, and the club has kept her in propane and groceries ever since, and she has never once asked why a man who left would leave his boots.
She opens the door before I knock.
“You brought the good coffee.”
“I brought the coffee that was on sale.”
“That is the good one.” She goes back inside and leaves the door for me. “Sit. Do not sit there, that one has a thing.”
I sit in the other one. The trailer is clean the way a place is clean when somebody has nothing else to do with their hands. Photographs on the wall, one of them face down, which it was not in June.
“Propane came Tuesday,” she says. “That boy would not take a dollar.”
“He is not allowed to take a dollar.”
“I put it in his jacket.”
“Then he has driven back and put it in the tin at the Yard and told on you.”
Dorrie snorts. She sets a cup down in front of me and one for herself and sits with her knees together like a woman at a job interview.
“How is your husband,” she says.
“He is fine.”
“That is what I say about mine.”
I look up.
She is not being cruel. She is looking at me over the cup with her eyebrows up and a kind of terrible good humor, and I understand that this woman has known for five months and has decided to hold it by herself, and has decided further that she will not make a single person in this world sit in it with her.
“Dorrie.”
“Do not,” she says. “You will start doing your job and I am enjoying this.”
So I drink the coffee. We talk about her sister in Elko who has opinions about propane.
We talk about the clinic being Tuesdays and Thursdays and how the THURS has been scratched out for a year and the state does not care.
She asks whether the school got its bus and I tell her the club paid for the transmission and it is going in October and she says that is nice, that is nice of them, and neither of us decorates it.
When I stand up she catches my wrist.
“That is Gene’s face down,” she says. “I put it down myself. I want you to know I did that and not somebody coming in.”
“Alright.”
“I know what he was.”
“I know you do.”
“Nobody has asked me one question in five months,” she says. “Not one. Not what I think. Not what I would like doing. They come with propane.”
Her hand is warm and dry and it is not shaking.
“What would you like doing,” I say.
She thinks about it. She actually thinks about it, which is the whole reason I asked.
“I would like the tank moved,” she says. “It is on the wrong side. The wind comes round that end all winter and I cannot get to the valve.”
“I will send Fritz.”
“Fritz is busy.”
“Fritz will be delighted,” I say. “He hates being told he is busy. It makes him feel like an old man.”
I get back to the Yard by noon.
The bar room is fourteen degrees cooler than outside and smells like it always smells, which is concrete and gun oil and forty years of cigarettes in a building where nobody has smoked indoors since Deacon’s lungs went.
Junior is on the stool at the end. Hollis has the salvage ledgers spread out over the back table like a man laying out cards.
“Sol.” Hollis does not look up. “Do we call a scale a scale or a weighbridge.”
“You have called it a scale for twenty years.”
“The inspector called it a weighbridge.”
“Then it is a scale,” I say, “and you should write scale, because if you write weighbridge in October and scale in November he is going to think you have got two of them.”
Hollis makes a small satisfied noise and changes the word.
Junior swings round on the stool. “Wade is out back getting torn up.”
“By who.”
“Deacon.”
“Good.”
“You are cold, Sol.”
“He broke Dale’s window.” I go behind the bar because my hands do not know what to do in this room otherwise, and I start on the glasses that somebody has stacked wet. “You know what happens if Dale stops taking club paper. He is the only bondsman inside a hundred miles and he does not have to be.”
“Dale loves us.”
“Dale tolerates me,” I say. “Which is not a thing you can inherit.”
The doors to the assay office are shut. They have been shut since before I got here. You can tell from the bar room whether church is in or out because that door does not have a gap under it, it has a seal, and when it is in, the room out here talks quieter without deciding to.
Priest comes out first, which he always does, with the book under his arm.
“There she is.” He kisses the side of my head on his way past, the same as he has since I was fifteen. “Did Dale do the sixty-one degrees.”
“Dale did the sixty-one degrees.”
“It is about the paper.”
“It is about the paper,” I say, and he laughs, and it is the only laugh in this building that has never once had anything under it.
Then the rest of them come out, and then Roan.
He looks tired. He has looked tired for six years but he looks like the specific kind today, the kind where he is standing straight on purpose.
He comes over and puts a hand flat on my back and leaves it there while he reaches past me for the coffee, and eleven years in I still lean into it before I have decided to.
“Wade,” he says.
“Four thousand. Dale did not put the window on the paper.”
“How much was the window.”
“A hundred and ninety.”
“Put two fifty in the tin,” he says. “In cash. Not this week.”
“Already told him you would.”
He almost smiles. He drinks the coffee, which is terrible, because Junior made it.
“Long one,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“Anything I should know.”
“Nothing you would want.”
There it is. It comes out of him easy, the way a man says drive safe.
He is not lying to me. He has never lied to me, and I want that understood, because the thing he does is cleaner than lying and it has taken me years to find the shape of it.
He hands me a door with nothing behind it and he does it kindly and he thinks he is protecting me, and there is no way to fight a man who is being kind at you.
Six years ago I would have asked twice.
“Alright,” I say.
“Sump run Thursday,” he says. “I will be gone by four.”
“Take the good truck. The other one is pulling right.”
“It is not pulling right, you are pulling right.”
“Roan.”
“Fritz drove it Tuesday and said it was fine.”
“Fritz would say a horse was fine,” I say. “Take the good truck.”
He takes his hand off my back. He takes his coffee and goes to the end of the bar where Hollis has the ledgers, and I watch him go and I do the arithmetic I promised myself I had stopped doing, which is: that was four sentences, and one of them was about a truck, and none of them were true or false, because none of them were about anything.
I have been asking a version of that question for six years.
I stopped counting somewhere around the fourth. Not because I gave up. Because counting is what you do when you still think a number is going to arrive.
Priest sits himself on the stool nearest the bar and pushes his cup at me and I fill it, and he watches me do it with his chin down.
“Dorrie Voss,” he says.
“Wants her propane tank moved to the north side.”
“That is a two-hour job.”
“Then it is a two-hour job.”
“I will put Fritz on it.”
“I already put Fritz on it.”
Priest smiles into the cup. “Course you did.”
Behind me the door to the assay office is still standing open on an empty room, and Deacon comes through the bar with Wade a step behind him looking like a wrung-out shirt, and Junior says something and Wade tells him where to go, and the room laughs the way it does, low, all at once, thirty years of the same laugh.
I dry the glasses.
Every man in this building has sat at my table.
That is not a boast and it is not a complaint, it is a fact you could survey.
Deacon has eaten at my table the second Sunday of every month for nine years.
Hollis brought his ledgers to my kitchen the winter the barn flooded.
Junior slept on my couch for a month at twenty-three because his father was doing what his father did.
Fritz calls me before he calls a doctor.
Priest sat me down when I was nineteen and told me what I would be signing up for and made me say it back to him.
And not one of them has ever thought to say: careful. She is listening.