Chapter Three
Sol
My mother has run the Verdigris for twenty-two years and in that time she has replaced the ice machine four times and the swamp cooler never, and she wants everybody to understand that this is a philosophy.
“It works.”
“It is making a noise, Ma.”
“It has always made a noise.”
“It is making a new noise.”
“You cannot tell.” She has a rag in one hand and eleven room keys on a ring in the other and she is doing both jobs at once the way she has since I was in fourth grade. “You have not lived here in eleven years and you come in and you say new noise.”
“I lived here for twenty.”
“And you never once said noise.”
“I said noise constantly. I said it so much you told me to say it to the wall.”
She points the keys at me. “And what did the wall say.”
The bar at the Verdigris is nine stools, six of them with tape on the vinyl, and a mirror behind the bottles that somebody shot in 1994 and nobody has replaced because my mother says a hole in a mirror is free advertising.
There is a payphone by the toilets that has not worked since Obama.
There is a sign about no colors that has been up so long it has gone the color of tea, and everybody understands it applies to everybody except the men it does not apply to.
I get behind it at eleven because Char called in and because my hands still know where everything is.
Second glass in, my mother stops beside me and watches me pour.
“You still do it the wrong way.”
“It is not the wrong way.”
“You tilt it.”
“You tilt it to stop the head.”
“I want the head,” she says. “The head is what they pay for. You give them a flat beer and they drink it in four minutes and then what.”
“Then they buy another one.”
“Then they leave,” she says, “because a flat beer makes a man think about his life.”
This is not a new argument. This argument is old enough to vote. I straighten the glass out of pure daughterly spite and she makes a satisfied noise and goes back to the office.
By noon there are four men in here and I know all four.
Amos is in the corner with a coffee he will make last three hours.
He is seventy-four and he has been sitting in that exact corner since before I could see over the bar and he has never once ordered anything but coffee and he has never once said thank you, and when I was fifteen he told my mother that a man who thanks you for a coffee wants something, and I have thought about it roughly nine thousand times since.
Two of the Nevill brothers are at the middle stools eating.
And Hollis is at the end with a folder, doing what Hollis does anywhere he sits.
“Sol.”
“Hollis.”
“Does your mother pay county on the ice machine.”
“Ask her.”
“I asked her.”
“What did she say.”
“She said she has an arrangement.” He turns the folder around like it will help. “Marisol, there is no arrangement. There is not a document in the county that says arrangement.”
“Then she has an understanding.”
“An understanding,” Hollis says, with the flat despair of a man who has audited people he loves, and writes something.
The Nevills leave at half past. The younger one raises two fingers to me on the way out and the older one does not, and I watch them go across the lot to a truck that is much newer than the truck they had in March.
Amos watches them too. He does not turn his head. He just watches them the way an old dog watches a door.
Fritz comes at one with a toolbox and a look of enormous grievance.
“Who told you,” I say.
“Priest told me. Then Roan told me. Then Priest told me again.” He puts the box down. “Which one of you was it.”
“Me.”
“I knew it was you.”
“Dorrie Voss needs her tank moved to the north side,” I say. “Do not act like that is a punishment.”
“It is a two-hour job.”
“So is this. Get on the roof.”
He goes up the ladder at the back of the office and I hear him walking around over the bar and then I hear him say a word my mother does not permit, and then he comes down with his forearms grey to the elbow.
“Your pads are gone.”
“They are new.”
“They were new when there was a president called Bush,” Fritz says.
“There is no pad. There is a frame with a memory of a pad. And the float is stuck open, which is why it is making the noise, which is why the whole thing is trying to pump air, which is why it is going to seize in about eleven days and then you will have a swamp cooler that is a box.”
My mother has appeared at the end of the bar in the way she does.
“How much.”
“Nothing.”
“Curtis.”
“Pads are thirty dollars at the hardware store and I have got a float valve in the truck from a job that did not happen.” He is already writing on his hand. “So it is thirty dollars and I will bring you the receipt.”
“And the labor.”
“There is no labor.”
“There is two hours of labor.”
“Mrs. Idrizi.” Fritz puts both hands on the bar.
“I have eaten at this bar since I was nineteen years old and you have never once let me pay for a sandwich, and I have kept a running total, and I want you to know that as of this year you owe me approximately negative four thousand dollars, and I intend to work it off slowly and with dignity, so please let me have the roof.”
My mother looks at him for a good five seconds.
“You will take a sandwich,” she says.
“I will take a sandwich.”
“Marisol, make the man a sandwich.”
He goes back up. He is up there for two hours and forty minutes, and at some point I stand in the lot with a glass of water for him and look up and see him lying flat on the tar paper with one arm down inside the housing to the shoulder, swearing steadily and happily at somebody in 1998.
The lot is where everything ever happened in my life.
Twelve units in an L, gravel, one dead sodium light and one that works, and a strip of dirt at the back where my mother has been trying to grow oleander since the nineties.
I learned to drive in this lot. I got my first cigarette off a prospect in this lot at fifteen and my mother took it out of my mouth without breaking stride and smoked it herself.
And business. God, the business. Half of what runs on this road got settled out here between a truck door and a wall, because the clubhouse is forty miles up and this is where two parties can meet without either of them being anybody’s guest. I have carried a tray past conversations that ended men.
I have wiped down Unit 6 the morning after a thing nobody named.
When I was seventeen a man from Winnemucca sat in the corner of the lot with his head in his hands for an hour and my mother sent me out with coffee and said do not ask, and I did not ask, and I have not asked in nineteen years, and that is a skill, and nobody in this world has ever once called it one.
Fritz comes down at four with a face full of grey dust and eats his sandwich standing up.
“Sunday,” he says, with his mouth full.
“What about it.”
“Bar room. Everybody in. Roan wants the room stocked.”
“He has not told me.”
“He is telling you now, through me, badly.” Fritz swallows. “It is after the Coldwater thing.”
“What Coldwater thing.”
“The meet.” He waves the sandwich vaguely south. “Saturday. Sanctioned. They do the numbers, everybody stands about, Hollis gets a stomach ache. Then Sunday everybody comes in and drinks about it.”
“Where.”
“Bitter Wells, I think. Or the Junction. It is not my end.” He shrugs with his whole upper body. “Ask Torch, he loves it. He gets to wear the shirt.”
“Torch has a shirt?”
“Torch has a shirt,” Fritz says, with feeling.
That is the entire conversation. That is all it is, at one minute past four on a Wednesday, a man with dust in his eyebrows telling me to stock the bar.
I write it on the pad by the register the way I have written a hundred Sundays.
Ice. The cheap whiskey and two bottles of the other one for Hollis.
Limes, because Junior went through a phase.
I do not think about it again for four hours.
The thing I want to be clear about, and I am saying this to nobody, is that there was nothing to think.
The clubs meet. They have met four times a year for fifteen years because that is how a truce works, you sit down and you count and you go home.
My father-in-law sat down with those men.
Amos sat down with the ones before them.
A sanctioned meet is a dentist appointment.
That is what it was to me. That is exactly what it was.
I close out with my mother at nine and she counts the drawer twice because she does not trust the way I stack fives.
“Your husband was down here Monday,” she says.
“Roan?”
“He came in for gas at the Springs and Ada sent him down for the pie.”
“He did not say.”
“Why would he say,” she says. “He had pie.”
She snaps the band round the twenties.
“He looked tired.”
“He is tired.”
“Not tired,” she says. “I know tired. I have got twenty-two years of tired coming through that door at two in the morning. He looked like a man doing sums.”
“He is always doing sums.”
“Mm,” my mother says, and puts the drawer in the safe, and that is the end of it, and I drive home and do not think about that either.
He gets in at eleven.
I am at the kitchen table with the bar list and the tin receipt and a pen, and he comes in and puts his keys down and stands behind my chair with his hands on my shoulders and his thumbs going, and I let my head go back against him.
“Roof is done,” I say.
“Fritz says the pads had geological layers.”
“Fritz is dramatic.”
“Fritz is correct.” His thumbs keep going. “He also says your mother made him eat a sandwich at gunpoint.”
“That is a fair account.”
I write ice on the list. He reads it upside down over my shoulder, which he has always been able to do and which I have never been able to do.
“Sunday,” he says.
“Fritz told me. Everybody in, room stocked.”
“Yeah.”
“So it is the Saturday meet, and then Sunday everybody comes and drinks about it.”
“That is about the shape of it.”
I put the pen down.
I want to say that I asked because something in me had turned over.
I would like to be able to say that. But I asked because it was Wednesday and my mother said he looked like a man doing sums, and because he was standing behind me with his hands on my shoulders and that is when a marriage is at its most open door.
“What are they after this time,” I say.
His thumbs do not stop. That is the thing I keep coming back to. They do not even hesitate.
“Same as always.”
“Which is what.”
“The toll.” A little shrug I feel through my shoulders. “They pay it and they do not like paying it and they say so, and then they pay it.”
“Is that all it is.”
“Sol.”
“I am asking.”
“It is club business,” he says, easy, kind, not even close to a lie. “Nothing you would want.”
And I sit there under his hands with a pen in mine and a list that says ice and limes, and something in my chest goes flat and neat, the way a bed gets made.
“Alright,” I say.
“You are on the list yourself, you know. Sunday.”
“I am always on the list.”
“Not like that.” He leans down and puts his mouth on the top of my head. “I mean stand at the bar and let Junior make the coffee for once.”
“Junior’s coffee is a war crime.”
“It builds character.”
“It builds nothing,” I say. “It removes character. It goes in and it takes character out.”
He laughs into my hair, and it is a real one, and he goes to shower, and I sit alone at the table with my list.
Ice.
Limes.
The whiskey Hollis likes.
I put the pen down and look at the window, which at that hour is a black square with a woman in it, and I think, for about four seconds, that I could go and stand in the bathroom doorway and ask him again while he cannot get away from me.
Then I think: and he will say it kindly, and I will have made him say it twice.
So I finish the list.