Chapter Four
Roan
No sign. No line. Just a cattle guard and then eleven miles of frontage road and then a town with a Chevron in it, and I am a man on a motorcycle in a t-shirt with a bag on the back, and nobody out here knows what a horse skull means.
I left the cut at the Yard. I want that on the record too, for whatever record there is.
Four months ago it was April and the meet was at the Junction, in the lot behind a truck stop that has been neutral ground since before I was patched, because it belongs to a man who is eighty and afraid of everybody equally.
Their president came in a car. That is the first thing. Not a rental, not a work vehicle. A car with a badge on it that cost more than the trucks the Nevill brothers chop, and he got out of it in a jacket with no cut over the top, carrying a folder.
“Roan.”
“Sutter.”
“You look well.”
“I look like a man who rode a hundred and ten miles.”
“That is what I said,” he says, and smiles, and I did not laugh, but I remember wanting to.
We did the numbers. That is all a sanctioned meet is.
Their loads north, our toll, four quarters of it, and their counsel standing at Sutter’s shoulder in a suit with a leather folio, reading out figures in a voice like a man doing a deposition, and Hollis across from him with a legal pad going grey in the face because he has been keeping this club’s numbers in his head and a shoebox for twenty years and there is a man in front of him with a spreadsheet.
Torch stood at my left in the shirt. It is a good shirt. He knows it is a good shirt.
It took forty minutes and there was nothing in it, and afterward everybody stood around in the lot in the way that men do, twenty of us in two loose clumps at a distance of about nine yards, which is exactly the distance at which nothing can happen.
I went to my bike to get a bottle of water out of the bag.
“Can I ask you something.”
She was two vehicles down, sitting up on the tailgate of a flatbed with her boots hanging, and she was not smoking and she was not on her phone, she was just sitting there looking at me the way you look at a thing you have already been looking at for a while.
“You can ask.”
“The canyon.”
I got the cap off the bottle.
“What about it.”
“There is one road through it.”
“There is.”
“So who pays for the road,” she said.
I stopped with the bottle halfway up.
“Say that again.”
“The state does not maintain that.” She said it flatly, like a woman reading a gauge.
“I came up through it in March in a truck with a bad rack and I counted eleven seams that have been cut and filled in the last two years, and that is not county work, county does not cut a seam, county puts a bucket of cold patch in a hole and drives off. Somebody is cutting and filling twelve miles of canyon in a state that has written that road off. So who pays for it.”
There is a sound a room makes when it stops. There is one a man makes too, on the inside, and nobody hears it.
“We do,” I said.
“How.”
“Cash. To a paving outfit in Elko who thinks he is doing county subcontract work, and he is not, because there is no contract, and every March he sends an invoice to an address that is a mailbox in Ivanhoe and every March it gets paid.”
“Does he know.”
“He has stopped asking.”
She thought about that. She actually thought about it, with her head tipped, and then she said:
“So you are the highway department.”
“We are the highway department.”
“That is the most money anybody in this lot is going to talk about today,” she said, “and it is not on anybody’s paper.”
Nine years.
Nine years and there is not one person alive who has asked me who pays for the road.
Not Torch. Not Priest, and Priest wants me to write everything down and has never once asked what is in it.
Not Sol, and God, Sol would have understood it in about four seconds, she would have got there faster than anybody, and I have not.
I have not given her the chance to.
That is the thing I did not think in the lot in April, because in April I did not think anything at all. I stood there with a bottle of water and something in my chest came unlocked and I said, because I could not help it:
“Ask me another one.”
She laughed. She did not smile, she laughed, once, surprised.
“Alright,” she said. “The Neck. If a rock came down at mile six, what happens.”
“Nothing for eleven hours. Then everything at once.”
“Because.”
“Because everything on the north half of that road is on a clock that was set in Coldwater,” I said, “and every one of those clocks fails at a different hour, and by hour eleven there are four separate parties who all think somebody has robbed them.”
“And you would move it by the Barrel Springs track.”
I looked at her.
“There is no Barrel Springs track,” I said.
“That is what I thought,” she said. “That is exactly what I thought,” and she swung down off the tailgate, and somebody called a name that was not hers, and she went.
The town two counties out has a motel with a green awning and a woman at the desk who has never looked at my face.
Room 14. Ground floor, end unit, door in the shade, and I have never once parked in front of it.
She is already there. Her truck is round the back by the ice machine and there is a bag on the chair and the AC is roaring like a small aircraft, and she is standing at the window with the blind down doing something to her phone, and when I come in she puts it face down on the sill.
That is the third time. I have counted. I have counted every one of them from the first, which is a thing I have never done in my life about anything else, and I have never let myself ask why a man counts.
“You are late.”
“I came the long way.”
“You always come the long way.”
“I always will,” I say.
She crosses the room and gets both hands in my shirt and pulls, and I let her, and her mouth is at my jaw and then not, and she says, into my throat:
“How many hours.”
“Four.”
“That is not enough.”
“It is what there is.”
Then it is her back against the wall by the bathroom door with her legs round me and my hand under her thigh, and she is fast and mean about it, she gets my belt open like a woman taking a lid off something, and when I get her jeans down she laughs at me for the way I do it and I stop being careful.
She is loud. That is the thing that gets me every time, that she does not have eleven years of habit in her about noise, that there is nobody in a room forty miles away, that she can be as loud as she likes and she likes to be loud.
She has a hand flat on the wall and one in my hair and she is telling me exactly what she wants in a voice that carries, and I have my forehead against her shoulder and I am doing what she says.
Afterward she does not go quiet. That is the other thing.
She sits up against the headboard with the sheet round her waist and a bottle of water off the nightstand and she says:
“So Sutter is putting a fourth charter in Fallon.”
“I heard.”
“Do you care.”
“Not yet.”
“Why not yet.”
“Because a charter in Fallon is a hundred and eighty miles from the Neck and it does not touch anything I hold,” I say, “and because Sutter putting a flag in Fallon is Sutter telling three other clubs he is bigger than they thought, and that is a fight I would like him to have.”
“And when it is finished.”
“Then it touches me.”
“So you have got about two years.”
“I have got about two years,” I say.
She turns the water bottle around in her hands.
“Nobody says numbers like that in my house,” she says. “In my house it is next Thursday. It is always next Thursday. Nobody in that whole club has said the words two years out loud once.”
“They are young.”
“They are children,” she says, “with lawyers.”
And I laugh, lying on my back in a room in a town two counties out, with my arm over my eyes, and it is not the sex. I want to be honest here with myself if nowhere else in the world. It is not the sex, because the sex at home is not broken and never has been.
It is that I have said four true things out loud in six minutes.
That is all. That is the whole thing. Four true things, out loud, to a person, in a room, and I did not have to hold any part of it, and nobody’s court date depends on it and nobody’s mother, and when it is over I will put my boots on and it will not exist and I will carry it out of here the same as I carry everything else.
There is a word for what that is in my chest and I have decided not to go and get it.
I know its shape. It is the same shape as putting a load down at the end of a run.
It is the same shape as coming over the north end of the Neck at dusk and seeing the flats open up and letting the throttle off.
It is not joy and it is not guilt. It is the absence of weight, and I have not felt the absence of weight since I was thirty-two years old, and I did not know it was gone until it came back.
“You have got a face on,” she says.
“I have got a road to ride.”
“You have got two hours.”
“I have got a road to ride in two hours.”
She puts the bottle down.
“Then do not waste them,” she says.
I get home at a quarter past one.
The kitchen light is on over the sink. There is a plate in the fridge with a paper towel over it. The bar list is squared up on the counter in her handwriting, ice and limes and the whiskey Hollis likes, and I stand there in my own kitchen and read my wife’s handwriting for a while.
She is asleep. She does not wake up. I get in behind her and she moves back against me in her sleep the way she has for eleven years and puts her hand over my wrist, and I lie there with my mouth in her hair.
Church is Tuesday.
Rule three is not complicated. The first sentence is nine words long and it has been nine words long since before I was patched.
No contact with rival club members outside sanctioned meets.
Any contact reported at the next church.
There is not a man at that table who could not recite it, including the two who cannot read a court date.
I could say it in eleven seconds. Contact with a Saints woman, three occasions, and here is what came out of it, and here is what she asked me about the Neck, which by itself is a thing this table needs to hear, because a woman on a flatbed in April counted eleven road seams and worked out what we spend.
That is intelligence. That is real. The table would want that.
And then Deacon would ask the second question, which is the one Deacon always asks, and there would be no answer to it that is not the true one.
Tuesday comes. The doors get sealed.
We do the inspector and the wall on the north bay and the Nevill brothers and a thing with Junior’s brother-in-law. Priest keeps the book. Hollis is grey about the fourth-quarter numbers because their counsel had a spreadsheet and he had a legal pad and it has been eating him for four months.
“Anything else,” Torch says.
I look at the table. Nine men in a concrete box with the door sealed, and every one of them looking at me the way they have looked at me for nine years, which is the way you look at a wall you have decided to stand behind.
“Nothing,” I say.
Priest closes the book.