Chapter Eight
Roan
Deacon shuts the door and the bar room goes away, and I look at eight men who have not sat down.
“Sit down,” I say.
Nobody moves. That is Torch’s doing, not out of insolence, because Torch has come in behind everybody and stopped at the end of the table instead of taking his chair, and once one man is standing the rest of them cannot decide.
“Ellis. Sit down.”
He sits. Then the rest of them do, in the order they always do, and it takes four seconds and those four seconds tell me more about where I am than anything that gets said in the next hour.
Priest opens the book.
“Second church on this,” he says, “in seven days. Sunday the ninth and today. All nine present.”
“Write down that she is out of the building,” Deacon says.
Priest writes it.
“Alright.” I put my hands on the table. “The bag came into the salvage office slot last Sunday. It has come back up because she is holding it now, so let us do the whole thing again with the door shut, and this time we do it properly, because last Sunday we did it as a scandal and it is not a scandal.”
“What is it,” Junior says.
“Wait,” I say.
Hollis has got the four sheets out of the bag and laid flat on the table in front of him, squared, the way he lays anything.
“Say the printing again, Hollis.”
“There is a grey band down the left edge of all four,” he says. “That is a drum, not a cartridge. Same machine, one run. And the crop is identical on all four, which means somebody sat down with a folder of images and chose four, and chose these four.”
“Meaning,” Wade says.
“Meaning there are more,” Deacon says.
“There are more,” Hollis says. “There are certainly more. And the four we got are the four with no faces in them except two, and no plate visible on either vehicle, and nothing in frame that would tell us where that motel is.”
“So it is a sample,” Fritz says.
“It is a sample,” Hollis says.
Priest writes.
“Now the second thing,” I say. “Nobody drove that up our road by accident, and nobody who took those pictures did it for himself. That is four months of somebody sitting in a lot in another county with a camera on a Tuesday. That is not a jealous man. That is a job.”
“Who does the job,” Torch says.
“Say it, Ellis.”
He looks up the table at me.
“The Saints,” he says.
“The Saints,” I say.
And then, because there is no reason to make eight men climb the same ladder I climbed at four this morning, I put the rest of it on the table.
“Which means the four months of it was theirs. Which means the woman was theirs from the first meet in April. Which means every single Tuesday of it was a photograph they already had, and they sat on all four months of it and let it run, and then they hand-delivered four pages in a bag.”
The room is quiet in the way this room gets.
“Why now,” Fritz says.
“That is the right question.”
“No,” Hollis says. “It is not.”
He does not say it loudly and he does not look up from the sheets, and every head goes to him, because Hollis Bird does not contradict me at this table twice in a year.
“Go on,” I say.
“Why at all,” Hollis says. “Why give it to us. If they have got four months of a president of a rival club in a motel, the thing that is worth money is the thing we do not know they have. You keep that. You keep that for the day you need it.” He straightens the four sheets that are already straight.
“You do not mail it to the man’s own club. Unless.”
“Unless what,” Junior says.
“Unless the point was never the pictures,” Deacon says.
“Unless the point was never the pictures,” Hollis agrees. “The point was to make us have this meeting.”
Priest’s pen has stopped.
“Rule three,” I say.
Priest looks up.
“Read it out,” I say.
“Roan.”
“Wendell. Read it out.”
He turns back a great many pages, which he does not need to do, because every man in here could say it in his sleep, and he does it because a secretary reading from the book is a different thing than a man reciting.
“No contact with a member or associate of a rival club outside a sanctioned meet,” Priest reads. “Any contact to be reported at the next church.”
“Any contact,” Deacon says.
“Any contact,” Priest says.
“Fourteen,” I say.
Nobody says anything.
“Fourteen occasions, from April to the twelfth of August, at a motel two counties south, none of them sanctioned and none of them reported.” I keep my hands flat.
“And there have been nineteen churches in that period, and I have sat in this chair at every one of them, and at the end of every one of them Ellis has said anything else, and I have said nothing.”
“Rule six,” Deacon says.
“Say it, Marcus.”
“You do not lie in church,” Deacon says. “You may refuse to answer. You may not lie.”
“I did not refuse to answer.”
“No.”
“I answered,” I say. “Nineteen times.”
Priest is writing. I can hear the nib. It is the only sound in a concrete room with nine men in it.
“Alright,” Torch says. “Alright. Hold on. Before we get into what he did or did not.”
“There is no before,” Deacon says.
“There is, because I am in it.” Torch has got both hands round the back of his own neck. “I knew in August.”
The room turns.
“Say the rest of it,” I tell him.
“The second week of August. I was coming back from Fallon and I stopped at the Chevron in that town for gas at about four in the afternoon and his bike was behind the ice machine at the motel across the road.” He is talking to the table, not to any of us.
“I sat at that pump for eleven minutes. Then I filled up and I went home.”
“You did not come to me,” Deacon says.
“No.”
“You did not come to me either,” I say.
“No.”
“Why.”
“Because you are the president,” Torch says, and looks up, “and I have known you since we were twenty-two, and there is not a version of that conversation where I come out of it still knowing you.”
“So you let it run.”
“I let it run for five weeks,” he says. “And I ate at his wife’s table on the twenty-sixth of August and I asked after her mother’s swamp cooler. So whatever the table wants to do about me, I will not be arguing.”
Priest writes it down.
“Note it as a rule three failure to report by the vice president,” Deacon says. “Not as a rule six. He was not asked.”
“He was asked nineteen times,” Junior says. “Anything else. That is the asking.”
“Anything else is the president asking the table,” Deacon says. “It is not the table asking a man. There is a difference and it matters, and it will matter more in about ten minutes, so learn it now.”
Junior sits back.
“Hollis,” I say. “You have been sitting on something since the bag came in and you did not say it last Sunday because last Sunday we were doing a scandal. Say it now.”
Hollis takes his glasses off and puts them on the ledger and does not put them back on.
“The corridor,” he says.
There it is.
I watch it go round the table, and it goes at different speeds, and that is the honest thing about a room of nine men. Deacon has had it since Sunday. Priest has had it since Sunday. Fritz gets there halfway through the sentence and I see him sit up. Junior and Wade are still on the wife.
“Say all of it,” I say.
“The truce is fifteen years old and I have got the terms in the safe in the original hand,” Hollis says.
“There are eleven clauses and nine of them are about money. Clause four is contact. It is reciprocal, it is unqualified, and there is no distinction in it between business and personal, because the men who wrote it in oh-eleven had just come out of a thing where four people died over a personal, and they wrote it that way on purpose.”
“Consequence clause,” Deacon says.
“Clause nine,” Hollis says. “Material breach by either club entitles the aggrieved club to compensation, and compensation is not defined, and it is not defined because in oh-eleven both sides had lawyers who could not agree on a number and left it open so that the thing could get signed.”
“Compensation is whatever they can make stick,” Fritz says.
“Compensation is whatever they can make stick,” Hollis says.
“And what they want,” I say, “is the road.”
“What they want is the road,” Hollis says.
“They have wanted the road since Sutter took that gavel. They cannot buy it because we will not sell it. They cannot take it because a war over that canyon costs more in prison time than the canyon earns. So they have spent four months building a documented material breach by the president of this club, with dates, and they have now put four pages of it in our hands as a courtesy.”
“That is not a courtesy,” Junior says.
“No,” Hollis says. “It is a receipt. It is them showing us the file exists before they produce it, so that when they sit down at the next sanctioned meet and put the whole thing on the table, we have already had a month to look at each other.”
“To do what,” Wade says.
“To fight about it,” Deacon says. “To vote about it. To take the gavel off him, or to not take it off him and split doing it. Either one is fine by them. They are not trying to win an argument. They are trying to make us be a club that has just had this argument, and then walk into a room with us.”
The fan is not on in here. It has never been on in here. It is a hundred and one degrees and there are nine men in a concrete box and nobody has moved for two minutes.
“So it was never about what she got out of me,” I say.
“What did she get out of you,” Deacon says.
And there it is. That is the second question. That is Deacon’s question and I have known since the first Tuesday in May that it was coming eventually and that it would be him.
I could hedge it. I want that written down too, that it went through my head, that there is a version where I say she got nothing and every man here would take it, because I am the president and my word holds until the table overrules it, and Deacon would look at me and know and say nothing.
“Rule six,” I say.
“Rule six,” Deacon says.
“Then I will answer it.” I keep my hands on the table. “She got Rowe. The young deputy out of Elko, the eleven o’clock unit at the Springs, the Coldwater plates detail, and the window on it. I gave her that on the fifth occasion, in the room, unprompted, and she did not ask for it.”
Fritz shuts his eyes.
“She got the Nevill brothers,” I say. “On the ninth. Which I told myself was nothing, because it was nothing, and I want the table to hear that I had a category in my head called nothing and that it got bigger every month.”
“Anything else,” Deacon says.
“She asked about the Sump.”
Somebody’s chair moves.
“When,” Deacon says.
“The fifth. Same occasion as Rowe.”
“What did you give her.”
“That it floods about once in ten years and it is gone in six hours, and that there would be sky first, so you would have most of a day.”
“Ground,” Deacon says. “Did you give her ground.”
“No.”
“Coordinates. A road. A gate. A name of anybody who has ever been out there with a machine.”
“No.”
“Say it as a whole sentence.”
“I gave her nothing about the ground,” I say, “and I stood in that room afterward and called that loyalty.”
The silence goes on a while.
“Well,” Priest says quietly, and writes.
“There is a thing I want on the record,” I say, “and then I am done talking and the table can do what it likes.”
“Go on,” Deacon says.
“Everybody in this room is going to spend the next month working out how much of the corridor is at risk, and Hollis will get a number, and it will be a bad number.” I look down the table.
“The reason it is a bad number is not the woman. It is that every arrangement on that road lives in my head and only in my head, which is what makes it unbuyable, and which is what made me the only door worth walking through. They did not find a weak man. They found a single point of failure and then they went and got a woman to stand next to it.”
“Roan,” Priest says.
“Wendell has asked this table five times in five years to write it down or to put a second man on it,” I say.
“Five times. It is in that book five times. And five times the answer was mine and the answer was no, and if anybody at this table wants to know how a rival club walked in through the front of us, it is not fourteen Tuesdays. It is that.”
Priest has stopped writing. He is holding the pen about an inch off the page and he is looking at me, and there is something on his face that I do not have a name for, and I have gone over it since.
“Write that down,” I say.
“Roan.”
“Write it down, Wendell. Word for word. You have got four asked and answered in there. Put the fifth one in properly.”
He writes.
“Now,” I say, “one more thing and then I am finished. I am not going to defend any of it. I am not going to tell this table I was tired, and I am not going to tell you what she asked me in a lot in April that nobody in this room has ever asked me, because it is true and it is not a defense, and a man who brings a reason into this room is asking you to do arithmetic on him.”
“You have got a wife out there in a truck,” Deacon says.
“I know where my wife is.”
“Do you.”
“No,” I say.
Deacon nods, once, slowly, and that is all he does.
“The table can vote whatever it wants,” I say. “Two-thirds takes the patch. If somebody wants to move it, move it now while the door is shut, because if this gets voted in a month with a Saints file on the table it will look like they did it, and I would rather it was us.”
Nobody moves.
I look at Torch. He does not move either, and I do not know what that is yet, and I am not sure he does.
“Then we are not voting today,” Deacon says. “Priest, note that no motion was made.”
“Noted.”
“Note that the president answered every question put to him and did not refuse any,” Deacon says.
Priest’s pen goes still for about a second.
“Marcus,” he says.
“Note it.”
He notes it.
“Doors,” Deacon says.