Chapter Sixteen
Sol
The money comes in four times over six weeks and none of it looks like money.
The first is eight thousand in an envelope in a parts catalog.
The second is nine and a half, cash, handed to me across the counter of a tire place in Milford by a man who does not know what he is handing me and thinks it is a settlement on a horse trailer.
The third is twelve, wired to an account Ferrell’s daughter opened for me in a bank in Beaver with a driver’s license I did not know a person could get.
The fourth is six thousand two hundred and it comes on a Thursday in November in a Wendy’s bag with a burger in it.
“That is thirty-five seven,” Ferrell says. “I told you forty and I got you just over forty, and my eleven comes off that, so thirty-five seven. There is a sheet in the bag.”
There is. Handwritten, itemized, with the eleven percent worked out at the bottom in pencil and a note that says PAID IN FULL and his initials.
“You gave me a receipt.”
“I give everybody a receipt,” Ferrell says. “That is the whole trick, if you want it. Nobody has ever gone to the police about a man who gave them a receipt.”
I sit in his office and look at thirty-five thousand seven hundred dollars in cash and paper.
I have never had that much money. That is not a figure of speech.
There has always been money around me, there is money in a tin at the Verdigris and there is money at the Yard in a tin with a slot in it, and Hollis moves numbers about that would make your eyes water, and none of it has ever been mine.
My mother has run a motel for twenty-two years and the most she has ever had at one time is eleven thousand dollars, and that was 2004, and it was for the roof.
“You are doing arithmetic,” Ferrell says.
“I am.”
“Do not do it in here. It makes people look poor.”
I do it anyway, in my head, sitting in a chair with a wall of combines behind him.
Thirty-five seven. Say a room at forty a night, so twelve hundred a month, and food, and gas, and the truck is a problem I have to solve. Say two thousand a month if I am careful and I have discovered I am very careful.
Seventeen months.
That is the number, and I sit there with it and I understand something that took me two full days to be honest about afterward: Seventeen months is not freedom.
Seventeen months is a hallway. At the end of it there is a woman of thirty-seven in a rented room in Beaver, Utah, with no money, no name, no work history since a bar in 1999, and a driver’s license somebody’s daughter made her.
Money that runs out is not a life. It is a countdown with better sheets.
“Right,” Ferrell says. “So now we do the other thing.”
I put the sheet down.
“Say it,” I say.
“You want to hear it now?”
“Ferrell.”
“Alright.” He gets up and goes to the door and shuts it, and he has never once shut that door in six weeks. “Do you know what the eleven percent that is not swathers actually is?”
“No.”
“Neither do most people who do it.” He sits back down.
“It is not moving things. Anybody can move a thing. It is knowing which yard a thing can sit in for a week without somebody asking, and which weighbridge does not photograph, and which four men in the state of Utah you can call at eleven at night. That is what I sell. I have been building it since 1991 and it is worth more than every piece of iron in that yard and I cannot put it on a balance sheet.”
“I know that.”
“You do know that,” he says. “That is the whole reason we are sitting here. So here is my thing.”
He puts both hands flat on the desk.
“There is a corridor going west out of here that I have never been able to touch,” he says. “Not the interstate. The other one. Down the two-fifty-seven and across and out onto that Nevada road, the long one with the canyon in it.”
I do not move.
“For two years I have had people ask me about that,” Ferrell says.
“Because if you can put something on that road you are in California in a day and a half without going through a single place that has a camera on a scale. And every time somebody asks me, I say no, because that road belongs to somebody, and I do not know who, and I do not know how they price, and I do not know what happens to a man who gets it wrong.”
“You know who it belongs to.”
“I know the name of a salvage company that was painted on the door of a flatbed in my yard for six weeks,” Ferrell says. “That is all I have known, and I have never once said it out loud, and I am not going to now.”
He waits.
“Say the thing you actually want,” I say.
“Who buries.”
The fan goes round in the corner.
“Say the rest of it,” I say.
“There is a dry lake out there.” He says it without any particular weight, the way he said eleven percent.
“Everybody who has ever run that road knows there is a dry lake and knows what it is for. That is not a secret, Sol. That is the least secret thing in the state of Nevada. What nobody knows is who. Who calls it. Who does the work. Who has to say yes before a man goes out there, and what it costs, and what a person has to be before that yes is available to him.”
“Why.”
“Because that is not a place,” Ferrell says.
“It is a service. And a man who can broker access to that service is not a hay dealer any more. He is the only address between here and the coast that can solve the one problem nobody can solve for themselves, and every single person in this trade has that problem eventually.”
“You want to sell the Sump.”
“I want to be able to answer the phone,” he says.
I sit in that chair for a while.
“That is not information,” I say. “You are calling it information. It is not.”
“What is it.”
“It is thirty years of men.”
He does not say anything.
“That ground has got people in it that somebody in this world is still looking for,” I say.
“There are women who think their husbands left them. I have sat in their kitchens. I have taken propane out to a woman in a trailer eleven miles outside a town, and she has got her husband’s photograph face down on the wall, and she has never once asked me why a man who left would leave his boots. ”
“I know,” Ferrell says.
“Do you.”
“Sol, I am sixty-four years old.”
“Then you know what you are asking me for,” I say. “You are asking me to price her.”
He takes that. He does not flinch off it and he does not defend himself and I will give him that until the day I die.
“Yes,” he says.
“And what happens to her when I do.”
“Nothing happens to her,” he says. “That is the honest answer and you are not going to like it. Nothing happens to any of them. Nobody is dug up. Nobody is charged. What happens is that men who need a hole start calling me instead of standing in a bar in Ely asking a stranger, which as it happens is how people get killed.”
“That is the version where you are helping.”
“That is the version where I am honest about the fact that I am not.”
He gets up and goes to the window.
“I will tell you what I am actually offering, because I have not said it and you have not asked,” he says.
“I am not offering to buy a fact off you for cash. If I wanted a fact I would offer you eleven thousand dollars and you would take it and in three weeks you would be a woman in a room with eleven thousand dollars.”
“Then what.”
“A position,” Ferrell says. “You would hold it. Not me. You would be the one who knows, and I would be the one who has your phone number, and every call I take about that road I would put to you, and you would price it and I would take my eleven, and in two years you would not be renting a room in Beaver.”
“That is not a job. That is a fuse.”
“It is a fuse,” he agrees. “It is a fuse that pays for a house. And I want to say the next bit plainly because I have thought about how to say it for six weeks.” He turns round.
“It only works if it is you. If you tell me and I sell it, I have got a fact, and a fact can be got a second time from somebody else, and then I am in a bidding war with a man in Coldwater. If you hold it, there is nothing to buy. It cannot be taken. It dies with you.”
“That is not a comfort.”
“No,” he says. “But it is why nobody sensible would kill you for it.”
I stand up.
“How long have I got.”
“How long do you want.”
“How long have I got, Ferrell.”
“There is a man coming through Delta on Saturday,” he says. “That is not pressure, that is a calendar. Tell me tomorrow either way and if it is no we never speak of it and I will still take your calls about hay equipment, and I mean that, and you will not believe me for about four years.”
I take the Wendy’s bag out to the truck.
I do not go back to Beaver.
I drive out past Minersville and up a track by a reservoir and sit on the tailgate of a flatbed in the cold with thirty-five thousand seven hundred dollars in a fast food bag beside me and the whole of Utah going purple, and I stay out there until two in the morning.
Here is the argument I have with myself, and I am going to put it down honestly, both sides, because I have heard the generous version of this told about me since and I do not want it.
The generous version is that I had no choice. That is not true. I had thirty-five thousand seven hundred dollars and seventeen months and a driver’s license, and there is a woman who takes that and drives to Boise and gets a job in a bar and is forty-one before anybody asks her a hard question.
I did not want to be her.
That is the first true thing and it is not a good one.
The second one is Dorrie Voss.
Because Ferrell is right, and that is the worst part. Nothing happens to Dorrie. Nobody digs anything up, nobody comes to her door, nothing on that flat gets so much as looked at. What I would be selling does not touch her at all.
Except that it does, because the only reason I know any of it is that I sat in her kitchen.
Every single thing I have got in my head came out of a kitchen.
Melva Pankhurst crying about a boy called Denny.
Junior on my couch at twenty-three. Hollis in my spare bed for nine days the winter the barn flooded, talking at two in the morning the way a man does when he is somewhere he feels safe.
I did not learn any of it by being clever. I learned it by being trusted.
And that is the thing I would be selling. Not a lake.
The third thing is the one I sit with the longest, and it is the one that decides it, and I am not proud of it.
They are going to kill me anyway.
Not as a feeling. As a fact, written on a page, read out loud twice in a concrete room by a man who eats at my table on the second Sunday of every month.
There is no version where I am forgiven.
There is no version where I come back. Rule four does not have a clause about circumstances, and I have known that since I was nineteen years old because Wendell Cobb sat me down in his kitchen and made me say it back to him.
So the question is not whether I have broken with them. That happened on a Thursday at half past three in the morning.
The question is what I am, now that I have.
A woman with a bag of money in a rented room, waiting seventeen months for the money to stop.
Or something they cannot do anything about.
I get down off the tailgate at about half one and stand in the dark and say it out loud, because I have started saying things out loud in the last two months and I do not think that is a good sign.
“You do not get to have clean hands and a chair.”
That is not wisdom. That is a thing my mother said to me across a bar when I was nineteen years old and had just told her what I was going to sign up for, and I was too young to hear it, and I have got it now, on a track by a reservoir in a state I had never been to, holding a fast food bag full of cash.
I drive back down at two and sleep four hours in a room in Beaver that costs forty a night.
At half past eight I am sitting in Ferrell’s yard with the engine off, waiting for him to open up, and I have not decided one single thing about what I am going to say.