Chapter Seventeen
Sol
Ferrell opens up at ten past nine and does not look surprised to see the truck.
He unlocks the office and turns the lights on and puts the kettle on the hotplate and does all of it without saying anything, which I appreciate more than I could tell him, and then he sits down behind the desk and folds his hands.
“Well,” he says.
“No.”
He nods slowly.
“Alright,” he says. “Then I meant what I.”
“I have not finished.”
He stops.
“No to that,” I say. “I am not going to tell you about the lake. Not today, not in four years, not if I am dying. And I want to say why, and then I am going to say something else, and you are going to want to hear the second thing.”
“Go on.”
“There is a woman in a trailer eleven miles outside a town in Nevada who has got her husband’s boots by the door,” I say.
“If I sell you that ground, then every time you pick up a phone she is in the room. Not because anybody digs anything up. Because I would be the one who put a price on the hole he is in. I sat at her table. She poured me coffee out of a pot I bought her.”
Ferrell does not say anything.
“So no,” I say. “That one is not for sale and it is not for trade and there is no number, and if that means we are finished then say so now and I will drive out of your yard and we will have had a good six weeks.”
“We are not finished,” he says. “Say the second thing.”
And here is where I stop being able to tell this story as a woman something was done to.
I have thought about how to put this part down for a long time.
There is a way of writing it where the room is dim and I am shaking and it happens to me.
That is not what happened. It was twenty past nine in the morning in an office with a wall of photographs of combines and a fan going in the corner, and I had slept four hours and had a coffee, and I was completely in possession of myself.
“You said you cannot touch that road because you do not know who it belongs to and you do not know how they price,” I say.
“I did.”
“That is the wrong problem.” I sit down.
“You are not going to get onto that road. Nobody is going to get onto that road, because that road is not a road, it is a toll, and the toll is one man and the man will not sell it to you and cannot sell it to you and would not know how. So stop looking at the canyon.”
“Then what am I looking at.”
“The other end.”
Ferrell puts his hands flat on the desk.
“There is a buyer,” I say.
He does not move.
“There is a man who has been taking long guns off that road for fourteen months,” I say.
“Four loads. Never a problem, never a phone call, never a name said out loud in a room. He does not talk to anybody, which is why he is the buyer. He does not go through the canyon, he sits above it, and the routing that reaches him does not touch the Neck at all. It comes up the east side, off the Line, on a track that is not on a map and has not been graded since 1970, and I know the four turnings on it because I have heard them said out loud eleven times in eleven years by men who did not know I was standing there.”
“Sol.”
“You wanted a corridor,” I say. “That is a corridor. It does not belong to anybody. It is not a road anybody holds, it is a way to reach the only man out there who buys without asking, and the thing that makes him valuable is not the guns. It is that he is the only address on that whole line that has never once had a problem.”
Ferrell has gone very still.
“What is his name,” he says.
And I am aware of my own heartbeat, and I am aware of the fan, and I am aware that there is a version of the next four seconds where I say I have changed my mind and drive to Boise.
“Say the terms first,” I say.
“I am not going to write it down and sell it,” he says. “Same as before. It is yours. You hold it, you price it, I take my eleven and I take your calls.”
“Then say the number for the first one.”
“There is a man coming through Delta on Saturday who wants forty crates of something moved west in January,” Ferrell says. “If that lands, your end is a hundred and ten thousand dollars, and it is the first of about six.”
“And in two years.”
“In two years you are not a woman renting a room.”
I look at the wall of combines.
“His name is Anselm Boyer,” I say. “He runs a fuel and feed operation on the Utah side of the Line north of a place called Bitter Wells. He has been buying for fourteen months and he has stopped buying six weeks ago because his supply stopped, and he will not have replaced it, because there is nobody to replace it with.”
“And the routing.”
I tell him the routing.
It takes about ninety seconds. Four turnings, a wash you cross at a specific place because of a culvert, a gate with a chain that is not locked and has never been locked, and a stretch you do at night because there is a house at the second turning with a woman in it who is nobody’s but who talks.
I say all of it in a level voice like a person reading out a phone number.
Then it is done, and it is quiet in the office, and Ferrell is writing nothing down because he does not write things down, and he says:
“How do you know all that.”
“Because Curtis Nakagawa sat at my mother’s bar on the ninth of March, 2019, and told a man he was drunk with why the east track is better than the canyon in a wet spring,” I say, “and I was six feet away washing glasses, and neither of them looked up.”
I get out of that office at ten to ten.
I get about four hundred yards down the frontage road and I pull onto the gravel and open the door and I am sick into the weeds beside a fence post with my hand on the wing mirror.
I am sick twice. Then I sit on the running board with my head down between my knees for a long time.
Here is what I understand, sitting on a running board in Utah with the taste of it in my mouth.
I have not done a bad thing to my husband.
That is the sentence that will not stay down, and it is why I am on the gravel. If what I had done was to hurt Roan Vasquez-Doyle I would be fine. I would be more than fine, I would drive back into that yard singing.
But Anselm Boyer is not my husband. Anselm Boyer is a sixty-year-old man on the Utah side of the Line who has never done one thing to me, and I have just put his name and his gate and his unlocked chain into the hands of a broker in a hay yard, and from this morning he is a thing that can be reached.
And the routing is not Roan’s either. The routing is Hollis’s, because Hollis works out how a thing gets somewhere, and it is Fritz’s, because Fritz drove it, and it is Amos Toft’s probably, because everything out there is somebody’s from before I was born.
I gave it away in ninety seconds in a level voice.
And I did it in the exact way it was got. I did not steal it out of a safe. I did not go through anybody’s phone. I heard it because a man was drunk and comfortable and I was invisible, and then I sold it, and there is a word for that and the word is not victim.
Rule four. Theft from the club is death.
I have been telling myself for two months that the crates were the thing.
Twelve crates, a hundred and sixty thousand dollars, a truck, and a woman who was owed.
There is an argument in that. There is an argument I have made at three in the morning in four states, that they took eleven years off me and I took a load off them, and a woman could probably die with that in her mouth.
There is no argument for this one.
This one is not compensation. Nobody is owed a routing.
This is a woman selling the working parts of a club to a man in another state so she does not have to be poor at thirty-seven, and it is the second theft, and it is worse than the first one, and it is worse precisely because nobody will ever find it.
The crates left a clean rectangle on a concrete floor.
This will leave nothing at all. Anselm Boyer will get a phone call in January from a man he has never heard of who somehow knows about the culvert, and he will never work out how, and he will die not knowing.
I sit on the running board and I make myself say the whole of it out loud, because I have learned that the things you will not say out loud are the ones that run you.
“I did that on purpose,” I say. “This morning. At twenty past nine.”
And then I get up and I wipe my mouth on my wrist and I get in the truck.
I do not undo it.
That is the part. I want that on the page more than anything else in this whole account.
There is a thing people say about a moment like this, that it happened too fast, that by the time you understood it it was gone.
That is not true and it was not true for me.
I sat on a running board for eleven minutes four hundred yards from that office.
Ferrell had not made a phone call. He had not written it down.
He does not write things down. If I had walked back into that yard at ten to ten and said I have made a mistake, that man would have looked at me for a second and said alright, and taken his hand off it, and it would have gone back to being a thing that only lived in one person’s head.
I know he would have.
I sat on the running board and I thought about a hundred and ten thousand dollars in January and about six more after it, and about being thirty-seven in a rented room, and about a table of nine men who have already decided what I am.
Then I drove to Beaver and I bought a phone.
I get back to the room at half eleven and sit on the end of a bed with a bedspread that has been there since 1996.
There is a thing I have not let myself do since September, which is add it up.
Twelve crates. One buyer. One routing. A road captain who refused to answer a question at a table on my account. And a man who has spent thirty years building a thing in his head that I have now taken two pieces out of and sold in two different states.
I am not the wronged party.
I was, for about four days in September before I stole the crates.
I was completely the wronged party and I could have stayed her, and there is a life where I did, where I stood in that bar room with four photographs in my hand and drove to my mother’s and cried for six months and was the woman it happened to, and everybody on that road would have said her name softly for twenty years.
I gave that up on a Thursday morning at half past three, and I gave the rest of it up this morning at twenty past nine.
I am something else now, and I have not got a name for it yet.
I put the money in a bag and the bag in the wardrobe, and I lie down on top of the bedspread with my boots on and my arm over my eyes, and I do not sleep for a long time, and what I keep seeing is not Roan and not the bar room and not the photographs.
It is a chain on a gate that has never been locked, out on a track on the east side, in the dark.