Chapter Eighteen
Roan
The run does not exist.
We are running a decoy. That is what it is called by the fourth week, when Torch stops pretending it is anything else in church.
The theory is that if the Saints took twelve crates off our yard, they have got to move them eventually, and if they move them they will move them the way anybody moves anything out of Coldwater, which is north through the Junction, and so we put vehicles on the road at night with tarps on them and we make it look like there is something worth taking, and we sit two miles back and wait for somebody to come and take it.
It is not a stupid plan. That is the worst part.
It is a perfectly reasonable plan for getting back a thing the Saints have got, and the Saints have not got it, so what it actually is, is nine weeks of putting our own men on a dark road at night in front of a club that has been burying its dead since October.
Fritz has said in church twice that we are chasing a thing that is not in Coldwater.
Nobody has listened, and I am the one who did not listen loudest, and I did it because listening to him would have meant sitting in a room with what I already knew.
He goes out at nine on the third with Wade in a flatbed with a tarp on it and nothing under the tarp but four pallets, and I am at the Yard, and the last thing he says to me is about a wheel bearing on the water truck.
They take him at the mouth of the wash three miles south of Rustling Springs.
There is a place there where the road comes down off a grade and the wash cuts under it and the shoulder is wide enough on the east side for a vehicle to sit with its lights off.
It is not hidden. It is the most obvious place on that whole stretch and every man in this club could name it, and Fritz could name it in his sleep, because Fritz has been reading that road since he was nineteen.
He would have seen it.
That is what I cannot get out of my head, and Wade has told me the same thing four times and each time he tells it he tells it the same, which is how I know it is true.
Fritz saw them at four hundred yards. He said, out loud, in the cab: there is somebody in the wash.
And then he kept going.
Because a decoy that turns round is not a decoy.
Because that was the entire point of nine weeks.
Because he was doing the job the table voted, and Curtis Nakagawa has never once not done the job the table voted, and he drove into it with both eyes open at forty-five miles an hour and told Wade to get down.
They put nine rounds into the cab from the east side.
Two of them come through the door. Wade is on the floor of the passenger footwell with his hands over his head and the truck goes off the road at the wash and stops in the sand at an angle, and by the time Wade gets up on his knees they are already going south with no lights on.
He calls it in at eleven eighteen from the one place on that stretch where a phone works.
I am there in twenty-one minutes and I have never ridden the 379 like that in my life and I hope I never do again.
The truck is at the bottom of the near bank at about thirty degrees with the driver’s door open and the interior light on, and Wade is standing in the sand holding his own elbow, and there is a smell in the air that is fuel and something else.
Fritz is half out of the cab. Wade has got him under the arms and pulled him that far and could not do the rest of it.
“He was talking,” Wade says. “Roan, he was talking in the truck.”
“Move.”
“He said a thing about the.”
“Wade. Move.”
I get my arms under him.
He is not a big man. That is the thing that nobody says about carrying somebody.
Fritz Nakagawa is about a hundred and sixty pounds and I have picked up transmissions heavier than that and there is no weight in the world like it, none, and I get up that bank with him and my legs do not work properly by the top.
I put him down on the shoulder of the road.
He is gone by then. He is gone and I know he is gone and I do the whole thing anyway, the hands, the counting, and Wade is on the phone to Deacon saying my name over and over.
At some point I am sitting in the sand at the side of the 379 at midnight with a man’s head on my thigh and my hand flat on his chest, and there is nothing under it.
Junior gets there at ten past twelve. Then Deacon, then Torch.
Nobody says anything for a while.
Then Deacon says, “Wade. Come here and stand where I can see you,” and Wade goes and stands there and does not stop shaking for an hour.
We do not call anybody. That is what the corridor is.
There is a sheriff’s substation in Ivanhoe with two deputies in it who have known Fritz since school and there is Corliss ninety minutes away, and none of them are called, and the truck goes on a hook at two in the morning and by four there is a stretch of road with some glass on it and nothing else.
He goes into the ground properly. I want that said.
Whatever else this club is, and it is a great many things, Curtis Nakagawa goes into a cemetery in Ivanhoe on the seventh of December with a stone with his name on it, and his sister comes from Sacramento, and the club pays for all of it out of the tin without a vote because there are some things you do not vote on.
Four hundred people. In a town of nineteen hundred.
That is what he was. That is the thing I did not understand until I stood at the back of it, that Fritz fixed everybody’s everything for twenty years, and there is a woman from the school district and there is the man from the hardware store and there is Dale the bondsman in a suit, and every one of them has got a story about a Saturday.
Ada is there. She has not shut those pumps in thirty years and they are shut.
And Sol’s name is not said once.
Not once, in four hours, by four hundred people.
There are men in that cemetery who have known her since she was in braces.
Her mother is not there and everybody notices that her mother is not there.
Melva Pankhurst comes and she has done her own hair and she says four things to me and not one of them is a question.
And it is in every mouth. That is the thing. It is in the way the club stands, in two loose clumps at nine yards, which is the distance at which nothing can happen. It is in Torch putting a hand on my back at the graveside. It is in Junior standing on his own by the fence for forty minutes.
Because everybody in that cemetery knows why there was a truck on that road at eleven at night in December.
There was a truck on that road because twelve crates went off a yard in September.
And there is only one name attached to that in this whole world, and none of them will say it, and none of them will say the other one either, which is that the man in the ground was the one who kept telling the table that they were looking in Coldwater for a thing that was not in Coldwater.
Hollis says one sentence to me at the graveside and then does not speak to me for nine days.
“He said it twice,” Hollis says.
Deacon finds me at the Yard on the ninth.
I am in the north bay doing nothing at all, standing in the middle of a clean rectangle of floor that has been clean since September, and he comes in and stands beside me with his hands in his jacket pockets.
“Marcus.”
“Roan.”
We stand there for a while.
“I have been in this club for thirty-six years,” Deacon says. “I patched in nineteen ninety, under your father’s father in the chair, and I have been sergeant at arms for twenty-two of it.”
“I know.”
“You do not know all of it, because I have never said all of it.” He is looking at the floor.
“I have taken eleven men out to that flat. Eleven. Some of them deserved it and some of them did not and two of them I have not slept right about since, and I have never once said I was ashamed. Not about the eleven. Not about the thing in oh-nine. Not about your father, and there is a version of your father’s death that this club has never told you and I am not going to tell you today either. ”
“Marcus.”
“I am not finished.” He takes a breath. “This is the ninth year with you in that chair. I have stood behind you in this yard for nine years and I have said no to men who wanted your seat and I have said it more than once and I did not tell you about it, because that is my job and it is not yours to know.”
“I know you have.”
“You do not know how many times.”
He turns his head and looks at me.
“And this is the first time I have been ashamed,” Deacon says.
The bay is very quiet.
“Say the rest,” I say.
“That boy said it in that room in October,” Deacon says.
“In front of all nine of us, in his own voice, in the flattest way that boy ever said anything. He said it was not the same club doing two things that cancel each other out. And he refused a question in front of me and I let him refuse it, and I want you to know that I have gone over that morning every single night since the third.”
“You could have asked him again.”
“I could have asked him again.”
“Why did you not.”
“Because I looked at him,” Deacon says, “and I knew what a refusal in that room meant, and I knew there were about four people on this earth that man would refuse for, and I made a decision that if I asked him the second question I would have to do what the book says to whoever the answer was.”
I do not say anything.
“And you sat two feet from me and said nothing,” Deacon says.
“Marcus.”
“I am not asking you,” he says. “I want that clear, Roan, the same way Ellis has been careful with you. I am not asking. I am telling you what I am ashamed of, which is that I have got a man in the ground who told the truth in that room and I let this table put him on a road at night chasing a thing I have suspected since October was not there.”
“Suspected.”
“Suspected,” Deacon says. “I am sixty-one and I am not a fool and there is a rule four in that book and I have read it out loud twice with my own mouth.”
He takes his hands out of his pockets.
“Here is where I am,” he says. “I have got no name. There has been no name put in front of this table, and I have not gone and got one, and I could have. I could have driven out to that motel in September and sat with a woman in a bar and had a name by the Sunday. I did not do that.”
“Why not.”
Marcus Oyelaran looks at me for a long time.
“Because I have eaten at that woman’s table on the second Sunday of every month for nine years,” he says, “and I am a man who does what the book says. So I have spent three months making sure nobody puts it in front of me.”
He says it flat. No apology in it and no pleading.
“And now Curtis is in the ground because of it,” he says, “and that is mine. That is not yours and it is not Ellis’s. I am the sergeant at arms and I sat on a thing I suspected, for a reason that was about my own stomach, and a good man drove into a wash.”
“Marcus.”
“Do not,” he says. “Do not tell me it is not. I have told you a thing I have never told anybody and I did not tell it to be comforted.”
He walks to the mouth of the bay and stops.
“One more,” he says. “When the name comes, and it is coming, because it always comes, I will do what the book says. I want you to understand that I am telling you that as a kindness and not as a threat. Whoever it is.”
“I know.”
“Whoever it is, Roan.”
“I know,” I say.
And he goes out into the yard, and I stand in the middle of a clean rectangle of concrete floor in a bay with a chain hoist on its hook, and my hands smell of a dead man’s jacket, and I have not been able to get it off them for six days.