Chapter Twenty
Roan
They pick the schoolhouse at Bitter Wells, which is ours, and Hollis spends two days telling me that is the whole message before anybody says a word.
“They are coming forty miles up our road to a building we use,” he says, “to tell us what they are going to take. Roan, that is not a location. That is a sentence.”
“Then we meet them at the Junction.”
“We cannot,” Hollis says. “We asked. They said Bitter Wells or nothing until June, and we cannot afford until June.”
Eight of us go. They bring six.
The schoolhouse has not had a school in it since 1978 and there are still hooks on the wall at child height and somebody has put two folding tables in the middle of the room and thirteen chairs, which means they counted.
Sutter comes in a jacket. Their VP comes in a cut and stands the whole time. The sergeant at arms stays at the door with his hands folded in front of him and does not look at anybody, which is a thing he does because it works.
And their counsel sits down with a folio and takes out a folder that is about two inches thick.
He is maybe forty-five. Grey at the sides, glasses, a suit that is not a costume, and a patch on the back of a jacket over the chair behind him. Hollis cannot stop looking at him.
“Before we start,” Sutter says. “Marcus.”
“Sutter,” Deacon says.
“Deshaun Pettway’s mother is in my clubhouse every Sunday.” He puts his hands on the table. “Your man is sitting at that end of the table and I am not going to say anything to him, because I have got sixty people who want to say something to him and if I start we do not finish this meeting.”
“That is fair,” Deacon says.
“Curtis Nakagawa,” Sutter says.
“Do not,” Torch says.
“I am saying his name because he is dead and because it happened on a road, and I am not going to sit in a room and pretend it did not.” Sutter does not look away from Deacon.
“There has been no vote in my club about that either. I want that on your record. I do not have control of everything my people do and neither do you, and that is what a dead truce is. That is what it looks like.”
“You have got a record,” Hollis says.
“Everybody has got a record,” Sutter says. “Go ahead, Warren.”
Their counsel opens the folder.
“For the avoidance of doubt,” he says, “I am acting for the Vinegar Saints Motorcycle Club and everything I say here is said within the framework of the agreement of the eleventh of June, 2011, which both clubs are party to and which is in force. I have a copy of it here. I believe you have the original.”
“We have the original,” Hollis says.
“Then we can go clause by clause or I can summarize and you can stop me. Which would you prefer?”
“Summarize,” I say.
“Clause four,” he says. “No contact between members or associates of either club outside a sanctioned meet. Any contact to be reported by the party involved at their club’s next scheduled meeting.
It is reciprocal, it is unqualified, and there is no carve-out for personal conduct.
That last point is deliberate, and if you look at the drafting notes, which we do not have, but your original may. ”
“It is deliberate,” Hollis says.
“Thank you.”
He turns a page.
“Fourteen occasions between the ninth of April and the twelfth of August,” he says. “I will read the dates.”
He reads the dates.
He reads fourteen dates out loud in a room with fifteen men in it in a voice with nothing in it whatsoever, and it takes about forty seconds, and I sit there and listen to a man in glasses recite my Tuesdays.
“Photographs,” he says. “There are two hundred and eleven images. I have brought thirty-one. They are not for you to keep. Four of them you have already seen, and I want to acknowledge that those four were delivered to your salvage office on the ninth of September in a manner that was not itself a sanctioned communication, and if you want to raise that as a breach we will hear it.”
“Do not,” Deacon says quietly, before Junior can open his mouth.
“Then I will continue. Room registrations for eleven of the fourteen, in the name of the associate, paid in cash. Two of the remaining three we have from vehicle position only, and one we are not asserting.” He looks up for the first time.
“I want to be precise about that, because the thirteenth date is weaker than the other thirteen and I would rather say so now than have you find it.”
Hollis puts his glasses on and then takes them off again.
“And the reporting,” Sutter says.
“Your club’s minutes,” Warren says.
Nobody at our table moves.
“We have not seen them and we are not asking for them,” he says. “But there is a question of fact that only your secretary can answer, and I am going to put it to him once, and if he declines that is his right and we will proceed on inference.”
Every head at our table goes to Priest.
He is sitting three down from me with the book shut under his hands, and he has not written anything since we came in, and his face is the color of the wall.
“Mr. Cobb,” Warren says. “Between the ninth of April and today, was any contact with a Vinegar Saints associate reported by your president at any scheduled church of your club.”
Priest looks at me.
“Answer it,” I say.
“No,” Priest says.
“Thank you.”
“Nineteen churches,” Priest says.
“I did not ask that.”
“I am saying it anyway,” Priest says. “Nineteen. It is in my book. If you are going to have it, have all of it.”
Warren looks at him for a second and something moves behind the glasses that might be respect.
“Then the position is this,” he says. “Fourteen unreported contacts by the president of your club over four months, in breach of clause four, none reported under the reporting requirement. That is a material breach under clause nine. Clause nine entitles the aggrieved club to compensation, and clause nine does not define compensation, which I am sure your treasurer has read a hundred times in the last six months.”
“A hundred and eleven,” Hollis says.
“Then you know it is open.”
“I know two men who could not agree a number left it open in 2011 so the thing could get signed,” Hollis says, “and I know that an undefined term is not a blank cheque, it is an invitation to a reasonable claim, and I would like to hear yours before you say it in a way that sounds like it was always going to be that.”
“That is fair,” Warren says. “Our claim is the corridor.”
Nobody says anything.
“Specifically,” he says, “the tolling rights on State Route 379 between the Junction and the Line, including all associated escort and clearance arrangements, transferred in full, permanently, effective on a date to be agreed but not later than the first of June.”
“That is not compensation,” Torch says. “That is the club.”
“It is the club’s principal revenue,” Warren says. “I am not going to pretend otherwise or dress it up as a percentage. You asked for the claim and that is the claim.”
“And if we say no,” Deacon says.
Sutter answers that one himself.
“Then it is not a legal question any more,” he says.
“Then it is nine of you and about two hundred of us, and I do not want that, and I am going to tell you why, since we are being honest in here. Because a war on that road with the state of the last four months means the ATF takes an interest, and once they take an interest neither of us has got a corridor. So I would rather have it by agreement.”
“You would rather have it,” Hollis says.
“I would rather have it by agreement,” Sutter says. “I am also going to have it.”
We take twenty minutes outside.
Eight men standing in the dust at Bitter Wells in March with the wind coming off the flats, and nobody can look at anybody.
“Fight it,” Junior says.
“With what,” Hollis says.
“With.”
“With what, Junior. Say the noun.” Hollis has got his hands out.
“We have got thirty patches and eleven of them are over fifty. We have lost the gun line because we have not got a buyer since September. The corridor is running at about sixty percent because two of Teodoro’s people have gone and found another way through since the shooting started, and I have not told this table that because I have been waiting for a day that was not this one.
There is a hundred and eighty thousand dollars in the tin and thirty of that is Curtis’s stone and his sister’s flights and the difference on Wade’s hand. ”
“So we lose the road,” Wade says.
“We lose the road or we lose the club,” Hollis says. “Those are the two.”
“There is a third,” Torch says.
Everybody looks at him.
He has got his hands in his pockets and he is looking at the ground, and I have known Ellis Brannigan for nineteen years and I know what it costs him to say a thing before he has been asked.
“We give them the man,” he says.
“Ellis,” Deacon says.
“I am saying it because somebody has to say it out loud and then we can all say no to it.” He looks up.
“Their whole case is a president who did a thing and did not report it. So we strip the patch and we go back in there and we say the man who breached your clause is not the president of this club any more, and the club that committed the breach does not exist in the same form, and their counsel has to sit down and think about that for about a week.”
“Would it work,” Priest says.
“No,” Hollis says.
“Say why,” Deacon says.
“Because a stripped president is a confession,” Hollis says.
“You do not strip a man for a thing he did not do. The second that patch comes off in front of them, the breach is admitted, and then all they have to do is come back in June with the same folder and a paragraph about how we agreed. It is worse. It is materially worse.”
“So there is nothing,” Junior says.
“There is time,” Hollis says. “That is all I have got. I can argue quantum. I can argue that the remedy is disproportionate to the breach and I can make them prove loss, and Warren will enjoy it, and it might buy us to August.”
“And then.”
“And then it is August,” Hollis says.
I have not said anything in eleven minutes.
“Roan,” Deacon says.
“Yeah.”
“You are the president. Say something.”
I look at seven men standing in the dust at a ghost town.
“There is no answer,” I say. “That is the thing I have got to say and I am not going to dress it up. There is no answer in that room. Hollis is right that we can argue it to August and Ellis is right that stripping me makes it worse, and Junior is right that fighting it ends the club, and every one of those is a way of losing more slowly.”
Nobody argues with me.
“I did it,” I say. “That is the beginning and the end of it. I did fourteen Tuesdays and I sat in nineteen churches and said nothing, and every single thing that has happened since the ninth of September comes out of that. Curtis is in the ground because of a load that went off our yard because that load sat eleven days because of a bag that came because of me.”
“Roan,” Torch says.
“I am not doing a speech.” I put my hands out.
“I am saying it because in that room a man in glasses read my dates out loud and not one of you flinched, because you have all had six months to get used to it, and I have watched this club get used to a thing that should have finished me, and that is on me too.”
“So what do we do,” Wade says.
“We go back in and Hollis argues quantum and we get to August,” I say. “And in August we will know more than we know now.”
“Will we,” Junior says.
“Something will happen,” I say.
We go back in. Hollis argues quantum for fifty minutes and he is better at it than any of us knew, and Warren enjoys it exactly as predicted, and at the end of it there is a date in June for a second meeting and nothing else.
Sutter stops at the door on the way out.
“Roan.”
“Sutter.”
“Was it worth it,” he says.
He does not say it cruelly. That is the thing about that man. He says it like an actuary.
“No,” I say.
“No,” he says, and puts his hand out, and I look at it, and I take it, because the alternative is being a man who would not.
Ada calls the Yard at eleven minutes past nine that night.
Junior takes it on the wall phone in the bar room because he is closest to it, and I am at the end of the bar with Torch and Hollis and about eleven other men who have not gone home because nobody wants to go home, and I hear Junior say her name.
Then he says, “Say it again.”
Then he says, “How long ago.”
And every man in that room turns round.
He puts the phone against his chest.
“Ada,” he says.
“We heard,” Torch says.
“A truck came through the Neck northbound at half past eight.” Junior’s voice has gone somewhere odd. “She was out front. She said it went past her at about eight forty and it did not stop for gas.”
“So what,” Wade says. “Trucks.”
“She said it is a flatbed,” Junior says. “White. Ten or eleven years old. And it slowed down at her pumps and it did not stop, and then it went north.”
The room does not move.
“Ada does not call about a truck,” Deacon says.
“Ask her why she called,” Hollis says.
Junior puts the phone back to his ear and asks her, and listens for about four seconds, and I watch his face do it.
“Because she recognized it,” he says.
Nobody says anything at all.
There are about thirty men in that bar room and every one of them is looking at me, and I am standing at the end of a bar with a glass in my hand that I have not drunk out of, and there is a light on over a sink in a house forty miles from here that has been on since the ninth of September.
“Northbound,” I say.
“Northbound,” Junior says. “Past the Springs at eight forty.”
Past the Springs at eight forty. Past the Verdigris at eight fifty. Ivanhoe at nine.
And then twenty-two miles of straight road, and a turn, and three miles more.
“Nobody moves,” Deacon says.
He says it in a voice I have heard him use four times in nine years, and thirty men stop where they are.
“Nobody moves and nobody rides out and nobody gets on a phone,” Deacon says. “Roan, that is not me giving you an order. That is me telling this room what is going to happen, and if you want to overrule me you had better do it now and out loud.”
I put the glass down on the bar.
“No,” I say. “He is right.”
“Then we stand here,” Deacon says.
And thirty men in a metal building at the end of three miles of straight road stand there and wait to see whether headlights come up it.