Chapter Twenty-One
Sol
The canyon is smaller.
That is the first thing and I did not expect it.
I have been driving toward this for eleven hours and I have had it in my head for six months as a thing with weight, twelve miles of rock that closed over me in the dark with a light in the mirror, and I come up out of the flats at half past eight in the evening and the walls stand up on either side and they are just rock.
I do the whole twelve miles at forty-five with the windows down.
At the wide part, at the grader turnout, I slow to about twenty and look at the place where he sat with his lights off, and I do not stop, because stopping is a thing you do for yourself and I have not come here for myself.
Then the north end and the flats open out and there it is, all of it, going grey at the edges.
I get to Rustling Springs at twenty to nine.
I have decided about a hundred and eleven times between Delta and the Line whether to stop, and I have gone back and forth so many times that by the time the pumps come up on the right I have stopped thinking about it, and my hands just do it.
I come off the road and pull in past the second pump and shut the engine off.
Ada is out front with a broom.
She has been sweeping that apron since before I was born, and there is never anything on it, and she does it at the end of the day the way other people lock a door.
She stops with the broom in her hands.
I get out.
We look at each other across about eleven feet of concrete for a long few seconds.
“Well,” she says.
“Ada.”
“You have got dust all up that side. Where have you come from.”
“Delta.”
“That is not eleven hours.”
“I stopped.”
“Where.”
“Beaver,” I say. “And then in a lot outside Fillmore for about two hours, and then again about a mile back.”
“A mile back.”
“In the wide part.”
Ada nods slowly, and puts the broom against the pump island, and comes over.
She stops in front of me with her arms folded and looks up at me, because she is about five foot one and has been since the eighties.
“You know I have to call it in,” she says.
“I know.”
“I am not asking your permission and I am not apologizing for it either.”
“Ada, I know.”
“Thirty years I have done this,” she says.
“Every vehicle both ways, and I have never taken one dollar for it, and the reason I have never taken a dollar is so that on a night like tonight nobody can say I did it for money.” Her chin goes up.
“So I am going to go in that office and I am going to call the Yard, and you are going to have about twenty-five minutes on me if you go now, and about eleven if you stand here and talk to me.”
“I do not want twenty-five minutes.”
“No,” she says. “No, I did not think you did.”
And then her face goes, all at once, for about two seconds, and she puts a hand up over her mouth and turns halfway away from me and gets it back, and I stand there in a gas station apron and let her, because I know what it costs that woman to be seen doing that.
“Do not,” she says.
“I have not said anything.”
“You have got a face on.”
“So have you.”
“Marisol,” Ada says, and takes her hand down. “I want to say one thing and then I am going to go and make my phone call and you are going to drive up my road.”
“Say it.”
“On the twentieth of September, at seven in the morning, Curtis Nakagawa rang this station and asked me what went south in the night.” She is looking straight at me. “And I said nothing, because I got up at five and there had been nothing since five. That is what I said and it was true.”
“I know it was.”
“And then I put the phone down and I stood in that office,” Ada says, “and I thought, why is he asking me at seven in the morning before anybody has told me a single thing has happened.”
I do not say anything.
“So I have known since seven o’clock on the twentieth of September that Curtis Nakagawa knew something,” she says.
“Not what. But something. And I have sat at these pumps for six months and never said it to one living soul, and then they put that boy in a truck on a road at night, and I have got to live with the fact that I could have said something in October to somebody and I do not know if it would have made any difference at all.”
“It would not have,” I say.
“You do not know that.”
“I know what he was doing and why,” I say. “Ada, it would not have made any difference. Whatever you said in October, he still did what he did in September, and by October there was nothing anybody could unpick.”
Ada looks at me for a moment.
“That is the first time anybody has said a true thing to me about any of this since it started,” she says. “Everybody else has been very kind.”
“I know.”
“They have been so kind I could scream.” She picks up her broom. “Go on. I will give you the eleven minutes and not a second more, because if I hold it any longer than that they will know I held it.”
“Ada.”
“Go on.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“Do not thank me,” she says. “I am about to call thirty men and tell them where you are.”
I go past the Verdigris at ten to nine and I do not stop and I do not look at the office window, because if there is a light on in it I will stop, and if I stop I will not do the rest of it tonight.
Ivanhoe at nine.
The Chevron sign. The substation with one unit outside.
The clinic with the THURS scratched off, still, six months later, and something about that nearly finishes me, that in six months in which a man died and a truce ended and I became whatever I am now, the state has still not sent anybody about a sign.
Then the twenty-two miles, and the turn.
The Yard road is three miles of straight.
I stop at the bottom of it with the engine running.
There is a fence line and a cattle guard and a mailbox on a post, and then three miles of graded dirt going straight at a group of buildings sitting up out of forty-one acres of dead vehicles, and every window in the front of that building has got light in it, and there are more vehicles out front than there should be on a Tuesday night.
They know. Ada made her call twenty minutes ago and every man in that building knows.
And Roan’s father built this road so that anybody coming has to be watched the whole way in.
I have thought about this specific three miles for months.
I thought about it in a lot in Beaver and at a gate on the east side and in a diner in Fillmore, and every time I have thought about it I have thought about doing it fast, coming up it hard with the dust going up behind me so that whatever happens happens quickly.
I put it in gear and I drive it at twenty-five miles an hour.
Three miles at twenty-five is seven minutes and twelve seconds.
That is a very long time. I want that understood, because it is the longest thing I have ever done.
Seven minutes of a straight road with a building at the end of it getting slowly bigger, and thirty men watching a white flatbed come up out of the dark at the speed of a woman going to church, and there is nothing to do but hold the wheel and let them look.
I do it slowly on purpose.
Not for courage. Because in eleven years I have watched about four hundred vehicles come up that road and I know exactly what a man in that bar room thinks when one comes up it fast, and I know what he thinks when one comes up it slow, and I have not driven eleven hours to arrive looking like something being chased.
The dogs come out at about half a mile. They come down the road at the truck the way they have come at every vehicle since they were pups, barking their heads off, and then at about a hundred yards one of them gets it and the barking changes and he turns and runs alongside the door with his whole body going.
I stop where I always parked.
Not in the lot with the trucks. Round the side by the office, in the third space, nose in, where I have parked since 2015 because that is where the shade is at four in the afternoon.
I shut the engine off.
I sit there for a second with my hands on the wheel and I do the thing I have been doing for six months, which is check that there is nothing in this vehicle that I would not want found, and there is not, because I stopped a mile back in the wide part and moved it all.
Then I get out.
The dog is on me before both feet are down and I put my hand on his head and say his name and he makes a noise I have not heard in six months.
The lot is very quiet.
Somebody has left a radio on in a truck somewhere and there is music playing about eleven yards away and nobody has turned it off, which tells me exactly how long they have been standing where they are standing.
I walk across the gravel.
The bar room door is standing open, which it is not, ever, in March, because it is fifty degrees at nine at night in March, and it is standing open because thirty men have come out through it and gone back in and nobody has thought about the door.
I go up the two concrete steps and stop in the doorway.
Thirty men.
Every single one of them except Amos is standing.
Not one man in that room is sitting down.
There is a bar with eleven stools at it and not one of them is occupied.
There are four tables and every chair is pushed back, and there are men standing along the wall under the patches off dead members, and men standing in front of the framed photographs nobody explains, and the whole room is on its feet and has been on its feet for twenty minutes.
Nobody says anything.
I stand in the doorway and I look at it.
Torch is at the end of the bar with both hands on it, in the same place he was standing on the ninth of September.
Hollis is at the back table with the ledgers under his hands.
Wade is by the wall with his hand strapped and his mother’s face on him.
Junior is standing on his own by the pool table looking at the floor and he has aged about nine years.
Amos Toft is in the chair by the door.
He is the only man sitting down in the entire room, because he is seventy-four and he has sat in that chair since 1971 and he is not going to stand up for anybody, and he has got a coffee in front of him, and when I come through the door he looks up at me and he does not look away.
Priest is by the assay office door with the book under his arm.
He looks like a man who has not slept since December.
Deacon is in the middle of the room.
He is standing square with his hands at his sides and he is looking straight at me, and there is absolutely nothing on his face, and Marcus Oyelaran has eaten at my table on the second Sunday of every month for nine years and has read rule four out loud at that table twice with his own mouth in my hearing.
And Roan is at the end of the bar nearest the door.
I have not seen my husband in six months.
He is thinner. That is the first thing. He has got about eleven days of beard and there is grey coming in at the side that was not there in September, and he is holding a glass he is not drinking out of, and when I come through that door he does not move one inch.
He does not come forward and he does not say my name.
He puts the glass down on the bar, very carefully, the way you put a thing down in a room where a wrong noise matters.
Nobody speaks.
I stand just inside the door on the concrete with thirty men on their feet and I do not look at my husband, because if I look at my husband I will be a wife in this room and there is a very short list of things a wife gets to say in it.
I look at Deacon.
“Marcus,” I say.
“Marisol,” Deacon says.
And it is the first word anybody has said in that building for four minutes.