Chapter Twenty-Seven
Dovey
The phone rings on the second of April at eleven in the morning and I am standing in a kitchen in Coldwater that is not mine.
Nothing in that house is mine. The dishes are his and the couch is his and the truck in the drive is registered to a body shop the club owns, and I have been in that kitchen for four years and I have got about eleven things in it that would fit in a bag.
“Is that Dovey Renard.”
“Who is this.”
“You have got a debt with a man in Henderson,” he says. “It was eleven thousand and it is nineteen now, because of what it does, and you have been paying him three hundred a month for two years and last month you did not.”
I stand there with my hand on the counter.
“Who is this.”
“You have not told anybody in that club about it,” he says, “because a woman in your position with a debt is a woman somebody can use, and you worked that out on your own, and I would like you to know that I noticed it.”
“I am going to hang up.”
“You are not,” he says.
And he is right, and that is the thing about that whole conversation, that he is right about everything and he does not say any of it like a man who is enjoying being right.
He is old. That is the first thing you get off the voice.
Old and unhurried and completely level, and there is a rasp in it that is not illness, it is just what happens to a throat over fifty-odd years.
He talks the way men talk in the small towns north of here, with a little space before each sentence, like he is putting each one down carefully.
“What do you want,” I say.
“On the ninth there is a sanctioned meet at the Junction,” he says. “You will be there, because you are always there, because your man likes you where he can see you.”
“That is not.”
“Do not,” he says. “Do not tell me what it is. I am fifty-eight years old and I have watched women stand at the back of lots at those meets since before you were born, and there is not a version of that arrangement I have not seen.”
I do not say anything.
“There will be a man there,” he says, “and after the numbers are done he will go to his bike to get water out of his bag, and he will be on his own for about four minutes because he always is, and I want you to ask him a question.”
“What question.”
“Who pays for the road,” he says.
I laugh.
“That is it?”
“That is it.”
“That is not a question.”
“You have driven that canyon,” he says. “You came up through it in March in a truck with a bad rack.”
The kitchen goes cold.
“How do you,” I say.
“Ask him who pays for the road,” he says. “And when he tells you, ask him how. And then whatever he says, you say one more thing, which is: so you are the highway department.”
“Why.”
“Because he has not been asked a question in nine years,” the old man says, “and he does not know that about himself yet, and when you ask him one he is going to feel something he has not felt since he was a young man, and he will not have a name for it either.”
I stand in that kitchen for a long moment.
“You want me to work him.”
“No.”
“Then what.”
“I want you to be interested in him,” he says. “You are very good at being interested. That is not an insult, Miss Renard, that is a skill and it is worth more than what half the men in your clubhouse can do, and nobody has ever once paid you for it.”
“And what do I get.”
“What do you want,” he says.
And nobody has ever asked me that, so I stand in a kitchen that is not mine and I say the true thing, which I have not said out loud in four years.
“A vote,” I say.
There is a pause on the line.
“Yes,” he says. “I thought it might be.”
“There is no vote,” I say. “Not in that house. There will never be a vote in that house, not if I am there thirty years. Sutter’s wife has not got a vote.
The mother of a patched member has not got a vote.
There is a woman in that club who has been keeping their books straight for eleven years and she has not got a vote and she has not got a wage. ”
“I know.”
“So do not offer me one, because you cannot.”
“I am not going to offer you a vote,” he says. “I am going to tell you what I can actually put in your hand, and then you can decide, and if you say no I will not call this number again.”
“Say it.”
“If a club delivers a corridor,” he says, “the person who delivered it is not property any more. Not because anybody votes. Because a thing that valuable stops being a thing you can pass around. Nobody will say it out loud and nobody will give you a chair, and you will spend the next twenty years being the woman who did that, and in that house that is the only currency there is.”
I hold onto the counter.
“And you want the corridor to go to the Saints,” I say.
“No,” he says.
“Then what in God’s name do you want.”
“I want a club to have a bad year,” he says.
I do not understand that. I want it on the record that I did not understand it, not on the second of April and not in July and not on the day the pictures went in a bag.
“Say that again,” I say.
“There is a club up that road that is going to die,” he says.
“Not in a war. It will die the way an old man dies, of one thing that nobody attended to, and everybody will call it something else. And there is not a man in that clubhouse who can stop it, because the one who could stop it will not, and I have asked him five times.”
“You are one of them.”
He does not answer that.
“So you want me to hurt him,” I say.
“I want a crisis,” he says. “A survivable one. Big enough that a table of men who have refused to look at a thing for nine years are made to look at it, and small enough that when they have looked, they are still there. That is all. A bad year and then a better one.”
“And that is worth.”
“It is worth a corridor to the Saints,” he says, “if that is what it takes, because a road can be got back and a club cannot be raised out of the ground.”
I sit down on a kitchen chair.
“You are talking about a man’s marriage,” I say.
There is a silence on that line that goes on for four or five seconds.
“Yes,” he says.
“Just yes?”
“What else would you like me to say,” he says.
“That it is a shame. It is. That I have thought about it. I have thought about very little else since February. His wife is a woman I have known since she was fifteen years old and I made her recite a set of rules in my kitchen when she was nineteen and I have been at her table more times than I could count.”
“Then do not do it.”
“I have asked him five times,” he says.
And that is the only moment in that entire phone call where the level goes out of his voice, and it is not much, it is about a quarter of an inch, and then it comes back.
“Miss Renard,” he says. “I am not going to lie to you and tell you this is a small thing I am asking. You will be, at the end of it, a woman who did something to another woman. There is no version where you are not. So you should decide about that now and not in August, because in August it will be too late to decide about anything.”
“And you,” I say. “What are you at the end of it.”
“The same,” he says.
I do it.
There is no part of this where I am owed anything for saying so, but I want it put down that I did it with my eyes open, at a truck stop lot on the ninth of April, sitting up on a tailgate with my boots hanging, watching a man in a t-shirt go to his bike for a bottle of water.
And I ask him about the road.
And the old man was right about all of it.
He is right that nobody has asked him anything in nine years.
He is right that it comes off him like a door opening.
He is right, and this is the part I have never been able to get past, that four minutes in, that man says ask me another one, and he says it the way a person says it when they are nineteen and somebody has been kind to them.
I go back to the truck afterward and sit in it for twenty minutes before I can drive.
He calls once a month. Never from the same number and never longer than four minutes.
In May he asks whether the man is still coming.
In June he asks the same. In July he asks whether anybody in my club knows and I say no, and he says good, keep it that way, and I say why does that matter to you, and he says because if they know it becomes theirs, and if it becomes theirs it becomes a war and not a lesson.
In August he says, “Take it to Sutter.”
“What?”
“Take it to your president,” he says. “Now, in August, with everything you have got. And you tell him you did it on your own, because you did, and I want that said, and it is even true.”
“He will.”
“He will be angry for about a day,” the old man says, “and then he will be a president with a file, and then you will be the woman who brought it, and that is your side of this and it is exactly what I told you it would be in April.”
“And your side.”
“They will convene a meet in the autumn,” he says, “and they will put it in front of that table, and that table will have to do the thing it will not do.”
“And if it does not work,” I say.
There is a pause.
“Then I have been wrong,” he says, “and a great many people will have paid for it.”
Here is what I got.
I got it exactly as described, which nobody ever gets.
I took it to Sutter on the thirteenth of August with two hundred and eleven images and a folder of registrations, and he was angry for a day and a half, and then he called counsel, and then everything in my life changed.
I am not in that kitchen. There is a house in the north of Coldwater with my name on the lease and it was Sutter who arranged the lease.
When I walk into that clubhouse now the conversation does not carry on over the top of me.
Nobody votes. He was right about that too.
But there is a room in that building where four men make decisions, and about once a month somebody puts his head round a door and says, what do you think, Dovey.
That is what it cost, and I got it, and I would like to be able to say that it was not worth it.
Here is what I did not get.
I did not know the woman until the ninth of September, when the bag went up that road, because until then it was a name in a folder and a woman I had never seen.
And then Sutter came back from a meeting in October and told the room that Ashfall had put a nineteen-year-old prospect into a lake bed, and then in December four of ours took a truck apart on a road at night and there was a man in it called Nakagawa who fixed people’s swamp coolers.
I was in the clubhouse the night that came back. Everybody cheered.
And I stood at the back of a room full of people cheering and thought: he said survivable.
He rings me one last time on the fourth of January.
“I am not going to ask you to do anything,” he says.
“Good, because I am not.”
“No,” he says. “No, I did not think so.”
He sounds older. That is the only way I can put it. Nine months of the same voice and there is something gone out of it.
“You said survivable,” I say.
“I did.”
“There is a man in the ground.”
“There are two,” he says. “There is a boy of nineteen in a lake bed and a road captain in a cemetery in Ivanhoe, and there is a woman gone that nobody in that valley can find, and there is a man in a hospital in Las Vegas who puts brake pads on Suburbans.”
“So you were wrong.”
“Yes,” he says.
I have thought about that yes more than anything else in this whole business. He does not qualify it. He does not explain. He does not do the thing men do, which is to tell you about the intention as if the intention is a thing that survives.
“What are you going to do,” I say.
“What I should have done in 2021,” he says.
“Which is what.”
“Say it out loud in the room and take what comes.”
“Then why did you not do that in the first place,” I say, “instead of a woman on a tailgate and a bag on a Sunday. Why not just stand up in your own church and say the thing.”
There is a silence on that line that goes on a long time.
“Because I have said it five times,” he says, “and every time I said it, one man said no, and everybody went home. Nobody in that room ever had to feel anything. And I could not think of a way to make eight men feel a thing they had decided not to feel.”
“So you made them feel it.”
“I made a great many people feel a great many things,” he says.
“That is not an answer.”
“No,” he says. “It is not. I have been sat with it since December and there is not one, and I have stopped looking for it, and I want to tell you one thing before I put this phone down and then I am going to leave you alone for the rest of your life.”
“Say it.”
“None of what happened to those people is yours,” he says.
“You asked a man a question in a lot. That is the whole of what you did. Everything after it was done by men who chose, and by me. If you carry any of it, carry the four minutes on the tailgate and not one second more, and if anybody ever tells you different, they are trying to get something off you.”
“You do not get to give me that,” I say.
“No,” he says. “I do not. But I have got nothing else and I am not going to sit here and hold onto it out of tidiness.”
And then he says, “Goodbye, Miss Renard,” and he is gone, and I sit in a house in the north of Coldwater with my name on the lease and my own furniture in it, and I never find out his name.