Chapter Twenty-Eight
Roan
It comes out of the money, which is how these things always come out.
Hollis is in the salvage office on the nineteenth of May with the new book open beside the old accounts, cross-checking every arrangement I put in it against nine years of the ledgers, because that is what Hollis Bird does when you hand him a thing.
He finds the mailbox in Ivanhoe.
Not the paving. The paving is right there in the book now, eleven thousand a year to Merle Dowdy under gravel, and Hollis has already tied that off.
What he finds is the second thing, which is that the same mailbox has been paid twice more, in March 2022 and March 2024, in amounts that are not eleven thousand, out of a line that Priest signs.
The secretary signs the box rental. That is all it is. It is a nine-dollar-a-month post office box and the secretary has signed for it since 1998 because the secretary signs for correspondence, and it is the most boring line in the account.
The box has had a second key on it since February 2021.
“Roan,” Hollis says, on the phone at nine at night, and his voice is wrong. “I am going to ask you to come here and I am going to ask you to bring Marcus and nobody else.”
There are three prepaid phones in that box.
Two of them are dead. One of them still holds a charge and it has ten outgoing calls on it between the second of April and the fourth of January and every one of them goes to the same number in Coldwater, and none of them are longer than four minutes except the first one, which is nineteen.
Deacon sits down on the edge of the desk in the salvage office and does not say anything for about a minute.
“Marcus.”
“Do not talk for a second,” he says.
He sits there with his hands on his knees.
“Nineteen minutes on the second of April,” he says. “Say the date the meet was.”
“The ninth.”
“Say the date on your first one.”
“The ninth.”
“Then that is a week,” Deacon says. “That is a man calling somebody a week beforehand for nineteen minutes and then once a month after.”
“It might not be.”
“Roan.”
“It might not be him,” I say. “It is a shared box, half this club has had a key to that box at some point, Junior collects the.”
“Roan,” Deacon says.
And I stop, because I can hear myself doing it, and because Marcus Oyelaran is looking at me the way he looked at Fritz across a table in October.
Church, the twenty-first of May, eight in the morning.
Everybody there. Amos comes, which he has not done since November, and nobody says anything about it, and he sits at the end with a coffee.
Deacon takes the chair without asking for it.
“Wendell,” he says. “Read the minutes of the eleventh of November 2021.”
Priest goes still.
“Marcus.”
“Read them.”
He turns the pages. It takes him a while and nobody helps him.
“Church of the eleventh of November, 2021,” he reads. “Nine present. Item four. Secretary raised succession and record-keeping. Motion not made. Asked and answered.”
“Next,” Deacon says.
“Marcus.”
“The next one, Wendell.”
“Church of the third of October, 2023. Item six. Secretary raised succession and record-keeping. Asked and answered.”
“Next.”
“Church of the ninth of April, 2024.” His voice has gone flat. “Item three. Secretary raised succession. Asked and answered.”
“Next.”
“Church of the twenty-second of April this year,” Priest reads. “Item nine. Secretary raised succession and record-keeping for the fifth time. President refused. President instructed the secretary to record his own words as follows.” He stops. “It is a long entry.”
“Read the last line of it.”
“That is a man deciding he is a building,” Priest reads.
The room is completely quiet.
“That is five in the book and one in a kitchen in 2019,” Deacon says. “Six. Roan counted the kitchen one at that table on the eleventh of this month and made you write it down as six, and every man here heard him do it.”
“Yes,” Priest says.
“Hollis,” Deacon says.
Hollis puts the three phones on the table.
He does it without any drama at all, which is worse. He sets them down in a row, and then he sets the ledger page beside them, and then he sits back and folds his hands.
“Post office box eleven, Ivanhoe,” he says.
“Nine dollars a month, on the correspondence line, signed by the secretary since 1998. Second key issued February 2021 and signed for. Three prepaid phones purchased in Elko, cash, and two of them are dead. The live one has ten outgoing calls between the second of April and the fourth of January to one number in Coldwater. The first call is nineteen minutes. The rest are under four.”
“Whose number,” Torch says.
“I do not know,” Hollis says, “and I have not called it, and I am not going to, because I am not putting this club in front of that woman.”
“Say the name you think it is,” Torch says.
“Ellis,” Deacon says. “No.”
He turns and looks down the table.
“Wendell,” he says.
Priest has both hands flat on the book.
He is fifty-eight years old and he has kept that book for twenty-six years, and I have known that man since I was a boy in a yard, and he sat in his own kitchen in September with my wife and gave her a thing out of pure love and it took her out of this valley in a flatbed.
“Yes,” he says.
That is the whole of it. That is all he says.
Junior stands up so fast his chair goes over.
“Sit down,” Deacon says.
“No.”
“Junior.”
“He was on the third of December,” Junior says. “He was in the room in October when Curtis said it was not them. He sat there. He sat there and wrote it in the book with his own hand.”
“Sit down or go outside.”
Junior goes outside. The door is open and we hear him get about eleven yards into the bar room and stop, and he does not come back and he does not go further.
“Say it in a whole sentence,” Deacon says.
Priest takes his hands off the book.
“I called a woman in Coldwater on the second of April,” he says, “and I told her who to ask a question of and what question to ask. That is what I did. Everything else is what other people did afterward and I am not going to hide behind that, but I want the sentence to be accurate, because it is going in this book and it is the last thing I will put in it.”
“Why her,” Hollis says.
“Because I could not think of another way to make eight men feel something they had decided not to feel,” Priest says.
“Say what you wanted,” Deacon says.
“A bad year,” Priest says. “One bad year. A crisis big enough that this table would have to look at the thing it had refused to look at five times, and small enough that we would all still be here at the end of it. That is what I wanted and that is exactly what I said to her on the phone, and I said the word survivable, and I have got to live with having said it.”
“You aimed it at me,” I say.
“I aimed it at the gavel,” Priest says. “There is a difference and it does not matter.”
“Say the rest,” Deacon says.
“I did not know she would take it to them,” Priest says.
“I want that said, not as an excuse. I found a woman with a debt and no standing and I thought I had found an instrument, and what I had actually done was walk up to a rival club and hand them a thing and tell myself I was steering it. She took it to Sutter in August on her own. I did not know that until October. By then there was a file and a lawyer and it was not mine any more, and it had never been mine, and I had spent four months thinking I was the man running it.”
“Wendell,” Torch says. He has got his hand over his mouth. “The bag. The ninth of September. Did you.”
“No,” Priest says. “That was them. I would not have done that.”
“Why not.”
“Because the bag was aimed at her,” Priest says.
Nobody says anything.
“I did not think about her,” Priest says.
“That is the thing I have been unable to get round since September. I sat on that phone in April and I thought about a table and a book and a club, and I did not once think through what happens to Marisol, and then it happened to her in front of thirty men on a Sunday and she came to my kitchen on the Monday.”
“And you told her about the load,” Hollis says.
“I told her about the load.”
“Was that.”
“No,” Priest says, and it comes out hard.
“No. That was not part of anything. I have gone over that afternoon every night since September and I would tell you if it was, because there is no point in me holding anything back now. I told her about that load because she was sat in my kitchen with her eyes red and she had just found out off thirty men’s faces, and she is the only person in this valley who never gets told anything, and I wanted her to have one true thing. ”
“And she took the truck,” Torch says.
“And she took the truck,” Priest says, “and that is where it stopped being survivable, and I did not know it for another six weeks.”
He looks at the table.
“There is a boy of nineteen in the Sump because Junior found him in a lot in November,” he says. “There is a man in Las Vegas with one hand. And there is Curtis.”
“Do not say his name,” Junior says, from the bar room.
“I am going to say his name,” Priest says, “because I have written it in this book and I would rather say it in a room with all of you than have it be a thing I only ever wrote down.”
He puts his hand flat on the closed book.
“Curtis Nakagawa told this table in October that we were wrong, and he was right, and the reason he could not say why is a woman on a road in September, and the reason she was on that road is a kitchen in Ivanhoe, and the reason she was in my kitchen is a phone call I made in April.” He does not look up.
“There is a line from me to that wash and there is nothing on it that is not mine.”
Wade is crying. He is not making any noise about it.
“Marcus,” Priest says. “Can I say the rest of it.”
“No,” Deacon says.
Priest looks up.
“Marcus.”
“No,” Deacon says.
“There are things this table needs to.”
“There is nothing this table needs,” Deacon says.
“You have said what you did and you have said it plain and you have not hidden behind one thing, and I will say out loud in this room that you have done that better than any man I have ever seen do it in thirty-six years. And that is where it stops.”
“I am asking to explain it.”
“I know you are.”
“Marcus, I am fifty-eight years old and I have been in this club for twenty-six years and I am asking for ten minutes.”
“And if I give you ten minutes,” Deacon says, “then every man at this table gets to hear a good man be reasonable about it, and some of them will start doing arithmetic, and I have watched this club do arithmetic on a man before and I am not going to let it happen twice.”
He puts both hands flat on the table.
“You have got a reason, Wendell,” he says.
“I know you have. I know it is a good one, and I know you have been carrying it since 2019, and I know that every single thing you have said in this room in five years about what happens to this club when Roan dies was correct, and you were right and we were wrong and Curtis is in the ground anyway.”
“Then let me.”
“That is exactly why not,” Deacon says. “Because you would be right, and it would still be true that you did it, and if this table hears you be right for ten minutes then in a year somebody will say he had his reasons, and then this club will be a club where a man can do that if his reasons are good enough.”
Nobody moves.
“Roan,” Deacon says.
I have not said anything since I asked him if he aimed it at me.
“He is right,” I say.
“Say it as a whole sentence,” Deacon says. “You are the president and this one is going in the book.”
I look down the table at Wendell Cobb.
“Every word he has said about this club for five years was true,” I say, “and he was right and I was wrong, and I said no six times, and if I had said yes once none of this happens. And he did what he did anyway, and it is not mitigated by my being wrong, and I am not going to let this room turn it into a thing about me, because that is the last thing I have got left to give him and it is not much.”
“Then that is where we are,” Deacon says.
He stands.
“Wendell Cobb is suspended from the office of secretary as of this hour and from all club business, and he does not leave this property, and nobody speaks to him about any of it until this table sits again.” He looks around.
“Not one man. Not in the yard, not in a truck, not out of kindness. If you cannot do that, go home now.”
“When does it sit,” Hollis says.
“When she is here,” Deacon says.
The room goes quiet.
“She is a counterparty of this club and Curtis Nakagawa let her through the Neck,” Deacon says, “and I am not going to sit a table on this without her in the room. Somebody call the Verdigris.”
“I will,” I say.
“No,” Deacon says. “Hollis will.”
He picks up his hat.
“Wendell,” he says. “Give me the book.”
And Priest sits there for a second with his hand flat on the cover, twenty-six years of it, and then he slides it down the table.