Chapter Twelve · Diesel
Chapter Twelve
DIESEL
They buried Casey Voyles on a Saturday with a hundred and forty people at Little Bethel and a line of bikes down both shoulders of the road for a quarter mile.
Diesel had done thirty-one of these in his life and had carried at nine of them and he had a system, which was that he did not think about anything at all until the last car left the cemetery. It had worked at his mother’s. It worked most of the way through this one.
It came apart at the church hall afterward, when he walked in and saw the folding tables.
There were nineteen casserole dishes on them and every one had a strip of masking tape on the lid with a name written on it in ballpoint. That was how it had been done in the Gap since before he was born and would be after. He had seen it a hundred times and had never once seen it.
Today he stood in the doorway of a church hall and had to look at the floor and count to four.
“Boss.” Rook, at his elbow, not looking at him. “Side door’s open if you want it.”
“I’m all right.”
“Didn’t say you wasn’t.”
Dutch Voyles was in a folding chair against the far wall in a suit that had fit him in 2004, with his hands on his knees, receiving people.
Diesel went over and sat down beside him and held his peace, because there was nothing on earth to say and Dutch would know it if he tried.
“They done a good job with him,” Dutch said finally.
“They did.”
“Boy had his grandaddy’s hands. You could see it.” Dutch held his coffee cup in both hands without drinking it. “Seventeen. He was going to weld. He had a hat and everything, one of them hoods with the flames on it, thought it was the funniest thing anybody ever bought him.”
“Dutch.”
“Don’t.”
“All right.”
They sat.
“I stood up in that room,” Dutch said.
Diesel closed his eyes.
“I stood up in front of sixteen men and I made the argument for taking their money,” Dutch said. “Nine days ago. And I have been laying awake with it every night since Thursday, and I want to tell you what I’ve worked out, because I ain’t going to say it twice and then I’m done with it.”
“Say it.”
“It wasn’t wrong.” Dutch’s voice did not shake.
It was worse than if it had. “That’s the part.
If I’d stood up and said something stupid I could’ve been a fool about it and got over it.
But it was a real argument and every word of it was true and this town has lost everything I said it lost. And it don’t matter, because that boy’s dead, and them pills come up the same road that money would’ve come up.
” He finally drank. “A man can be right and still be pointed the wrong way. That’s the thing I got out of it.
I’m eighty-one years old and I just now learned it. ”
“You voted no.”
“I voted no because a lawyer told me my signature would hang me,” Dutch said. “Don’t give me the other thing. I know what I voted and I know why.”
Then he put his hand out and Diesel took it, and the old man’s grip was terrible, and that was the end of it.
At some point after that Dutch said, to the room in general, “He wasn’t but four when we lost my Ruth,” and then he stopped, and Diesel sat beside him and let the hall go on around them.
That was the other thing about the Gap. Nobody came over to fix it.
Two women moved the coffee urn closer. A man Diesel had gone to school with put a plate down in front of Dutch that Dutch was not going to eat, and squeezed his shoulder, and went away again.
Nobody said he was in a better place and nobody said at least and nobody asked how it happened, because everybody already knew how it happened, which was the whole reason a hundred and forty people were standing in a church hall on a Saturday instead of forty.
The hall filled and emptied and filled again the way they do.
Pike Danner stood at the end of the food table for two hours cutting cake for children and did not eat anything.
Scout carried chairs. Cutter Reeves parked cars in a wet field for ninety minutes in a good coat and never came inside at all, which was how Cutter attended a funeral.
Grace worked the room like a woman running for something, except that what she was doing was finding out, house by house, quietly, who else had a kid who had come home from Roanoke thin.
Diesel watched all of it from a folding chair and understood, in the way a man understands a thing he has known his whole life, that this was what the club actually was. Not the vests. Not the table. Nineteen casseroles and a field full of parked cars and somebody cutting cake.
It was also, he thought, the exact thing Alton Renner had never had to look at.
Cinder found him in the parking lot at four.
“You want to talk about Buchanan,” Cinder said.
“No.”
“Boss.”
“I said no, and I said it out here instead of in there, and I want you to take a real hard look at where we are standing.” Diesel turned around. “There is a woman in that hall who buried her son at ten o’clock. If you want to have this, we have it Monday at the table with everybody in the room.”
Cinder Sullivan put a toothpick in his mouth and looked at him with an expression of enormous patience.
“Monday,” he said. “All right. But I’m going to say one thing out here so you’ve got the weekend with it.
” He tipped his head toward the hall. “You keep running this like it’s a case.
Grace’s binder, Grace’s chain of custody, don’t touch nothing, everything true.
That’s a fine way to run it and I ain’t voting against it.
But you’ve got a man in Roanoke who put a hundred and forty people in that building today, and what we are doing about it is filing. ”
“Cinder.”
“I know. Monday.” He walked away, and then he stopped and said, without turning, “I’d have been all right with any answer, boss. I just want to know you’ve considered the question.”
The Voyles family came through the line at five, all of them, and Dorene Voyles stopped in front of Diesel and took hold of both his hands.
He had known this woman since he was seven years old. She had run the concession stand at the ballfield. She had a face like a closed door today and her hands were freezing.
“Dutch told me what y’all voted,” she said.
Diesel could not get anything out.
“I want you to hear it from me and not from him, because he’ll soften it.” Dorene’s grip tightened. “You tell that man in Roanoke that Casey Voyles was seventeen and he was going to weld. You tell him the name. Don’t you let anybody call it an epidemic in front of you and not say the name.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“All right,” she said, and let go, and went on down the line.
By six the hall was down to twenty people and by seven it was down to the ones who clean up, and Diesel went out the side door into the cold and stood in the church lot with his hands in his coat and looked at the mountain going black behind the steeple.
Evelyn came out after him.
She had been in there since noon. She had not known one person in that building at the start of the day.
And at some point in the afternoon somebody had put her behind a coffee urn, which was what the Gap did with people it had decided to have opinions about later, and she had stayed there for five hours refilling cups for a hundred and forty strangers who all knew who she was and none of whom said so.
“You’ve been out here twenty minutes,” she said.
“Have I.”
“Charlene sent me. She said, and I want to get this right, that you’d stand out here till you froze if somebody didn’t come get you, and that your mother used to do the same thing.”
Diesel laughed. It came out wrong and cracked in the middle and he put his hand over his mouth and turned his head away, and then he was not laughing.
Evelyn stayed quiet. She did not touch him and she did not tell him it was all right and she did not fill it, and he understood, standing in a church parking lot with his back to her, that she was doing it deliberately and that it was the single kindest thing anybody had done for him in twenty years.
When he had it back he turned around.
She had her arms wrapped around herself in a coat that was still not hers, and her nose was red, and her hair had come down on one side from being behind a coffee urn all day.
“I keep doing arithmetic,” he said.
“I know.”
“Two hundred and six loads. Eleven point four million on my paper alone. And I keep trying to get from that number to that boy, and I can’t make it come out, because it don’t work like that, it ain’t one pill from one pallet, and I know that.
” Diesel heard his own voice go somewhere he did not permit it to go.
“And it don’t matter that it don’t work like that.
Because I signed the sheet. Every month for two years I signed the sheet. ”
“Diesel.”
“I’ve been standing out here trying to find the version where I’m not part of it and there ain’t one.”
“No,” Evelyn said. “There isn’t.”
He looked at her.
“There isn’t,” she said again, and her chin was up.
“And I’m not going to give you the other thing, because you’d know.
You hauled it. You didn’t know, and you couldn’t have known, and I will say that in a courtroom, and it is still true that it went up that road in your trailers.
Both of those are true at the same time and you have to carry both of them, and if you put down the second one you’ll be a man who got fooled, and if you put down the first one you’ll be a man who deserved it, and you are neither. ”
The wind came up the hollow and moved the bare trees behind the church.
“Then what am I,” Diesel said.
“You’re the person it happened through,” she said. “That’s the worst place to stand and it’s the only place with a door out of it, because you’re the only one who can testify to what it felt like from the inside.”
Diesel Harrow crossed the four feet of gravel between them.
He did not decide to. That was what he came back to afterward, at length, for weeks.
He had spent his entire life deciding, in advance, alone, and he crossed a church parking lot in the dark on the day they buried a seventeen-year-old boy without one single word of it going through the part of him that decides.
He got one hand under her jaw and the other in the collar of a coat that was his, and Evelyn Chase came up on her toes to meet him, which meant she had been ahead of him the whole time.
She tasted like church coffee. Her hands got in his hair.
He heard her make a sound against his mouth that he was going to hear again at four in the morning for the rest of his natural life, and the cold went away completely, and somewhere out on the road a truck went by and neither of them heard it.
When they came apart she kept hold of the front of his coat.
“That’s not going to be a one-time thing,” she said. It was not a question.
“No.”
“Good. Because I’ve been standing at that urn since noon composing an entire argument about how it would be a mistake, and it was a very good argument, and I’d like the record to show I’m abandoning it voluntarily.”
“Noted,” Diesel said, and he was going to say something else, and then he saw the car.
It was parked on the shoulder past the last of the bikes, nose out, and there was a man leaning against the front fender of it with his arms crossed, and he had been there long enough to be cold.
Grey Malibu.
“Evelyn,” Diesel said. “Go inside.”
She turned and looked and did not go inside.
The man pushed off the fender and came up the shoulder toward them, unhurried, with his hands visible, which by now Diesel understood to be a thing certain men were trained to do.
He stopped at the edge of the church lot.
“Mr. Harrow,” he said. “I’m sorry about the boy. I’m not sorry enough to have waited till tomorrow, and I want to be honest about that up front.”
“Who are you.”
“Marcus Teal,” the man said. “Drug Enforcement Administration. I’ve had a file open on your company for two and a half years, and I would like about twenty minutes.”
Nobody moved.
Out on the road a set of headlights came around the bend and slowed, and Diesel did not have to look to know it was Rook, because Rook had been watching that side door since noon.
“Twenty minutes,” Diesel said. “Not tonight.”
“Tonight would be better for you than you think.”
“Mr. Teal, there is a woman in that building who buried her boy this morning, and you drove out here and stood on that shoulder through the whole service so you could catch me in a parking lot.” Diesel took one step forward and stopped where he had chosen to stop.
“So no. Monday. In my lawyer’s office, on the record, with her in the room.
You can call her tonight and she’ll give you a time. ”
Teal considered it.
“You know what’s coming,” he said. “You’ve worked it out by now, or she has.”
“Say it, then.”
“Your insurance filing got hit with a cancellation six days ago on information that is not public.” Teal’s breath went up white. “There are four people alive who could have put that in front of an underwriter in Richmond, and two of them work in my building.”
Diesel felt the whole night change temperature.
“Monday,” Teal said. “Nine o’clock.”
He walked back down the shoulder and got in the grey car and did not turn his headlights on until he was past the last bike.