Chapter Twenty · Diesel
Chapter Twenty
DIESEL
A hitch in him. Right side. Old break.
Diesel drove home from Daleville in the back seat of a Subaru with his hands on his knees and that sentence going around in his head like a bearing coming apart.
He had walked into that house with a memory card in a drawer twenty miles away and one piece of evidence, which was a walk on a screen, which he had told himself four hundred times was not enough. A man could be wrong about a walk. Infrared and eleven seconds and a hood.
Now a seventy-six-year-old stranger in Daleville, who had never heard of Copperhead, who had no reason on this earth to say it, had put a second man at that rack in 2019 with a hitch on the right side and an old break in him.
Pike Danner’s rod had gone in the right tibia in 2011.
So that was that.
He said nothing about it in the car. He said nothing about it at church.
He stood up in that room and said the only true thing he had left and said it in front of all of them, and watched Evelyn Chase stand up and hand it back better than he had given it, and for about ninety seconds he had been happier than he had been in nine years.
And underneath all of it, the whole time, in a place he was keeping shut: I have got to do something about Pike, and I have not told one soul.
The rest of that night was the best one he had ever had in that house and he knew it at the time, which almost never happens to a man.
She came up the hall behind him at midnight while he was banking the stove and put her arms around him from behind and her forehead between his shoulder blades, and stood there without speaking.
“You all right?” he said.
“I’m doing arithmetic.”
“Course you are.”
“Sixteen men clapped.” Her voice was muffled against his back. “I have been to two weddings and a graduation and a promotion dinner in my life and nobody has ever clapped for me at any of them.”
Diesel put the poker down and turned around inside her arms.
“Come here.”
“I am here.”
“Then come closer.”
She did, and he got both hands in her hair and tipped her head back and took his time about it, and she made a sound into his mouth and got a fistful of his shirt, and after a minute she pulled back an inch and said, against his mouth, “You said you’d never have to have that conversation again.”
“That’s right.”
“Say the part again anyway.”
“Which part.”
“You know which part.”
“You’re mine,” Diesel said, “and I’m yours.”
“That’s the one.”
“That’s the one you’re going to want at two in the morning in about six months when I’ve done something stupid,” he said, “and you’re going to remember that I said it out loud in front of Dutch Voyles, and it’s still going to be true.”
He had meant it as a joke.
He would think about that afterward, for years, at inconvenient moments. He had meant it as a joke on a Wednesday night with his hands in her hair, and there had been a memory card in a drawer at the yard the entire time.
They came for the house on Thursday night.
They did not come violently. The restraint was the message Diesel kept returning to afterward.
He was up at midnight letting the dog out that was not his dog, a shepherd mix that belonged to nobody and lived under his porch and had for six years, and the dog would not go down the steps.
Diesel put the porch light off and stood in the dark and let his eyes come.
There was a truck at the bottom of his driveway.
It was parked crossways on the gravel apron where the county road met his line, nose out, and it had its running lights on, which was the point. A vehicle sitting dark is a vehicle hiding. A vehicle sitting lit at the bottom of a man’s mountain at midnight is a letter.
He watched it for six minutes. It did not move.
Six weeks ago he would have walked down there.
That was the honest measure of what had changed, and he stood in his own dark front room and made himself look straight at it.
Six weeks ago, before the cancellation and the binder and a boy in a bedroom in Salem, Diesel Harrow would have put a coat on and walked a quarter mile of gravel and knocked on that glass, and whatever happened after would have happened, and the club would have told the story about it for twenty years.
There was a woman asleep in the front of his house.
He had spent his whole life being the man who went down the hill. It had never once cost him anything he could not stand to lose, and he had mistaken that for courage for about thirty years.
Then he went inside, and picked up the phone, and called the Botetourt County Sheriff’s Office, and gave them his name and his address and asked for a deputy to come look at a suspicious vehicle, and stayed on the line for six minutes while a car came out from Fincastle.
The truck was gone before the deputy got to the bottom of the grade.
Diesel gave a statement anyway, standing in his driveway in a coat over nothing at midnight, and got a case number, and wrote it on the back of an envelope, and the deputy, who was about thirty and looked like he wanted to say something, finally said it.
“Mr. Harrow, that’s the fourth one of these you all have filed this month.”
“It is.”
“Everything all right out here?”
“No,” Diesel said. “But we’re doing it right.”
Evelyn was on the porch when he came back up, in his coat with her hands shoved in the sleeves, and she had been there long enough to be cold and had not come down.
“Grace said file everything,” she said.
“Grace said file everything.”
“That’s four.”
“That’s four.”
She looked down the mountain at the empty apron. Then she said, without any particular inflection, “They were telling you they know which house.”
“Yeah.”
“They were telling me too.”
Diesel came up the last two steps and stopped in front of her.
“Say what you want to say.”
“I want to say that I’m not going anywhere, and that I know you’re about to try, and that I’d like to get it over with tonight instead of having it in three days when you’ve built the whole argument.
” Her chin was up. “So go ahead. Say the safe house thing. Say Waynesboro or Grace’s spare room or your cousin in Ohio. ”
He stood there.
“I ain’t going to say it,” he said.
Evelyn blinked.
“You were going to.”
“I was going to. I’ve had it half built since the porch light.
” Diesel put his hands in his coat pockets because otherwise he was going to put them on her and this needed saying first. “And then I got to the part where I imagined telling you, and I couldn’t get through it, because there ain’t a version where it don’t come out as me deciding. ”
“It could come out as you asking.”
“It could.” He nodded slowly. “So I’m asking.
Not tonight. But sometime in the next while, if it gets worse than a truck at the bottom of a hill, I’m going to ask you, and it’s going to be the hardest thing I’ve done, and I need to know you’ll actually consider it and not just fight me for the principle of it. ”
Evelyn Chase looked at him for a long moment.
“That’s fair,” she said. “Yes. I’ll consider it.”
“That easy.”
“It’s not easy at all, and I want credit for it later.” She unfolded her arms. “But you asked me instead of telling me, at midnight, in the cold, about the thing you most want to decide for me, and I would be an idiot to punish that.”
“All right.”
“Diesel.”
“Yeah.”
“Take me inside,” she said. “I’m freezing and I’ve been standing out here for twenty minutes watching a man call the sheriff on people who came to scare us, and I would like to be extremely clear that I have never wanted anything more in my life than I want you right now, and I would like to not have a conversation about why. ”
He got her inside and had her against the back of the door before it was entirely shut.
“Say it,” she said, into his mouth.
“Say what.”
“What you said at the table. I want it here, where it’s just us, and I want to hear whether it sounds different.”
“You’re mine.”
“And?”
“And I’m yours, and if a truck sits at the bottom of my road again I will go down there myself and knock on the glass.
” His hand was in her hair and he tipped her head back to make her look at him.
“And you’re going to hate that, and I’m going to do it anyway, and that’s the one I ain’t negotiating. ”
“Good,” Evelyn said. “That’s the correct one to not negotiate.”
There was nothing careful about it. That was the difference and both of them knew it inside four seconds: the first time had been decided in a kitchen and the second had been slow and grey at five in the morning, and this was two people who had just watched a set of running lights sit at the bottom of a mountain for six minutes.
Her hands were cold on his neck and he did not care. She got his coat off his shoulders and it hit the floor and he got a fistful of the back of her shirt and she said his name once, sharp, and it went through him like a hot wire.
“Bedroom,” he said.
“No.”
“Evelyn.”
“Here.” She had both hands in his beard and her eyes were bright and she was not shaking, which was somehow the entire thing. “Right here. I’ve been in that house six weeks and I want one part of it that isn’t sensible.”
So they did not make it to the bedroom.
He got her shirt off over her head and put his mouth at the base of her throat and she said something that was not words, and her hands went flat against the door behind her, and he took his time in a way that had nothing to do with patience and everything to do with the fact that he had spent six minutes at a dark window and needed to hear her.
He heard her.
Afterward she was still braced against the door with her forehead on his shoulder and her breath going in pieces, and she said, “That was not sensible,” and he said, “No ma’am,” and she laughed and the laugh came apart into something else halfway through and he held on to her until it stopped.
“They came to the house,” she said, finally, into his shoulder.
“They did.”