Chapter 5
Roman
The plan was simple, which should have been the first sign.
Move her off the property for two nights.
Ash and Tobin sit the house with Odile, who has agreed to this in the sense that she has stopped saying no out loud.
Take Birdie down to the foundry, put her in the room over the bar, let Vane's people watch an empty guest bedroom for forty-eight hours and get bored.
Forty minutes of ridge road. I've ridden it in the dark since I was fifteen.
"I'm not leaving her," Birdie said.
"You're not leaving her. You're relocating four miles."
"That's leaving her."
"Ash Delacroix is going to be sitting in her kitchen."
"I've never met Ash Delacroix."
"Nobody has," I said. "He's like weather."
She got on the bike.
It's not nothing, a person getting on the back of your bike. It's the only place in the world where somebody has to hold on to you and can't see your face. Deacon told me that once. He said it like it was a warning.
She rode well. Leaned when I leaned, didn't fight the corners, kept her feet where they belonged.
Six miles out the sky went the color of an old bruise.
You can't outrun weather on a ridge. What you can do is be wrong about it for about four minutes, which is what I did, because there's a turn at the Kesler cut where you can see thirty miles of valley and I have never once in my life gone around it without looking, and by the time I looked back the rain was already on us like somebody dropped a bucket.
Then the switchback.
Then the water across the switchback — the whole cut bank gone soft and sitting in the road, eight inches of it, moving.
I got us stopped. Sat there with the rain going sideways.
"ROMAN."
"YEAH."
"IS THAT THE ROAD?"
"THAT WAS THE ROAD."
"WHERE'S THE ROAD NOW?"
"IT'S IN OHIO," I said.
There's a fire tower half a mile back on the spur. State put it up in 1934, quit using it in 1986, and never took it down because taking a thing down costs money and leaving it up costs nothing. Fourteen flights of steel stairs and a room at the top with glass on four sides, half of it gone.
I got the bike as far as the base, and we went up.
Fourteen flights in that rain is a long conversation with yourself.
The cab up top was maybe twelve by twelve.
Wood floor, a table bolted down, a stool, forty years of names carved into everything and a smell like dust and cold iron.
Two of the windows were out. The other six held, and once we got the trapdoor down the noise dropped to something you could talk over — the rain gone from a roar to a drum.
Birdie stood in the middle of it dripping and turning in a slow circle.
"Okay," she said. "This is the coolest place I have ever been."
"It's a shed on stilts."
"It's a shed on stilts you can see the whole world from." She went to the glass. "Roman. There's no lights."
"No."
"There's no lights. Not one."
"That's the north end. It's nine miles to the next porch."
She put her forehead on the glass. Lightning went off somewhere south and the whole valley came up out of nothing for half a second, black trees and a river and the ridge running away like a spine, and then it was gone again.
"Oh," she said, very quietly.
I got the blanket out of the roll on the bike — I'd gone back down for it, which is fourteen flights each way, and I'd like some credit for that — and there was one, singular, and a fire tower in October is not a warm room.
"There's one blanket," she said.
"There's one blanket."
"Is this a — is this a bit? Did you do this?"
"Did I wash out the ridge road."
"You gave me directions to a strip mine, Roman! You have a history!"
"That's fair," I said. "No."
We sat against the table leg with the blanket over both of us because the alternative was hypothermia and pride, and I've been cold enough times to know which of those keeps.
Her hair was soaked. She'd taken the red hoodie off and wrung it out over a gap in the floorboards and hung it on a nail, and it dripped in the corner all night like a metronome.
"Okay," she said. "Inventory. What have we got."
"Blanket."
"One blanket."
"Lighter."
"Anything to light?"
"No."
"Great. Ambience only." She dug in her jacket pocket. "I've got — okay, I've got a hoof pick, a roll of vet wrap, three ibuprofen, and a granola bar that expired in March."
"March of what year?"
"That's a very hostile question," she said, and split it in half.
We ate an expired granola bar in a fire tower, which I want it known is now a thing I've done.
"Best worst place you've ever been stuck," she said.
"Is that a game?"
"It's a game."
"I don't play games."
"You gave a stranger directions to a strip mine, Roman, your whole life is a game." She elbowed me. "Go."
"Sheetz parking lot in Altoona. Nine hours. Blown primary."
"Nine hours?"
"Nine hours."
"What'd you do?"
"Read a magazine about bass fishing four times," I said. "I know a lot about bass now. It has never once come up."
"It's coming up now."
"It really isn't."
"Tell me one bass fact."
"No."
"Roman."
"They can see color," I said.
She stared at me.
"That's it? That's nine hours?"
"They can see color, and they're territorial, and that's why the lure's the color it is." I shrugged. "It's a whole thing about aggression versus hunger. Fish don't hit a lure because they're hungry. They hit it because it's in their spot."
Birdie went quiet for a second.
"That's about Vane, isn't it," she said.
"...I hadn't got there yet."
"You'd have got there."
"I'd have got there by morning," I admitted.
"Tell me the long version," she said.
So I did.
I told her about six boys out of the Pike house in Youngstown, and a chicken dinner, and a barn, and a woman who fed anybody who worked. I told her about her grandmother in her husband's bathrobe at one in the morning saying not in my kitchen.
I told her about October.
Not the details. The shape. That there'd been a man with money on the ridge, and that he'd paid for a door to be left open, and that six of us had found out one at a time going around a table that we all had the same thing in us.
I've never said it in a room with a woman in it. I've never said it in a room, period, except that one time, and I was sixteen.
She didn't say I'm sorry. That's the thing. Everybody says I'm sorry and then the whole thing becomes about them being sorry.
She said, "Was it Vane's father?"
"Yes."
"Is he dead?"
"Yes."
"Did you do it?"
"No," I said. "I was in a cellar."
And I told her about the bolt.
About being sixteen and screaming through a door at a woman who'd sent me down for a jar of beans and turned the bolt behind me, and how I heard the truck go, and how I counted, and how the counting got to a number I stopped saying out loud somewhere around three in the morning.
"Five of them went," I said. "She kept one. She picked which one."
"She picked the youngest."
"She picked the youngest."
Birdie was quiet a while.
"You know that's love, right," she said.
"I know that's love."
"But."
"But she picked," I said. "She didn't ask.
Every man at that table got to decide what he was, and I got a bolt.
And I have spent twenty-eight years being the only one of six who's still walking around, and I don't know if that's because she loved me or because she took something out of me before I got to use it, and Birdie, I've had a lot of years to work that out and I still don't know. "
Rain on the glass. That hoodie in the corner. Drip. Drip.
"That's why you don't turn up the drive," she said.
"That's why I don't turn up the drive."
"But you slow down."
I looked at her.
"She told you that?"
"She said she can hear your bike from the sink." Birdie pulled the blanket up. "She said the first year she set a plate."
And that's the thing that did it. Not the tower, not the storm, not one blanket. A plate.
I put my head back against the table leg and I put my hand over my eyes and I sat there in a fire tower like a forty-one-year-old man, and Birdie Bly put her hand on my chest, flat, the way you'd steady a horse, and left it there.
"Hey," she said.
"Yeah."
"You want the good news or the funny news?"
"...The funny news."
"There's a name carved above your head that says CHAD '91 and under it somebody's written CHAD LIED."
I laughed. God help me. I laughed with my hand still over my eyes.
"What's the good news?"
"That was the good news," she said. "The other one's not news, it's a decision, and I'm making it, so you should look at me."
I looked at her.
Nine miles of black in every direction and a woman with wet hair and a blanket and her chin up like she was daring the weather.
"I'm not getting handled," she said.
"I know."
"So this is me. Not you. Me."
"Birdie—"
"Say something true or don't say anything."
"I've been sitting in a gas station parking lot for three weeks," I said, "and the day you got off that bus was the first day I wasn't watching the road."
She kissed me.
I'd like to tell you it was some kind of restraint on my part that it took as long as it did, and the truth is it was fourteen flights of stairs, a washed-out road, twenty-eight years, and a woman making a decision out loud, and after that I didn't have any restraint left and neither did she.
It was cold. That's the first honest thing about it.
It was cold and we laughed about it — she got a hand up under my shirt and I said something about her fingers that I'm not going to write down, and she said this is what you get, and then the blanket went sideways and we spent about forty seconds fighting a blanket, which is not in the songs.
She said, "Are you — is this—"
"Ask me."
"Is this a thing you're going to be careful about tomorrow?"
"No."
"Because I've had careful, Roman, I've had a lot of careful, and what careful is, is a man giving himself somewhere to stand later—"
"Birdie."
"What."
"There is no later where I'm not," I said.
And she stopped talking, which is the only time in four days I'd managed it.
Slow, because it was cold and because there was nowhere to be. She kept her hands on my face. I don't know why that's the part I keep — a woman's hands on either side of a jaw, thumbs at the corners, holding my head still like she wanted to make sure I stayed where I was.
Halfway through, a piece of the roof flashing let go somewhere above us and went off down the hill like a cymbal, and we both stopped dead, and she said into my neck, "If we die here they're going to find us like this," and I lost it completely, and she started, and for about a minute the two of us were just two idiots laughing in a fire tower at two in the morning with the storm doing all the work of privacy.
Then she said "come here" in a voice I hadn't heard yet, and it stopped being funny.
Lightning came up under us twice more. The whole valley in and out of existence. She had her forehead against mine both times and neither of us looked.
After, she was mostly asleep with her ear on my sternum and one hand fisted in my shirt like a kid, and I lay on a plank floor in 1934's finest accommodations and looked at the ceiling.
"Ask me the pump house question," I said.
"Mm."
"Ask it."
She lifted her head. Hair everywhere. "What's in the pump house?"
"Paper," I said.
"...Paper."
"Six deeds," I said. "Bought clean in 1997 by a dead man, signed over in 1998 to six boys out of a foster house in Youngstown, and buried in a milk can under a cinderblock floor by your grandmother the morning after."
She sat up.
"Six parcels," I said. "Vaughn. Kesler. The mineral tracts. The Sanderson farm. The church camp. And the strip of ridge that the county road runs on, which the county has been maintaining for twenty-eight years under the impression it belongs to the county."
"Roman."
"Callum Vane has spent eleven months and a great deal of money buying land," I said, "from people who did not own it."
The rain kept going.
"And the other thing," she said. "There's another thing. You're doing the face."
"There's an envelope."
"What's in the envelope?"
"Everything," I said. "Who his father was. What he did. What five men did back. It's both halves in one can, Birdie — the money and the rope — and that's why nobody's ever dug it up. You can't pick up one without the other."
She sat with her arms around her knees in a blanket in a glass room over nine miles of nothing.
"And my grandmother," she said slowly, "has been sitting on top of it. Alone. Since before I was born."
"Yes."
"And a man just pried at that door with her standing forty feet away in a nightgown."
"Yes."
"Why didn't you dig it up?" she said. "Any of you. Twenty-eight years, Roman, you could have — that's land, that's the number Ash said, you've been eating nineteen hundred a month for a year—"
"Because of what's on top of it."
"The envelope."
"The envelope."
"So burn the envelope and file the deeds."
"And on the day I file those deeds," I said, "a title clerk in Beaver Falls opens a folder and finds six parcels signed over to six minors in 1998 by a man who died on a ridge road three weeks later, and she does what any human being would do, which is call somebody."
Birdie put her forehead on her knees.
"There's no version," she said.
"There's no version."
"There's genuinely no version of this where you get the money."
"There's one," I said. "It's the one where Odile Bly dies of old age in her own bed with nobody having asked her a question, and then it all comes out of an estate as a mystery instead of a confession."
"That's your plan?"
"That's been the plan since 1999."
"That's not a plan, Roman, that's a waiting room."
"I know what it is."
"Twenty-eight years."
"I know how long it's been," I said.
Birdie Bly looked out at the dark for a long time.
"Okay," she said. "We have to go back."
"Road's out."
"Then we go at first light."
"Birdie."
"At first light, Roman."
And at first light we went, and we were four hours too slow, and I have thought about those four hours every day since.