Chapter 7
Roman
Twenty-two minutes down. I did it in fourteen.
Here's what I thought about for those fourteen minutes, and I've written it down because a man ought to be honest about the inside of his own head.
I thought: Tobin's got a wife and a wrist he uses for a living.
I thought: Cricket's twenty and he's standing in a road.
I thought: this is what a president is for. Not the table. Not the vote. This — the part where somebody's on the shoulder of Route 9 at six-fifteen saying I don't know what to do and you're the answer.
I did not think about a kitchen.
I want that on the page in my own words, because everyone since has been generous about it, and generous is worse than accurate.
Tobin had a broken wrist and a cut eyebrow and a truck with a mirror off it. The vehicle in the road was empty and had been reported stolen out of Erie in June.
"Where'd they go?" I said.
"They didn't take anything."
"Tobe. Where'd they go?"
"That's what I'm telling you." He was holding his wrist against his chest and his eyes were doing the thing eyes do.
"Prez, they came across, they clipped me, they got out — three of 'em, no masks, nothing — and one of 'em looked at the load and he laughed, and then they walked back to a second car and went north. "
"They laughed."
"He looked in the truck," Tobin said, "and he laughed, and he said, is this it?"
Six thousand dollars of restaurant fryer oil equipment, is what was in that truck. Legitimate freight for a legitimate customer, the kind of job we've been taking since March because it's the kind of job that's available.
They hadn't hit a transport. They'd hit a schedule.
Cricket stood in the middle of Route 9 and said, "He said his name was Wendell."
And I got back on the bike before the sentence was over.
Twenty-eight minutes back up. I did it in nineteen, and I'd have done it in nothing, and it wouldn't have mattered, because they'd been in the house since twenty past six.
The kitchen light was on.
That's what I want you to see, because it's what I saw from the bottom of four hundred feet of gravel with the engine off and the bike walked the last hundred yards: an ordinary yellow kitchen window on an October night, warm as a church, and two people at a table.
Wendell Pike in Odile's chair, in Deacon's cut.
And Birdie across from him with her elbows on the table, talking.
Talking. Hands moving. Chin up.
And the last thing before I walked into it: I looked at that window from a hundred yards out and I understood the shape of the whole evening, and it was not a shape anybody had improvised.
Route 9 at 6:12 wasn't a hit. It was a phone call I would take. They needed twenty-two minutes and they'd bought thirty-eight for the price of one broken wrist and a stolen car out of Erie.
Which means somebody had sat down and worked out what I would do.
Which means somebody had worked out what I am, and I have spent every week since wondering how long that took them, and whether it was hard.
There were three of them. One on the porch, one at the corner of the barn, Wendell inside. The one on the porch was young and cold and had been standing still for forty minutes, which is the single hardest thing to do in this life and he wasn't good at it.
I came up the blind side of the barn with the wind in my face and I took the barn corner first and I did it quietly, and I'm not going to walk you through that part.
The porch one heard me on the third step and turned with his hand going, and that's the man I killed.
I want that sentence to sit where it is. I've heard men tell this kind of story with the sentence buried in the middle of a paragraph. It goes at the front.
The screen door was unlatched.
I came into Odile Bly's kitchen with a gun in my hand for the first time in my life, and Wendell Pike had a revolver on the table under his palm — my mother's revolver, out of a Kroger bag — and Birdie was mid-sentence.
She did not stop.
That's the thing. She looked at me and she did not stop talking. She said, "—and that's the part I don't understand, because a hasp like that you could pop with a screwdriver, so why'd you bring a pry bar—"
"Prez," Wendell said.
"Get up."
"You're bleeding."
"Get up, Wendell."
"That's your own," he said, mild. "That's off your hand."
Birdie kept her eyes on him. She was the color of the tablecloth and her voice was completely steady and she had been keeping a man talking for forty minutes with a loaded gun eighteen inches from his hand, and I have led men into three counties' worth of stupidity and I have never seen anything like it.
"Sit down, Prez," Wendell said. "There's coffee. She makes a hell of a pot, I'll give her that."
"Get up."
"You know what she's been telling me about?" He tipped his head at Birdie. "Forty minutes. Horses. I've heard about a horse's stomach for forty minutes. Did you know a horse can't throw up?"
"They can't," Birdie said.
"That's a design flaw."
"It is a design flaw."
"That's what I said. I said that's a design flaw, and she said—"
"I said God was tired," Birdie said, "by the time He got to horses."
"That's funny," Wendell said. "That's a funny thing to say."
"Thank you."
"You've been talking to me so I don't go in the other room."
"Yes," Birdie said.
He laughed. Genuinely delighted. "See, that's — I like that. You just say it. Nobody in this county just says it."
"Where's Odile," I said.
"She's fine."
"Where."
"Cellar," Birdie said. "He put her in the cellar."
And the room went out from under me for about a half a second.
Wendell watched it happen. He'd been waiting for it. That's the whole reason for the cellar — not to hold a seventy-nine-year-old woman, you could hold her with a chair, but to put me in a doorway looking at a bolt.
"Huh," he said. "She told me that'd land."
"Who told you."
"Miss Odile. Friday night. Right before she came out with the shotgun." He turned the revolver a quarter turn on the tablecloth, the way a man turns a coffee cup. "Told me if I ever wanted to make you stupid, put her behind that door. Said it like she was giving me advice."
"She was," Birdie said.
We both looked at her.
"She was telling you what you'd do," Birdie said, "so we'd know you did it. She's been telling people things for twenty-eight years, that's the whole — you think you got that out of her. Wendell. Nobody gets anything out of my grandmother."
Wendell's jaw moved.
I've thought a lot about what a good president does in that kitchen. There's a version where I talk him down. I've run it. It ends with him in the drive with his hands up and the cut on the ground and everybody's alive and I'm still a man who can walk past a doorway.
But the version happened instead.
Because he moved his hand.
Not fast. He wasn't fast. He moved it two inches toward my mother's — toward her mother's — revolver, and he did it while looking at Birdie, and that's what did it, because a man reaching for a gun while looking at the woman across the table has told you which way it's pointed.
I have replayed it enough to know that I did not decide.
It was very loud in a small kitchen.
The clock on the wall — the one shaped like a rooster, the one my hand has fixed the battery in twice — kept going. That's what I remember. That absolutely nothing in the room stopped except one thing.
Birdie didn't look away.
She had every right to. There was a whole world of somewhere else to look. And she sat in her grandmother's kitchen with her hands flat on the table and she watched it, all of it, start to finish, and then she stood up on legs that shouldn't have held her and said:
"Cellar. Roman. Cellar."
I couldn't do it.
I want to be very clear, because I've told exactly one other person this and that person was a bartender in 2004 and it wasn't about a cellar. I got to the door. I put my hand on the bolt. And my hand did not work.
Nine seconds. I counted them later off the recording in my head. Nine seconds standing in front of a bolted door with my hand on it like a man in a dream.
Birdie put her hand over mine and pulled the bolt.
Odile came up the stairs.
She'd been down there fifty-one minutes. She had a jar of applesauce in one hand, which she had apparently gotten off the shelf at some point out of what she described later as spite, and she took one look at the kitchen and said:
"Oh, hell."
"Grandma—"
"Not you. The floor. That's a hundred-year-old floor."
"Grandma."
And then Odile Bly — seventy-nine, four foot eleven, fifty-one minutes in her own cellar courtesy of a man wearing her friend's coat — set the applesauce on the counter, crossed the kitchen, and took my face in both hands.
Birdie wrote that down in a notebook later and showed me. I told her it hadn't gone like that. She said, it went exactly like that, you were busy.
"Roman," Odile said.
"Ma'am."
"Look at me."
"Ma'am, I can't."
"Look at me."
I looked at her.
"Twenty-eight years ago I made a decision in this kitchen," she said, "and I have never once apologized for it and I'm not starting tonight. But I'll say this and then we'll never speak of it. I have thought about that bolt every single day of my life."
"Odile—"
"Every day, Roman."
"I know."
"You don't. You've thought about the inside of that door. I've been out here."
She let go of my face.
Then she said, "Where's the boy?" and went out onto the porch, and stood a while over what was on it, and came back in and said, "Well.
He had a terrible chin," and sat down heavily in a chair, and started shaking, and did not stop for about twenty minutes, and would not let anybody touch her while she did it.
Ash got there at 7:40 with four men and a tarp and a plan, and I have never in my life been happier to see anyone.
He came in the kitchen door and stopped for exactly one second, and then he went to work, and he did not say a single word to me about any of it until three days later.
What he said three days later was: "You want to know the worst part?"
"Go on."
"You did it right."
"Ash—"
"You did it right, Roman, that's what I'm going to be chewing on until I'm dead.
There's no version where you did it wrong.
He moved his hand." He shook his head slowly.
"I have spent nineteen years telling myself that if it ever came to it, the reason it came to it would be that somebody screwed up. And nobody screwed up."
"Somebody did."
"Who?"
"Me. In March," I said. "When I didn't tell eleven men we were broke."
Ash thought about that for a long time.
"Yeah," he said. "Okay. Yeah, all right. I'll take that one."
We did what you do. I'm not going to tell you what you do.
But I'll tell you the one thing I did that wasn't procedure, which is that before any of it, before Ash's men touched anything, I went out onto that porch alone and I took Deacon Ross's cut off Wendell Pike, and I folded it the way you fold them, and I put it inside my own jacket against my chest, and I stood in the dark for a minute with my arms crossed over it like a man holding a wound shut.
At some point around eleven I found Birdie sitting on the porch steps in the dark, exactly where Wendell used to sit, with her arms around her knees.
I sat down about three feet away. Not next to. There's a difference and it mattered that night.
"I didn't look away," she said.
"I know."
"I want you to understand that I chose that. I thought, right then, in real time, I thought: if I look away, then he's alone in it." She was very calm. That's what scared me. "So I watched. On purpose. So he wouldn't be alone in it."
"Birdie."
"And now I've got it," she said. "Now it's in me. Forever. And that was the price and I paid it on purpose and I'd do it again, and I need you to know that I'd do it again, and also that I'm not — Roman, I'm not okay. Those are both true. Don't pick one."
I didn't say anything for a while.
"Twenty-eight years ago your grandmother made me sit in a hole so I wouldn't have to carry something," I said.
"Yeah."
"And tonight you walked out and carried it on purpose."
"Yeah."
"I don't know what to do with that."
"Nothing," she said. "You don't do anything with it. That's the whole point. You just know it happened."
And then she reached over, three feet, without looking, and took my hand — my right hand, the one, and she knew which one, and she took it anyway — and held it on the step between us like a thing she was keeping warm.
"Can I ask you something," she said, after a while.
"Yeah."
"When you were at the door. The cellar door."
"Birdie."
"You went somewhere."
"Nine seconds."
"It was nine seconds?"
"I counted them after," I said. "That's the thing nobody tells you about the worst nine seconds of your life. You get them back later, in order, and you can count them."
She was quiet.
"You want to know the actual worst part," I said.
"Yes."
"For about four of those nine seconds I was sixteen and I was on the other side of it.
" I looked out at the dark. "I wasn't a man trying to open a door.
I was a kid behind it listening to somebody not open it.
And I want you to understand that I have run a club for nine years and I have sat in rooms with men who would kill me over a road, and none of that ever once got in.
And a bolt on a door in a farmhouse took nine seconds off me in front of my — " I stopped.
"In front of your what."
"In front of you," I said.
Birdie Bly considered that.
"Roman," she said. "I pulled a bolt. That's the entire thing I did. My hands worked and yours didn't, for nine seconds, on the worst night of both our lives, and if you're about to build something permanent out of that I'm going to have to argue with you and I am too tired."
"I'm not building anything."
"You're a little bit."
"...I'm a little bit."
"Well, stop it," she said. "Or at least wait till Thursday."
Odile came out at midnight and put a blanket over both of us, and said, "There's coffee," and then stood there in the doorway of her own house looking out at nine miles of dark.
"They'll be back," she said.
"Yeah."
"He'll come himself now."
"Yeah."
"Good," said Odile Bly. "I've been wanting a word."