Chapter 2
Bishop
Cerro Vista in June is a hundred and six degrees and everybody lies about it.
"It's dry," Amos said, from inside a bay at Compass Salvage with a torch in his hand and sweat running off his jaw in a continuous rope. "That's the thing about it. It's a dry heat."
"You are on fire."
"That's the torch."
"Your shirt's on fire, Amos."
He looked down. He patted it out with the back of his glove, unhurried, like a man swatting a fly he'd known for years. "Dry heat," he said. "Nothing sticks to you."
That was the last normal minute of my life for about six months, so I've kept it.
Cade came out of the office with a letter in his hand and a look on his face I'd only seen him wear twice, both times before somebody died.
"Bishop."
"Yeah."
He didn't hand it to me right away, which told me he'd read the envelope and thought about it and decided against opening it, and then thought about it again on the walk across the yard.
The envelope said:
THIBODEAUX IRON COMPASS CERRO VISTA, ARIZONA
No street. No number. Just the club and the town and my name, in handwriting I could have picked out of ten thousand.
My uncle wrote his T's with a long crossbar that ran back over the whole word like he was underlining from above.
He'd learned it from a nun in 1961 and he'd never once considered changing it.
"That come today?" I said.
"Came Tuesday."
"It's Friday."
"It did," Cade agreed.
I looked at him.
"I sat on it three days," he said. "Wasn't sure if I was doing you a favor or not. Decided I wasn't. Here."
I wiped my hands on a rag that made them dirtier and I opened it standing up in the yard in a hundred and six degrees.
It wasn't from Rene.
It was from a woman named Sister Agathe at a hospice in Marrero, and it was two paragraphs long, and it said that Rene Thibodeaux had asked her to write on his behalf because his hands weren't reliable anymore, and that he had named me in a matter of family responsibility, and that if I intended to come I should not take a great deal of time about it.
At the bottom, in a different pen, in the shaky wreck of that long crossbar, four words he had made her let him write himself:
Come back on time.
I stood there.
Amos turned the torch off. I hadn't asked him to. The yard got very quiet in the way a shop gets quiet when six men decide simultaneously to become extremely interested in their own hands.
"Bishop," Cade said.
"Yeah."
"You want the office?"
"No."
"You want a minute?"
"I want a map," I said, and my voice came out fine, which was a surprise to everybody including me. "Somebody get me a map."
"We got GPS."
"I want a map."
Nobody argued. Torren went and got one out of a truck, an atlas from about 2009, and I opened it on the hood in the sun and put my finger on Cerro Vista and dragged it east across Arizona and New Mexico and the whole width of Texas, and the trees came back into the country somewhere around Beaumont like Rene said they would, and my finger kept going, and stopped in the little green nothing south of New Orleans.
Fifteen years takes about nineteen hours if you don't stop.
Amos came and stood next to me at the hood. He didn't look at the atlas. He looked at me looking at the atlas, which is a different activity and one he's better at than anybody I know.
"You went white," he said.
"It's a hundred and six."
"You went white in a hundred and six. That takes work."
"Amos."
"I'm not asking." He put a hand flat on the map, on West Texas, holding it down against a wind that wasn't blowing. "I'm telling you I saw it, so that later on you can't tell me I didn't."
"That's not a favor."
"It's the only kind I do."
Behind us Torren said, to nobody, "Is Louisiana the one with the—" and Reyes said, "Yes," and Torren said, "I hadn't finished," and Reyes said, "Whatever it was, yes."
We had church that night.
I need to explain about church, because people hear it and think it's some ceremony.
It's twelve men in a room with a table that Amos built badly in 2011, and a gavel that's a hammer, and rules that we mostly follow.
But it's the room where the club is actually the club, and everything else is just motorcycles.
I told them the short version. Uncle. Hospice. Family matter, unspecified.
"How long you gone?" Cade said.
"Two weeks. Maybe three."
"And the eastern contracts?"
"Torren can run the eastern contracts."
"Torren can't run a bath," Amos said.
"I ran a bath last night," Torren said.
"Did you though."
"There was water in it and I was in the water. What's your metric."
Cade put the hammer down on the table, not hard. "We ride with him."
"No," I said.
"That's not a motion, that's an announcement."
"Cade."
"Bishop."
I stood up, which you're not supposed to do, and I did it anyway.
"This isn't club business. It's not salvage.
There's no fee and there's no relic and there's nothing on the other end of it but a dying man and a parish that hates my whole name.
I'm not taking eleven men into that so they can stand around a hospice parking lot in a hundred percent humidity. "
"Ninety-eight," Marisol said, from the end of the table, not looking up from her phone. "Ninety-eight percent, and it's going up. There's a system in the Gulf."
"Thank you, Marisol."
"I'm agreeing with you. It's going to be disgusting."
"So you'll stay."
"Oh, no," she said. "I'm coming. I just wanted the record to show I understood what I was signing up for."
Cade let it go around for a while. He does that. He lets a room talk itself into the thing he already decided, and then he puts the hammer down, and everybody feels consulted.
"Bishop," he said finally. "You remember Colorado?"
"Don't."
"You rode nineteen hours for a man you'd known eight months, in February, on a bad tire, because his mother died."
"That's different."
"How."
"He asked."
"He did not ask," Cade said. "He specifically did not ask.
He told everybody not to come and then he stood in a parking lot in Pueblo and cried when we came anyway, and then he denied crying, and then he denied being in Pueblo.
" He picked up the hammer. "It's the same.
It's always the same. The whole point of a club is that it doesn't wait to be asked. All in favor."
"Hold on," said Whitlock, who is the newest patch and therefore the only man in the room who ever asks the obvious question. "Nobody's said what we're doing there."
"We're standing around a hospice," I said.
"For two weeks?"
"For as long as it takes."
"Bishop, I'm not complaining, I'll go, I'm just—" He looked around the table. "We've got four active contracts. There's a barge job in Yuma on the eleventh."
"Reschedule the barge," Cade said.
"That's forty thousand dollars."
"Reschedule the barge."
"I'm just saying it out loud so it's been said," Whitlock said. "That's all. I want it in the minutes that somebody said it."
"It's in the minutes," Cade said. "Amos, write it down."
"I'm not writing that down."
"Amos."
Amos wrote it down. It took him a while, because Amos writes like a man carving a headstone, and the whole room waited for him, and that's the other thing about a club that nobody puts in movies.
Eleven hands.
"Motion carries," Cade said. "Bishop, you're outvoted, which is what you wanted or you'd have made it a real fight."
"I hate you."
"Mm," he said, which is a sound my uncle also made, and I had to go outside for a second.
Cade caught me outside afterward, by the fence, where the yard lights end and the desert starts about nine feet later.
"Tell me the part you didn't tell them," he said.
"There's no part."
"Bishop."
I stood there a while. There's a specific noise the desert makes at night in June, which is nothing, and it's the noise I moved there for.
"There's a thing my family holds," I said. "Has held since the 1870s. I don't know what it is. Nobody's ever said. My uncle's the last one holding it and after him it's me, and I said no when I was twenty-three, and that's why I'm here and not there."
Cade took that in.
"How dangerous?"
"I don't know."
"Guess."
"My father killed a man over it," I said, "and everybody involved agrees he did the right thing by the arrangement, and that's the part I want you to sit with."
Cade sat with it.
"Do the boys know?"
"No."
"You gonna tell them?"
"When there's something to tell. Not before. I'm not going to hand eleven men a rumor and let them get scared of a shape."
"That's not your call, but it's a defensible wrong one." He pushed off the fence. "One rule. You don't get to go anywhere alone. Not a bar, not a house, not a hospice hallway. You want a minute by yourself, you say so and somebody stands eleven feet away with his back turned like a gentleman."
"That's ridiculous."
"That's the rule."
"Cade—"
"That's the rule, Bishop, and if you argue with it I'll make it nine feet."
The packing was the funniest thing I have ever watched, and I want it written down somewhere because in about four days none of it would be funny anymore.
Amos bought a hat. Not a normal hat. A hat with a neck flap and a brim you could land a small plane on, and mesh vents, and a chin cord.
"It's a sun hat," he said.
"It's not sunny there. That's the thing I keep telling you. It's wet."
"So it's a rain hat."
"It has mesh in it."
"For the rain to go through," Amos said, with total confidence.
Torren packed one pair of jeans and eleven T-shirts, which was the closest anybody came to being right, and he did it for the wrong reason, which was laundry avoidance.
Reyes bought bug spray. He bought so much bug spray.
He came out of the store with a case of it, an actual case, and he put it in the truck like a man laying in for a siege, and I said, "Reyes, that's forty-eight cans," and Reyes said, "That's twelve days at four cans a day," and I said, "That's not how—" and then I stopped, because in a week I'd be borrowing from him.
Marisol packed a dehumidifier.
"For the bike?"
"For me," she said.
Torren asked, sincerely, whether Louisiana had "regular grocery stores."