Chapter 6
Rafferty
"This is breaking and entering," Sunday said.
"The door was open."
"You made the door open."
"I encouraged it," I said. "There's a difference and it's about eleven months."
DAWN'S closed in 2011, according to the health permit still taped inside the glass, and nobody had told the electric company, which is the single greatest oversight in the history of Nye County.
The lights came up in three long stutters — the counter, the row of booths, a neon OPEN sign in the window that flickered on and then thought better of it.
Sunday stood in the middle of the floor and turned all the way around.
"It's perfect," she said.
"It's a dump."
"It's a perfect dump. Look at it. Nobody wiped down. There's still ketchup."
"Don't touch the ketchup."
"I would never touch the ketchup," she said, and touched the ketchup, and made a face I'm going to be thinking about when I'm eighty.
Here was the smart plan, and I want it on the record that there was one, because of what happened to it.
Mile 68 is the dead center of the thirteen.
If the road's got a middle, this is it. And a building with power and walls is a place you can sit for six hours and watch a stretch of highway without being on the stretch of highway, which — after pass three — seemed like a distinction worth several hundred dollars.
So: two chairs at the window, a thermos, the map spread on the counter, Judah parked at 61 and Marlowe at 74, and a plan to just watch for once instead of feeding a woman into the thing headfirst.
Bishop's conditions took eleven minutes to negotiate and I want them recorded, because three days later every single one of them turned out to matter.
One: radio check on the half hour, both ends, no exceptions.
Two: nobody goes outside after one in the morning, not for a smoke, not for the truck, not for anything.
Three — and this was Marlowe's, and she was immovable about it — if the power in that building goes out, we leave. Not investigate. Not check the box. Leave.
"Why the power?" I'd said.
"Because it's the only thing out there that's on," Marlowe said. "You've got thirteen miles of dark and one lit building. If something turns that off, it's not a fuse, it's a decision."
At eleven-thirty Judah came on the radio.
"Enforcer."
"Go."
"You in the diner?"
"We're in the diner."
"Is there pie?"
"It closed in 2011, Judah."
"That's not a no," Judah said, and I heard Marlowe laugh eleven miles away at the north end, and that was the last funny thing anybody said on a radio that night.
That was the plan. It held for about ninety minutes.
"Northbound," Sunday said, at midnight. "White pickup."
"Got it."
"He's fine."
"You can tell from here?"
"He's got a passenger," she said, and made a mark on her pad, and that was it. That's how we spent an hour and a half — her calling cars and me writing them down and both of us pretending that a woman had not, two nights before, come off a bike sideways reciting the names of the dead.
"Can I ask about the crosses," I said, around one.
"You can ask."
"Thirty-one is a lot of nights."
"Forty-four nights," she said. "Some I did two." She had her boots up on the sill and the pad on her knee. "It's not as noble as it sounds. It started because I felt guilty and it kept going because it was the only two hours a week where I felt like a person doing something."
"That's the definition of noble."
"That's the definition of coping."
"Sunday, most people cope by drinking."
"I tried that first. I'm very bad at it. I get one glass in and start telling strangers about mortality."
"Yeah," I said, "I'd pay to see that."
"You would not. Nobody would. I've cleared rooms." She marked a car. "Southbound. Fine. Everybody southbound's always fine, it's the most boring superpower in Nevada."
"You ever tell anybody at work?"
"Hollis knows I'm strange. He thinks it's a divorce thing."
"Are you divorced?"
"I've never had a second date," Sunday said. "Do you know how a second date works? You sit across a small table from a person and look at them. That's the whole activity. That's what people do for fun."
"You've never done that."
"Once. When I was twenty-three. I looked at him over a candle and got a stroke in a kitchen at sixty-one, and I said excuse me and went to the bathroom and climbed out a window."
I put my coffee down.
"You climbed out a window."
"It was a low window."
"That's not the part I'm stuck on."
"That's what everybody says," she said, "and honestly, at some point the county's going to have to build lower windows or I'm going to have to get better."
At one-thirty she got up to stretch and hit the jukebox with her hip.
The jukebox lit up.
We both stopped.
"No," she said.
"That thing's fifteen years dead."
"So's the range hood." She crouched down in front of it. "Rafferty. It's got a coin return with money in it."
"That's not—"
"It's got sixty cents in the coin return," Sunday said, in a voice of purest reverence, "and that's a sign."
"That's a robbery."
"It's the coin return, it's the little bowl of forgiveness at the bottom of the machine, it belongs to whoever finds it. That's the law." She fed a quarter in. "What's on here."
"Sunday—"
"Oh no," she said. "Oh, it's all sad."
"Let me see."
It was, in fact, all sad. Whoever loaded that machine in 2011 had a specific and expensive kind of heartbreak going on, and the selection reflected it: two Patsy Cline, three Roy Orbison, a Willie Nelson that I'd argue is medically dangerous after midnight, and one inexplicable disco track sitting at the bottom like a note from a hostage.
"That one," I said.
"That's disco."
"That's joy, Sunday."
"We're on a haunted road."
"We are on a haunted road," I said, "eating gas station beef jerky in a condemned diner at one in the morning, and the last three days have been the worst days of your life, and there is a disco song in that machine and sixty cents in the bowl of forgiveness."
She looked up at me.
"Press it," she said.
She pressed it.
And it turned out the speakers in that ceiling still worked, and it turned out they were loud, and for about eleven seconds we both just stood there while a dead diner filled up with the stupidest, happiest song ever recorded, and then Sunday Marsh started laughing so hard she had to hold the jukebox.
"It's so bad," she said.
"It's incredible."
"It's so bad, Rafferty—"
"You want to dance?"
I don't know why I said it. I've said maybe four charming things in my life and I've been sorry about three of them.
She stopped laughing.
"I don't dance," she said.
"Neither do I."
"No, I mean I've never danced. Not once. Because you have to look at somebody."
"Okay," I said.
"Okay?"
"Okay," I said, "we don't dance," and I put my hand out anyway, palm up, at about waist height, low and easy like you'd do with a horse you'd never met.
She looked at my hand for a long time.
The disco song ran out and the machine, which apparently had opinions, went straight into a Patsy Cline, which is not fair and which I did not choose.
And Sunday put her hand in mine.
We didn't dance. I want to be accurate. We stood in the middle of a linoleum floor between a jukebox and a counter, and I put my other hand at the small of her back, and she put her forehead against my collarbone because that's the highest she could go without a face being involved, and we moved about four inches in either direction for the length of one song.
She smelled like desert cold and gasoline and something soft underneath it.
"Rafferty."
"Yeah."
"Why doesn't this scare you?"
"Which part?"
"Any of it," she said. "You've seen me on the ground. You know what I do. Everybody who's ever found out has left within a week — my college roommate, two boyfriends, a therapist, which I think might be malpractice—"
"They didn't leave because you're scary."
"No?"
"They left because you handed them a thing they couldn't fix and they couldn't stand sitting next to it." My hand moved on her back without asking me. "That's the only skill I've got, Sunday. I'm the guy who can sit next to something."
She lifted her head.
And she looked at my face.
It was the second time. I knew it was the second time. I'd counted, like an idiot, since the office.
"I need to tell you something," she said.
"Okay."
"When I look at you, I don't see anything."
I waited.
"That's not — " she stopped, started over.
"You don't understand. I've looked at four thousand people.
Every one of them came with an ending, no exceptions, no gaps, not once in eighteen years.
And I looked up at you in that office because you laughed, and there was nothing there, and I have been carrying that around for four days like a stone in my shoe. "
"What's it mean?"
"I have no idea," she said. "It could mean you're going to live forever.
It could mean you're going to die in a way I can't look at.
It could mean the thing on that road already has your name and I'm not allowed to see the receipt.
" Her voice cracked right down the middle.
"But what it feels like — Rafferty, what it feels like is that I get to stand here and look at your stupid face for as long as I want and not pay for it, and I've never had that, I have never once had that with another human being, and I don't know how to explain what that is—"
"Sunday."
"—because it's not romance, it's rest, it's like somebody finally turned off a sound I've had on since I was twelve—"
"Sunday."
"What."
"I'm going to kiss you," I said, "unless you'd rather keep talking, because honestly the talking's going great too."
She said, "Oh," in a very small voice.
Then she said, "Do the other one."
So I did the other one.
And I'd like to report that I was smooth about it, but the truth is my hand shook when it came up to her jaw, which she felt, and which she smiled against my mouth about, and I have never in my life minded being laughed at less.