Chapter 11
Sunday
The plan was mine, which I want on the record, because it was a bad plan and I'd hate for anybody else to take the credit.
Here it is.
"That's not a plan," Judah said, "that's a dare."
"It's a plan with a dare in it."
"Bishop."
"I heard her," Bishop said.
Nine of them came out. That's the part I still can't say without my voice going strange. I told a room full of men that I intended to stand alone in the dark at a mile marker and let a dead man drive at me, and nine of them said fine and got their coats.
Emmett brought sandwiches. There were sandwiches at a haunting. I don't know what to do with that.
"There's turkey and there's the other one," he said.
"What's the other one?"
"Nobody knows. It's been the other one for eleven years."
"Emmett."
"It's egg salad, and I'm not apologizing, and I'd like everybody to remember that the last time I didn't bring anything there was a situation in Idaho and Judah ate a granola bar out of a saddlebag that had been there since March."
"That's true," Judah said, "and I was not well."
Bishop let that run about forty seconds longer than he had to, and I understood, eventually, that he was letting it run on purpose, because eleven people standing in the dark before something like that need to hear each other be ordinary first.
Then he said, "All right," and everybody stopped.
"Rules," Bishop said, at eleven-forty, at the south end.
"Nobody rides alone. Nobody's northbound after midnight except Rafferty and Sunday.
Everybody else holds their post and nobody — nobody — looks at anything they can't explain.
You see something out there that shouldn't be there, you shut your eyes and you get on the floor of the truck. "
"That's genuinely the least dignified order I've ever been given," Judah said.
"You'll take it anyway."
"I'll take it anyway," Judah agreed.
Marlowe stood by the trucks with her arms crossed and her chin up and did not come.
"I'd be a liability," she said. "He'd go for me before he went for you and I'd be a very loud snack." She looked at my collarbone, which I'd noticed she'd started doing on purpose, as a courtesy, which I have never once acknowledged and never will. "Sunday."
"Yeah."
"When you read him — and you will, because that's what you are — don't argue with him."
"What?"
"Everybody argues," Marlowe said. "That's the mistake.
You get one and you want to explain to it why it's wrong, and it can't hear you, because it isn't a mind anymore, it's a rut with a face on it.
" She shrugged. "Tell it something true instead.
That's all any of them want and none of them know it. "
We rode north at eleven-fifty.
Thirteen miles. Twelve minutes on a normal night.
We stopped at 74 at eleven past midnight, which means it took twenty-one, and neither of us said anything about it because at that point what would be the point.
Rafferty walked me to the marker.
"Fifty yards," he said. "That's where I'll be. Fifty yards south, on the bike, facing you, headlight off unless you say."
"Rafferty."
"And I'm not going to look at it," he said. "I know. I've been told nine times. Bishop made me say it back to him like a kid."
"Say it back to me."
"I'm not going to look at it."
"Thank you."
He stood there in the dark. Big and banged up, scar through the eyebrow, hands loose at his sides.
"Sunday."
"Don't."
"I wasn't going to say anything good."
"Then go ahead."
"I've got sixty-eight dollars in my pocket," Rafferty said, "and if you come out the other end of this I'm going to give it to you, because I've owed it for eleven days and it has bothered me the entire time."
I laughed with my whole chest on a highway at midnight.
"Go stand fifty yards away," I said.
He went and stood fifty yards away.
I want to describe the waiting, because it was the longest part and nobody ever writes it down.
Thirteen minutes of desert. Cold coming up out of the ground through my boots.
The mile marker at my hip, white paint, 74, a bullet hole through the 7 because this is Nevada.
The stars doing what they do out there, which is too much.
Behind me the road going north into county I'd never worked and never would.
I talked to myself, because there was nobody else and because I've been doing it since I was twelve.
Sunday, run the list.
Number one, Renata, insurance, a son who studied fish, Mile 63.8. Number two, a mud-logger named Aurelio, Mile 70.1. Number three, a woman driving back from her own bachelorette party who I have never been able to think about without having to sit down.
I got to nine and had to stop.
Then I did the other thing, the thing I have never admitted to anybody, which is that I said out loud into the dark, "I'm sorry it took me two years."
Nobody answered. It's a desert. That's what deserts are for.
And in front of me, the thirteen miles.
I could feel them. That's not a metaphor and I don't know how else to say it.
Thirty-one people had been erased along that stretch and I had put a cross up for every one of them with my own hands and I had touched the dirt at every one of those spots, and standing at the top of it I could feel the whole sentence stretching away south like something written on my own arm.
At twenty-six past, the sound started.
It came from the south. It did not get louder.
"He's here," I said, and my voice went out into nothing.
"Copy," Rafferty said, from fifty yards.
I put my hands in my pockets, because it seemed important not to have them out, and I turned to face down the road, and I made myself look.
The headlights weren't headlights. That's the first thing. They were the color of a light bulb in a room you left, and they didn't throw anything — they didn't light the asphalt, they didn't light the shoulder, they just sat out there in the dark being two small dirty yellow facts.
The sedan came up the northbound lane at about fifteen miles an hour.
It was brown. It had a bench seat. It had a cracked dash and a dent in the driver's-side rear quarter panel where paint that wasn't its own had been driven into the metal thirty-two years ago and never come out.
It stopped eleven feet from me.
The engine idled. The passenger window was down.
And there was a man behind the wheel.
Here's the thing I hadn't prepared for, and I'd prepared for a great deal. I'd imagined something terrible. A shape. A hole. Whatever the last thing thirty-one people saw before their hands came off the wheel.
It was a man in his fifties in a work shirt with the sleeves rolled, hair combed wet, one arm along the back of the seat, looking straight ahead through the windshield at the road he had been driving north for thirty-two years.
He looked so tired.
"Roy Ballard," I said.
He didn't turn his head.
"Roy."
Nothing. The engine idled.
It isn't a mind anymore. It's a rut with a face on it.
I walked around to the driver's side.
I'd like to say something about courage here and I can't, because it wasn't courage, it was eighteen years of being handed things by strangers and never once getting to hand anything back, and the whole weight of that walked me around the front of that car.
I stood at the driver's window.
And Roy Ballard turned his head and looked at me.
It came the way it always comes. No travel time. Already in the room.
A house in Beatty in 1996. One story, cheap panelling, a couch with a blanket on it.
A cigarette that went down between the cushions at half past two in the morning, and a man too far gone to wake, and then the part I'm not going to write down, except to say it was slow, and he was alone, and at the very end he was trying to get to a door that was four feet from him in the wrong direction.
And under it, laid into it, the thing he'd been paid four thousand dollars to do two years before that: a brown sedan coming up on the rear quarter of a wrecker at seventy miles an hour on the ninth of February, and a woman's face in a side mirror for about a second and a half.
My aunt had time to see him.
She looked right at him. Of course she did. That's my family, that's the whole rotten inheritance, we look.
"Roy Ballard," I said, "you were paid by Gerald Herrick to run a woman off this road in February of 1994 and you did it, and he's dead, and you're dead, and there's nobody left to pay you and nobody left to tell."
His mouth moved.
I didn't hear anything. I want to be honest: there was no voice, there was no whisper, there was nothing supernatural about it at all.
There was just a dead man's mouth making the shape of a word, over and over, the way a man does when he's been saying the same thing into an empty car for thirty-two years.
The shape was sorry.
And that was the moment I understood what the letters were.
He wasn't writing her name to gloat. He wasn't marking territory.
He'd been driving north on this stretch since 1994 doing the only thing he knew how to do, and somewhere in the middle of that a building went dark and the last sign with her name on it came off the pole, and a dead man with one working idea left had started dragging the only apology he had left through the dirt using whatever came to hand.
Thirty-one people had died because a dead man was trying to say sorry and had nothing to write with but them.
I have never been angrier in my life. I want that recorded too.
I stood at that window and I was so angry my eyes stopped working properly, and it wasn't at him, it was at the arithmetic — at a world where the worst thing a person ever does can go on being done by them forever, after they're finished, with no way to stop and nobody to say enough.
Tell it something true.
So I leaned down, and I put my hand on the door of that car — it was cold, it was metal, it was as real as anything I've ever touched — and I looked Roy Ballard in the face.