Chapter Two
Roan
The man driving the box truck is called Teodoro and he has made this run eleven times and he still cannot help himself at the Neck.
“Is narrow,” he says, on the radio, for the eleventh time.
“It is.”
“You never think, one rock.”
“I think about it constantly.”
I am running lead, Junior is on his back door, and there are forty miles behind us and plenty still to go and the sun is doing the thing it does at seven in the evening out here where it comes in flat under the brim and turns the whole road orange and useless.
“One rock,” Teodoro says, “and is finished. All of it.”
“Then we would move you by the Barrel Springs track.”
“There is a track?”
“There is not a track.”
He laughs. He is a nice man who works for people who are not nice, and the arrangement is that we do not discuss what is in the box and he does not discuss where it goes after Ivanhoe, and in four years neither of us has broken that, and it is the closest thing to a friendship either of us is allowed.
Six miles into the canyon my phone comes back for ninety seconds because there is one dead cell mast on the rim that leaks a little signal down into the wide part, and it buzzes twice against my chest, and I do not stop to look because I know what a phone does at seven on a Tuesday. It is Hollis about the inspector.
The wide part comes and goes. The grader turnout, the old cut, the place where a hundred years ago somebody decided to widen it and gave up.
Then the walls go back to being walls and the phone dies again and we come out the north end into the last of the light.
I take him up the 379 past the motel. Teodoro flashes his lights at the Verdigris the way he does, because he stopped there once for a coffee and Sol’s mother gave him a slice of pie and would not take his money, and he has been paying that back with headlights for four years.
At Rustling Springs, Ada is out at the pumps in a housecoat with a hose in her hand watering four feet of dirt that has never grown anything.
I pull in. Junior holds the box truck out on the road.
“Two,” she says.
“Two what.”
“Two county units north today. One at eleven, one at four. The four was Corliss.”
“Corliss is fine.”
“Corliss is fine,” she agrees. “The eleven was not Corliss. The eleven was a young one and he came back south at one and he did not stop for gas, which means he did not need gas, which means he came out here on purpose.”
“Plate.”
“I do not write plates down.”
“You do write plates down.”
“Nine-eight-one Victor Roman Charlie,” Ada says, “and I want it understood that I do not write plates down.”
I stand there with my hand on the pump island and I put nine-eight-one Victor Roman Charlie in with the rest of it, and it goes where it goes, and it will be there in six months when I need it, which is the only filing system this club has.
“You want a coffee,” she says.
“I want a coffee. I have got a man on the road.”
“Then you do not want a coffee.” She turns the hose off. “How is Marisol.”
“Fine.”
“You always say fine.”
“She is always fine.”
Ada looks at me for a second longer than she needs to and then goes back to watering dirt, and I get back on the bike.
Eighty miles later I hand Teodoro off at the Line to a man in a Tahoe I have met four times and whose name I have never asked for, and he hands me an envelope, and I count it in the dark at the side of the road because counting it in front of him would be an insult and not counting it at all would be stupid.
It is right. It always is. It has been right for four years, and the reason it is right is that the man in the Tahoe knows that if it ever is not right, the road stops working, and there is no other road.
That is the whole business. There is no ledger for it. There is no phone with the numbers in it. It is four years of Teodoro and a Tahoe and pie at the Verdigris, and it lives in my head, and if I go into the Sump tomorrow it goes with me.
We stop for gas at the north pumps and Junior gets two of everything from the machine.
“You want a Slim Jim.”
“No.”
“You never want a Slim Jim.”
“I have never wanted a Slim Jim, Junior. In my life.”
“It is protein,” Junior says, with a Slim Jim.
Coming back south, six miles out of Ivanhoe, there is a county unit sitting in the wash with his lights off, and he pops them once when he sees us, which is not a stop, it is a greeting, and I pull over anyway because you do not make Corliss come to you.
He puts the window down. He is sixty and has a neck like a fence post.
“Roan.”
“Corliss.”
“You are running heavy tonight.”
“I am running empty tonight. You saw the heavy at seven.”
“I saw the heavy at seven.” He scratches under his jaw. “There is a young one out of Elko doing detail. Rowe. Been up here twice.”
“I heard about the eleven o’clock.”
“Course you did.” He almost smiles. “He is not looking at you. He is looking at the Coldwater plates that keep coming north through the Junction, and he is going to find nothing, and in about six weeks he is going to notice that the nothing stops at the Neck.”
“And then.”
“And then he will be somebody’s problem,” Corliss says. “I would prefer it be his sergeant’s.”
“So would I.”
“Eleven deputies, Roan. For all this.” He waves a hand at four hundred square miles of dark. “You keep it quiet, I keep my numbers, everybody’s sergeant is happy. That is the whole arrangement and it is thirty years old and it does not survive somebody getting shot on my road.”
“Nobody is getting shot on your road.”
“Somebody got shot in my jurisdiction in March.”
“Not on the road,” I say.
Corliss looks at me for a while.
“Good night, Roan,” he says, and puts the window up.
Church is at ten because that is when everybody is back.
The assay office does not have a window and it does not have a vent that works and in August it is a concrete box with nine men in it, and Deacon shuts the door and the sound of the bar room goes away all at once like somebody has put a hand over it.
Hollis does the inspector. Fritz does the road. Junior does the run we just finished and is stopped twice by Deacon for embroidery.
“Corliss,” I say. “There is a young deputy out of Elko named Rowe doing detail on the Coldwater plates. He will find nothing for six weeks and then he will notice that the nothing stops at the Neck.”
“Then we slow it down,” Torch says.
“We do not slow it down.”
“For six weeks.”
“For six weeks we lose the Sacramento window and Teodoro’s people go and find a different corridor, and when they find it they do not come back.” I let that sit. “There is not a version where they come back. That is the part nobody in this room believes because it has never happened to us.”
Torch puts his hands up. He is not fighting me. He has been not fighting me since we were prospects and he is very good at it.
“So what,” Junior says.
“So we give Rowe something to find that is not us. Fritz, what is running out of the Barrel Springs side.”
“Cars,” Fritz says. “The Nevill brothers are chopping in that barn again.”
“Are they paying.”
“They are paying.”
“They are about to pay differently,” I say. “Two weeks. Let him find the barn.”
Hollis writes nothing down, because Hollis does not write that kind of thing down, and Priest writes nothing down either, and Priest is the one who is supposed to.
I see him not write it.
We do the tin, we do Wade’s window, we do a wall that needs doing on the north bay. Deacon says four words about Wade and I would not want to be Wade.
Then Priest closes the book.
“One thing,” he says.
The room knows. That is the thing about this room, it knows before the sentence gets out, and I feel Torch go still on my left and Hollis stop moving his pen.
“Priest.”
“Five minutes.”
“We did this in April.”
“We did it in April,” he agrees, “and in October before that, and the November before that, and once more I have got in the book but I am not going to read it out because it will embarrass both of us.”
“Then do not do it.”
“Roan.” He sets both hands flat on the table. “Teodoro’s people. Who has the name.”
“I have the name.”
“Who else.”
“Nobody else.”
“The Tahoe.”
“Nobody else.”
“Corliss.”
“Corliss talks to me,” I say. “Corliss has talked to me since I was twenty-four years old because he buried my father and he does not talk to anybody at this table except me, and that is not arrogance, Wendell, that is the arrangement, and it is the arrangement because it is one man to one man and that is the only way it stays deniable for him.”
“And in the Sump,” Priest says.
“What.”
“When you are in the Sump.” He says it flatly and nobody moves. “You are forty-one and you ride two hundred miles a day on a road with no shoulder. Gene Voss was fifty-one. What happens to the Tahoe on the day after you are in the Sump.”
“Nothing happens to the Tahoe.”
“That is right,” Priest says. “Nothing happens. Nothing ever happens again. That is my whole point and you keep answering it like it is an insult.”
“It is not an insult.”
“Then write it down.”
“No.”
“A book. One book, in the safe, and Deacon holds it, and it does not open until.”
“No.”
“Then two men,” Priest says. “Not a book. Two men. You and Deacon. You and Torch. You and me. You take one man to a meet and he stands there and says nothing and he learns a face.”
“And if that man goes down in a room in Coldwater with a lawyer in it,” I say, “he has got names in his head, and a man with names in his head has something to sell, and every man in here has a mother or a daughter or a court date.”
“You have got names in your head.”
“I do.”
“So you have got something to sell.”
“I am the president,” I say. “That is what the patch is. It is the thing you cannot sell, because there is nowhere for me to go.”
The room is very quiet.
“That is not a plan,” Priest says. “That is a man deciding he is a building.”
“Vote it if you want it.”
He does not vote it. He never votes it, and both of us know why, which is that he would lose seven to two and it would be on the book forever that the table looked at succession and said no, and then it would be dead.
“Fifth time,” he says, and opens the book, and writes something short.
“What are you writing.”
“Asked and answered,” Priest says. “Same as the other four.”
Deacon speaks for the first time in an hour.
“He is not wrong, Roan.”
That is all. He does not say which one of us he means, and he does not say it again, and the room chews on that for a second and then Torch calls for the doors and it is done.
I get home at ten past midnight.
The kitchen light is on over the sink because she leaves it on, and there is a plate in the fridge with a paper towel over it, and the receipt from Dale is on the counter squared up against the edge with the four thousand written in her hand.
She is awake. She is always awake and she never says she was waiting.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
She is on her side with a book she is not reading. I get my boots off and my shirt off and I sit on the edge of the bed and for a moment I do not do anything, and she puts her hand flat between my shoulder blades and leaves it there, and I sit in it.
“Long,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“You are cold.”
“I came over the Neck.”
She pulls at me. That is all it takes, that is all it has ever taken with us, and I turn and get a knee up on the bed and she is already coming up to meet me with her hands on my jaw, and there is nothing careful about any of it.
It works. It has always worked. This is not the part of us that broke.
She gets a fist in my hair and her mouth at my ear and says something filthy and specific and I laugh into her neck, and she bites me for laughing, and I get her onto her back and she puts a heel into the back of my thigh and pulls me down like she is docking a boat.
I know every inch of this woman. I know what makes her make the sound in the back of her throat and what makes her go quiet, which is worse and better, and I go looking for the quiet one because I am tired and I want to feel like I can still do a thing well.
I find it. She goes still under me and then comes apart with her nails in my back and her teeth in my shoulder to keep the noise down, out of eleven years of habit, in a house with nobody in it for forty miles.
After, she stays where she is with one leg across mine and her hand on my chest, and I look at the ceiling.
The fan turns.
“Wade,” she says eventually.
“Deacon had him out back for twenty minutes.”
“Good.”
“He did not cry.”
“He cried in the truck,” she says. “He said his eyes were doing a thing.”
I laugh, and she laughs, and it is good, and then it stops being anything and there is just the fan.
“Roan.”
“Mm.”
Her hand does not move. Her voice does not change. She says it the way you ask a man to pass the salt, which is what six years does to a question.
“What was church.”
And there it is, in the dark, with her leg over mine and my hand still on her hip. I look at the fan going around. Corliss, and a young deputy named Rowe, and the Nevill brothers about to get fed to him, and Priest saying that is a man deciding he is a building.
I could give her all of it in ninety seconds. It would not even be dangerous. That is the part I do not have a word for.
“Nothing you would want,” I say.
Her hand stays exactly where it is. She does not stiffen and she does not sigh and she does not ask again.
“Okay,” she says.
And that is worse than anything she could have said, and I do not know why, and I lie there in the dark with my wife asleep on my arm inside forty minutes, and I am awake for a very long time listening to the fan and to a house with nobody in it, and I could not tell you what is wrong with me.
I am not unhappy. Nothing is wrong. I am forty-one years old and I hold two hundred and forty miles of road in my head and it does not weigh anything and I cannot put it down.