Chapter Nine
Sol
I sit in the truck outside it for a long time.
The lemon tree has three lemons on it. I count them twice.
Then I go up the path, and the door opens before I get to it, because Priest has been watching the truck the whole time.
“Come in out of that.”
“I am alright.”
“You are stood in a hundred and four degrees looking at a tree,” he says. “Come in out of that.”
His kitchen has not changed since I was fifteen.
Formica, a wall clock shaped like a rooster, a chair with a cushion tied to it.
He puts the kettle on because he makes coffee with a kettle like a man in a war film, and he gets down two cups, and one of them has a cartoon dog on it and I get that one, which I have got every time since I was in braces.
He does not say anything for the first four minutes. He does the coffee. He puts the cup in front of me and sits down opposite with his hands round his own.
Then he says:
“Ask me anything you want and I will answer it.”
“You will not.”
“Marisol.”
“You will not, and I have not come here for that.” I put both hands round the dog. “I have come here because everybody I know is in that building and you are the only one of them who is not going to open with sorry.”
“I am sorry.”
“Wendell.”
“Not for that,” he says. “Not for him. I am not apologizing for that man, I have not got the standing and I would not if I had. I am sorry that a woman I have known since she was in braces stood in that bar room with thirty of us in it and had to work it out off our faces. That is mine to say sorry for and I am saying it.”
“You were not there.”
“I know I was not there.” His jaw goes. “I was out the back with Marcus and him, and I have spent one day going over the fact that I let that happen, because I knew you were coming at eleven with the ice, I knew it, and I stood out the back.”
“Why.”
“Because he asked us to be out the back,” Priest says. “And I let a man who had done what he had done make one more decision about how it went for you.”
He turns his cup around.
“Seven days,” he says. “Seven days between the bag and you finding out, and I sat in this kitchen for six of them thinking somebody would do it, and the somebody I was thinking of was Ellis, and then it was Marcus, and then on the Thursday I thought, well, Wendell, it is you, and then I did not.”
“Why not.”
“Because I have known you since you were fifteen,” he says, “and I could not think of the first sentence.”
I drink the coffee. It is terrible. Priest’s coffee has always been terrible.
“There it is,” he says. “You have made the face.”
“I did not make a face.”
“You have made that face at my coffee since 2001.”
“It is the kettle.”
“It is not the kettle.”
“It is absolutely the kettle,” I say, and my voice comes apart in the middle of it and he does not look at me while it does, he looks at the rooster clock, and gives me the thirty seconds, and does not reach across the table.
That is why you go to Priest.
“Alright,” he says, when I am back. “Now, before you ask me anything, I want to say one thing and I want to say it badly and get it over with.”
“Go on.”
“You are not stupid,” he says. “That is the thing that is coming for you at three in the morning and I want to get in front of it. You are going to lie in that motel room and think, how did I not know, what kind of woman does not know, and I have watched thirty years of women go through that door and every single one of them does it, and it is a lie, and I want to have said so out loud in a kitchen with a witness.”
“There is no witness.”
“There is a clock,” he says. “Shaped like a rooster. It has seen everything.”
I laugh. It is horrible, but it is a laugh, and he lets it be one.
“He has been unreachable for six years,” I say.
“I know.”
“You know?”
“Marisol, I have asked that man five times in five years to open his head up and let one other human being stand next to what is in it,” Priest says.
“Five. It is in the book five times. I did not know it was a woman. I thought it was a stroke. I genuinely thought that, I thought one day Fritz would find him at the side of the 379 and the whole thing would go into the ground with him, and I have been saying so at that table since 2021 and getting told no in a nice voice.”
“That is the same voice.”
“It is the exact same voice,” he says.
And that is the first thing he tells me that he should not, and he does not even notice he has done it, because it is not about the road, it is about a man, and Priest has never once counted a sentence about a man.
“Do they know who she is,” I say.
“Sol.”
“That is a fair question.”
“It is a fair question and I am going to answer it,” he says, “and then I want you to hear the rest of what I say, because you are asking me the woman question and it is the least of it.”
“Then answer it.”
“She is attached to the Saints,” Priest says. “That is what she is. She is not a girl in a bar in another county who caught his eye at a gas pump. She is theirs, and she was theirs in April at the meet at the Junction, and she was theirs every one of the times after.”
I put the cup down.
“They sent her.”
“Somebody sent her.”
“Wendell.”
“I am not going to dress it up for you.” He puts both forearms on the table.
“The bag came to us. Nobody in this club found it out. It was put in the salvage office slot on a Sunday morning by somebody who drove up our road to do it, and the four pictures in it were chosen. Four out of what has to be dozens, and not one of them shows a plate or a room you could find. That is a sample. That is a man showing you a corner of a thing so that you will think about the rest of it for a month.”
“So it was never about him and her at all.”
“It was never about him and her at all,” Priest says. “That is the part I want you to have, because you have spent one day in Unit 3 thinking a woman took your husband, and a woman did not take your husband. A club took a president. She was the instrument.”
I sit with that.
“That does not make it better,” I say.
“No.”
“It makes it worse.”
“I know it does,” he says. “I know. But you are going to be hearing a version of this for the rest of your life from men who want it to be simpler, and I would rather you had the true one from a kitchen than the simple one from a bar.”
The rooster clock does its thing on the hour, which is a click and then a slightly disappointing chirp.
“What do they want,” I say.
Priest looks at me.
And this is the place. I want to be exact about this, because I have gone over it a thousand times since and I owe him the exactness. There is a moment where Wendell Cobb, secretary of the Ashfall Nomads for twenty-six years, the man who keeps the book, decides.
And what decides him is not carelessness.
It is that I am sitting in his kitchen with a cup with a dog on it and my eyes are red and he has watched me since I was fifteen, and he cannot fix the thing that is broken, so he reaches for the only thing he has got, which is to treat me like a person who deserves to know what is happening to her own life.
He does it out of respect. I want that written down.
“The road,” he says.
“The toll.”
“Not the toll. The road.” He turns his cup.
“There is a clause in the truce about contact and there is a clause about compensation and the compensation clause has no number in it. So when they walk into the next sanctioned meet with four months of dates, they are not coming to embarrass him. They are coming to say a material breach has occurred and the remedy is the corridor.”
“They can do that?”
“They can try it, and here is the ugly bit,” Priest says. “Under the only law that operates out here, they are not wrong. That is the thing that has Hollis grey. It is not that they are bandits. It is that they have got a case.”
“And what have we got.”
He notices the we. I watch him notice it, and something goes over his face.
“We have got a bad month,” he says. “We have got a treasurer doing sums about what the road is worth against what a war costs, and a sergeant at arms who has not said his own opinion out loud once, and a table that has been told not to vote and is going to want to vote.”
“Vote on what.”
“On the gavel.”
“They would take it off him.”
“Two-thirds takes a patch, never mind a gavel,” Priest says.
“And I will tell you what nobody at that table has said out loud, which is that if we hand them a president who has been stripped, we have handed them the whole argument. Sutter walks into that meet with a club that has already convicted its own man, and then what is the defense? There is not one. So the men who want to punish him are also the men who want to lose the road, and none of them know it yet, and it is my job to know it and I have known it for eight days and I have not slept.”
“Wendell.”
“I am fine.”
“You are not fine.”
“I am fine,” he says, “I am tired, there is a difference, and I am going to say the last part because you have got a right to it.”
“Say it.”
“The exposure is not four pictures.” He looks at his hands. “The exposure is what is standing at the Yard while all this is going on. We are not in a position to be having a month of meetings, Sol. We have got a load in the north bay right now.”
The kitchen is very quiet.
“A load,” I say.
“Twelve crates. Guns, long ones, banded in threes because Hollis will not have anything counted once.” He rubs his eye.
“They have been sat in that bay eight days because of this. It was supposed to move the Thursday after the bag came and it did not, because the bag came. And now it goes Thursday, and I have got a man in this club who thinks that is fine, and it is not fine, because a load that sits is a load somebody has had time to hear about.”
“Thursday.”
“Thursday, and then it is somebody else’s problem, thank God.” He puts his hand over mine on the table. “And then we can have our month.”
His hand is warm and dry. He is fifty-eight years old and there is nothing at all under this.
He is telling me because he is furious for me and because he has decided that a woman standing in a bar room reading four photographs off thirty men’s faces has earned the truth, and because a man who has kept the minutes for twenty-six years has one single way of showing love and it is telling you what the minutes say.
“You should not have told me that,” I say.
“No,” Priest says. “Probably not.”
“Wendell.”
“Marisol, I have watched you carry this club on your hip since you were nineteen years old,” he says.
“You have sat in every kitchen on that road. You buried Gene Voss’s wife’s marriage for her and she still thinks he left.
And in twenty-six years I have never once seen anybody in that building tell you a single thing that was not already over. ”
He takes his hand back.
“So you have got one,” he says. “Take it or do not.”
And I sit at that table in his kitchen with my hands round a cup with a cartoon dog on it, and I say, “Thank you,” and I mean it, and I have meant it every day since.
Because here is what happens in me, and it happens under everything else, quietly, the way the swamp cooler on my mother’s roof was pumping air for a year before anybody heard the noise.
Twelve crates.
North bay.
Thursday.
I do not decide anything. I want that clear, because I have been over this in a truck at four in the morning and in three states since, and I did not sit in Priest’s kitchen and decide anything.
I finished the coffee. I asked after his sister in Winnemucca.
I let him walk me down the path and stand under the dying lemon tree and tell me that this house has got a bed in it any night I want it, and I said I know, and I kissed his cheek, which I have done since I was fifteen.
But somewhere between his gate and the truck, something in me went and stood in a different room.
Eleven years of carrying trays past conversations. Eleven years of hearing a thing and putting it somewhere and never once being asked what I knew, because nobody has ever thought to ask what I knew, because I am the coffee.
And a man who loves me has just handed me the only thing in that entire building that is worth anything, and he handed it over a cup with a dog on it, as comfort.
I sit in the truck outside Priest’s house with my hands on the wheel at ten and two.
There are three lemons on that tree.
I count them again on the way out