Chapter Ten
Sol
I sleep. That is the part that ought to disqualify me from any sympathy anybody has ever offered. A woman on the edge of the worst thing she will ever do sleeps four solid hours and gets up when the alarm goes and puts her boots on in the dark.
The office light is off. My mother goes down at eleven and does not wake for engines.
I write nothing. There is a pad by the register with a pen on a string and I look at it on the way past and I keep walking, because there is no sentence.
I have been trying for two days to find the sentence and there is not one, and every version of it I got to was a woman explaining herself to men who never once asked her a question.
So there is no note.
I take my own truck as far as the turn and leave it in the wash behind the water tank where the county leaves the grader, and then I walk the last three quarters of a mile up the Yard road in the dark, because the Yard road is straight for three miles and anybody coming has to be watched the whole way in, and headlights on it at three in the morning would bring Junior out of the back room in eleven seconds.
Nobody has ever thought about a person on foot. Why would they. There is nowhere to walk to out here.
The dogs know me. That is not a figure of speech, there are two of them and they are useless and they come out from under the flatbed and put their heads under my hand and go back to sleep.
Junior’s truck is here and Wade’s is not. Junior is in the back room, which has no reception, which Fritz says is the roof.
I let myself into the office with the key from the top of the frame that has been on the top of the frame since 2009.
The north bay is not locked. It has never been locked. A padlock on a bay door forty miles from anywhere tells anybody driving past that there is a reason to lock it, and Roan’s father worked that out in about 1974, and everybody has repeated it ever since like scripture.
Twelve crates.
Long ones, blanket-wrapped, banded in threes. I stand there with the flashlight off and let my eyes do it, and my heart is going so hard I can hear it in my ears, and I put my hand flat on the top crate for a second, the way you do with a horse.
Then I go and get the flatbed.
It starts on the second turn. It is loud, it is the loudest thing that has ever happened, and I sit with my hands on the wheel and count to thirty and nothing happens, because there is one man in this building and he is asleep in a concrete room at the back of it and this yard has trucks running in it at all hours of every day and night.
I back it in.
I load them myself.
I want to be precise about this because it is the part men do not believe.
Four hundred and forty pounds of rifle crate, banded in threes, and there is a chain hoist on a rail in that bay that has been there since before I was born, and I have watched men use it for eleven years.
You do not lift a crate. You lift a band.
Three at a time, four lifts, and you swing it out and you set it down soft, and the reason you set it down soft is not the guns, it is that a crate set down hard on a flatbed makes a noise you can hear from the back room.
It takes me nineteen minutes.
I throw the tarp and I do the straps, and I do the front two and the back two and then I go round and do the fifth one, the one over the headache rack, because Hollis will not have anything counted once and I will not have anything strapped four times.
The strap over the rack is the one that ticks. It is going to tick for a hundred and eleven miles. I know it will and I do it anyway, because a fifth strap is right.
Then I stand in the bay for a moment.
There is nothing to feel. That is the thing nobody tells you. I keep waiting for the thing to arrive, the grand feeling, the door closing behind me, and what is actually there is a woman with grease on her hands checking a strap for the second time.
I put the office key back on the top of the frame.
Then I go, and one of the dogs follows the truck to the cattle guard and stops, and I watch him in the mirror sitting in the road until the road takes him.
The Yard road out is three miles of straight.
Ivanhoe is dark except the Chevron sign and the substation, and I go through it at the limit with my hands at ten and two like a woman taking a test.
Past the school. Past the clinic with the THURS scratched out.
The Verdigris at three fifty, twelve units, nine dark, Room 4 with the bathroom light on. My mother’s window is black.
Rustling Springs at four, and I put the lights out a hundred yards short and roll past Ada’s dark pumps at a speed that would embarrass a bicycle, and nothing moves in the glass, and forty minutes from now her alarm goes and she will come out and water four feet of dirt that has never grown anything and she will not have seen one single thing.
Then the road bends and climbs and the shoulders come in and the rock stands up on both sides, and I am in the Neck, and the scanner under the dash is dead air on all three channels.
The strap ticks.
Six miles in, the canyon opens into the wide part where the old grader turnout is.
And the mirror goes white.
They come out of the turnout, no run-up, no growing dot, which means sitting, which means dark, which means waiting.
Fifty feet. Twenty.
Then they are on my bumper with the light stopped being two lights and become one white thing, and my foot goes for the brake and I get it back, and I hold the pedal where it was, and I put my hand down under the seat and get three fingers on the gun Fritz put there four years ago and told me was not a gift, it was maintenance.
I bring it up out of the dark.
And I put it on my lap.
That is all. I put it on my lap with my hand over it and I keep both eyes on the road, because there is a version of this where I am doing fifty-one in a canyon with a hand off the wheel pointing a gun into a mirror at somebody I cannot see, and that version ends with twelve crates of long guns on their side in a wash and a dead woman.
So I drive.
He stays at my bumper for two miles.
Two miles at fifty-one is about two minutes and twenty-one seconds.
I have done that arithmetic since, which is a thing you can do when you are not in it, and at the time it is not two minutes and twenty seconds, it is a length of time with no bottom to it, and the light fills the cab and comes off the mirror onto the ceiling and onto my hands, and I watch my hands stay white on the wheel and I say out loud, twice, “Come on then.”
Then the light drops.
Not all at once. He falls back three lengths, and the mirror stops being a smear and becomes a shape, and the shape is one machine with one rider on it, and then he comes up on the left.
There is no left. That is the thing about the wide part. There is a left for about four hundred yards and then there is not.
He comes up anyway, and he holds level with my door.
Fritz.
No helmet, because he never wears one on the 379 and Roan has been on him about it for a decade.
Grey to the elbows because he has been under something all day the way he has been under something every day since he was nineteen.
He is riding one-handed at fifty-one miles an hour eleven inches from a rock wall and he is looking at me.
I look back.
I have got a gun on my lap and twelve crates of his club’s guns under a tarp on the back of his club’s truck, and Curtis Nakagawa has known me since I was sixteen and wired a scanner under this dash three winters ago because he did not like me driving this road alone, and he looks at me for about four seconds.
He does not say anything. He could not, at that speed. He does not shout and he does not point and he does not put his hand out.
He looks at me, and then he looks at the strap over the headache rack, and then he looks back at me.
And I watch a man decide.
I have thought about those four seconds more than I have thought about my marriage.
I have thought about them in a truck stop outside Cedar City and at a table in a room I do not want to describe and at a funeral I was not at.
And what I know is that in those four seconds Fritz worked out the whole thing, all of it, faster than anybody at that table would have given him credit for, because Fritz has been reading a road for twenty years and a road is just a thing that tells you what has already happened.
He knew what was on the back. He knew where it came from. He knew what rule four says and he has heard it read out at that table by Deacon, and he knew that a mileage sticker in a book at the shop had been sitting in his chest for three weeks like a stone.
Then he nods.
Once. Barely. The way you nod at a man across a bar to say you have got the next one.
And he rolls off.
He falls back, and back, and I watch him get small in the mirror, and then the wide part ends and the rock comes in and he brakes and turns in that stupid tight way he does with his boot down, and the light swings across the canyon wall and goes north.
I drive four more miles of Neck with a gun on my lap and I do not cry.
I come out the south end at twenty past four into flat country with the sky going grey at the edges behind me, and the Junction is thirty-one miles, and the interstate is thirty-four.
At the Junction there is a Chevron with four pumps and a truck stop across the road with a green sign, and I sit there at twelve past five in the passenger seat of my own stolen flatbed drinking a coffee out of a paper cup, because I cannot make my legs work well enough to go back in for a second one.
The sun comes up over twelve crates of guns.
And that is when it arrives. Not on the Yard road, not in the bay, not with a rider eleven inches off my door.
Here. In a lot, with a paper cup.
I have taken from the club.
Not from him. That is the part I have to keep saying to myself, because there is a version I could tell where this is a woman taking something off a husband, and that version is a lie and I am not going to be a woman who tells it.
Roan Vasquez-Doyle does not own that load.
That load belongs to a table of nine men, and one of them is Amos Toft who is seventy-four and sat in a chair in my mother’s bar since before I could see over it, and one of them is Hollis who slept in my spare bed for nine days the winter the barn flooded, and one of them is Marcus Oyelaran who has read rule four out loud at that table in his own voice, more than once, in my hearing, when I was standing at the door with a tray.
I know exactly what it says. I have known since I was nineteen, because Priest sat me down and made me say it back to him.
I put the cup in the bin and I get behind the wheel.
Thirty-four miles to the interstate. Then east, because south is Coldwater and Coldwater is theirs, and north is the road I just came down.
East, then, into country where the word Ashfall does not mean anything and neither does being somebody’s old lady.
I check the mirror.
There is nothing in it, and there is going to be nothing in it for a long time, and that is not relief.
Fritz is going to go and sit in that yard for two hours before anybody wakes up, and then he is going to go into a concrete room and stand in front of a table and be asked a direct question, and he does not lie in church.
I turn the scanner off.