Chapter Twelve
Sol
The girl at the register in Cedar City looks at me for exactly as long as she looks at anybody.
“Card or cash.”
“Cash.”
“Bag?”
“No.”
“Have a good one,” she says, and she is already looking at the next person, and the next person is a man in a polo shirt.
I sit in the truck for twenty minutes after that.
It is nine hours and eleven minutes from the Yard. I have gone east on 70 with my hands at ten and two through country that got up and turned red about an hour after the line, and I have not been out of Nevada since a funeral in 2016.
Nobody has looked at me all day.
I have spent eleven years being looked at.
You do not notice it while it is happening.
You walk into a diner in Ivanhoe and four heads come up, and you walk into the Chevron and the boy behind the counter says how is Roan, and you walk into the county holding door and Dale has the folder out before you have got your bag off your shoulder.
Every room I have been in since I was fifteen has known exactly what I am.
Some of them liked it and some of them did not and it did not matter, because all of it was the same thing, which is a woman who is covered.
I have got a paper cup of coffee and there are twelve crates of long guns under a tarp forty feet away and not one person in this parking lot would cross it for me.
That is not fear. That comes later. What it is, at eleven in the morning outside a gas station in Cedar City, is quiet.
I count the money at a rest stop off 15 with the doors locked.
Four thousand one hundred and eighty dollars.
Three thousand of it is mine and has been mine for six years, in an envelope in a coffee tin in the back of a cupboard, because my mother has kept money in a tin since 1988 and her mother did before her, and it is not running money. It was never running money. It was the money you have.
The other eleven hundred and eighty is off the bar float at the Verdigris, and it is not stealing because I have put money into that float since I was fourteen, and if I ever get to say one sentence to my mother about any of this it will be that one.
I do the arithmetic on the back of the receipt.
Gas is the killer. The flatbed does eleven miles to the gallon empty and it is not empty, and I have put a hundred and forty dollars into it already today, and every time I stop for it I am standing at a pump in the open with our name painted on the door.
Motels are forty a night in the places where the man at the desk wants a card and does not care, which is not the same as the places where he does not want a card.
Food is nothing. Food is genuinely nothing, I have discovered, if you do not care.
Six weeks. That is the number I get to. Six weeks if I sleep in the truck four nights out of seven and do not do anything stupid, and every mile I drive comes off the six weeks, and I cannot stop driving because a flatbed with Doyle Salvage and Recovery on the door parked anywhere for two days is a phone call.
I sit there with a pen and a receipt and I get to the other side of it, which is the actual problem, and the actual problem has nothing to do with money.
I have got a hundred and sixty thousand dollars of long guns and I cannot sell one of them.
Here is what I know. I know it the way you know a thing you have heard talked about across a room for a decade.
A load like that moves on a relationship.
Not a price. Roan has said the word buyer roughly four thousand times in my hearing and every single time it has meant a person, one specific person, who has been taking off him for fourteen months, and who takes off him because there has never been a problem and because he knows exactly what the road is and who is standing on it.
That is the whole market I understand. Every route I have ever heard named runs down the 379 or off it, every name I could say out loud belongs to a man who would have the phone in his hand before I finished the sentence, and there is not one of them who would buy from me.
Not because I am a woman. Because I am not the road.
I could stand in front of any buyer between the Line and the Junction with twelve crates and the only thing I would be selling him is a war.
I know the market and I cannot use the market. I am a woman who has spent eleven years learning the exact shape of a door she is now standing on the wrong side of.
There is one more thing and I make myself write it on the receipt because I have been walking around it since the Junction.
The Saints would buy them.
They would buy them in an afternoon, and they would pay under, and they would enjoy it. And there is a version of me that goes south to Coldwater and does that, and it is the fastest money in the world, and it would take about six hours.
And then I am the woman who took her husband’s club’s guns to the club that put a woman in front of him.
Then everything they did to me was true.
I fold the receipt up and put it in my pocket and sit at a rest stop off 15 for an hour and a half, and that is the closest I come, that whole first day, to going back.
I do not go back.
Not out of pride, whatever anybody thinks. I do not go back because there is no back. There is a bay with a clean rectangle on the floor and a man called Marcus Oyelaran who reads out loud from a book, and the sentence is the rule.
I did not think about that on the Yard road and I did not think about it in the Neck.
I think about it at a rest stop off 15 with a pen in my hand, and I am sick twice in a concrete toilet block with a broken door, and then I wash my face and drive.
The first night I get as far as a place off 6 that is four buildings and a grain elevator, and I put the truck behind a shut-down implement dealer where there are two other trucks and a horse trailer, because one truck alone in a lot is a thing and three trucks is a lot.
I back it in so the door with the name on it faces the wall.
Then I sit in the cab with the windows down two inches and the gun on my lap.
That is not a figure of speech either. It is a .
38 with four in it, because Fritz gave me four and said the fifth is for the person who tells you five is safer, and it lives under the seat and it has lived under the seat for four years, and tonight it is on my lap under my jacket with my hand on it.
It gets to sixty-one degrees by midnight, which after a day at a hundred and four feels like a joke somebody is playing.
I hear everything.
That is the thing about a truck. A house has walls that go all the way round and a truck has glass, and glass tells you about a world you cannot see.
A dog somewhere. A cattle guard. Somebody’s diesel two streets over that starts and idles for eleven minutes and shuts off.
Something walking on gravel at half past one that is small and is probably a cat and I sit up with my hand round the grip for four minutes over it.
And at about two I start doing the other arithmetic.
Church is at eight most mornings. So they had it at eight. Junior went out at six and saw the bay and called, and Roan was there by half six, and Hollis by seven with his hands on his knees at the edge of the floor.
Deacon read rule four. He would have read it twice, because he reads a thing twice when he wants a room to stop pretending.
And Fritz sat in that room.
That is the one that gets me. Not my husband. I do not think about my husband once that whole first night in that lot, and I have wondered since whether that means something was already finished.
I think about Curtis Nakagawa sitting in a concrete room with his arms folded, four hours after riding eleven inches off my door at fifty-one miles an hour with no helmet on.
He does not lie in church. That is not a nice thing about him. It is the only rule that man has ever cared about, and I have heard him say it drunk at my mother’s bar, that you can keep your mouth shut in that room until they carry you out but you do not put a lie in Wendell’s book.
So they will ask him. Not today. But at some point somebody in that room is going to ask a direct question about the road that night and Fritz is going to have to sit there and refuse to answer it in front of eight men who will all know exactly what a refusal is.
I put him there. I did not ask him to, and he chose it in four seconds at fifty-one miles an hour, and I put him there.
I say out loud, in a truck, in a lot, in Utah, “I am sorry.”
It is the only thing I say out loud that whole night and it is not to my husband and it is not to God.
I sleep maybe two hours before dawn, sitting up, and I wake with my neck locked and my hand still on the gun and grey light coming through a windscreen full of dead bugs from the 379.
There is a woman in the mirror with her hair flat on one side.
I look at her for a while.
Then I get out and stand in the cold and stretch my back, and I walk round the flatbed once and check all five straps, and the fifth one is exactly where I left it, and I stand there with my hand on the tarp in a lot in a town with a grain elevator, nine hours from every person who has ever known my name.
Nobody is coming.
That is the whole of it, at ten past five in the morning.
Not that they are coming. Nobody is coming.
There is no phone call I can make. There is no kitchen I can sit in.
There is no man who will drive out at three in the morning because I have got a flat, and there are about four of those men on the 379 and every one of them is now legally obliged to kill me.
I get a coffee out of a machine outside a gas station that has not opened yet, and it is terrible, and it is not even Priest’s kind of terrible, it is worse.
Then I stand there in the cold holding it in both hands and I do the sum I have been not doing since Cedar City.
Six weeks of money.
A load I cannot sell into the only market on earth I understand.
And eleven years of watching men do this exact thing from four feet away with a tray in my hands.
“Alright,” I say to the truck.