Chapter Fourteen
Sol
It takes me nine days to find him and it costs me two hundred dollars and a story about a horse trailer.
I am not going to pretend that was clever.
It was not clever, it was nine days of standing in the parts department of an ag supply outside Parowan and a diner in Beaver and a tire place in Milford, being a woman with a broken-down flatbed and a great deal of time, saying almost nothing and buying coffee for people.
Men will tell you anything if you let them explain something to you.
That is not a trick I invented. That is eleven years of standing behind a bar.
His name is Ferrell and he is not a criminal, which is the first thing you have to understand about him.
He runs a business off the frontage road with a chain-link yard full of hay equipment and two Quonset huts, and he brokers farm machinery across four states, and he has done it since 1991, and about eleven percent of what goes through that yard is not hay equipment.
The office has a wall of photographs of combines.
“You will be the horse trailer,” he says.
“There is no horse trailer.”
“I know there is no horse trailer.” He is sixty-something and heavy in the shoulders and he does not get up.
“Ronnie in Milford called me. He said there is a woman going round asking for a name and doing it politely, and I said what does she drive, and he said a flatbed with a company on the door and the company is in Nevada. So sit down and tell me why you have got a Nevada company truck and no company.”
I sit down.
“I have got twelve crates,” I say.
“Of.”
“Long guns. Re-serialed. Banded in threes.”
He looks at me for a second and then laughs, once, with no pleasure in it at all.
“No,” he says.
“You have not heard the.”
“Sweetheart, I do not need to hear it.” He puts his hands behind his head.
“You know what I do? I move a swather out of a bankruptcy in Delta and I put it in a yard in Burley and a man in Burley pays me eleven percent. That is my whole life. I have got a daughter who does the books and a boy who does the driving and I sponsor a rodeo.”
“And the eleven percent that is not swathers.”
“Is a different conversation and it is not one I have with somebody who walks in off a frontage road.”
“Then have this one,” I say. “How do I get out of your office without you making a phone call.”
“I was not going to make a phone call.”
“You were absolutely going to make a phone call.”
“I was going to make a phone call,” Ferrell agrees. “But not about you.”
He drops his hands and leans forward.
“Do you know why I would not touch that,” he says. “Not because it is guns. I want you to understand that, because you are going to walk out of here and tell yourself it was the guns and it is not the guns.”
“Then say it.”
“Because it is somebody’s.”
He says it like a man explaining that a tire is flat.
“There is not a load like that on this earth that does not belong to somebody,” Ferrell says.
“So when a woman brings it to me, I am not being asked to buy twelve crates. I am being asked to stand between whoever that is and whoever wants it, and get paid a percentage for standing there. And you have not told me who it belongs to, and I am not going to ask, because if you told me I would have to do something about it.”
“How much would somebody have to pay you to stand there.”
“It is not money. Do you not,” and he stops, and he does the thing men do, which is to soften it into contempt because contempt is easier.
“Look. Go home. Whatever happened, go home. Your people will be angrier about you than about the crates, and there is a version where you drive back in with all twelve of them and it is a bad month and then it is over.”
“There is no version where it is a bad month.”
“There is always a version.”
“Not with this,” I say.
“Everybody says that.”
“I have counted men who said that,” I say. “There were four of them and I know where three of them are.”
Something moves behind his face.
It is not fear. He is not a man who gets frightened by a woman in a chair. It is that he has been talking to a runaway wife for four minutes and something has just come out of her mouth in the wrong voice.
“Alright,” he says slowly. “Alright. Then let us do the other thing.”
“What other thing.”
“The thing where I find out what you actually are, because I have got you down as a woman who has taken her husband’s property in a temper and you have just said a sentence a woman like that does not say.
” He pulls a legal pad over and does not write on it.
“You want me to move something. Fine. Tell me what it costs to move something.”
“You said it is not money.”
“Tell me anyway. Price it.”
“Price what.”
“That.” He points out the window at my flatbed sitting in his yard with the tarp on it. “Twelve crates, from here to a buyer who is not the one it was going to, in a truck that is on somebody’s list. Go on. Tell me the number.”
And there it is. That is the humiliation, and I want to be honest, it works. He is doing it to make me say a figure so he can laugh at it and send me home feeling like a woman who was out of her depth, and it is about the fourth time this month somebody has done a version of it to me and it lands.
So I do not give him a number.
“You are asking the wrong question,” I say.
“Am I.”
“You asked me what it costs. There is no what. There is only who, and how far, and how long it sits.”
Ferrell puts the pen down.
“Go on,” he says.
“Nobody prices a load,” I say. “You cannot. A load is worth what it is worth in a catalog and that number is a fiction, because the number that matters is what it costs the man carrying it if it stops moving. That is the only real number in the whole business.”
“So what stops it.”
“Time and distance and how many people have to touch it,” I say.
“So you price the touches. Every hand that goes on it is a percentage, and the percentage is not for the work, the work is nothing, the work is four hours and a truck. The percentage is for what that hand knows afterward. You are not paying a man to move a crate. You are paying him to have a thing in his head for the rest of his life, and the price of that goes up the longer he has to hold it and the more people know he is holding it.”
“And storage.”
“Storage is the killer and everybody prices it wrong.” I lean forward, and I do not decide to.
“A load sitting is not a load doing nothing. A load sitting is a load being talked about. Every day it sits, the circle of people who could mention it in a bar gets one wider, and there is no interest rate for that, so people pretend it is zero. It is not zero. It is the whole thing. I have watched twelve crates sit in a bay for eleven days and by the eleventh day there were four separate parties who all thought somebody had robbed them, and not one of them was wrong about anything except which somebody.”
Ferrell is looking at me.
“And who eats that,” he says.
“Whoever has got the least other business,” I say.
“That is the part nobody says out loud. If a load stops and I have got forty other things running, I absorb it and I am annoyed. If a load stops and it is all I have got, then I have to do something about it, and men who have to do something about it are how everybody in this trade dies. So when you are pricing a counterparty, you are not pricing his money. You are pricing how much else he has got going on.”
The office is quiet. There is a fan in the corner going round.
“Who told you that,” Ferrell says.
“Nobody.”
“Somebody told you that.”
“Nobody told me any of it,” I say. “That is the thing. Nobody has ever told me one single thing. I carried the coffee in.”
He sits back in the chair and it creaks.
“Eleven years?” he says.
“Eleven.”
“And you were what, in the room.”
“I was at the door with a tray,” I say. “For eleven years. And every one of those men would tell you I do not know a thing about the business, and every one of them would mean it kindly.”
Ferrell laughs.
It is different this time. It is the laugh of a man in his sixties who has just had a thing he thought he knew turned over, and it goes on a bit too long, and at the end of it he wipes his eye with the back of his wrist.
“Well,” he says. “That is the first interesting thing that has happened in this office since March.”
“Will you move it.”
“I will move it.”
I do not say anything, because if I open my mouth the sound that comes out of it will not be words.
“Not here,” he says. “Not out of this yard, and not to anybody within three hundred miles of your road, because whoever owns you is going to be looking at every buyer he has ever heard of, and if a crate turns up in a place he can put on a map you and I are both finished. So it goes north and east, and it goes in pieces, and it takes about six weeks, and you will not like the number.”
“What is the number.”
“You will get about forty on the hundred and sixty,” Ferrell says. “And before you make that face, that is not me robbing you. That is what it costs to make twelve crates stop being twelve crates.”
“And your percentage.”
“Eleven,” he says. “Same as a swather.”
I sit there and do the arithmetic and it comes out at a little under thirty-six thousand dollars for a thing that has cost me my whole life, and I nod, because there is nothing else to do.
“There is one more thing,” he says.
“Say it.”
“Not yet.”
“Ferrell.”
“Not yet.” He gets up, finally, and goes to the window and looks out at my truck in his yard.
“I am not being cute. I want you to think I am being cute, because that is easier, but I am not. I have got a thing that I have been carrying for two years and I have not been able to do anything with it, and I have never once had the right person walk in here.”
“And I am the right person.”
“You might be the right person.” He turns round.
“And if I say it now, you will say yes, because you are sat in that chair with four thousand dollars and no floor under you, and then in three weeks when you have got money in your hand you will look at me differently and I will have bought something off a woman who had no choice, and I do not do that. I have got a daughter.”
“That is very moral for a man taking eleven percent.”
“It is not moral,” Ferrell says. “It is that a person who says yes with a knife at her back does the job badly. You will do this job well or you will not do it at all, and I would rather find out which in six weeks.”
He puts his hand out.
I look at it.
“Six weeks,” I say.
“Six weeks. And in the meantime you do not sleep in that truck, because a woman sleeping in a truck gets noticed and a woman renting a room does not. There is a place in Beaver, forty a night, the man does not want a card.”
“How do you know I sleep in the truck.”
“Because you have got a mark on your neck from a headrest and you have had it every day since you started walking round Milford,” Ferrell says. “Ronnie noticed. Ronnie is not a clever man. Think about that.”
I shake his hand.
“What do I call you,” he says.
And I stand in the office of a hay equipment broker on a frontage road in Utah with a wall of photographs of combines behind him, and I think about it for a second, because it is the first time in my life anybody has asked me that and there has not been an obvious answer.
Marisol Idrizi-Doyle is a name that belongs to a table of nine men.
“Sol,” I say.
“Sol what.”
“Just Sol.”
“Right,” Ferrell says. “Well. Nobody around here is going to ask twice.”