Chapter Fifteen
Roan
Junior does it on a Tuesday and does not tell anybody until Wednesday night.
That is the part I keep coming back to. Not the doing. The twenty-six hours.
He comes into the bar room at ten with his hands in his pockets and stands there until I look up, and I know before he opens his mouth, because I have known this boy since he was nine years old and he has one face for this and I have seen it twice.
“Outside,” I say.
We go out into the yard. The dogs come and he crouches down to them, which is a thing he does with his hands when he cannot do anything else with them.
“Say it.”
“There was a kid at the Junction,” Junior says.
“What kid.”
“A prospect. Saints prospect, he had the bottom rocker on and nothing else.” He is talking to a dog. “He was in the truck stop lot. He came north.”
“When.”
“Tuesday. About eight at night.”
“Junior.”
“He was on our side of the Junction,” Junior says. “Roan, he was north of the cattle guard. He was in the lot with a phone out and he was taking pictures of the pumps.”
“Was he.”
“He said he was on the phone to his girl.”
I put my hand over my mouth and stand in a yard in the dark for about four seconds.
“Where is he,” I say.
Junior does not answer.
“Junior. Where is he.”
“He is out on the flat,” Junior says.
“Say the words.”
“He is in the Sump.”
The dogs are still going at his hands. He has got his head down and I can see the back of his neck and he is thirty-four years old and he slept on my wife’s couch for a month when he was twenty-three.
“Who was with you,” I say.
“Nobody.”
“Junior.”
“Nobody. I swear to God. I was coming back from the Junction and he was in the lot and I stopped for gas and he was there and.”
“How.”
“What?”
“How,” I say.
“With the truck,” he says. “I put him in the truck.”
“How, Junior.”
“I hit him,” Junior says. “In the lot. Once, with my hand, and he went down onto the island and he did not get up right, and then I could not.” He stops. “And then there was not a version where I take him back.”
“So you drove eighty miles with a boy in your truck.”
“Yes.”
“Alive.”
“For some of it,” Junior says.
I stand there in my own yard and look at the top of the head of a man I have known for a quarter of a century.
“Get up,” I say.
He gets up.
“Church at eight,” I say. “You will tell it exactly the way you told me and you will not put one word on it, and if Deacon asks you whether you thought about it beforehand you will say no if that is true and yes if it is not.”
“Roan.”
“And you will not say the word prospect again after the first time,” I say, “because he was nineteen and he was somebody’s.”
Church, and it takes eleven minutes, and nobody argues with anything.
Priest writes it down. His hand is steady and his face is grey and he writes down that Junior Delacroix reported the death of a Saints prospect on Tuesday night, unnamed, and that the disposal was in the Sump, and that no vote was taken beforehand and no order was given.
“Nineteen,” Deacon says, when it is finished.
“He said nineteen,” Junior says.
“He said it to you.”
“Yes.”
“So you talked to him,” Deacon says.
Junior does not answer.
“Roan,” Hollis says.
“Go on.”
“Fifteen years.” He is not looking at anybody.
He has got his glasses off and his hands flat on the ledger and he is looking at the wall.
“The truce is fifteen years old and eleven clauses and the whole reason those men wrote it in oh-eleven is a thing that started exactly like this. Not with a war. With one boy in a lot.”
“I know.”
“You do not know,” Hollis says, and it comes out with an edge nobody in this room has heard from him.
“I have got the original in the safe in the hand of a man who is dead. That document exists because four people died over a personal in oh-nine and two of them were not in a club. And I have read it more times in the last month than in fifteen years and there is not a clause in it that survives this.”
“Then say what it means.”
“It means we are not in a truce,” Hollis says. “As of Tuesday night at eight o’clock, at a truck stop, we are two clubs who used to have one.”
Sutter calls me at eleven.
I take it in the yard.
“Roan.”
“Sutter.”
“His name was Deshaun Pettway,” he says. “Nineteen. He had the bottom rocker for six weeks. His mother works at the school district office in Coldwater and she has called my wife twice.”
I do not say anything.
“I am going to ask you one question and I want the true answer,” he says, “and then I am going to hang up. Did you order it.”
“No.”
“Did you know.”
“That is two questions.”
“Did you know, Roan.”
“I found out last night,” I say. “Twenty-six hours after. It was one man on his own and it was not sanctioned and there was no vote.”
“Alright,” Sutter says.
And that is all.
He does not shout. He does not tell me what he is going to do. He does not say the boy’s mother’s name again, which he could, and which would land, and which a lesser man would.
He says alright, in the voice of a man writing something down, and there is about two seconds of nothing on the line.
“Is that it,” I say.
“What else would there be.”
“Sutter.”
“You have got a man who did a thing on his own with no vote,” he says.
“So have I got, now. Four of them, probably. And they will do a thing on their own with no vote and you will call me and I will say alright, and we will do that for about nine weeks, and then neither of us will be able to stop it. That is how it goes. I have read the same file you have read, out of oh-nine.”
“So stop it.”
“I cannot stop it,” Sutter says. “I could have stopped it in November when I had a file and a lawyer and a meeting. You have just spent a month making sure we are not going to have a meeting.”
“We can have a meeting.”
“We are going to have a meeting,” he says. “But it is not going to be the meeting I wanted, and that is on both of us, and I want you to know that I am aware of the difference. Good night, Roan.”
He hangs up.
I go back inside and Hollis is standing in the bar room with his coat on, which he never does, he never stands anywhere with his coat on, and he has been listening from the doorway.
“He was calm,” he says.
“He was calm.”
Hollis puts his hand on the back of a chair.
“I would have preferred shouting,” he says.
“Roan, I would genuinely have preferred to hear that man scream down a phone at you. A man who is shouting is a man doing the thing in front of you. That was a man who has already been through it, and has got to the end of it, and has worked out what it costs him, and has decided he can carry it.”
“You are reading a lot into alright.”
“I am a treasurer,” Hollis says. “That is the entire job.”
I go out at eleven most nights now.
I want it on the record how it actually goes, because in my head, for the first two weeks, it was not a search. It was a ride. A man cannot sleep, so he rides, and if the ride happens to end at the Junction at one in the morning, that is where the road goes.
That lasted about eleven days.
After that it is a search and I know it is a search.
The Junction first, always, because it is the only place a vehicle coming off my road has to touch. There is a truck stop with a green sign and four pumps at the Chevron across from it, and there is a woman on nights called Renata, and by the third week she says my name when I come in.
“Nothing,” she says.
“I have not asked you anything.”
“You come in at one in the morning and you buy a coffee you do not drink,” Renata says.
The plate cameras. That is the second thing. There is a camera on the canopy at the Chevron that points at pump two and a half of pump three, and it keeps eleven days, and the boy who manages it wants two hundred dollars a time, and I have paid him twice.
Eleven days is the problem. She went on the twentieth and I did not start doing this until the second week of the month after, and by the time I had a boy who would take two hundred dollars there was nothing on that drive older than the ninth.
I know that. I go anyway.
And then east, which is the part I do not have an excuse for.
Interstate, four hours out and four hours back, and every truck stop between the Junction and the state line, walking the lots at two in the morning looking at flatbeds.
There is a specific ache that comes into a man’s shoulders on a bike after the fourth hour and I have got it every day now and I have started to like it.
I am looking for a company name painted on a door.
Doyle Salvage and Recovery. My father’s name and mine.
Six nights out of seven, and I do not report one mile of it, and there is no version in which that is not rule one.
Club business stays at the table. It does not go out onto an interstate at three in the morning with one man on a bike and a wallet full of two-hundred-dollar camera fees off the club’s own tin.
There is a night at a truck stop outside Salina where there is a flatbed under the lights with a tarp on it and five straps, and I stand at the end of that lot for four minutes with my heart going like a boy’s, and it is a hay truck out of Delta and the man in it comes out of the shower and looks at me like I am going to rob him.
I ride home a hundred and ninety miles and get in at six and there is a light on over the sink.
Torch catches me on a Sunday.
Not catches. That is not what it is. He is in the yard at half seven in the morning when I come in off the road, and he is leaning on the wall of the north bay with two coffees, and he holds one out.
“Junior’s,” he says. “Sorry.”
I take it.
“You have got a thing where you go quiet in the third week of anything,” he says. “You have done it since we were prospects. You went quiet after your dad and you went quiet in the winter of the thing with the Denver people and you are doing it now.”
“I am tired.”
“You are riding four hundred miles a night.”
“I ride.”
“You ride the interstate,” Torch says. “You do not ride the road.”
I drink the coffee, which is a war crime.
“Ellis.”
“I am not asking you,” he says, quick, and holds a hand up. “I want that understood. I am not asking you where you go and I am not going to ask you in church either, because if I ask you in church you have got to answer under six and then we are all in a room we cannot get out of.”
“That is very careful of you.”
“It is,” he says. “It is extremely careful of me, and I have got about four other careful things going on and I am not enjoying any of them.”
He turns his cup around.
“Hollis asked me Thursday what happens if the Saints put paper in front of us in a room and you are still holding the gavel,” he says.
“What did you tell him.”
“I told him that is not a question for a treasurer.”
“And what did he say.”
“He said everything is a question for a treasurer, and then he did not say anything for about a minute, and then he said a thing about the tin that I am not going to repeat because it was about the camera money.”
I stand there in my yard with a coffee I am not going to drink.
“How many,” I say.
“How many what.”
“Ellis.”
“I am not counting votes,” Torch says.
“You have been counting since the second week of August. You started counting the day you sat at that pump for eleven minutes and you have not stopped, and I do not hold it against you, because if you were not counting you would be no use to this club at all.”
He looks at the ground for a while.
“Deacon will not talk to me about it,” he says. “Which is not a no. That is the thing you should take away. Marcus Oyelaran will not talk to me about it, and Marcus will talk about anything, and that is not a no.”
“And Priest.”
“Priest is the only man in this club who has never once been in a room where somebody was counting,” Torch says. “He would go straight to you. He would come and stand in front of you and tell you what he had been asked.”
“Would he.”
“Roan, he has told you no to your face five times in five years in front of eight men,” Torch says. “Whatever else Wendell is, he does it out loud.”
And I stand in the yard and I let that go past me, the way I let all of it go past me for eleven months, because it is seven thirty in the morning and I have been on a road all night looking for my wife.
“I am going to sleep,” I say.
“Roan.”
“What.”
“The interstate is four hours away,” Torch says, “and there is nothing on it.”