Chapter Nineteen
Sol
The man from Delta is called Sipe and he does not shake hands.
“You are the road.”
“I am not the road.”
“Ferrell said the road.”
“Ferrell said what he had to say to get you into a chair,” I say. “I am not the road. I am the only person you are going to meet who can put a thing on it.”
We are in a diner in Fillmore at two in the afternoon and there are four other people in it and none of them are ours.
He is about fifty and he has hands like a man who has done actual work at some point and has not for twenty years, and he has come with a boy who sits two booths down and looks at his phone.
“Say the terms,” Sipe says.
“Forty crates, west, January.” I turn my coffee round.
“It goes on the east side. It does not go through the canyon and you will never see the canyon and you will never meet the people the canyon belongs to. I am not going to describe the route to you and I am not going to be in the vehicle. Your driver meets a man at a gate on the Utah side and gets out of the truck and stands where he is told for four hours and gets back in.”
“He drives blind.”
“He drives nothing,” I say. “He is a passenger for four hours in his own truck and then he is a driver again on the other side.”
“I do not like that.”
“You do not have to like it.”
“My driver is my nephew.”
“Then he will be a passenger for four hours and go home to his mother,” I say, “which is better than the alternative, which is that a man who has seen the east side is a man who knows the east side, and then in a year I have got a problem and you have got a nephew with a problem.”
Sipe sits back.
“What is the number.”
“Two twenty.”
“That is a lot of money for four hours.”
“It is a lot of money for the only four hours in the state of Utah where forty crates go west without touching a scale,” I say.
“You have been trying to do this for two years. That is not me guessing, that is Ferrell telling me you have asked him three times since 2023 and he has said no three times because he did not have this.”
He does not deny it.
“Twenty percent up front,” he says.
“Fifty.”
“Fifty.”
“Fifty, and here is why, and then I will not argue about it,” I say.
“If this goes wrong at any point on that east side, it does not go wrong for you. You will be in Delta. It goes wrong for one man at a gate who has been letting people through since before you were in business, and it goes wrong for me, and neither of us has got a nephew to send. So half of it is not a deposit. It is you having something at stake at the same time I do.”
Sipe looks at me for a while.
“Ferrell said you were a bar girl,” he says.
“Ferrell is a hay dealer,” I say. “We are all something.”
He laughs, and that is when it lands, and we do the rest of it in eleven minutes.
Anselm Boyer takes four months to become mine.
That is the actual work and nobody would put it in a story. The first time I drive out to the Line, in December, I sit in a lot outside a fuel and feed operation for two hours before I go in, because there is one road in and it goes past a house with a woman in it who talks.
He is sixty and he has got a hearing aid and a dog that does not get up.
“I do not know you,” he says.
“No.”
“You know my name.”
“I know your name, and I know it because a man in Nevada said it in a room with the door shut and I was on the other side of the door with a tray,” I say.
“And I want to say that first, before anything else, because you are going to work out that somebody told me and I would rather you knew now than in six weeks.”
Anselm Boyer looks at me over the counter of an office that smells like grain dust and diesel.
“That man is not coming any more,” he says.
“No.”
“Four loads and never one problem,” he says. “And then September and nothing, and no phone call, and I sat here for six weeks thinking I had done something.”
“You did not do anything.”
“I know I did not do anything. I have had fourteen months of not doing anything, that is the whole product.” He puts both hands on the counter. “Who are you.”
“I am the reason it stopped,” I say.
That is the moment it is decided, and I have thought about it since, and I did it deliberately and it was still the truest thing I could have said.
He looks at me for a long time.
“Sit down,” he says.
By March it is a thing that exists.
Sipe’s forty crates go west in the second week of January and there is a night where I sit in a truck at a gate on the east side with a chain in my hand and my heart going, and then it is four hours later and it is done and nobody has died.
Then there is a second one in February that is not guns and I do not ask what it is.
Then a man out of Rock Springs who Ferrell puts to me, and I say no to him, and that no is worth more than the two yeses, because he goes and tells four people that there is somebody on the east side who turns work down.
By March there are three parties who will not move anything west without calling a number that rings in a room in Beaver, Utah.
And here is what it actually is, which took me until about February to see clearly.
It is not a route. Anybody can drive a track.
It is that Anselm Boyer will open a gate for me and will not open it for anybody else, and the reason he will not open it for anybody else is that I sat in his office in December and told him the truth about how I knew his name before I asked him for anything.
That is the whole asset. A sixty-year-old man with a hearing aid trusts me, and there is no way on this earth to take that off me.
You cannot buy it, because he is not selling.
You cannot seize it, because the second I am gone the gate is a gate.
You cannot inherit it, because there is nothing to hand over.
If somebody put a gun in my mouth and made me write it all down, the paper would be worthless, because the paper is not the thing.
Ferrell says it to me in the office in March in one sentence.
“You have made yourself into a fact that only exists while you are alive,” he says. “That is either very clever or the stupidest thing I have ever watched a person do, and I have not decided.”
“Which way are you leaning.”
“I have been in this trade since 1991,” he says. “The men who died were all replaceable. Every one of them. Somebody could do their job the next day, so somebody did.”
The number rings on a Tuesday in March at ten past seven in the evening and I am in the lot of a grocery store in Beaver with two bags in the passenger seat.
There are four people alive who have that number. Ferrell, Boyer, Sipe, and one other.
I bought the other one a phone in November and sent it in a padded envelope to a motel in Nevada with no note in it, and I have never once let myself expect it to ring.
“Ma.”
“Marisol.”
And I know from one word.
I have known that woman for thirty-six years and there is a thing her voice does, and I have heard it twice, once in 2011 and once when I was nine, and I put my hand on the wheel and say, “Say it.”
“Curtis,” my mother says.
The parking lot has a sodium light over it and a woman putting a trolley back.
“When,” I say.
“Third of December.”
“That is.” I stop. “That is fifteen weeks ago.”
“It is fifteen weeks ago.”
“Why are you.”
“Because I have picked this phone up eleven times since December,” my mother says, “and put it down, because I did not know what it would do to you, and tonight I have decided that not knowing is worse. And because Ada came in on Sunday and said his sister has gone back to Sacramento and the pumps have been shut for a week and I thought, she does not know. My daughter does not know.”
I sit in the truck.
“How,” I say.
“On the road. Three miles south of the Springs, at the wash. At night.”
“Who.”
“They say the Saints.”
“They say.”
“Marisol.” She takes a breath and I can hear her deciding to give me the whole of it, which is the same thing Priest did in a kitchen in September, and it is the same reason.
“There was a truck on that road at eleven at night in December with a tarp on it and nothing underneath it. Nine weeks of that. They have been putting trucks out at night since October to catch somebody taking a thing back.”
“A decoy.”
“That is the word they use in my bar,” my mother says.
“They have been using it since October and I have poured drinks over the top of it and I have never once asked anybody a question about it, and I have got a daughter in another state and I have known for four months exactly what those trucks were for.”
The woman with the trolley gets into a car and pulls out.
“He was in the driver’s seat,” I say.
“He was in the driver’s seat.”
“Of course he was.”
“Marisol.”
“Was Wade with him.”
“How do you know Wade was with him?”
“Because it is a two-man run and Junior is not allowed out with anybody since October,” I say. “Because Fritz would take Wade over Junior for a night run. Because that is how it works, Ma.”
There is a long silence on the phone.
“You are still doing it,” my mother says.
“Doing what.”
“Standing at the door with a tray,” she says. “You are nine hours away in another state and you are still stood at that door working out who was in a truck.”
I put my head back against the rest.
“Four hundred people,” my mother says. “In the cemetery in Ivanhoe. Dale came in a suit. Ada shut the pumps.”
“You did not go.”
“No.”
“Ma.”
“I did not go because if I had gone, thirty men would have spent that funeral looking at me instead of at him,” my mother says, “and Curtis Nakagawa deserved four hours where nobody in that town was thinking about my daughter.”
I sit in a parking lot in Beaver, Utah, with the engine off and two bags of groceries in the passenger seat, and I do not cry, and I want to be truthful about why.
It is not shock. It is arithmetic.
That is the thing. That is what I have become and it happens right there in the front seat with my mother on the phone, because what my head does, immediately, without being asked, is this.
The decoys started in October. The decoys existed because twelve crates went off a yard in September.
The decoys were nine weeks long because the club believed the Saints had those crates, and the club believed that because there is not one other person on this earth they could have believed it about.
Fritz sat in a room and told them it was not the Saints. He said it twice. I know he said it twice because I know that man and I know he would say it exactly twice and then stop, because he does not push.
And he could not say why.
That is the whole thing. That is the entire cost, right there.
He knew, and he could not say, because saying it meant giving them a name, and rule four does not have a clause in it.
He sat in that concrete room and refused to answer a question and let them think he was being awkward about the road, and then he drove a truck with nothing in it into a wash in December.
I did not kill him. I want to put that down and I want it to be true, and it is technically true, and I have said it out loud in a room four times since.
But there was a woman on a road on a Thursday morning in September with twelve crates on the back of a flatbed, and a man on a bike eleven inches off her door at fifty-one miles an hour, and he had four seconds and he chose me, and every single thing that happened to him after that was downstream of those four seconds.
He nodded.
He nodded at me like a man in a bar saying he has got the next one.
“Marisol,” my mother says. “Are you there.”
“I am here.”
“Say something.”
“I have got a route,” I say.
“What?”
“I have got a route and a man at a gate and three people who will not move anything west without calling me,” I say, and my voice does not do anything at all, which is the frightening part.
“I did that in six months. I have got a hundred and ten thousand dollars in a wardrobe in a rented room and there are four people alive who have got this number.”
“Marisol, why are you telling me this.”
“Because I want you to hear me say what it cost,” I say. “Because there is a version where I sit in this truck and cry and tell you I never meant any of it, and you would believe me, and you would tell people, and it would be a lie.”
My mother does not say anything for a moment.
“You knew what they were when you started pouring,” she says.
“I know.”
“That was not what I meant when I said it to you at nineteen.”
“I know what you meant, Ma.”
“Do you.”
“You meant do not go in there thinking you can stay clean,” I say. “And I did go in thinking that. For eleven years I thought that. I thought I could stand at the door and carry the tray and be the good one.”
“And now.”
“And now there is a man in the ground in Ivanhoe,” I say, “and I have got a hundred and ten thousand dollars.”
The sodium light buzzes. Somebody comes out of the grocery store with a child.
“Come home,” my mother says.
“There is no home. There is a book with a rule in it.”
“Marisol.”
“Ma, Marcus Oyelaran has read that rule out loud at that table twice with his own mouth and I was at the door with a tray both times,” I say. “There is no coming home. There is only coming back.”
“Then what are you going to do.”
And I sit in that parking lot with the phone against my ear and my other hand flat on the wheel at ten and two, and out past the light there is a whole state and then a line and then a canyon with one way through.
“I do not know yet,” I say. “But I am not going to be a woman it happened to.