Chapter Twenty-Three
Sol
I have been in this room four times in eleven years and every one of them was with a tray.
It is smaller with men sitting in it. The table takes up almost the whole floor and there is about two feet between the back of Hollis’s chair and the wall, and the ceiling is lower than I remember, and the door is standing open behind me on a bar room where thirty men are not making a sound.
Seven chairs with men in them. Two empty.
“Stand where you are,” Deacon says. “Hands where the table can see them. That is not personal.”
“I know it is not.”
“Wendell will write down what you say. If you want a thing off the record you cannot have it. There is nothing off the record in this room and there never has been.”
“I know.”
“Then say what you came to say.”
I put my hands on the back of the empty chair in front of me, because I have to put them somewhere and I am not going to fold them.
“You are going to lose the corridor on the first of June,” I say.
Nobody moves.
“Their counsel is called Warren and he ran clause four and clause nine at you at Bitter Wells three weeks ago, and the claim is the tolling rights between the Junction and the Line, permanent, transferred in full, and Hollis argued quantum for about fifty minutes and got you a date in June and nothing else.”
Hollis takes his glasses off.
“Who told you that,” Deacon says.
“Nobody in this room and nobody in this club,” I say.
“I will tell you exactly how I know it, because if I do not, every one of you is going to spend the rest of this conversation working out which of you talks. A man called Sipe out of Delta moves forty crates of things west in January and he does it because of me, and Sipe drinks in a place in Beaver with a man who does freight for a company in Coldwater that has got two patched Saints on the books. That is it. That is the whole chain, and it is four people long, and I did not go looking for it. It came to me because I am now a person that kind of thing comes to.”
“Go on,” Deacon says.
“Then I will say the thing you actually need.” I look down the table. “Anselm Boyer.”
Hollis’s head comes up.
“Fuel and feed on the Utah side of the Line, north of Bitter Wells,” I say.
“He took four loads off this club in fourteen months, never one problem, never a phone call, and he has been the buyer since 2024. He stopped hearing from you on the twentieth of September and he has bought nothing since, from anybody, because there was nobody to buy from.”
“He will not deal with us,” Hollis says. “We have tried. Twice.”
“I know you tried twice. He did not answer the second one.”
“How do you.”
“Because he told me,” I say. “He is dealing with me. He has been dealing with me since December and he has moved five things for me since January, and the reason he opens a gate for me is not money and it is not the road. It is that I sat in his office in December and told him how I knew his name before I asked him for anything.”
Nobody says anything for a moment.
“What is the routing,” Torch says.
“No.”
“Marisol.”
“No, and I will tell you why, and it is not spite.” I keep my hands on the chair.
“If I say the four turnings out loud in this room, then seven men have got it, and in a year one of them has got a court date or a debt or a mother in a home, and then it is worth something to somebody. And Boyer opens that gate for me. Not for a routing. There is no piece of paper that transfers what I have got. If I write it all down and hand it to this table, the paper is worth nothing by Friday, because on Friday there is a man with a hearing aid who does not know the person calling him.”
“So you are the asset,” Hollis says.
“I am the asset.”
“That is very convenient.”
“It is extremely inconvenient,” I say. “It means I cannot be replaced and it also means I cannot be protected. If I am dead the gate is a gate. There is nothing here to take.”
“Say the numbers,” Deacon says.
“Boyer will buy long guns again,” I say.
“He will not buy from this club and he will buy from me, and he has got capacity for four loads a year on what he was taking before and he told me in February he could go to six. On what you were getting for twelve crates, that is between six hundred and nine hundred thousand a year through a buyer who has never had one problem in fourteen months.”
Hollis puts his glasses back on.
“And the second thing,” I say, “and this is the one that matters, because guns are guns and you will find another buyer eventually. Three parties will not move anything west without calling a number that rings in a room in Beaver. Sipe out of Delta, a man in Rock Springs I said no to who has since told four people that there is somebody who says no, and one other. That is a corridor. It runs east and it does not touch the canyon, and it does not touch the Junction, and it cannot be claimed by anybody at Bitter Wells because it is not on your road and there is no clause in an agreement from 2011 that reaches it.”
“What is it worth,” Deacon says.
“Sipe alone was two hundred and twenty thousand for four hours in January,” I say. “I have run six since. My end this year, if nothing goes wrong, is between five and seven hundred thousand dollars.”
Hollis says a number under his breath and Torch says, “What?”
“The corridor is running at sixty percent,” Hollis says, and he is looking at the table, not at anybody.
“It has been under seventy since November. On this year’s run rate that road is going to do about four hundred and ten thousand, and we lose it entirely on the first of June, and there is nothing after that. ”
“So she is worth more than the road,” Wade says.
“She is worth more than the road is currently earning us,” Hollis says. “Yes.”
The room goes quiet in a way I have heard through a door but never from inside.
And this is the place.
I have thought about this moment for eleven hours in a truck and for four months before that, and there is a version of it that works. I want to be honest about that, because people have told me since that I had no choice and I had a choice and it was sitting right there.
The version that works is that I stop talking now.
I have given them a number that saves the club and I have not put my own name in front of anybody, and Deacon told that table not to go fishing, and I know he told them because I heard him say it through an open door while I stood in a bar room with thirty men.
He said it deliberately loudly. That was a gift and I knew it was a gift while it was happening.
If I stop now, this table votes on terms with a woman nobody has named, and Priest writes it down, and in five years it is a thing that happened in a difficult year.
“There is a second thing,” I say.
Deacon closes his eyes for about half a second.
“Marisol,” he says.
“Marcus, do not.”
“I am going to say one sentence to you,” Deacon says, “and then I will not say another one. There is no name in front of this table.”
“I know.”
“Nobody has put one there in six months.”
“I know exactly what you did,” I say, “and I want it said out loud in front of Wendell’s book that Marcus Oyelaran told this table not to go fishing, and that I am not being fished. Write that down.”
“Written,” Priest says.
“Then here is why I am not going to take it,” I say.
I take my hands off the chair.
“I am not standing in this room as a wife,” I say.
“I have been a wife in this building for eleven years and I have never once been in this room with the door shut. If I come in here as somebody’s wife, then what happens tonight is that seven men do a kindness for Roan’s Sol,, and in four years when it is inconvenient, somebody at this table says she was never entitled to any of it, and they will be right. ”
“Nobody would say that,” Torch says.
“Ellis, you would say it,” I say. “Not out of malice. You would say it in a bad month in about 2031 when the money is short, and you would be correct, because it would be true.”
He does not argue.
“I am asking this table for terms,” I say.
“That is a thing you do with a counterparty and a counterparty stands under your law or she is nothing. And your law has got six rules in it and the one this club actually treats as sacred is the last one, and it is the only one I have ever heard a man in this building say he would die under.”
“You do not lie in church,” Deacon says.
“You may refuse to answer,” I say. “You may not lie. And I will not sit at this table with a thing I refused to answer, because a refusal in this room is not neutral. I watched what a refusal in this room did to Curtis Nakagawa.”
Junior makes a noise and puts his hand over his mouth.
“On the twentieth of September I took the flatbed and twelve crates out of the north bay at about half past three in the morning,” I say.
“I loaded them myself off the chain hoist, three at a time, four lifts, and I put the hoist back on its hook. I drove south through the Neck and east over the line. I sold them through a broker in Utah over six weeks and I got just over forty thousand for them and he took eleven percent, leaving me thirty-five thousand seven hundred.”
Nobody moves.
“That is the first theft,” I say. “That is the one you have all known about since September and none of you would say.”
Hollis has both hands flat on the ledger.
“The second one is worse,” I say.
Deacon opens his eyes.
“In November the broker wanted a thing off me before he would put me in front of anybody,” I say. “He wanted the Sump. Where it is, who calls it, what it costs, who has to say yes.”
Torch stands up.
“Sit down, Ellis,” Deacon says.
“I did not give him that,” I say. “I said no and I have never said anything different to anybody and I will be saying no on the day I die. Not for this club. Because there is a woman in a trailer eleven miles outside Ivanhoe with a photograph face down on her wall and I have sat at her table.”
“Then what did you give him,” Deacon says.
“Anselm Boyer’s name,” I say. “And the routing to his gate. The four turnings, the wash and the culvert, and the chain that has never been locked, and which stretch you do at night because of the woman at the second turning who talks.”
Hollis makes a small sound.
“I gave it to him on a Thursday morning in November at twenty past nine,” I say, “and it took ninety seconds, and I said it in a level voice, and then I drove four hundred yards down a frontage road and was sick in the weeds, and then I did not go back and undo it, and he had not made a phone call and he does not write things down and I could have. I sat on the running board of that truck for eleven minutes and I chose not to.”
The room is completely silent.
“And I know exactly what I sold,” I say.
“It was not Roan’s. Roan carries the corridor.
The east track is Hollis’s, because Hollis works out how a thing gets somewhere.
It was Curtis’s, because Curtis drove it and because I learned it from him at my mother’s bar in March 2019 when he was drunk and comfortable and I was six feet away washing glasses and neither of them looked up. ”
Junior is crying. He is not making any noise about it.
“That is the second theft,” I say. “It is worse than the crates and it is worse for a specific reason, which is that nobody would ever have found it. There is no clean rectangle on a floor. Boyer would have taken a phone call in January from a man who somehow knew about the culvert and he would have gone to his grave not knowing how. I could have sat in this room tonight and given you the money and never said one word about it and not one of you would ever have known.”
I put my hands back on the chair.
“So there is a name in front of this table now,” I say, “and it is mine, and I put it there myself, and it is two of them.”
Deacon sits back.
“Well,” he says.
“Marcus,” Hollis says. “Marcus, wait.”
“Nobody is doing anything for a minute,” Deacon says.
“No, listen to me.” Hollis has got both hands up. “She has just given this table the only asset that keeps this club alive past June, and then handed us a name, and those two things cannot both be acted on.”
“They can,” Torch says. “That is exactly the problem. They can both be acted on and one of them cancels the other.”
“Rule four does not have a clause about usefulness,” Junior says. He has got his sleeve at his face. “Marcus. It does not. You read it out twice in this room in September when it was somebody we did not know.”
“I know what I read.”
“And in December,” Junior says. “You read it in December.”
“I know what I read, Junior.”
Wade says, “What about Curtis.”
“What about him,” Torch says.
“That is what I am asking.” Wade’s hand is shaking on the table.
“I was in the truck. I was on the floor of that truck and I have not said one word about any of this in three months because nobody asked me. He knew. Did he not. He sat in this room and refused a question because of her, and then we all put him on a road.”
Nobody answers him.
“So do we do it because of Curtis,” Wade says, “or do we not do it because of Curtis. Because I do not know. I have been sat here for six months not knowing and I want somebody at this table to tell me.”
“Nobody can tell you that,” Deacon says.
“Then what is the book for,” Wade says.
And that is the room. That is exactly the room, and I stand at the end of the table with my hands on the back of an empty chair and I watch seven men come apart on it, and nobody looks at me, and I do not say anything else because there is nothing left that is mine to say.
Priest is writing and writing.
“Vote,” Torch says.
“Not tonight,” Deacon says.
“Marcus.”
“Not tonight, and I am chairing.” He puts one hand on the table.
“There is a name in front of this table for the first time since the twentieth of September and it got there four minutes ago out of the mouth of the person it belongs to, and I am not going to let seven men vote a death at eleven o’clock at night with their blood up.
We will do it tomorrow at eight, sober and slept, and if it goes the way it may go, I will do it myself and nobody at this table will have to vote on who. ”
He stands.
“Marisol. You will stay on this property tonight and you will not leave it, and I am putting Wade on the door of the office where you will sleep, and that is not a guard, and if you tell me you would rather have somebody else it will be somebody else.”
“Wade is fine,” I say.
“Eight in the morning,” Deacon says. “Doors.”
And for the first time all night, as everybody stands up and chairs go back, I let myself look down the length of the table at my husband.
He has not said one word in this entire room.
He is sitting with both hands flat on the wood in front of him, looking at me, and his face is doing something I have not seen on it in eleven years and cannot read at all.