Chapter Twenty-Six
Roan
I call church for the eleventh of May at eight in the morning and I tell Priest to bring a second book.
“A second.”
“A blank one. A new one. Not the minutes.”
“Roan, what am I bringing a blank book for.”
“Because if I say it into the minutes it goes in between a wall on the north bay and Junior’s brother-in-law,” I say, “and in nine years it will be spread across four hundred pages and nobody will be able to find anything. It needs to be its own book.”
Priest stands in my kitchen for a moment with his hat in his hand.
“I have got one,” he says. “I bought it in 2021.”
Seven men at the table and Marisol at the end of it.
That took a vote of its own, on the ninth, and it went five to one with Junior abstaining again, and I did not chair it because Deacon has kept the chair for anything with her name in it and nobody has asked him to give it back.
She stands where she stood in March. Deacon points at the empty chair at the far end and says sit down, and she sits.
“Say what this is,” Deacon says.
“I am going to open my head,” I say.
Nobody says anything.
“Wendell has got a blank book. Everything that is in my head about that road goes in it this morning, out loud, in front of this table, and when we are finished it goes in the safe and Hollis and Marcus have got the combination and so has Wendell and so have I, and after today there is no arrangement on the 379 that lives in one man.”
“That is what I have asked you for five times,” Priest says.
“Six.”
“Five.”
“Six,” I say. “You asked once more in a kitchen in 2019 before you started putting it in the book, and I told you no then as well, and you have never counted that one because you did not think it was official. Count it.”
Priest looks down at the table.
“Six,” he says.
“Roan,” Torch says. “Why now.”
“Two reasons and I am going to say both and then we will start.” I put my hands on the table.
“The first one is that the reason this club is in the state it is in is that the corridor lived in one man and that made me a door. They did not need to break anything. They needed one man to walk through and it happened to be me, and it would have been me whoever it was, because the structure made the door.”
“And the second,” Deacon says.
“The second is that I do not get to be forgiven for suffering,” I say.
“I have been very sorry for eight months. I have been visibly sorry all over this county. I have been on a road at three in the morning being sorry and I have knelt on a floor being sorry, and none of it is worth one thing, because sorry costs a man nothing but sleep.”
I look at the end of the table.
“So here is a thing that costs,” I say. “That is all this is. Nobody in this room should mistake it for anything else.”
“Start,” Deacon says.
It takes ninety-one minutes.
I want to put down how it actually goes, because a man could make it sound like a speech and it is not a speech, it is a stocktake, and it is boring in the way that the real thing always is.
Teodoro first, because he is the biggest.
“Teodoro Salas Mendive,” I say. “Forty-eight. He drives for a family out of Sinaloa through an operation in Nogales, and his people have been paying this club a toll since 2019, and he is not the principal, he is the driver, and the reason that matters is that he is also the relationship. If he goes, they do not send another Teodoro, they send somebody who has to start again and who will not know that we are the highway department.”
“Say the principal,” Hollis says.
“I do not know the principal.”
The room stops.
“I have never known the principal,” I say.
“In seven years. There is a man in a Tahoe at the Line who takes the envelope and hands me one back and I have met him four times and I have never asked his name. And I want that written down as the first entry in that book, Wendell, that the president of this club did not know the name of the man at the top of the biggest arrangement we have got, and told himself for seven years that not knowing was cleverness.”
Priest writes.
“What was it,” Deacon says.
“It was cowardice with a good story on it,” I say. “If I do not know it, I cannot give it up. Which sounds like discipline and is actually a man arranging not to have to be brave.”
“That is fair,” Deacon says.
“The Tahoe,” Hollis says. “Description.”
“White, oh-nine or ten, Arizona plate that changes twice a year, and there is a chip in the windscreen on the passenger side that has been there for four years, which is how I know it is the same vehicle.” I look at Hollis.
“That is the sort of thing that has been in my head and nowhere else and it is worthless in there and worth something on a page.”
He writes that himself, on his own pad, and then looks embarrassed, and Priest says, “Give it here,” and copies it into the book.
Then the road.
“The paving,” I say. “There is a man in Elko called Merle Dowdy who has been cutting and filling the Neck for nine years on the understanding that he is doing county subcontract work. He is not. There is no contract. He sends an invoice every March to a mailbox in Ivanhoe that Hollis pays out of the salvage account under the code that says gravel.”
“That is you?” Hollis says. “That has been you?”
“That has been me since 2017.”
“I have been signing that for nine years.”
“You have been signing eleven thousand dollars a year for nine years to a man whose name you did not have,” I say.
“And if I had gone into the Sump in year two, that invoice would have arrived in March and you would have looked at it and not paid it, and in three winters that canyon would have shaken itself to pieces and the whole thing we are all sitting here fighting over would have stopped being a road.”
Nobody says anything for a moment.
“Christ,” Wade says.
“Merle Dowdy,” Priest says, writing. “Elko.”
“He has got a daughter who does his books and she has asked twice why the county pays cash,” I say. “That is a live problem and it has been a live problem since 2023 and it has been in my head.”
Corliss next.
“That one is the hardest and I am going to say it anyway,” I say.
“Deputy Corliss Whitlatch, sixty-one years old, thirty-four years with the county, and there is nothing between him and this club except an understanding that goes back to my father. He does not take money. He has never taken one dollar, and if anybody in this room ever offers him one it ends the same day.”
“Then what is the arrangement,” Torch says.
“Quiet,” I say. “That is the entire arrangement. He gets a corridor with no bodies on the road and no shooting at the pumps and no traffic stops that turn into something, and in exchange his sergeant never has a reason to put a second unit up here. It is not corrupt. It is two men agreeing that eleven deputies cannot police four hundred square miles and that everybody would rather it stayed boring.”
“And we shot a truck up in December,” Hollis says.
“And we put a boy in the Sump in November,” I say.
“And I have not been able to look at that man since, and I have not called him since the third of December, and that is a thing this table needs to know, because the single most valuable arrangement this club has is currently held together by an old man’s manners and nothing else. ”
Deacon puts his hand over his mouth.
“Write it,” I say.
Priest writes it.
Then Boyer.
“Anselm Boyer,” I say. “Sixty, fuel and feed on the Utah side north of Bitter Wells. Four loads in fourteen months. I have met him seven times. He drinks tea and not coffee and he will not do business before ten in the morning and he does not like being called sir.”
“He is not ours any more,” Torch says.
“No,” I say. “He is hers.”
Nobody looks down the table.
“I am putting him in the book anyway,” I say, “including the seven meetings and what he takes and what he will not, because in nine years’ time somebody at this table will need to know that the reason that relationship exists at all is that in 2024 I drove up there four times before I ever asked him for anything, and that is not a technique, that is what he requires. ”
She does not say anything. I do not look at her.
Then the rest of it, and this is where it stops being interesting and starts being the actual work.
The two brothers at Barrel Springs who move things off the west track in a horse trailer twice a year and take payment in diesel.
The woman at the second turning on the east side who talks, and what her name is, and why she talks, and that she has never once been paid to stop and would not take it.
The scale at Ivanhoe and which weeks it is manned.
Four buyers we have not used since 2021 and why each of them stopped.
What the Nevill brothers actually pay and what they think they pay and why the difference has been left in place for six years.
Nine phone numbers that are in my head and not in a phone.
The name of the man in Reno who cleans the salvage account’s overflow, and the fact that his fee went up in 2023 and I did not tell Hollis because I did not want an argument in church.
“You did not tell me a fee went up,” Hollis says.
“I did not tell you a fee went up.”
“Roan, I am the treasurer.”
“I know.”
“Why.”
“Because you would have wanted to renegotiate it,” I say, “and I did not want to spend the political capital in a bad month, so I paid it out of a line you do not read and I have carried it for three years.”
Hollis takes his glasses off and puts them on the table and puts both hands over his face for about four seconds.
“Alright,” he says.
By the end of it, it is half past nine and the room smells like nine men and there are forty-one pages in a book that was blank at eight.
Priest sits back.
“There is a thing I want to say,” he says.
“Go on,” Deacon says.
“I have wanted this for five years,” Priest says. “Six. And I want to say out loud that it is worse than I thought.”
“Say what you mean,” Torch says.
“I thought there was a lot in his head,” Priest says.
“I have just written down forty-one pages and about eleven of them are things where the club would have gone off a cliff inside two years and never known why. A paving invoice. A fee that went up. A man in a Tahoe. If Roan had died in 2022, this club would have died about eighteen months later and everybody would have said it was the Saints, and it would have been a mailbox in Ivanhoe.”
“That is right,” Hollis says quietly.
“So I am going to say the other part,” Priest says, “which is that I have been asking for a book for five years and I did not understand what I was asking for. I thought I was asking for tidiness.”
“You were asking for the club to survive its president,” Deacon says.
“Yes,” Priest says. “And it would not have.”
Deacon puts both hands flat on the table.
“Right,” he says. “Then here is where we are, and Hollis, tell me if I have got it wrong. We have got a book. It goes in the safe with four men on the combination. Any arrangement in that book, any man at this table can pick it up and carry it tomorrow if he has to.”
“That is right,” Hollis says.
“Which means the thing they came for does not exist any more,” Deacon says. “There is no door. There is no single man to stand next to. They spent four months and two hundred and eleven photographs on a structure that as of half past nine this morning is not there.
“It does not fix June,” Torch says.
“No,” Hollis says. “It does not fix June at all. The breach happened, the claim stands, and Warren will be in that schoolhouse on the first with the same folder.” He puts his glasses back on.
“But it means that whatever happens in June, this is a club that can lose a president and keep functioning, and eight months ago it was not, and I want that said, because I have been the most frightened man in this room since September and I am less frightened than I was at eight o’clock. ”
“Then we are done,” Deacon says. “Wendell, close it and take it to the safe now, while everybody is still in the building.”
Priest closes the book.
“Doors,” Deacon says.
They go out. Junior first, then Wade, then Torch with his hand on my shoulder for a second on the way past, and Hollis carrying the book beside Priest like a man walking a bride down an aisle.
Deacon is last, and he stops in the doorway.
“Roan,” he says.
“Marcus.”
“That was the first useful thing anybody in this club has done since September,” he says, and goes.
And then it is a concrete room with an open door and two people in it.
She is still sitting at the far end of the table with her hands flat on the wood.
I do not say anything, because I have said ninety-one minutes of things and there is not one word left in me, and because I worked out at some point around Merle Dowdy that whatever this was, it stopped being about her about twenty minutes in, and that is either the point or the failure of it and I do not know which.
She stands up.
She comes down the length of the table and stops beside my chair, and I look up at her.
“Ask me something,” she says.
I look at her.
“Not now,” she says. “Not in here. But the next time you have got a thing that is still a question.”
“Sol.”
“That is all I am going to say about this morning,” she says, “because if I say any more you will do it again for the wrong reason.”
And she puts her hand flat on the top of my head, for about two seconds, the way you would to a horse, or a boy, and then she goes out through the bar room and I hear the front door and then a truck starting up in the lot.