Chapter Thirty
Roan
The vote takes eleven minutes and it is the only vote I have ever sat through where nobody argues.
Torch moves that Wendell Cobb be stripped of his patch and put off the road, permanent, no contact, and that he be given seventy-two hours to be out of the county. Junior seconds it before Torch has finished the sentence.
Hollis speaks against it for four minutes, badly, because Hollis is not built for this and he knows it, and what he actually says at the end of it is, “I have been in his house.”
Wade says nothing and votes for it.
Amos does not vote. He sits at the end with a coffee and when Deacon says his name he says, “No,” and that is all, and nobody knows if that is a vote against or a refusal to cast one, and Deacon writes it as an abstention and Amos does not correct him.
I vote for it, and my vote is worth nothing, and everybody knows it.
Five to one with one abstention.
“Carried,” Deacon says.
And then he does not stand up.
That is the thing that stops the room. There is a rhythm to that table, thirty years of it, and when a vote carries the sergeant at arms stands and the man says doors and everybody goes, and Marcus Oyelaran sits in his chair with his hands flat on the wood and does not move.
“Marcus,” Torch says.
“No,” Deacon says.
Priest looks up from the chair in the corner.
“Say what you mean, Marcus,” Hollis says.
“I am not going to carry it out,” Deacon says.
Nobody says anything.
“The vote stands,” he says. “It is voted and it is carried and it is in that book and I am not overruling this table. Wendell Cobb is off this road in seventy-two hours and that is done and I will not have anybody go back over it. But I am not going to be the man who drives him to the county line, and I am not going to be the man who takes that patch off his back, and if this table wants that done today somebody else in this room is going to do it.”
“That is your office,” Junior says.
“It is my office.”
“Then.”
“Junior, I know what my office is,” Deacon says.
“I have held it for twenty-two years and I have carried out every single thing this table has ever voted and there is a list of it in my head that I do not say out loud. Eleven men on that flat. A thing in 2009 I have never discussed with anybody in this room. I have never once refused.”
He takes his hands off the table.
“And I am refusing this,” he says.
“Marcus,” I say.
“There is a second part and I will say it now,” Deacon says. “I am putting my patch down.”
The room goes.
“Do not,” Torch says. “Marcus, do not do that in this room today.”
“It has to be today, because if I do it next month everybody will say it was about something else.” He is completely level.
“Thirty-six years. I patched in 1990. And I have spent nine months watching this club do a thing to itself, and I have done my part in every bit of it. I sat on what I suspected in October because I did not want to have to act on it, and Curtis drove into a wash. I told this table not to ask a question about the twentieth of September, out loud, in front of the book, because I could not stomach where the answer went. And I have just sat here and voted with the rest of you to put a man off this road for being right in 2021.”
“Then unvote it,” Junior says. “You are the.”
“It is not wrong,” Deacon says. “That is what I need this table to understand, because I am not standing up here saying you have all done a bad thing. The vote is correct. Wendell put a woman in front of the president of this club and fifteen months later there are two men in the ground and one in a hospital, and there is no version of a motorcycle club where that man keeps his patch. If I sat in that chair for another ten years I would vote it again.”
“Then why,” Wade says.
“Because I have been the man who does what the book says for thirty-six years,” Deacon says, “and I have found out this year that a man who only does what the book says can walk a good man into a wash and never once break a rule doing it. Every single thing I did in the last twelve months was correct. Curtis is still dead.”
Nobody says anything.
“So somebody else can hold this office,” he says. “Somebody who has not spent a year finding out what it is worth.”
He stands up, finally, and he unpins nothing and takes nothing off, because you do not, and he puts both hands on the back of his chair.
“Roan,” he says.
“Marcus.”
“You will want to say something to me later, out in the yard, on your own. Do not.”
“Marcus.”
“I am asking you,” Deacon says. “I have not asked you for one thing in nine years.”
He looks down the table at Wendell.
They look at each other for about four seconds. Neither of them says anything. Thirty years, and there is not one word.
Then Marcus Oyelaran walks out of that room and through the bar room and out into the yard, and six men sit in a concrete box and listen to a truck start up and go down three miles of straight road.
Torch drives Wendell out on the Friday.
He does it because he asks for it. He comes to me on the Thursday night and says, “It should be me, because I am the one who put the motion, and if somebody else does it I have got to live with having voted for a thing I would not do.”
I think about that a great deal afterward.
There is a photograph on the wall in the bar room now that nobody explains to outsiders.
That is what this club does, and it has been doing it since 1971, and I have looked at that wall my whole life and never once understood that every one of those frames is a thing somebody decided not to talk about.
Amos dies in September, of being seventy-five.
We hold the funeral in Ivanhoe and four hundred people come, and Deacon is at the back of the cemetery in a suit, and I do not go over to him and he does not come over to me, and that is the arrangement now and I have accepted it.
I find her at the Verdigris in October, in the lot, at four in the afternoon, in the shade by the ice machine where she has parked since she was nineteen.
“Sol.”
“Roan.”
“Have you got ten minutes.”
“I have got the whole afternoon,” she says, “which you would know if you had asked me instead of standing there like a man at a rail.”
I sit up on the tailgate of her truck beside her.
We do not say anything for a bit. There is a swamp cooler running on the roof of that motel, and it is not making a noise, and I put a new float valve in it in May and I have never told her that.
“The gavel,” I say.
“What about it.”
“It is not going anywhere.”
“I know that.”
“I want to say it out loud anyway, because in May I offered it to Ellis and you laughed at me, and you were right, and I have had five months to work out why.” I look out at the road.
“It was not a sacrifice. It was me trying to get emptied out so that being open would not cost me anything. So I am not doing that. I am going to be the president of this club for as long as this club can stand me, and that is not a thing I am giving you and it is not a thing I am taking away from you, it is just true.”
“Alright,” she says.
“So here is what I have actually got.”
She turns her head.
“The Saints are going to want the fourth charter in Fallon running north by spring,” I say. “Which means their volume through the Neck goes up about forty percent in eighteen months, and the fixed toll in the new agreement does not move for eight years.”
“I know. I wrote that clause.”
“You wrote it to stop Sutter renegotiating.”
“I did.”
“It also stops us,” I say. “In three years we will be running double the volume for the same money on a road that costs more to keep every winter, and Merle Dowdy is sixty-eight and his daughter has been asking why the county pays cash since 2023.”
She does not say anything.
“That is a problem,” I say, “and I have not solved it. I have got three ideas and two of them are bad and I am not going to tell you which two, because if I tell you which two you will only look at the third one.”
She goes very still on that tailgate.
“So that is what I have got,” I say. “I am not asking you to come back to the house and I am not asking you for anything at all. I am asking you what you think we should do about the Neck in three years, because I do not know, and it is still a question, and you are the only person I want to ask.”
The swamp cooler runs.
She looks out at the 379 for a long time.
“Say the bad two,” she says.
“Sol.”
“Say them,” she says, “because I am not going to be handed the good one like it is a gift. If we are doing this, I get all three and I get to be wrong in front of you, and you get to be wrong in front of me, and that is the actual thing. Otherwise you are just doing a nicer version of the same.”
And I sit on the tailgate of a truck in a motel lot on the 379 and tell my wife all three, including the two that are stupid, and she takes about ninety seconds and then tells me why the second one is not as stupid as I think, and she is right.
We are out there until the light goes.
At some point she says, “Not the house.”
“No.”
“Not yet. Maybe not for a long time.”
“Alright.”
“I am not saying that to punish you.”
“I know what you are saying it for,” I say.
“Do you.”
“You have got a corridor,” I say. “You have got a gate on the Utah side and three parties and a clause with your own name on it, and if you move back into that house in October you will spend the next thirty years being the president’s wife who also does a thing, and you will not be able to stop it, because I could not stop it and it is my club. ”
She looks at me.
“Yes,” she says.
“So not the house.”
“Not the house.”
She puts her hand down on the tailgate between us, palm down, not reaching for anything.
I put mine down beside it. Not on it.
“I am not forgiven,” I say.
“No,” she says. “You are not. I do not know if you are going to be, and I have stopped promising myself an answer about it, and I want to be honest that there is a version where you never are.”
“I know.”
“But I am here,” she says. “In this lot. On a Tuesday. With the whole afternoon.”
And I sit there in the dark with my hands on a tailgate beside a woman who came up three miles of straight road at twenty-five miles an hour so that everybody could look at her the whole way, and I understand that this is not being forgiven and that it is worth more.