Chapter 4
Gideon
"Because it's rusty," said Tuck.
"What is?"
"Everything." Tuck gestured at the fairground with a corn dog. "Look at it."
He wasn't wrong. Four hundred bikes, half of them older than the men on them, drawn up in ranks on gravel under a sky doing the thing Arizona skies do in April, where the whole west end goes the color of a peach and stays that way for an hour like it's showing off.
There was a stage made of a flatbed. There was a band called The Dirty Verde who were, and I say this with love, four dentists. There was a raffle table with a saddlebag on it stuffed to bursting with jerky, being guarded by a nine-year-old with a clipboard and an attitude problem.
And at seven-fifteen, an hour and a half after the ride came in, she still wasn't there.
"Stop looking at the gate," said Cricket.
"I'm not looking at the gate."
"Gideon, you've turned your head at the gate eleven times. I've been counting because Bear made it a wager and I'm about to win nine dollars."
"You're betting on me."
"We are all betting on you. Bear's got 'doesn't show.' Dutch has got 'shows and he says something stupid.' I've got the one nobody wanted."
"Which is?"
"Shows, and you don't say anything at all," said Cricket, and ate a piece of my funnel cake.
She came through the gate at seven-forty.
Here's what I want to get right about this, because everybody who tells this story afterward gets it wrong and makes it into something it wasn't. They say she came in transformed. They say nobody knew her.
Half of that's true. Half of it's a lie people tell because the true version is stranger.
She was wearing jeans and boots — her own boots, work boots, steel-toed, resoled twice — and a plain black tee, and a borrowed jacket, black leather, three sizes of history on it, which I later learned was Odette's boyfriend's and had been handed over in the driveway in total silence at seven o'clock as the single bravest act of that girl's life to date.
Her hair was down. That was one thing. In eleven days I had never seen it out of a knot.
And her hands and face were clean.
That's it. That's the whole transformation. Soap.
And half the room didn't recognize her, because half the room had met her that week over a fender with her jaw set and a smear of black up her cheekbone, and it turns out that when you take the soot off a woman who has been sleeping next to a wood stove for eight years, what's underneath is a twenty-seven-year-old with a mouth built entirely for laughing, and nobody in Ash Fork had ever been given that information.
Dutch walked straight past her. Straight past. Then stopped. Then turned around like a man in a cartoon.
"Ellie?"
"Don't."
"You've got a face."
"I've always had a face, Dutch."
"You've got — Cricket. Cricket, come here, she's got a face—"
And then it was gone, the whole moment, dissolved into eleven people yelling, and she was in the middle of it with her ears going red, and I stood forty feet away with a funnel cake I didn't want and said nothing at all.
Cricket collected nine dollars off Bear without breaking eye contact with me.
Eleven hours.
I've done the arithmetic more than once since. Seven-forty at night to six-thirty in the morning. Eleven hours minus the ride back, so ten. Ten hours out of a life. It doesn't sound like anything. I've spent longer than that in a bad meeting.
Some of what happened in it:
She won the jerky.
Before that, she met Sal.
Sal came through the crowd with a cooler like a man delivering a summons, and set it on a picnic table, and opened it, and the smell came out and I watched a woman across the yard turn around from forty feet away like a dog hearing a can.
"That's not gas station," she said.
"No, ma'am."
"That's a kitchen."
"That's my mother's kitchen," said Sal, "and she's eighty-one and she doesn't come to these, and if you tell her the beans were better I'll have to put you in the fire."
Elodie ate four. I counted, because I've become a man who counts things.
She ate four standing up with her eyes closed and then she opened them and looked around the yard — at the bikes, the pit, the dentists tuning up, four hundred people who had ridden a hundred and ten miles for a children's hospital and were now arguing about beans — and I watched something reorganize itself behind her face.
"Gideon."
"Yeah."
"How often does this happen?"
"Once a year."
"That's not enough," said Elodie Vasquez, and went to buy a raffle ticket with a dollar she'd found in a borrowed jacket.
Not metaphorically. The nine-year-old with the clipboard drew a ticket, and the ticket was 114, and Elodie Vasquez, who had bought one ticket with a dollar she found in the borrowed jacket, won forty pounds of dried meat in a leather saddlebag, and the sound she made has been described by multiple witnesses and none of the descriptions agree.
"What am I going to do with it."
"Eat it," said Bear.
"For how long, Bear? Give me a number."
"...Years?"
"Years. I've won years of jerky." She held the bag up over her head at the stage. "I'd like to thank the hospital."
She and Odile Kade found each other, which I had feared and which turned out to be a tectonic event.
Roman's grandmother had flown in for the run because she flies in for everything now that she's decided to be seventy-nine at maximum volume, and she took one look at Elodie's hands and said, "You work. "
"I work."
"Good. Sit down, everyone here is boring.
" Ten minutes later they were leaning together over a phone, and Odile was saying, "This is the one you want, the yellow one, they made them for four years and then stopped because it was too good, that's always why," and Elodie was saying, "Show me the sixty-two," and I went and got a beer and let it happen.
She fixed a bike in the parking lot at half past nine, in a borrowed jacket, in the dark, with a pocketknife and somebody's belt, while a semicircle of grown men held their phones up for light.
The bike belonged to a man from Prescott who'd been about to call a tow.
It took her four minutes. She refused money twice and then accepted a beer and said, "This is exactly what a beer is worth, actually, everybody's been overcharging me for years. "
Odile got the whole story out of her in forty minutes, which took me eleven days, and did it by a method I have since studied and cannot reproduce.
I know because I was standing eight feet away pretending to look at a raffle table.
"Who taught you?"
"My father."
"And where's he?"
"Dead."
"Mm," said Odile, in exactly the tone of a woman being told a bus was late. "Mine too. Fifty-one years. Does it still make people go quiet when you say it?"
"Every time."
"It's the worst part." Odile turned her beer bottle. "Not the dying. The managing everybody's face afterward. I once told a woman at a church supper and she cried harder than I did and then I had to get her a glass of water. Nineteen sixty-four. I'm still furious."
And Elodie laughed — that short ugly one, the real one — and said, "Thank you," and Odile said, "Don't thank me, I'm being selfish, everyone here is boring," and then, four minutes later, without any transition at all:
"Who's got the shop?"
"My stepfather."
"How?"
"Paperwork."
"How much paperwork?"
"One page," said Elodie. "On a morphine drip. At nine forty at night."
Odile Kade set her bottle down on the tailgate.
"Well," she said. "That's a hanging offense."
"It's legal."
"Half of everything is legal, dear, that's why we have bonfires." She patted the tailgate beside her. "Sit down and tell me the rest and don't tidy it up. I'm seventy-nine and I have limited patience for the tidied-up version."
She danced.
Badly. Enormously badly. That's a thing I found out at eleven o'clock when the dentists started doing something with a slide guitar and Cricket dragged her onto the flatbed apron by the wrist, and she went — this is important — she went willingly, and she danced like a person who has never been watched, which is a completely different motion from dancing like a person who doesn't care about being watched, and I had to go stand behind a truck for a minute.
At one point she kicked her boots off.
Steel-toes on a gravel dance floor. She got about ninety seconds in and said something furious to Cricket and pulled them off and left them by the flatbed and went back in in her socks.
Nobody clocked it. It was that kind of night. There were sixteen pairs of boots around the edges of that dance floor by midnight.
At quarter past midnight she found me by the fence.
"You've been standing here for an hour."
"Forty minutes."
"You've been standing here for an hour, Gideon, I've been keeping track between activities."
"You had activities."
"I won jerky. I fixed a Sportster with a belt. I have danced." She hooked her arms over the fence rail next to mine. Out past the fairground the land went flat and blue and empty all the way to nothing. "Why are you over here?"
"Because if I was over there I'd be running it."
She turned her head.
"Somebody'd ask me about the raffle money," I said, "and then somebody'd ask me about the permit, and then Tuck would come over and ask about the thing with the trailer, and by ten past I'd be a president again. Over here I'm a guy at a fence."
"That's the saddest sentence I've heard all week and I live in a parts loft."
"It's not sad. It's a good job."
"It's a good job you do sad." She bumped her shoulder into my arm, which is the first time she had voluntarily touched me in eleven days, and I want it noted that I did not visibly react. "Can I say a true thing?"
"Please."
"I haven't been out of that lot at night in two years.
" She said it easily. That was the awful part, how easily she said it.
"Two years, maybe three. There's no — it's not a rule, right, there's no rule.
I could go. I've always been able to go.
It just costs, and everything costs, and after a while you stop spending. "
"And tonight?"