Chapter Twenty-Three · Evelyn
Chapter Twenty-Three
EVELYN
Grace made coffee nobody drank and put four legal pads on a table that had been a door, and at three minutes past seven Diesel Harrow took a memory card out of his shirt pocket and set it in the middle of it.
“Before anybody says anything,” he said. “I’m going to tell it all the way through, in order, and I’d take it as a kindness if nobody stopped me, because if I get stopped I’m not sure I get started again.”
Nobody stopped him.
Evelyn had been awake since Friday morning and had spent the drive down the mountain in the passenger seat of his truck with her hands in her lap.
Neither of them said anything for eleven miles.
She had understood at about the halfway point that whatever he was going to say in Grace’s office was going to be said to her too, and that he had known that at four in the morning and had called anyway.
She had decided, somewhere on 220, to give him credit for that.
She came back to that decision later, and found that she still gave him the credit, and that it changed nothing at all about the rest of it.
He talked for nineteen minutes.
Evelyn sat across the table with her hands flat on a legal pad she never wrote one word on, and listened to a man describe eleven days of his own life with the specific flat thoroughness of somebody reading a charge sheet about himself.
Scout’s trail cam. Eleven seconds. Fourteen feet of gravel. The hip on the fourth step, both directions, and a rod that went into Pike Danner’s right tibia in 2011 while Diesel sat in a plastic chair for nine hours.
Telling Scout that nobody sees it.
Standing in the shop with a drawer four feet away and telling Cutter Reeves a lie, and knowing it was a lie at the time, and doing it anyway.
Taking Pike off the schedule.
Cecil Ammen, and a hitch on the right side, and an old break.
Saying no to Pike in front of sixteen men.
Pike with his cap in his hands asking whether he had done something.
And at three in the morning in a cold office, on the sixth viewing, a left hand.
When he finished he did not add anything to it.
He did not explain and he did not apologize, and Evelyn understood, watching him, that he had made a decision on the drive down about what this was going to be, and that the decision had been to give them the facts and let them do whatever they were going to do.
The window unit hummed.
Cutter spoke first.
“Left handed,” he said.
“Left handed.”
“You’re sure.”
“Eight times. Six digits, quick, no light, no lean.” Diesel pushed the card an inch toward the middle. “It’s on there. Watch it however many times you need.”
Cutter picked it up and turned it over in his fingers, and Evelyn watched a very large man hold a thing the size of a postage stamp.
“Then it wasn’t him,” Cutter said.
“No.”
“And Aldridge knew you’d think it was.”
“Aldridge stood in my lot for twenty minutes in February and watched me handle him,” Diesel said, “and he went home knowing more about how I do things than my own vice president. That’s not a guess. That’s the only way the play works.”
Grace had been writing continuously since the fourth minute. She stopped.
“I want to say the legal part now and get it out of the way, because the rest of this is going to be worse and it deserves its own room.” She capped her pen.
“Diesel, the card is evidence. It’s been in your personal possession for eleven days with no chain of custody and a boy is going to have to testify that he bought the camera himself and never told anybody.
A defense attorney will have a wonderful afternoon with that, and it is still enormously better than not having it, and I am going to take custody of it in about ninety seconds and log it properly and we will live with the delay. ”
“All right.”
“And I want it on the record that if you had put that on this table the day Scout gave it to you, I would have had a subpoena out for the tower data on that gate within a week, and we would have had a phone number.” Grace’s voice did not rise and did not soften.
“That’s what the delay cost, in my part of it.
I’m not going to pretend it’s the largest bill in the room. ”
Then she looked at Cutter, and stood up, and said, “I’m going to go stand in the hall for ten minutes,” and took her legal pad with her, and shut the door.
Cutter did not stand up.
“I counted five,” he said.
“You did.”
“I’ve been counting since we was seventeen and I told you every time and I want you to know that I never once thought it’d get to a number that mattered.” He had both forearms on the table. “I ain’t going to yell at you, Diesel. You’re going to want me to. It’d be easier on you.”
“Yeah.”
“So here’s what I’ve got instead.” Cutter looked up.
“You didn’t do this because you’re arrogant.
Everybody’s going to say arrogant and they’ll be wrong.
You did it because you’d rather carry a thing alone than watch somebody you love have to carry a piece of it, and that is the single most decent-looking rotten habit a man can have, and I have watched it work out for you for thirty years, and this is the first time the bill come due at the actual price. ”
Diesel took it standing up and said nothing.
“You want to know the part that’s going to sit in me?” Cutter said. “It ain’t the lie in the shop. I’d have got over that in a month. It’s that if you’d told me, I’d have said Pike’s left handed.”
The room went absolutely silent.
“I’d have said it in four seconds,” Cutter said. “Standing right there. Because I have watched that man eat lunch for twenty-six years.”
Diesel Harrow closed his eyes.
“Yeah,” he said.
“There’s one more piece and then I’ll stop.” Cutter pushed his coffee cup two inches away and did not drink it. “You know what he done Thursday? Pike?”
“Cinder told me. He went around asking.”
“He asked me too.” Cutter’s jaw set. “Wednesday, in the yard, by the fuel island. He come up and he says, Cutter, has the boss said anything to you about me. And I said no, and that was true, and I stood there and watched him try to work out whether I was covering for you.” He looked up.
“So I’ve been lied to about it and I’ve been made a liar with it, and them’s two different injuries and I want both of ’em counted. ”
“They’re counted.”
“That’s all I’ve got.” Cutter stood up. “I’ll be at the table Monday and I’ll stand where you tell me to stand, same as ever, and that ain’t me letting you off.
It’s me saying that the club is bigger than the two of us and that this ain’t the week to hand Renner a president.
” He picked up his coat. “But you’re going to have to say all of this to sixteen men. ”
“I know it.”
“Not the short version.”
“Not the short version.”
Then Cutter went out and Grace stayed in the hall, and Evelyn Chase was alone in a room over a hardware store with the man she had told she loved nine hours earlier.
He turned and looked at her and waited, which she appreciated, because he had made every other person in this go first and it would have been unbearable if he had tried to make her go last.
“I have three things,” Evelyn said. “I’ve been building them for nineteen minutes and I’d like to get through all three.”
“Go ahead.”
“The first one is that you are not going to hear me say that you killed Pike Danner, because you did not, and there is a man in Roanoke who did, and I am not going to help you take that away from him.” Her hands were flat on the pad and perfectly steady.
“That’s real and I mean it and I want it first so you’ll believe the rest.”
“All right.”
“The second is about Wednesday night.” She watched him understand what was coming and take it standing up.
“You stood at that table in front of sixteen men and you said the best thing anybody has ever said to me in my life. And you gave me both halves of it, and you handed it back to me to take or not, and I stood up in front of all those people and took it.”
“Evelyn.”
“And the card was in the drawer.”
He did not look away. She had to give him that.
“Yes,” he said.
“You said, that’s the one you’re going to want at two in the morning in about six months when I’ve done something stupid.
” Her voice did something on the last word and she stopped and made it behave.
“It was nine hours, Diesel. Not six months. Nine hours, and it wasn’t stupid, it was the exact thing Grace warned me about on a switchback the second day I was here, and you knew that, because I said it back to you in your own kitchen and you agreed with me. ”
“I did.”
“So the third thing.” She stood up, because she was not going to do this sitting down.
“Last night you got down on one knee in front of Del Danner and told her about Wolf Creek Road. And while you were down there, you already knew why her husband took that run. You had known for eleven days. And you let that woman hold your face.”
Diesel Harrow put his hand on the back of a chair.
“Say the rest of it,” he said, and his voice was gone.
“There isn’t any more. That’s the whole injury.”
She had thought there wasn’t. She was wrong, and it came up out of her before she could get a hand on it.
“And I want to tell you what it does to me, because you’re going to spend tonight thinking about Pike and Del and Cutter and you have earned every minute of that, and you are not going to spend one second on this, and I’d like it to exist.” Her hands had started shaking.
“Six weeks ago I came down that road expecting to trade something. That is not a figure of speech. I did the arithmetic in the car on 220 about what I had and what it was worth and what a woman with four hundred dollars gets asked for, and then I walked into a salvage yard and a man crouched down so his eyes were level with mine and asked me one question and gave me gas.”
“Evelyn.”
“And every day since then I have been slowly putting down a thing I have carried since I was nineteen years old, which is that everybody is running a second set of books.” Her voice went completely.
“And you were. Not the way I was afraid of. Not even close to the way I was afraid of. But there was a second set.”
Diesel Harrow made a sound she had never heard out of him.
“I’d give anything,” he said.
“I know. That’s not one of the available items.” Evelyn wiped her face with the heel of her hand, hard, furious about it. “That’s the part nobody tells you. There’s no line item for it.”
Evelyn picked up her coat. “I’m going to stay at Grace’s.”
“Okay.”
“I want you to hear the reason, because you’re going to give yourself a worse one tonight and I’d rather you have the true one.
” She got her arms in the sleeves and made herself look at him.
“It is not to punish you. It is not because I’ve stopped.
I have spent six weeks putting my entire judgment about people through you, and last night I found out that for a stretch of it I was reading a man who was not showing me the page, and I cannot tell right now which parts of what I know about you I actually know. ”
“That’s fair.”
“Don’t.” Her voice cracked all the way through. “Do not be reasonable about it. Argue with me.”
“No,” Diesel said.
“Why not.”
“Because you’re right, and because the only thing I’ve got left to give you is the first thing you’ve ever asked me for, which is to not decide something for you.
” He straightened up off the chair. “You want to come back, you come back. You want a ride to Grace’s, Cutter’s downstairs.
You want the binder brought over tonight, I’ll bring it and set it on the porch and go. ”
Evelyn stood in the middle of Grace Walsh’s office and cried for the first time since Maryland, which she resented enormously.
“I still love you,” she said. “I’m extremely angry about it.”
“I know it.”
“Pike’s funeral is Saturday.”
“Saturday.”
“I’ll be there,” she said, “and I’ll be standing with the club, because that woman knows my name now and I’m not going to make her wonder where I am.”
Then she went down the stairs past the hardware store and got into a truck with Cutter Reeves, who drove four miles without opening his mouth, and then said, “He’s going to sit up there tonight and decide he ought to step down.”
“Probably.”
“Don’t let him.”
Evelyn looked over.
“That’s not my job anymore.”
“Ma’am,” Cutter said, “it’s Tuesday. Give it till Monday before you decide what your job is.”
They went another two miles.
“Can I ask you something,” Evelyn said.
“Go ahead.”
“You’ve known him thirty years. You counted five lies. Why are you still standing next to him?”
Cutter Reeves drove for a while before he answered, and when he did he kept his eyes on the road.
“Nineteen eighty-eight,” he said. “I was ten. My daddy left in July and my mama had four of us and no car, and for about two months we ate what the church brought.” He changed gears.
“And one evening Ray Harrow come up our road in a truck and set an envelope on the porch rail and didn’t knock, and did it again the next month, and the next one, and never once said a word about it to anybody, and my mama didn’t know it was him till his funeral. ”
“That’s his father.”
“That’s his father, and that’s the thing I’m trying to say to you, ma’am, so hear it right.
” Cutter’s hands did not move on the wheel.
“That man raised his boy to believe that the decent thing is the thing you do without telling nobody. He taught it to that boy deliberate and he taught it well and he was wrong, and every good thing about Diesel Harrow and every bad thing about him come out of the same envelope on the same porch rail.”
Evelyn looked out the window at the mountain going by.
“That’s not an excuse,” Cutter said. “I want to be plain. It ain’t an excuse and I ain’t offering it as one. It’s a diagnosis, and you’re a woman that likes to know what she’s looking at.”