Chapter Thirty-Two · Diesel
Chapter Thirty-Two
DIESEL
Aldridge said, “Don’t.”
He said it fast and he said it loud and it was the first time in two months that Diesel Harrow had heard that man’s voice do anything at all, and it did not work.
“Eleven cameras,” Diesel said.
He had his own phone up in his left hand and he kept it up and he did not move his feet, and behind him he could hear the whole line of them holding, which was the loudest thing in the yard.
“Ain’t going to be a camera in a minute,” the man said.
“That’s not how phones work,” said Scout Carlisle, from somewhere to the right, in a voice that was going to break in about four more words. “It goes to the cloud. It’s already gone.”
Diesel could have kissed him.
It was, Diesel thought later, the single bravest thing he had ever personally witnessed, and it had been done by a boy who had painted a shop floor twice in three weeks because he could not sit still, and who had not been able to keep his voice from going on the last word, and who had said it anyway.
The man’s head turned a fraction, and Diesel understood that this had landed, that this was in fact the single most useful sentence anybody had said in the last two months, and that a nineteen-year-old with a Tractor Supply trail cam had just told the truth about the entire world to a man from Hagerstown at two in the morning.
“Sir,” Diesel said. “Listen to me.”
“Shut up.”
“There’s a deputy that come by this gate at midnight and he’s due back through, and there’s a call reference number with the county from ten last night, and there’s a dozen telephones and a lawyer on an open line.
” He kept his voice flat and slow. “You have not done one thing yet. Right now you are a man standing in a lot. Get in the truck.”
“Told you,” Aldridge said, to nobody.
“You shut up too.”
“Gladly.”
The man came four steps closer, and the light off the fuel island got him properly, and Diesel would testify to that face nine weeks later without one second of hesitation.
“The boxes,” he said.
“Office is open,” Diesel said. “Door’s unlocked. Take every one of them.”
The unlocked office did it.
Diesel worked it out later, lying on his back in a room with a television bolted to the wall.
Grace worked it out too and said so in a courtroom eventually.
The man had come down from Maryland to make something happen in a yard he had been told would be empty.
He had walked into a lit lot with a dozen men filming him, and been offered exactly what he came for with no resistance at all.
There was nothing in him that could do anything with that.
He had one move.
There was one more beat before it and Diesel would go over it a thousand times.
The man’s eyes went along the line. Left to right, unhurried, the way a man counts a room, and Diesel watched him do it and watched him arrive at the arithmetic that everybody in this thing kept arriving at, which was that eleven telephones is not the same as eleven witnesses, because a telephone can be picked up off the ground and a witness cannot be talked out of what he saw.
And then he looked past all of them at the office, where the light was off.
“Where’s the woman,” he said.
And Diesel Harrow, who had spent two months learning not to walk across gravel, felt every muscle in his body try to do it at once, and did not, and heard his own voice come out of somewhere very cold.
“There ain’t no woman here.”
“Where is she.”
“You come down here for boxes and you’re asking me about a woman.” Diesel kept the phone up. “I want everybody on this recording to hear him ask that. Say it again.”
“Boss,” Cutter said, low.
“Say it again,” Diesel said.
The man raised the pistol.
Diesel had been shot at twice in his life and both times it had been a long way off and half a joke, and afterward he could not describe the sound at all except that it was smaller than he expected and that there were two of them very close together and that the second one went into the side of the fuel island with a noise like a dropped wrench.
The first one hit him.
It went in below the left collarbone and turned him about a quarter around and put him on his knees on his own gravel, and the phone came out of his hand and landed face up, still recording, and it stayed there for the entire rest of it, which mattered enormously later.
He heard the whole line start to move.
He heard the whole line of them come off their spots at once, every one, and he heard Cinder Sullivan’s boots going and he heard Rook already halfway, and Diesel Harrow got his hand flat on the ground and put everything he had left into one word.
“Hold.”
They held.
He would think about that until the day he died.
There is a thing that happens in a man’s chest when eleven people he has known his whole life do the hardest possible thing because he asked them to, and Diesel Harrow had spent forty-two years believing he understood what a club was and found out on his knees in his own gravel that he had not had one clear idea about it.
He had been running it like a man carrying something.
It had been eleven of them the entire time, standing where he told them to stand, waiting for him to let them.
Sixteen men had voted him back at thirteen to three eleven days after he had cost one of them his life, and every one of them was standing in a lot at two in the morning watching him kneel in the gravel with a hole in him, and a man with a pistol forty feet away, and they held, because he said to.
“Phones up,” Diesel said, and his voice was not doing well. “Nobody moves. Cutter.”
“I got you.”
“Don’t come out here.”
“I ain’t coming out there.” Cutter’s voice was about ten feet behind him and had not moved. “Rook’s on the road side. Scout’s got him in frame. Dutch is on the phone with the county. You’re all right.”
“Am I.”
“You’re on your knees and you’re talking, so yeah. Sit down before you fall down.”
Diesel sat down.
The man with the pistol had not moved either. People who heard the story later never understood the next nine seconds: nothing happened at all. A man knelt on gravel bleeding. A man stood forty feet away with a gun in his hand and a line of telephones pointed at him. Nobody said anything.
Then Aldridge, in a grey overcoat, still with his bare hands in his pockets, said, in a voice of complete exhaustion:
“You have just shot a man on eleven cameras in front of the Botetourt County Sheriff’s Office, you absolute idiot, and I want it on every one of them that I said don’t.”
“He come at me.”
“He is sitting on the ground forty feet away with a telephone in the gravel, and there are a dozen recordings of it, and I am going to be asked about this in a room with a stenographer in it before Thursday.” Aldridge’s voice had gone somewhere Diesel had never heard it go.
“I have spent eleven years making certain that nothing anybody did was ever visible, and you have just made it visible, and I want to tell you something for free, friend, because I doubt anybody else will. Whoever asked for you is going to say they never heard of you before Wednesday, and they are going to be believed, because that is what the paperwork is for.”
The man from Hagerstown looked at him.
Then he ran.
He got maybe nine steps toward the truck before the first cruiser came down the grade with everything going.
Diesel lay back on his own gravel because he was not going to be able to keep sitting up, and looked at the sky over Blackthorn Gap, which was clear and had the whole winter arm of it out, and thought, with total clarity, that he had put a light in every fixture in that yard and it was the first time in his life he had not been able to see the stars from it.
Cutter got to him in about a second and a half.
“That’s it, that’s it, lay still.” Hands under his coat, then pressure, hard, and Diesel made a noise about it. “Rook! Get me the kit out of the office, it’s on the wall by the door, the orange one!”
“Sienna’s kit,” Diesel said.
“What?”
“The medic kit. Cutter, that’s the one that woman put up.” He was having trouble getting hold of the sentence. “The one out of Salem. Come out and showed everybody. Two years ago.”
“Yeah,” Cutter said. “Yeah, boss, that’s the one. Don’t talk.”
“I want somebody to tell her.”
“I’ll tell her myself. Shut up.”
There was a deputy on the ground beside him then, and then two, and one of them was the one who had raised two fingers off the wheel at midnight, and Diesel got hold of his sleeve with his right hand and would not let go until the man leaned down.
“Buchanan,” Diesel said. “Rural route. Wendell Prine.”
“Sir, we got a unit at that address ten minutes ago.”
Diesel Harrow let go of his sleeve and put his head back down on the gravel.
“She got it,” he said.
“Sir?”
“She got it.” He was laughing, which was a mistake, and he stopped. “Ain’t nobody ever told her a thing and she got it anyway.”
The ambulance took nineteen minutes to come up out of Fincastle and Cutter Reeves kept both hands on him for all of it and did not say one word after the first minute except to answer questions.
Scout Carlisle threw up behind the shop at some point and came back and picked his phone up off the gravel and kept filming, and Diesel saw him do it.
Cinder Sullivan stood a few feet away with both fists at his sides and his jaw locked and did not go anywhere near the man from Hagerstown, who was face down on the gravel by then with a deputy’s knee in his back, and Diesel watched him not go, and understood what that had cost, and got out one word.
“Cinder.”
“Boss.”
“You didn’t.”
“No sir,” Cinder Sullivan said, and his voice came apart on it. “I sure wanted to.”
“I know it.” Diesel got his hand up about four inches. “That’s why it counts.”
When they had him on the cot and were about to put him in, Diesel got a hand on Cutter’s wrist.
“Cutter.”
“I’m right here.”
“Nobody moved.”
“Nobody moved.”
“Not one.” Diesel could hear how he sounded and did not care. “Twelve years I’ve been telling that table I’d rather have one man that does what he says than four that mean well, and tonight I found out it was true, and I want somebody to remember I said so before they give me anything.”
“I’ll remember it.”
“And Cutter.” He got his fingers tighter. “You tell her yourself. Not on the phone. You go get her and you drive her down and you tell her in the car so she ain’t got to hear it standing up in a lawyer’s dining room.”
Cutter Reeves looked down at him with a hand still flat under the blanket where the pressure was.
“That’s the fifth good decision you’ve made this month,” he said, “and I’ve been counting them too.”
Then the doors shut.
The last thing Diesel Harrow saw of his own yard was through six inches of window glass as the ambulance came around: his club in a lit gravel lot at half past two in the morning, none of them moving, every one of them still holding a telephone up, because nobody had told them they could stop.
Dutch Voyles was in a folding chair by a burn barrel with his phone in both hands at arm’s length, pointed at the deputies, filming, at eighty-one years old, with his hat off.
Diesel put his head back on the cot.
“Sir, I need you to stay with me. Can you tell me your name?”
“Diesel.”
“Your given name.”
“Ray,” he said. “Raymond Harrow. After my daddy.”
“All right, Raymond. You’re doing fine. Any allergies?”
“No.”
“You on anything for blood pressure, heart, anything like that?”
“No.” He got his eyes open. “Son, is there a way to ask somebody something.”
“Ask me.”
“There’s a woman in a house in Fincastle.” His voice had gone to about nothing and he made it work anyway. “And a man’s going to come get her in about forty minutes and drive her down, and by the time she gets there somebody’s going to have told her a number, and I’d like the number to be right.”
The paramedic looked at him for a second.
“Through and through, upper left chest, above the lung field as best I can tell,” he said. “Good radial pulse, you’re talking, you’re oriented, and you have not shut up since Fincastle. If you were somebody’s daddy I’d be telling him you’re going to be all right.”
“Tell her that.”
“Sir, I’m not going to be the one who tells her.”
“Then tell whoever is,” Diesel said, “and use them words. Not the other ones.”
He shut his eyes and listened to the siren, which he had heard from that road his entire life and had never once heard from the inside, and it occurred to him that Pike Danner had never gotten one at all, and he lay in the back of an ambulance on the Blackthorn Gap road at ten of three in the morning and cried about a man for the first time since the funeral.
Nobody in that ambulance said one word about it.