Chapter 3
Wren
There are four kinds of passenger and I can sort a man into one of them inside forty miles.
There's the Sleeper, who is the best kind and also an insult.
There's the Narrator, who reads every sign out loud like the road's a menu.
There's the Advisor, who has opinions about my lane choice and will be asked to get out somewhere with a sidewalk.
And there's the fourth kind, which I don't have a name for, who just sits there and looks out the window and lets the road do what it does.
Ash Delacroix was the fourth kind for exactly eighty-two miles.
Then he said, "Why Delores?"
"Nope."
"That's it? Nope?"
"That's the whole file."
"Kai's been trying to get it out of you for six years."
"Kai's been trying to get it out of me for six years and Kai has a terrible record," I said. "You're welcome to join the effort. There's a mailing list."
He laughed. It was a real one, surprised out of him, and it changed his whole face for about a second and a half, and I looked hard at the road.
We took 80 west because 80 west is what you take, and Ohio at eleven at night is a long dark ribbon with a Love's every fifty miles like a knot in a rope.
He read for a while by the map light. Then he stopped, because reading in a truck is a young man's game and he's not one.
"Ask me something," he said.
"Why?"
"Because it's eleven at night and I'm going to fall asleep and you said you don't like it when passengers sleep."
"I said it's an insult, not that I don't like it. Those are different."
"Why is it an insult?"
"Because it means they've decided nothing's going to happen," I said. "It's fine. It's just — I'm doing a thing up here that requires my entire attention and they've concluded it doesn't require any of theirs."
"Huh."
"What."
"Nothing. It's just the most Wren-shaped thing anybody's ever said to me and I've known you nine hours."
"You've known me four hours."
"It feels like nine."
"Yeah," I said. "It does."
So I asked him things.
I'm good at it. It's a skill from towing, actually. You show up at the worst forty minutes of somebody's life and you have to get eleven pieces of information out of them while they're crying about their bumper, and if you ask straight they lock up, so you ask sideways.
I asked what he read. He said everything, badly, out of order, whatever's in the box at the church rummage sale. He'd read four biographies of the same man and never noticed until the third one.
I asked what his first bike was. He said a Honda that wasn't his and that's a longer story.
I asked how he got in the club. He said his mother's boyfriend put him through a storm door when he was fifteen and a man named Cormac Delacroix, who was not related to him, came and got him out of a hospital parking lot at two in the morning and then legally became his father over a period of about three years and a great deal of paperwork.
"So Delacroix's not—"
"Not blood. No."
"Do people know that?"
"Everybody knows that. It's Hollow Ash. There are nine hundred people and four last names."
"Where is he now?"
"Deceased," Ash said. "2019."
Something moved in the cab, and it wasn't the road.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"Thank you." Very smooth, very quick, the way you hand somebody back a plate.
I let it go. I'm not proud of letting it go. I let it go because I'd gotten eleven hours of a man's life out of him in three and there's a point where a person's face closes and pushing past that is a thing I've had done to me.
I did note it, though. 2019. Filed under pen skips here.
Around one in the morning the CB went off and a voice said something about a four-wheeler in the median at the 118 and a second voice answered it, and Ash sat forward like a dog hearing a gate.
"Is that — do people actually still—"
"Constantly."
"I thought that was a movie thing."
"It's a Tuesday thing," I said. "It's mostly weather, wrecks, and one man near Sandusky who reviews restaurants."
"He what?"
"He reviews restaurants. He's been doing it for years. He's brutal. Last month he destroyed a Cracker Barrel."
"On what grounds?"
"Insufficient gravy, and then a whole thing about the chairs."
Ash stared at the radio for a while, with an expression I can only describe as religious.
"Can I talk on it?"
"Absolutely not."
"Why?"
"Because you'd enjoy it," I said, "and there's no coming back from that."
Somewhere past Elyria he said: "You've given me nothing."
"What?"
"I've told you about my father, my mother's boyfriend, my first bike, my worst decision, my second-worst decision, and a book I'm embarrassed about. You've told me a truck's name is Delores and refused to say why."
"That's true."
"Is that on purpose?"
"Yes."
"Okay," he said, and — this is the thing — he left it. He didn't get wounded about it. He didn't do the little wobble men do where they've extended and you didn't and now you've got to manage them.
Which of course made me want to tell him something, immediately, which is exactly the kind of cheap trick I'd expect from a man who reads four biographies of the same guy.
"I have a Class A," I said. "And a rec-vehicle endorsement, and air brakes, and a hazmat I let lapse because the fingerprinting is a scam."
"That's a résumé."
"It's what you get."
"I'll take it," he said. "Do you like it?"
"Like what?"
"The job."
"Nobody's ever asked me that."
"That's not an answer, it's a stall."
"Yeah, I noticed," I said. "Give me a second."
He gave me one. He gave me about four miles, actually, which is more than a second, and there were no mile markers out there worth anything and the dark went on either side like water.
"I like the part where I'm the one who comes," I said.
"...Say more."
"Somebody's on a shoulder at two in the morning in the rain with a car that's not going anywhere and they're scared and everything's ruined, and then there's lights, and the lights are me.
And I get out and I'm calm and I know exactly what to do and in eleven minutes their disaster is a Tuesday.
" I shrugged. "That's the whole job. Everything else is straps. "
Ash didn't say anything for a while.
"What," I said.
"Nothing."
"Say it."
"I was thinking that if you'd said that at my table," he said, "thirteen men would have voted you in on the spot."
"I don't want in your club."
"I didn't say you did. I said you'd have gotten in."
"That's the same sentence with a different hat."
"Little bit," Ash said.
We stopped in Toledo for fuel and I bought a bag of sunflower seeds and a coffee, and Ash came out with a hot dog that had been on the roller since the Clinton administration.
"Absolutely not," I said.
"What?"
"Not in the cab."
"It's food."
"It's a decision."
"You have a rule about hot dogs."
"I have a rule about smells," I said. "I live in there four nights a week. You know what stays? Everything. Everything stays. In 2019 a man ate an egg sandwich in that seat and I can still find it in cold weather."
He looked at the hot dog. He looked at me. He ate it standing up in the parking lot at two-forty in the morning in nineteen degrees, in a leather vest, with the dignity of a man taking communion, and I stood there drinking my coffee and I laughed so hard I had to put a hand on the fender.
"You're a lot of fun," he said, chewing.
"I've been told."
"By who?"
"Nobody. Ever. Not once in my life."
"That tracks," Ash said.
Somewhere around Monroe he said, out of nothing:
"Cormac's the one who taught me to read."
I kept my eyes on the road, which is the correct response to a man handing you something.
"You could read at fifteen."
"I could get through a sign. I couldn't get through a page." He had his boots up on the toe kick. "Nobody ever caught it. You move enough times, everybody assumes the last school handled it. And Cormac figured it out inside a month because he'd hand me a work order and I'd go quiet."
"What'd he do?"
"Read out loud at me. Every night. Whatever was in the house. Manuals, mostly — he had a Chilton for a Ford he didn't own — and then paperbacks off the rummage table, and he never once said it was a lesson. He'd just say, sit down, this one's stupid, you'll like it."
"How long?"
"Two years."
"That's a lot of nights."
"He was a lot of man," Ash said.
I let a mile go by.
"That's why you brought a book into church," I said.
"...What?"
"You had a paperback face-down on the table in a meeting. Nobody else in that room had anything. That's not a reading habit, Ash, that's a carrying habit."
The dash lights are green in Delores. They put a strange color on a face.
"Huh," he said.
"You didn't know that."
"I did not know that," he said, "and I'd like the record to show it's been four hours."
Michigan came up around four and by then the weather had started doing what weather does above a certain latitude in February, which is that it stops being weather and starts being terrain.
"Your bike would be wrong for this," I said.
"My bike's fine."
"Your bike would be very wrong for this."
"It's a Road King."
"I've pulled four Road Kings out of ditches and every single one of them had a guy nearby telling me it was fine," I said.
"That's anecdotal."
"That's four," I said, and he shut up, and about twenty minutes later, at a place where the road went from wet to that gray-black sheen that means the surface is now a suggestion, he said, quietly, "Okay, yeah, the bike would be wrong for this," and I did not say anything at all, and I have never in my life felt better.
Grayling at five-fifteen. Everything closed. Everything.
"There's a place in Gaylord," Ash said, "but it's another forty and this is going to get worse before it gets light."
"There's a motel back there."
"Was that a motel?"
"It had a sign with a moose on it."
"That's a strong indicator."
"Can I ask what you're going to do," Ash said, "if she says no?"
"Marchand?"
"Marchand."
"She won't say no. You've told me eleven times that nobody up there says no."
"Right. So what do you do when everything's a yes?"
I thought about it for a mile of unplowed county road at five in the morning, which is a genuinely stupid place to think.
"You count the yeses," I said. "That's all.
If a place says yes to everything, then the yeses stop meaning anything and the only real information left is what they say yes with.
Paper. Access. Time. Somebody's going to hand me something, Ash, because handing things over is their whole personality, and I'm going to read every page of it. "
"And if there's nothing in it?"
"Then I'll have driven nine hours for nothing, which is Tuesday."
"Ten and a half," said Ash. "In Delores."
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Don't use her name to be charming. That's a tool, and you don't get tools yet."
The Antler Rest had eleven units, nine of which were dark, and a night man who came out of a back room in a Carhartt over pajama pants and was so happy to see us I thought he might cry.
"One or two?" he said.
"Two," I said.
"I got one."
"You have eleven rooms."
"I got one heated," he said. "Boiler's been out since Thursday. Whole east side's froze. I got six, and six has a wall unit, and that's the situation."
I stood there in a lobby with a moose on the sign at five in the morning and thought several unkind things about the universe's sense of humor.
"Two beds?" Ash said.
"Two beds," the man said.
"Fine," I said.
Room six had two beds, a wall unit that sounded like a man clearing his throat, a painting of a canoe, and carpet with a history.
I took the bathroom first, came out in a T-shirt and sweats, and got in the far bed.
Ash had taken his boots off and was sitting on the near one with his back against the headboard and his vest folded over the chair, and in a white long-sleeve shirt with no leather on him he looked about ten years younger and considerably less like an argument.
"Don't say anything about this," I said.
"About what?"
"About the one room. I'd like it noted that I'm not going to make a thing of it and I'd like you to not make a thing of it either."
"Okay."
"Good."
"It's a good painting," Ash said.
"It's a terrible painting."
"There's a canoe."
"There's half a canoe. It goes off the edge. That's the whole complaint." I punched the pillow into a shape. "Turn off the light."
He turned off the light.
The wall unit cleared its throat. Somewhere out on the highway a plow went by, and the sound of a plow at five in the morning is one of the four or five sounds in the world I actually like.
"Wren."
"What."
"When we get there tomorrow." A pause. "You're going to walk in and it's going to be nicer than anything you've ever been in. It's going to smell like bread. There's going to be a fire. And every single person is going to be so glad you came."
"Okay."
"I want you to know that ahead of time, because when it happened to me I didn't have it ahead of time, and I lost about four hours to being charmed."
"I don't get charmed."
"Everybody gets charmed. That's what charm is. It's the thing that works on people who don't get charmed."
I lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling of the Antler Rest.
"Ash."
"Yeah."
"If he says he wants to stay."
The wall unit did its thing. He took long enough answering that I knew he'd already thought about it, many times, probably in a truck, probably at night.
"Then it's legal, and it's voluntary, and there's nothing to hit," he said.
"That's not an answer."
"No," Ash said. "It's the problem."
Here's the part I'd change if I could go back, and I've thought about it more than I'd like.
Six feet away, in the dark, a man I'd known for eleven hours had just told me the truth twice in one day when a lie would have cost him nothing, and my whole body knew it, and I lay there with my hands on my stomach staring at half a canoe and did absolutely nothing about it.
Nothing happened in room six of the Antler Rest.
I've had things happen to me that bothered me less.