Chapter 11 #4
"For about eleven weeks before the lights went out I did almost nothing," Marchetti said. "I drove past twice a week. I ate in Heber. I walked the ridge above your place four times because it's public land and because I wanted to know the ground."
"And after?"
"After, I moved onto it."
Joe sat down on the arm of the couch.
"The knob," he said. "The cigarette butts."
"That's Crowe's men. I was two hundred yards above them and they never knew I was there."
"The rock shelf."
"That's mine."
"And the shot past my ear."
Marchetti was quiet.
"Yes," he said.
"Explain that. Right now, because that's the thing I cannot get past."
"I was hired to be near you and I'd been near you for six weeks and I could not stay near you forever without somebody finding me," Marchetti said.
"And you were standing in the middle of a road twenty yards from Arlan Crowe with nine men behind him, and you had walked out there with your hands empty to pick up a dead man's gun off the gravel."
"So?"
"So I had to know what you were."
"That's not an answer."
"Mister Henfry, it's the only answer." Marchetti leaned forward.
"I had a choice. Either I introduce myself to you in October, and you spend the winter with a stranger in your house who you don't trust, or I find out in one second whether you're a man who runs, and then I stay on the hill and do my job."
"And if I'd run?"
"Then I'd have come down the next morning and knocked on the door," Marchetti said, "and taken your wife and your children out of this valley to Kamas and put them in a rented house with the doors locked, which was the plan I had written down and which I am glad I did not have to use."
Joe stared at him.
"You had a plan to take my family."
"I had a plan to save your family," Marchetti said. "There's a difference, and you're the only man on this mountain who'd see it."
Crowe, from the doorway, said, "He's not wrong."
Everyone turned.
Arlan Crowe was leaning against the frame with his arms folded.
"What?" said Joe.
"He's not wrong and you know he's not wrong." Crowe came in. "Mister Marchetti."
"Mister Crowe."
"You put a round through my hat."
"That wasn't me."
"I'm aware of that now," Crowe said. "But you put one past his ear on a road in October, and I've been trying to work out what it was for since it happened, and I'd like to tell you what I decided."
"Go ahead."
"I decided it was a test," Crowe said, "and I decided it was a good one, and I decided that whoever ran it was somebody I would very much rather have on my side of a valley than the other."
Marchetti almost smiled.
"That's generous."
"It's not generous. It's inventory."
Joe rubbed his face with both hands.
"All right," he said. "Marchetti."
"Sam."
"Sam. The note. The freeze. The third group."
"That one's simple," Marchetti said. "I got shot on the eleventh."
"By who?"
"Teague's people, on the river bottom, at about four in the morning. I was down there because I'd figured out what the bottom road was for and I wanted to see if anybody else had."
"And?"
"And somebody had. There were eleven men on that flat with two trucks doing a route survey, and one of them was a lot better in the dark than I expected, and I took one through the flank at about forty yards and had to go in the water to break contact."
"You went into the creek in November with a gunshot wound."
"For about four hundred yards, yes."
Joe looked at Imogen.
"That's how he's alive," Imogen said slowly. "That's why there was no sepsis for four days. He iced the wound for half an hour before he ever packed it."
"That was not the plan," said Marchetti. "That was me running out of options."
"It was still correct."
"It was still very cold."
Joe got up and walked to the window and looked at the sky.
The cloud was lower.
"So you came to the door twice," he said.
"Because by the twelfth I knew what was coming and I could not sit on a rock about it anymore." Marchetti shifted again. "And I want to say something about that, because your wife has been kind to me and I've watched her for six weeks and I owe her the truth."
"Go ahead."
"I could have written a clearer note," he said. "I wrote four lines on a page torn out of a notebook and I thought I was being efficient and instead I frightened her for eleven days. That was bad work. If your father in law were alive he'd have taken it out of my pay."
Imogen laughed. It came out wet.
"He absolutely would have," she said.
"Eight hundred dollars," Marchetti said, "and a lecture about how a job half communicated is a job not done, in two languages."
Imogen's head came up.
"English and profanity," she said.
"English and profanity," Marchetti agreed.
And that was the moment Joe watched his wife stop being afraid of the man on the cot.
They let him sleep after that.
Joe went out into the yard and stood in the cold and tried to fit thirty one people and eleven weeks and a woman named Junie into a shape that made sense, and could not.
Crowe came and stood next to him.
"You believe him?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because he told me about the plan to take my family," Joe said. "A liar leaves that out."
"That's good reasoning."
"It's the only kind I've got left."
Crowe looked out at the timber.
"Then here's the next problem," he said.
"I know what the next problem is."
"Say it anyway."
Joe pointed at the sky.
"That's a storm," he said. "That's the first real one. When it lands, the county road is gone until March for anything on wheels, and there are nine hundred tons of wheat nine miles away with four hundred gallons of diesel pooled around the base of it and eleven men to the south who want it
destroyed."
"How long have we got?"
"Thirty six hours. Maybe forty eight."
"And how many trips?"
Joe had been doing this number since dawn.
"Your flatbed does two tons a trip on that road," he said. "Loaded, in the cold, on gravel, call it fifty minutes each way plus loading."
"Two hours a round trip."
"Two hours a round trip. Eleven hours of light."
"Five trips."
"Five trips a day if nothing breaks. Ten tons."
Crowe did the rest of it out loud.
"Ten tons is twenty thousand pounds," he said. "Thirty one people at a pound of wheat a day is thirty one pounds a day. That's six hundred and forty five days."
Joe turned and looked at him.
"That's the whole thing," he said.
"That's the whole thing," Crowe agreed. "Ten tons in two days and this bench is fed until the summer after next."
"And the other eight hundred and ninety tons?"
"Belongs to the board and eleven hundred families and I meant every word I said about it," Crowe said. "But Mister Henfry, if that bin burns next week or if that road closes tonight, then what's on this mountain is what we've got, and I would like there to be twenty thousand pounds of it."
Joe stood there for a long moment.
"We'd be taking it without the board," he said.
"The board voted four to nothing in Harlan Batey's front room and Harlan Batey is asleep in your bed with a split scalp."
"That's not a vote for us taking ten tons for ourselves."
"No," Crowe said. "It isn't."
Joe looked down at his boots.
"Then we don't do it that way," he said.
"How do you want to do it?"
"We take thirty one people's worth. Not a pound more. We weigh it on the scale, we write it in the book, and Harlan Batey signs it or it doesn't move."
"He's concussed."
"Then he signs it tomorrow and we load tonight and we don't turn a wheel until he does."
Crowe looked at him with an expression Joe could not read.
"That costs us eleven hours," he said.
"Yes."
"In a thirty six hour window."
"Yes."
"You understand that if the storm comes early, that piece of paper kills people."
"I understand that if we take it without the paper, I'm the man who stole the wheat," Joe said, "and then everything I said on that slope this afternoon was noise."
Crowe put his hands in his pockets.
"All right," he said.
"That's it?"
"Mister Henfry, I have spent six weeks not touching that elevator for exactly that reason. You think I'm going to argue with you about it now?"
They woke Harlan Batey at four in the afternoon.
Imogen did not want to. She said the word concussion eleven times in about two minutes and she made Joe say back to her, out loud, what the signs of a worsening bleed looked like.
Then she let him in.
Batey was gray and his eyes were bad and he listened to the whole thing sitting up against the headboard with his hands in his lap.
When Joe finished, the old man was quiet for a while.
"How many people on this mountain?" he said.
"Thirty one."
"And you want twenty thousand pounds."
"I want what thirty one people eat in the amount of time it takes for that road to open again, plus a margin, and I want you to tell me what that number should be instead of me telling you."
Harlan Batey thought about it.
"Twenty thousand's too much," he said.
Joe felt Crowe go still beside him.
"Say the right number," Joe said.