4. Delaney
DELANEY
The truck is a green Freightliner day cab with a dry van behind it and a hundred and ninety thousand miles on the odometer, and it takes me forty minutes to decide her name is Peggy.
"Peggy," I say, somewhere past the Milk River bridge. "Because she sounds like a woman who worked forty years at a school district and took no guff from anybody."
Rook does not respond.
That is fine. I have made my peace with it in the first hour.
He drives with two fingers on the bottom of the wheel and his back straight and his eyes going in a pattern I have started to be able to predict, mirror, road, mirror, ditch, road, and every so often the sky.
He has a dog on the floor between us, a hard-eyed old blue heeler named Job that the chaplain handed up into the cab this morning with the instruction that she is very good and does not like men.
Job has her head on my boot. I take this as a professional endorsement.
"He's a good dog," I say. "She. She's a good dog."
"She's a prop."
"She's a good prop." I scratch behind her ear. "That's two things you've said since Havre and both of them were about her, so I'm going to keep talking about the dog."
Something happens at the corner of his mouth. It is over so fast that I am willing to concede I invented it.
The country out here goes on in a way that people from anywhere else find upsetting.
Stubble fields the color of a paper bag, section lines running out to a horizon that is nothing but a change in the quality of grey, a grain elevator every so often standing up out of the flat like the last tooth in a jaw.
Cattle guards. A dead cottonwood with a hawk on it.
Two hundred miles of it between us and the line, and I have lived here my whole life and I have never gone north.
"We should do the story," he says, around Chinook.
"The story."
"You are going to be asked questions at a booth by a man whose job is finding the seam between two people.
If we have not built it out loud, he will find it in four seconds.
" He reaches over and knocks the heater down a notch without looking.
"How we met. How long. What you call me.
What I take in my coffee. Every one of those has been asked at a port of entry and every one of them has sunk a truck. "
"Okay." I sit up. I put my hands on my knees. "Okay, I'm good at this. I've been lying about being fine for thirty-three years."
He does look over then. One second, maybe less, and then back to the road.
"Feed store," he says. "Keep it close to true. True holds up under pressure and invention does not. I came in for diesel. We start there."
"You came in for diesel four hundred times."
"That is the part that is true."
"How long?"
"Two years. Married one." A beat. "Courthouse in Malta. No party. Say it that way and nobody asks about photographs."
"Do I have a ring?"
He reaches into the cup holder and puts a ring in my palm without ceremony, a plain band, warm from being in his pocket, and it fits, and I do not ask how he knows the size of my hand and I am going to think about that for the next four hundred miles.
"What do I call you?"
There is a silence that lasts about a quarter mile.
"Rook is a road name," he says. "A CBP officer who has run the plate and the authority is not going to blink at a road name, half the ag haulers on this line go by something their grandfather called them. Rook is fine."
"That's what everybody calls you."
"Yes."
"What do people who aren't everybody call you?"
The mile markers go by. He has both hands on the wheel now, which I have already learned means something.
"Rafael," he says.
I sit with that. Outside, an antelope herd breaks and runs parallel to us for a stretch and peels away.
"I'm not going to use it," I say. "Unless you tell me to. I just wanted to know it was in there."
He does not answer. But about a minute later he reaches down and turns the heat back up the notch he took it down, on my side only, and I am aware that I have been given something and I have absolutely no idea what.
Here is what I learn between Ferris and Chinook.
He takes his coffee black and he takes it at about a hundred and ninety degrees, which he says out loud like a specification.
He cannot stand to be touched without warning, which I find out when I go to hand him the thermos and my knuckles brush the back of his wrist and every muscle in his forearm goes to stone and the truck drifts four inches toward the fog line before he corrects it.
He apologizes without apologizing, which is a skill, and I say sorry, and he says do not be sorry, say Rafe, and I do not know if that means say my name before you touch me or if it means something else, and I decide it is a rule and I file it.
He knows the name of every drainage between Ferris and Havre.
The towns, no. The water. Cottonwood Creek, Big Sandy, Sage Creek, Peoples Creek, and he says them without being asked, one at a time as we cross them, the way another man might hum.
Twenty miles in I realize he is doing it for me.
He is six hundred miles of silence in a human body and he has found the only thing he owns that is worth handing over and he is handing it over a teaspoon at a time.
I am in serious trouble. I have been in the truck for four hours.
The truck stop is outside Chinook and it is the sort of place with a linoleum counter and pie under a plastic dome and a rack of gloves by the register.
I go in first because Job needs the grass and Rook is fueling. I get a booth. I get two coffees. I am reading a laminated card about the walleye special when a man puts his hand on the back of my seat.
He is maybe fifty. Sunburned neck. Belt buckle the size of a saucer. He smells like Copenhagen and cologne over a shirt that has been worn twice.
"Now that's a shame," he says. "Pretty thing sitting alone with two cups. Somebody stand you up?"
"My husband's pumping fuel."
"Husband." He says it with all the weight taken out of it, the way men do when they have decided a word is decorative.
He does not move his hand off my seat. He leans a little into the space over the table, and I get the smell of him closer, and I do the thing I have done in this county since I was nineteen, which is calculate the number of steps to the door and keep my face pleasant.
"There's a lot of husbands out here," he says. "Few of them show up."
I open my mouth to say something bright and useless.
And Rook is beside me.
He did not come across the room. There was no sound of a chair or a door.
One heartbeat the space to my left is air and the next it is a man, and he is not touching anybody and he has not raised anything, and he is standing at an angle that puts his shoulder between this stranger and the entire rest of my body.
He does not speak.
He looks at the man's hand on the back of my seat. Then he looks at the man's face. That is the whole event. Two looks, maybe a second and a half apiece, and there is something in the second one that I am glad I am seeing from the side and not from the front.
The hand comes off my seat.
"Didn't know," the man says. His mouth has gone loose. "No harm."
"Buckle," Rook says, and nothing else, and the man looks down at his own belt buckle for reasons neither of us will ever know, and then he goes back to the counter and gets his coat and leaves without his food.
Rook sits down across from me. He picks up the coffee. He does not say anything about it, then or later, and when the waitress comes he orders the walleye for both of us because I had been reading the card.
I sit there with my hands around a mug and something enormous going on behind my ribs.
Because here is the thing.
I stopped scanning the room.
Somewhere in that hour, somewhere between the booth and the pie case, I quit doing the arithmetic I have done automatically in every public building I have entered since I was a teenager.
Exits. Distances. Who is between me and the door.
Which man is looking and whether he has stopped.
I have run that program every day of my adult life the way you run your heart, without thinking about it, and today I put it down, because someone else picked it up.
Thirty-three years. I have been the one who makes the coffee and holds the door and buries everybody and opens at six, and I have never once in my entire life been the thing standing behind somebody's shoulder.
"Eat," Rook says.
I eat. I look at him across a linoleum table with a plastic dome of pie behind his head, and I understand that in five days I am going to hand back a costume and drive home and open at six, and that the woman who does that is going to be somebody I have to invent from scratch.