7. Rook
ROOK
"He never changed it," she says.
"He never changed it because he cannot conceive of me using it.
That is his whole flaw. He thinks nine years of taking orders about a route turns a man into a route.
" I go down the drive lane with the headlights off.
"Unit one twenty-four. There is a camera on the office and nothing back here.
Six minutes inside. If a vehicle comes down that lane, you get in the truck and you leave and you do not stop until Ferris. "
"That's not going to happen."
"Say yes."
"I'm going to say yes and we both know it's a lie."
She is a menace. That is the correct word and a rancher out of Beaver Creek got there before me.
The lock is a disc padlock and it takes forty seconds. Inside there is a rolled carpet and a set of golf clubs and a gun safe bolted to a pallet, and on top of a plastic tote, unlocked, not even hidden, a grey steel lockbox with a handle.
He has never hidden it. He has kept it here for nine years, thirty feet from a golf bag, because a man who believes he cannot be reached does not bother.
I take it and I close the door and I put the padlock back on and I lock it, which she asks me about later, and the answer is that it will be ten days before he goes and looks, and ten days is a lifetime.
There is a gravel lot on the edge of Redcliff where the truck route comes in off the highway, and I pull off and set the brake and put the box on the hood.
She opens it.
Nine hundred and forty-one pieces of paper.
Original manifests, carbon copies, bills of lading, a photocopy of the carrier authority with the renewal stapled to it, four years of it, and a manila envelope with a rubber band around it that has Overbeck's own handwriting on the front, which says COBB.
She takes them out in stacks. She goes through them slowly. The sun is not up yet and there is that long grey light coming from behind the Cypress Hills and the air is cold enough to hurt the inside of the nose.
Her signature is on every single one. Round and open. The little flourish on the D.
On one of them, dated March of the year Tobias died, there is a gold star sticker in the corner.
She makes a sound.
"I put a star on it," she says. "I put a star on it because I thought somebody was going to open an envelope and have a bad day and I could make it four percent better."
"Delaney."
"Nine hundred and forty-one loads and I was in every one of them.
" She is holding the stack against her middle with both arms. "I have been at the center of the only thing anybody in this county is scared of and I have been sitting behind a counter for four years wondering why nobody comes for my birthday. "
The wind takes the top sheet off the hood and she catches it out of the air without looking.
"Give me the lighter," she says.
I give her the lighter.
She does it in the gravel, in a pile, feeding it in handfuls the way you feed a burn barrel, and the paper goes up fast because paper does, and the light comes off it orange and swings her shadow out long across the lot, and I stand there with the sun coming and let a woman burn four years of federal counts out of existence forty feet from a highway.
She feeds in the manila envelope with her name on it last.
Then she stands up and turns around and comes at me.
She does not stop at the distance she has been keeping for four days.
She comes into the space and takes two fistfuls of my cut and goes up on her toes and kisses me, and her hands are shaking so badly I can feel it through the leather, and her mouth is hot and tastes like smoke, and she has done it first, and she has done it without asking, and every alarm I have installed in myself since 2019 goes off at once and then, all together, quits.
I get a hand into her hair at the back of her skull.
I break it. Six inches. That is as far as I can make myself go.
"Delaney."
"Don't." Her eyes are enormous.
"You need to hear this one time and then I am never going to say it again.
" My hand is still in her hair and I have gone completely still, and she has stopped breathing, and there is a fire going out behind her in the gravel.
"I have controlled every variable in my life for eighteen years.
Every route. Every window. Every man at that table and where he stands and how far he is from a door.
It is the only reason I am alive and it is the only reason this club is alive. "
"I know."
"If you keep going, I stop. All of it. I stop being careful with you and I stop being polite about any part of it, and you do not get a version of me that hands things back. That is the whole warning. That is everything I have."
She looks up at me in the grey light with her hair in my fist.
"Rafe," she says. "I opened at six every day for nine years and nobody ever wanted anything from me that had teeth in it."
And she pulls me down.
The sleeper is a day cab, which means there is no sleeper, which means it is the bench and the cold coming through the glass and the seed cap on the floor by the shifter and the dog put out on the driver's side with the door shut and an apology she will not accept.
Her coat goes. The property cut goes on the back of the seat and I put it there myself, deliberately, because I want to know what she is under it and not what she is wearing.
She has a burn across the back of one hand from the paper and I take that hand and I hold the wrist and I go over the burn with my mouth first, before anything else, and she makes a noise like she has been struck somewhere internal.
"Say Rafe," I tell her.
"Rafe."
"Again."
She says it again and it comes apart in the middle.
I have thought about the shape of her since I stood in the doorway of a feed store and lied to myself about the word assess and I have filed it and refused to look at the column, and the column is open now and it turns out to be everything.
She is soft through the hips and strong through the shoulders from years of hauling fifty pound sacks, and she has a farmer's tan that stops hard at the collar and the elbow, and the skin under it has never been out in the world, and that undoes something in me I did not know was load-bearing.
I take my time. She does not want me to and I do it anyway, because control is the only currency I have ever had and I am spending all of it on going slow, and by the time I have her out of everything she is saying my name in a way that has stopped having consonants.
She reaches for my shirt and I catch her wrists.
"Ask me," I say.
She goes still. She understands immediately, which is the thing about her, she understands everything immediately.
"Rafe. Can I touch you."
And a man who has not been touched without flinching since a phone call in July of 2019 says yes, out loud, in a truck cab in Alberta, and lets a woman put her hands on the scar that goes down under the collar and follow it all the way to where it stops.
After that I stop being polite.
I told her I would and I do. I take her mouth and I take her hands and put them where I want them and hold them there, and I get a fistful of her hair and use it, and every single time I do something that would put another woman on the other side of the cab, she arches into it and makes a sound and comes further in.
I say things to her I have never said to anybody. Low, in Spanish, half of it, because it comes out of the older part of me and I have no governor on it, and she does not know one word of it and it goes through her like current anyway, and she says say it again, so I say it again.
Mine is a word I have never used about a person. I use it four times.
The window fogs. The cold comes through the door and stops a foot in.
There is stubble field going gold outside and a highway forty feet off and neither of us hears a single vehicle, and I have both hands on her and I am not tracking exits, and that has not happened to me one time in eighteen years.
At the end she has my face in both of her cracked-up hands and she is looking at me, right at me, and refusing to close her eyes, and that is the part that finishes me. She holds my eyes through the whole thing. She has decided to be a witness.
"There you are," she says.
Afterward there is a long time where nothing gets said.
She is half under my coat with her back to me and my arm across her and the burn on her hand under my thumb, and she is doing something with her breathing that I recognize because I do it too, which is trying to make a thing last by being very still inside it.
The fire in the gravel is down to a black patch and a curl of smoke going sideways.
"So the cover story," she says. "For the way back."
"There is no cover story."
She goes rigid.
"Listen to what I said." I turn her by the shoulder so she has to look at me. "The cover is finished at the border. It ends at the line. Once we are south of Wild Horse there is nothing to keep up, no clerk to convince, no officer at a window, no story."
"Right."
"And I have no intention of behaving like it."
Her eyes come up.
"You are going to hand that cut back to Warden," I say, "because it is a costume and he was right and you should never have to wear a lie on your back.
And then I am going to go to the table and ask Diesel for a real one with my name on it and I am going to bring it to your store, in the daylight, in front of that entire town, and you can tell me no in front of them too if that is what you want.
But I am not going back to buying diesel from you at four in the afternoon.
That version of my life is over. It ended in a gravel lot. "
She puts her hand over her mouth.
"Say something," I tell her.
"I'm doing arithmetic."
"On what."
"On how many gold stars I'm going to have to put on you." Her eyes are streaming and she is grinning like a lunatic. "It's a lot, Rafe. It's going to look ridiculous."
I get her dressed. I get the dog back in. I get us on the highway south with the sun all the way up and her boots on the dash and her hand on the back of my neck, which she asks permission for, once, and never has to ask again.
Forty miles later I remember January nine, and Bakken, and a man with her middle name in his mouth.
I do not say anything. I put both hands on the wheel.