10. Delaney
DELANEY
The club is poorer in the spring than it has been in twenty years and Diesel says so out loud at the table, at church, on a Tuesday morning in April, with everybody sitting there.
I am allowed in the room now. That took some doing and it is still, according to Cinder, technically unresolved, and Cinder is the treasurer and if he wanted it resolved he could resolve it and he has not, which is its own answer.
"The lane is dead," Diesel says. "There is no cut going north to anybody.
That's twelve hundred a month we don't pay, and it's about seven grand a month in freight we don't run, because half those crossings are hot now and Rook has pulled us off them, and I'm going to say the number out loud so nobody has to whisper it in the yard. We are down thirty-one percent."
Nobody says anything. The wind is doing what it does in April, which is worse than February and shorter.
"Poorer is survivable," Diesel says. "That's the whole speech. I've been in a club that made money the other way and I have buried men out of it. We are going to be poor for a while and we are going to be here in five years." He puts his hands on the wood. "Rook. Say the legal part."
Rook stands up with a folder.
He has reading glasses in his hand. He puts them on, in the room, in front of every man at that table, and there is a silence of a very specific quality, and Pike says something under his breath that I do not catch and Deacon hits him in the arm without looking.
"The Cobb authority is dissolved as of the fourteenth of March," Rook says.
"It is gone. There is no carrier by that name.
Delaney has no filing obligation, no officer liability, and nothing outstanding with the department, and we paid a woman in Billings four thousand dollars to make that true instead of doing it ourselves, which was the correct decision and I do not want to hear about the four thousand again.
" He turns a page. "There is a new authority.
It is filed in the name of a Montana LLC, the members are this club, the safety rating is provisional, and the insurance is real insurance that we actually pay for.
Every load is going to be logged. Every log is going to be true. "
"And Freel," Cinder says, because Cinder is the man in this room who asks the question everybody else is hoping went away on its own.
"Freel closed it in February." Rook does not look up from the folder.
"The referral that put him in her store came out of a port of entry, and the officer who made it stopped answering his phone in January, and the woman in Billings sent the department a dissolution and a clean set of books and a very boring letter.
There is no file. I had her check it twice and then I had her check it again in March. "
"That's going to cost us," Harrow says, from the far end.
"It is going to cost us thirty-one percent," Diesel says, and that is the end of that.
I open at six.
The seventh of May, first day in the year the wind comes out of the southwest and means it, and I put the sandwich board out and set the cinder block on it and go back in and turn on the pump, and the sun is coming up over the elevator and the whole store smells like alfalfa and warm dust for the first time since October.
There is a man behind my counter.
He has reading glasses on and his sleeves rolled and my invoice book open in front of him and a coffee at his elbow that he made himself, and he is going through last month's tickets with a pencil, and he has been doing this three mornings a week since the middle of March.
In the front window. In full view of the entire town of Ferris, Montana. Which he apparently no longer cares about even slightly.
Wesley comes in at ten past six for range mineral and stops dead in the doorway and looks at Rook and looks at me and decides, visibly, to say nothing, and that decision lasts him about four seconds.
"Delaney."
"Wesley."
"There's an outlaw doing your books."
"There is."
"Huh," Wesley says, and pays for his mineral, and gets a gold star on his invoice, and goes.
At half past ten Rook takes the glasses off and rubs the bridge of his nose and says the word margin in a tone that means we are going to have a conversation about my pricing on twine, and I tell him the twine is a loss leader, and he says the words loss leader back to me the way another man would say a slur, and we have the whole fight in the middle of the store with two customers in it, and I win, and he goes out to the pump smiling where a witness can see it.
Warden marries us in September in the yard, under the flare stack, with a dog named Job in the front row acting like it is beneath her.
The envelope comes in October.
It is in the mail slot with the seed catalogs, plain white, my name typed. No return address. No postmark at all, which means it never went through the mail, which means somebody stood on my porch.
I open it standing behind the counter at half past six in the morning with a coffee going cold at my elbow.
It is a photograph.
Long lens, grainy, shot from a rise. A green Freightliner at a booth at a rural port of entry, in November light, with a woman in the passenger seat and her hand on her knee and a ring on it, and a man at the wheel with two fingers on the bottom of the wheel, and a supervisory officer leaning one forearm on the sill with his face in the cab.
Somebody was on that hill. Somebody was on that hill in November and has been sitting on this ever since, waiting for the exact morning when it would do the most.
I turn it over.
There is one line on the back, in pen, in a small tight hand.
Ask him what he did in 2019.
I stand there a long time. Out the window the elevator goes gold at the top and the wind starts up and puts the sandwich board over into the road.
I know what he did in 2019. He told me in the dark in a motel outside Medicine Hat with a heater ticking, and it was a phone call, and a drive to Havre, and a closed casket, and nine people in a trailer outside Lordsburg, and a man sitting down with the officers of a club and telling them what the route was going to be from that morning forward.
He told me in the dark. That is the part they are counting on. He told me in the dark, where I could not see his face, and there are two months between a closed casket in July and a man sitting down with officers in September, and he has never once said out loud what he did with them.
Whoever sent this thinks I am the seam.
That is the whole idea of it. Find the wife.
Find the woman who is glad to see everybody.
Put a small doubt in her at half past six in the morning when she is alone, and let it work, because a woman like that has spent her whole life being the person nobody tells anything to, and she will chew on it, and she will start asking, and in four months there will be a crack in that man wide enough to drive a load through.
They have my address. They have my hours. They have a photograph.
What they do not have is any idea at all what I am.
I go to the woodstove in the back corner, the one Tobias put in in 1996 that pulls badly and that I light every morning from the first of October, and I open the door with the poker and the heat comes out at my face.
I feed the photograph in. Then the envelope. I stand there until both of them are nothing but a shape in the coals and then I close the door and set the poker back on its hook.
At ten past seven Rook comes in the front with the wind behind him and a box of pump packing on his shoulder, and he sets it down and puts his glasses on and opens the invoice book, and looks up.
"You put the board back out?"
"It's already in the road," I say. "It's always in the road, Rafe."
"I will build you a better one."
"You will not, you'll build me a magnificent one and it'll weigh ninety pounds and I'll never move it."
He makes a note in the margin of my book about twine that I am going to erase later, and the bell over the door goes, and somebody comes in wanting hog panel.
I get up to help them.
Behind me a man in reading glasses says good morning to a customer without being asked to, which is new, and which took a year, and which nobody in this town except me knows the cost of.
I have buried four people and I have opened at six for ten years and nobody ever wanted anything from me that had teeth in it.
Somebody does now. Somebody out there in the dark north of here has decided I am the soft place in the wall.
They can come.
BEFORE YOU GO!
THANK YOU so much for reading!