Chapter 15 The list
The call came at twenty past eight on Monday morning and he took it standing in the near bay with the phone against his left ear and a ratchet still in his other hand.
It was a woman he had spoken to a thousand times over the years and had never met. Dispatch out of the Ellery yard. She had a voice like a form letter and she had always been decent to him, and she said his name and then she said the sentence, and the sentence had clearly been given to her to say.
“The county’s revising the rotation, effective this morning. You’ll come off the north-end list. There’ll be a letter.”
Hitch turned the ratchet over. Under the rolling door, stood up its usual two feet, a slab of grey lay along the concrete and a cold draught came in at ankle height that nobody in twenty years had done anything about.
“Off it,” he said. “Or down it.”
“Off it.”
“Who’s got the north end.”
A pause with paper in it. “I’m not to discuss the assignments.”
“Sue.” He said it without heat, because there was no heat in him yet; that came later and it came slow, the way it always did.
“There’s sixty miles of Highway 12 between the Verlon cut and the summit and I’m the only truck inside an hour of the top of it.
Who’s coming when a log hauler goes over at four in the morning. ”
“There’s a vendor out of Cutbank has capacity.”
“Cutbank’s fifty minutes off in July.”
“I know,” she said, and he heard, in the way she got the two words out, that she knew exactly how far Cutbank was and had said so to somebody and had been thanked for her input. “I’m sorry, Silas. There’ll be a letter.”
He said thanks and hung up and stood there a while with the radio out of Butte fading in and out over the parts shelves and the compressor kicking in and shuddering out ten seconds later.
Then he went and looked at the board by the shelves — four names in grease pencil and one place where a name had been wiped off years ago and never written over — and could not have said why if a man had asked him.
He was on the grade by nine and in Ellery a little after ten, which was about right for a dry pass in the last of August.
The county yard sat out past the fairground behind eight feet of chain link: gravel stockpiles in windrows, a row of yellow plow trucks nose-in with their blades chained on pallets for the summer, a fuel island.
A shop building with the doors run up, and a smell coming off it of diesel and hot asphalt that he could have picked blindfold out of any smell in the state.
He did not go to the office. The office would have given him a form and a man in a golf shirt and he had come ninety minutes to not be handled.
He went to the shop, where a foreman named Wendell Sparr had been running the north-end crews since before the cable let go on the Verlon cut, and stood in the doorway until Sparr straightened up off a grader tire and saw him and stopped moving.
“Aw, hell,” Sparr said.
“So you knew.”
“Thursday.” Sparr wiped his hands down the front of himself, which did nothing.
He was sixty and had never in his life been any good at this.
“I put my name on a sheet saying the north-end vendor rotation was under review and I want you to hear me say I put it on knowing what it was, because you’ll find that out anyway and I’d rather you had it off me. ”
“All right.”
“It’s not all right.”
“No.” Hitch turned his head a few degrees to get the man’s voice on the good side. “Why.”
Sparr looked past him at the yard for a second. Out on the fuel island a kid was filling a tack truck with the pump handle locked open and not watching it.
“Seventeen years you’ve been on that list on nothing but a phone number,” he said. “Nobody’s ever complained about you. Nobody’s ever going to.” He put his hands in his back pockets. “Silas, who do you think paves the roads?”
Hitch said nothing.
“Chip seal, culvert, curb-and-gutter, the spur out to the transfer station, overlay on Bench Road this fall. Same outfit, every season I’ve been here, and they bid it and they’re cheap and they’re local and there is no earthly reason to go anywhere else.
Now: a man whose family holds four-fifths of the road work in this county does not have to threaten anybody.
He doesn’t have to say one word that would look like anything written down.
He just has to sit in a chair on a Thursday and wonder out loud whether the county’s really got the right vendor on the north end.
” Sparr’s jaw worked. “And a room full of people who’d like to be paving next year wonder it right along with him. ”
“Bidwell.”
“I didn’t say a name and I’m not going to.” Sparr held his eye. “But there’s two of them in this county and only one of them’s had a summer like his.”
The tack truck overflowed out on the island and the kid swore and got it shut.
“Can it come back,” Hitch said.
“Anything can come back. Rotation’s a list, lists get revised.
” Sparr shrugged with everything above his belt.
“It comes back when whoever wondered stops wondering, or when somebody with more to spend than him wonders the other way. That’s the entire machinery, and I’ve watched it work on three outfits in this yard and it has never once been in writing. ”
Hitch nodded. There was nothing in Sparr’s face he wanted to look at any longer.
“Appreciate you telling me.”
“I haven’t told you anything,” Sparr said miserably, and went back to the tire.
He did the arithmetic on the shoulder of the county road with the engine running and a gas-station pen and the back of a recovery sheet, which was the only paper in the truck, and he did it twice, the way he checked a chain.
Eleven hundred and forty a month on the flatbed, forty-one months to go.
The tow list was fourteen, fifteen calls a month in the summer and better than twice that once the ice came, and it was the only part of his year he had never had to go and find.
The private work — the yard calls, the repos out of Yoakum’s, a dropped transmission on a switchback for whoever had a cousin who had his number — was maybe a third of what came in, and it came in when it felt like it, and half of it paid in November for what it did in August.
He ran the truck out to the end of the sheet.
Fuel, tires, the insurance. What the flatbed would bring at auction in a state full of men who already had one, which was less than what he owed on it.
What was in the coffee can in the kitchen of a house nine miles up the pass road that his grandfather had put a roof on.
Four months. Five if he did not eat much and nothing broke.
He sat with the sheet on the wheel and understood, without any particular drama about it, that a man in Verlon had reached across ninety miles and one pass and taken away the only thing he owned that the club had not lent him, and had done it with a chair and an afternoon and a wondering voice, and had not even had to come up here to do it.
And then he understood the other thing, which was worse, and which he had known since twenty past eight and had been driving away from all morning.
The club would get it back. That was settled.
Deacon would put down the glasses and say two sentences.
Vault would cost it out. Ridge would drive his own truck down to Ellery and stand in a room with a sheriff he had not spent in twelve years.
By the middle of September Silas Voyles would be back on the north-end list and would never in his life know what it had cost any of them, because none of them would tell him, because that was how the table did it.
All he had to do was ask.
He folded the sheet into eighths and put it in his shirt pocket and drove home, and did not stop on Toole Street, and then turned around two miles up the pass road and came back and did.
She had a lamp on and the window open and the little radio going.
She came down the outside stairs in her socks, hair up in a knot, a paperback folded backwards in her hand.
She was so pleased to see him standing in the dark at the bottom of somebody else’s stairs that he had to look at the railing for a second.
“You didn’t come up.”
“You didn’t ask me to.”
“I’m asking you to.”
So he went up. She made coffee at nine at night in a two-burner kitchen the size of a horse stall.
She told him about a man from the propane company who had come into the Ember at noon and tried to pay for a $6.
40 lunch with a $100 bill, and about the landlord’s dog, and about a letter from her sister’s husband’s mother, of all people on this earth.
She told it lying half across him on a couch that had come with the room, and laughed twice.
He sat with forty-one months of truck payments in his shirt pocket four inches from where her hand was and said nothing at all about any of it.
It did not even come to him as a thing to decide.
He did not weigh telling her and put it down.
It never got as far as his mouth. She had been in this county sixteen days and had gotten herself a job and a key and a bank card with nobody’s name on it but hers.
If he set this on the table in front of her she would pick it up.
She would pick it up before he had gotten the sentence out — he could see her doing it, she would sit up and put the book down and say right, what do we do — and then she would be carrying it, and it would be hers, and every good thing that happened to her afterwards would have his trouble underneath it.
There was not one man alive he was willing to be owed by. She was at the bottom of a list of nobody.
He left at eleven. She stood in the doorway at the top of the stairs with the light behind her and said come back Wednesday and he said he would.
Tuesday afternoon there were five of them around the table, which was not church and did not have to be: Deacon with his tea going cold, Ridge, Vault, Torch on the arm of a chair, Breaker in the doorway with a parts box on his hip.
Vault said, “Sue Hovda called my phone Friday to ask what north-end vendor meant and I told her I’d find out.”
“It means me,” Hitch said.
Deacon set the mug down.
“Say it out,” he said.
“County pulled the recovery rotation yesterday morning. Effective, no reason given, there’ll be a letter.
” He kept his voice flat and level and got it all out in one go, because he had rehearsed this too, and this time he had the words.
“Foreman down at Ellery told me why without telling me why. It’s Verlon.
It’s the same hand that did the job and the sheriff and the paper. ”
The room came awake around him.
“Friday, Gil,” Ridge said.
Vault kept his eyes on the grain of the table in front of him. “I know.”
“Wednesday you sat in that chapel and said you’d never in your life been able to hand a thing over. Friday you took a phone call about a man at this table.” Ridge was not loud about it. “That’s the same sin with the same hands.”
“It is,” Vault said. “It goes on the sheet under the other one.”
“Sit down,” Deacon said. “Gil, get a sheet.”
“No.”
It stopped everything. He had never said that word in this building in his life.
“I’m not asking,” Hitch said.
Torch said, “Nobody asked you to ask, for fuck’s sake —”
“I know what happens next. That’s why I’m standing up.
” He had his hat in his hand again; he noticed it and made himself stop turning it.
“Ridge goes down and spends the truce. Or we lean on somebody who paves for a living and then this club has hold of a county contract, which is the exact thing we’ve spent ten years not having hold of.
Or it comes out of the shop. And it’s for my truck payment.
” He shook his head once. “Six days ago I stood in that chapel and said we’d arranged a woman’s life at a table she wasn’t at.
I’m not going to turn around and have this table arrange mine. ”
“That’s not the same thing,” Ridge said. “She didn’t ask. You’d be asking.”
“It’s near enough the same thing from where I’m standing.”
Deacon looked at him for a long moment with his glasses up on his head.
“Silas. Sit down and ask me.”
“No,” Hitch said, “thank you,” and put his hat on and walked out of the nave and down the aisle past the pool table and out into the light.
He sat in the flatbed in the gravel for a long time with the keys in his hand and did not start it.
The thing about a recovery was that you never argued with the load.
The load was the weight it was; you did not stand on the shoulder resenting it.
You worked out where it wanted to go and you got everything soft out of the way first, and then you put the winch on it and you did not care how it looked while it came.
Four months. Five. Somewhere inside that, Bidwell would run out of chairs to sit in and afternoons to wonder in, and the Verlon thing would finish the way these things finished, and the list would come back or it would not and he would drive for somebody else.
He could live through all of it. He had lived through worse with a piece off the top of his head.
What he could not do was live through it with her in a room over Toole Street four doors down from a bay window with the oak stacked under it, in a town where every man who wanted to be paving next year now knew exactly whose girl she was and exactly what it cost a man to have her.
He could not do it with her close enough to see him go under, because she would not watch it.
She would do something. She would stand up in a room and do something, on his account, and it would go on his sheet, and it would never come off.
Her aunt was in Trosper — she had told him that herself, in his own kitchen, over a split knuckle. Four hours, over the state line, high desert and a rail siding and a brick school. Nobody in Ellery County had any business there at all.
He turned it over once and found there was nothing on the other side of it, because the only two moves that were not this one were putting it to the table and putting it to her, and he had just done the first and would never do the second.
Dara, he thought. She’ll go for Dara. She’d go for Dara in her socks.
He did not have the far end of it. He looked for it twice and it came out empty both times: there was no house in Trosper with her sister in it and no sentence he could say in that yard when they got there that would be anything other than the truth arriving four hours late.
Four hours of road was the plan. That was all it had ever been, and he was going to do it anyway, knowing the size of it, and that was the part he would never be able to put in front of her and did not intend to try.
Hitch put the key in and started the truck, and pulled out onto the dead highway, and the arithmetic in his shirt pocket sat there against his chest the whole way up the pass and never once turned into a sentence he could have said to anybody.