Chapter 18 Ask me for something
The flatbed was on the frontage road at the bottom of Kerr with the engine off and the hazard lights going, parked the way a man parks when he has not decided yet whether he is staying.
Maeve came down the three streets of her own town with two hundred people behind her in a hall — the hundred and ten who had been asked in the first place and ninety more who had come for the story — and the white afternoon going yellow at the edges, and she did not run and she did not look back, and when she got to the truck Hitch was already at the passenger door with his hand on the handle, waiting to see if she wanted it opened.
“I’m not going to Trosper,” she said.
“I know it.”
“I’m going up the pass to a room I pay for.”
“I know that too.” He opened the door and stood out of the way of it. “Ninety miles. You want it quiet or you want me talking, either one.”
She got up into the cab. It smelled of hot oil and dust and the paper of a hundred recovery sheets, and it was the second time in twenty-one days that she had climbed into a vehicle in Verlon with eleven dollars in her pocket, and this time she had picked it.
“How did you know to be here,” she said.
“Girl on the counter at the fuel stop sold a ticket east at seven this morning and rang me about it straight off, because I’ve been coming off that road seventeen years and every soul on it has my number.
” He got in and pulled his door to. “And Breaker’s still sitting on Verlon.
Two men on rotation, and one of them watched a bus come in on the frontage at twenty past one.
” He looked straight out through the windshield.
“It’s the same machine that was used on you.
I used it. Then I stood at the back of that hall with my hat in my hands and did not come up there and take one single thing out of your hands, and that is the hardest thing I have ever done inside a building. ”
He drove. He did not talk, and about fifteen minutes on, a few miles above Verlon where the road cuts through the last low ridge before the flats and there is a turnout above it wide enough for a truck to sit with its lights off, he pulled in without asking and put it out of gear.
Below them the flats went out east and brown for thirty miles. The elevator. The water tower. The whole of everything she had ever been told about herself, laid out small enough to put a thumb over.
“I’ve got no rotation,” Hitch said.
“I said that in a room this afternoon.”
“You did.” He had both hands on the wheel of a truck that wasn’t moving, which she had learned was the only place he could put them when something was coming out of him.
“I want you to hear the rest with your own ears and not off a hall full of Verlon. The table wanted to go get it back Tuesday. Two calls and a man in Ellery who owes Deacon from thirty years back and it’s done by Friday.
I stood up and told them no and I meant it and it’s still no. ”
“Why.”
“Because then it’s the club’s, and then you’re the reason it’s the club’s, and you’d be carrying it down Main Street for the rest of your life whether anybody ever said a word out loud or not.
” He turned his head, left ear up, the small courtesy, and this time she did not want to scream at him for it.
“I know what that does to a person. I watched it happen to you in my own kitchen and I did the next one to you myself at seven in the morning.”
“You did.”
“I’m not going to say a word to you about how it was meant.” His jaw worked once. “It doesn’t matter what it was meant as. It was the same machine with a better man running it, and I’d have driven you four hours and sat in the truck outside your aunt’s house feeling like I’d done something decent.”
The wind came up the cut and moved the aerial. Somewhere below, a semi was working down the grade on its engine brake, that long dry stutter that is the only sound out here that means anybody is awake.
“So fix it,” Maeve said.
“No.”
“That’s your whole way. Something’s in a ditch, you get under it and you winch it out.”
“I know what my way is. It’s cost me you once.
” He let go of the wheel. “There’s nothing for me to fix.
Everett Bidwell’s not a load and you’re not stuck and there is not one thing about today that wanted my hands on it.
You did it. Two hundred people and a church hall, and I stood at the back of it and did not move, and that was the hardest thing I have ever done sober. ”
She sat with that.
“What I’ve got,” he said, “is that I don’t want the version of my life where you are a thing that got handled. Not by him. Not by the table. Not by me. I’d rather have nothing.”
“You do have nothing,” Maeve said. “That’s not a hard offer to make.”
And he laughed — one breath of it, out through the nose, which she had not got out of him before — and then his face went as serious as she had ever seen a face go.
“Then here’s the hard one.”
He looked at the wheel for a second, and she watched a man of forty-five try to get a sentence up out of somewhere it had been sat on since he was twenty-five, and understood that whatever it was, it was going to cost him more than the tow list had.
“Ask me for something,” Hitch said. “Anything. Rent, a lift, the whole of a Tuesday. Ask me and let me give it to you and don’t you thank me for it.
” He stopped. He made himself go on. “And let me ask you. That’s the part.
I’ve not asked another living person for anything in twenty years — not Deacon, not my own father, not the county — and I’ve built a whole life out of being the one nobody has to carry, and I’d like to put it down. With you. If you’ll have it.”
The engine ticked. The flats went on being brown.
“I’m not asking to keep you,” he said. “You’d have to keep yourself. I’ve seen you do it.”
Maeve looked at him — at the grey through the black, at the hat on the bench seat, at the piece gone out of the top of that ear, at the hands that had been under half the wrecks in this county and had never once been held out.
And the word was there, where it had been since the sodium lamp and the strap under her jaw and the wind coming off a mountain at fifty miles an hour: the word he had said into her ear over a kitchen table, that she had said yes to because yes was all she had, when yes was a thing she had been handing out since she was twenty-three.
She had it now. That was the difference. She had eleven dollars and a room and a counter shift and a mother still sitting in a folding chair, and for the first time in her whole life she had something to give that had not already been decided for her.
“Mine,” Maeve said.
Hitch went very still.
“Say that again.”
“No.” She shifted around on the bench seat until she had all of him.
“You don’t get to make me say it twice, that’s yours, that was in your kitchen.
I’m saying it the once and I’m saying it first.” She heard her voice come out level and carrying, the same one that had crossed a church hall that afternoon.
“You’re mine, Silas. Not the club’s and not the county’s and not four-in-the-morning’s.
Mine. And I’m not asking you for anything tonight except the whole way up this pass without you saying you’re sorry. ”
He got the truck into gear without ever once taking his eyes off her, which is a thing only a man who has driven a road ten thousand times can do.
“All right,” he said.
Toole Street was dark by the time they came down the grade into Coldwater, the one streetlight at the top of it ticking away to itself every nine seconds the way it had since before she got here, and four doors down a bay window full of banded oak nobody had ever laid.
She went up the outside stairs first. Her key, her lock, her hand.
He stopped at the bottom the way he had on the Friday.
“Are you going to stand down there every time?” Maeve said.
“Till you tell me otherwise.”
“Come up.” She put the door open on the dark and the smell of a room that was hers — paint and cold radiator and the eleven dollars still in the coat on the hook. “That’s me asking.”
He came up.
She did not put the light on. The streetlight at the top of the street came through the blind in bars across the floor and that was enough to see a man by.
Maeve took the cut off his shoulders herself and hung it over the back of the one chair she owned, and turned around, and found she was not frightened at all, only awake all the way through in a way she had not been since she was a child.
“First thing,” she said. “Put your hands on my back and don’t do anything else yet.”
He did it. That was all he did — both palms flat between her shoulder blades, and the heat of them coming through her shirt, and him standing there being still for her. It went on long enough that she heard the valley through the inch of open window, cold pine and nothing.
“You’re shaking,” he said.
“I know. Keep still.”
He kept still.
“Second thing. Sit down on the bed.”
He sat. She got the shirt off herself, and then the rest, in her own time, with him watching from two feet away with his forearms on his knees and every muscle in him locked up like a chain under load, and Maeve discovered a thing about herself in that narrow room that three years of being wanted quietly had never told her: that she liked being looked at when she had said he could.
She put her hand out and he took it, and turned it over, and put his mouth on the knuckle that had split open on a motel wall heater on Thursday morning.
The third thing was harder. She got two words of it out and stopped, and got three, and stopped, and he did not help her and he did not finish it for her, because he had learned that lesson at some cost and had learned it for good.
“Say it,” he said. “I’ve got all night and there’s nothing else I want.”
So she said it. All of it, plainly, out loud, in her own words in her own room, and heard how it sounded, and did not take one syllable of it back. “I want your mouth on my cunt. I want you to lick me until I come.”