Chapter Twenty · Cutter
CHAPTER TWENTY
CUTTER
Hollis Teague came up to the office at five-forty on the eighteenth, after the crew had cleared out, and stood in the doorway with his cap in his hand and did not come in.
I have known that man twenty-two years. He has never once stood in a doorway.
“He come back,” Hollis said.
I put the pen down.
“When.”
“Today. Twenty past four. I was on the brake press and Denny had already gone.” He turned the cap around in his hands. “Same as before. Walked in off the lot. No vehicle. Cap and that coat.”
“How’d he look.”
“Same. Fifty, sixty. Working hands.” Hollis frowned at the floor, working at it.
“I’ll tell you one thing I noticed and I don’t know if it’s worth a nickel.
He’s got a habit. When he’s thinking he taps his knuckle on whatever’s next to him.
Twice. Not a nervous thing, more like a man testing a panel for hollow.
He done it on my bench and he done it on the door frame going out. ”
“That’s worth more than a nickel,” I said, and wrote it down, because Grace has taught us all to write things down.
“Did he give a name this time.”
“No. And I didn’t ask, same as before, and I want you to know that was on purpose and not on account of nerves.
” Hollis finally came through the door and sat down heavy in the chair across from me.
“He said, and this is close to word for word: *You’ve had some time.
I’ve had some too. I hear the yard’s been busy.
* And then he said, *I hear Fincastle’s expensive. *”
The office went completely still.
“He said Fincastle.”
“He said Fincastle.” Hollis’s one eye came up. “My girl’s in Fincastle, Cutter. Her mortgage is in Fincastle. Her husband’s been gone off that job since March, and there is not a man in this county who don’t know it, and there is not a soul outside this county who has one reason to.”
I got up and shut the door.
“Tell me the rest.”
“He said the work is the same as before. Partition work. Reefers. Fit’s the thing.
” Hollis stopped and started again. “And then he told me something he did not have to tell me, and I have been chewing on it the whole way up your steps. He said the work would happen at the shop in Buchanan. He named the place. He said the power’s back on and the lease is signed and there’s a bay clear, and he said it like a man handing over a piece of himself on purpose. ”
“That’s a test.”
“That’s a test,” Hollis agreed. “He give me an address that ties him to a thing the government’s already photographed.
If I run to you with it, and you run to a federal agent, and the government goes up there and finds a clean empty shop with a lawful lease, then he knows exactly what Hollis Teague is and exactly what this club does with a gift, and it cost him one month’s rent. ”
I stood at that window a while looking down at the yard, at the scale house and the crusher and forty years of my family’s name on a fence, and thought about a man in a canvas coat standing at a public rail on the eighth with a pair of binoculars, unhurried, in ninety-one-degree heat, watching sixteen of us sit in the open all day.
“Or,” I said, “it isn’t a test at all.”
“How’s that.”
“He’s short of capacity and he’s on a schedule. Eight, nine, twenty-two, twenty-three, every month since May, no missed windows. That’s a man with customers.” I turned around. “Maybe he named Buchanan because he’s got to have a bay and a welder by September and he has run out of quiet ways to ask.”
“That’d make him careless.”
“That’d make him busy,” I said. “Which is the only kind of careless a man like that ever gets.”
“What did you tell him.”
“I told him I’d think on it. He said take your time and don’t take too much.
” Hollis rubbed his mouth. “Then he done the thing again. Walked my rack on the way out and put his hand on every piece of plate I’ve got, and this time he said a number.
Said, *You’re four short of what you’d need.
* And he was right, Cutter. I counted after he left.
I am four sheets short of what that job would take, and I could not have told you that before he said it. ”
Grace got there at seven. Diesel and Rook came up from the clubhouse. Nobody sat.
Grace made Hollis say the whole thing again from the beginning while she wrote, and then made him say it a third time, stopping him on details.
What direction he came from. Which hand he tapped with.
Whether the coat was buttoned. Whether he ever touched anything besides the plate stock, and the answer to that one was no, not once, not the bench, not the door handle going out, he pushed it with his forearm.
Hollis bore all three passes better than most men would have, and at the end of the third one he said, “You’ve done this before,” and Grace said, “Nineteen years,” and that was the only personal thing anybody said in that office.
“All right,” she said, when she was done writing. “Hollis, before anybody in this room says a word about what happens next, I want you to hear four things from your lawyer, and I am your lawyer for this, separately, and I’ll paper that tonight so nobody can ever say the club’s counsel handled you.
“One. You have committed no crime. A man asked you to do something and you said you would think about it. There is nothing on you.
“Two. You are under no obligation to any person in this room. Not to Diesel, not to this club, not to the county. You can walk out that door tonight, tell the man no, sell your house and move to Fincastle, and there is not one man here who gets to have an opinion about it.”
Rook said, “That’s right,” from the wall, which for Rook is a speech. Hollis looked over at him, surprised, and Rook said, “I mean it. Nobody says a word,” and went back to being furniture.
“Three. If you go forward, it will not be with this club. It will be with the government, in a room, with me sitting next to you, and it will be slow and it will be documented and you will be told what you may and may not say, and if you deviate one word from that you can destroy the case and expose yourself.” Grace put her pen down.
“And four. The man has now named a location, a workload, and your daughter’s town in a single conversation.
Whatever else he is, he is not a person who says four things by accident.
He is telling you he knows the shape of your life. ”
Hollis sat there with his cap in his hands.
“I know what he’s telling me,” he said.
Diesel spoke for the first time.
“Hollis. Look at me.” He waited until the old man did.
“In November I stood in a room and told this county that the Copperhead Motorcycle Club was never again going to ask a man to carry something for us. That wasn’t a speech.
That was a promise with sixteen votes behind it, and if I break it for you I’ve broke it for everybody, and this club goes right back to being what it was.
” He put both hands on the back of a chair.
“So I’m not going to ask you. And I’m going to say the next part clear so nobody misremembers it later: if you say no tonight, tomorrow morning you’re the foreman of my fab bay, same as this morning, and I will personally break the jaw of any man who says otherwise in my hearing.
That’s the offer. That’s the whole offer. ”
“And if I say yes?”
“Then you’re not doing it for us,” Diesel said. “You’re doing it for a nine-year-old on a porch behind mile marker 173, and you’ll be doing it with a federal agent and a lawyer and about nine hundred pages of paper, and I’ll be sitting in my own kitchen unable to do one thing to help you.”
Hollis Teague looked at the floor of that office for a long minute. Down in the yard the last truck of the day went over the scale and Renata’s window slid shut.
“Y’all want to know what I’ve thought about since July,” he said.
“It ain’t the money he offered me in May, and it ain’t the money now.
It’s that I said no in May and it didn’t matter one bit.
He went and got what he wanted somewheres else and twenty-two people died anyway, and every one of them died in the two days after a truck sat somewhere on a road I have driven my whole life.
” He looked up. “A man says no and thinks he’s clean.
That’s the part I got wrong, and it took me all summer. ”
“My wife died in that house in Fincastle,” he said.
“In the front room. My girl was twenty-two and she took care of her mother for nine months and never once complained, and then her and her husband bought the place off me for what I owed on it, because I couldn’t be in it.
” He looked up. “That’s the house he’s talking about, whether he knows it or not. ”
Nobody said anything.
“Y’all keep telling me what I’m not obligated to do.
” He put his cap on. “I built the county’s bridges.
My welds are holding up the low-water crossing at Wilkes Ford right now with school buses on it.
I’ve had one skill my whole life and a fella just walked into my bay and told me my skill is the thing standing between him and every trailer he’s got to run.
” He stood up. “That ain’t a burden, Grace.
That’s the first time in about four years anybody’s told me I’m necessary. ”
“Hollis,” Grace said. “Sit down for one more minute.”
“No, ma’am. If I set down I’ll think about my girl, and I’ve been thinking about my girl since twenty past four.” He looked at Diesel. “Set it up. Whatever the government wants. I’ll say what I’m told to say and I’ll not say one word past it.”
Grace called Teal from the office phone in front of all of us, on speaker, which is how she does everything now, and told him in about ninety seconds without one word of editorial.
Teal asked three questions. Did Hollis consent to speak with the government voluntarily and with counsel.
Had anyone in the club offered Hollis anything of value.
Had anyone in the club told Hollis what to say.
“No, no, and no,” Grace said, “and I’d like all three of those on your report tonight, Marcus, in that order, because when this gets to a courtroom the first thing the defense will say is that a motorcycle club ran him.”
“It’ll be in the report tonight,” Teal said, and then, after a second: “Ma’am, does he understand what he’s stepping into?”
Grace looked across the office at Hollis Teague sitting in a chair with his cap in his hands.
“He understands it better than anybody in this room,” she said.
Teal was in his truck coming out of Roanoke inside of forty minutes.
I walked Hollis out to his truck while they set it up.
The yard was empty by then. The lights had come on in banks, and the scale sat dark under its lamp with a full day’s tickets in the book, six hundred and eleven weighs for the month with two weeks still to run.
He stopped at his truck and looked back at the fab bay with the light still on over the door.
“Twenty-two years in that building,” he said. “You know what I was doing when he walked in the first time in May? Cutting sign brackets for the Ruritans. Free of charge.”
“You could still say no,” I said. “Right now, in this gravel, with nobody but me.”
“I know it.”
“Hollis. I want to say something and I need you to take it the way it’s meant.
I’ve spent about six weeks watching a woman get handed everything she ever asked this county for by the same man, and I’ve watched her turn it over looking for the hook, and there’s always a hook, and it’s always the thing you’re proudest of.
” I stopped. “He didn’t come at your fear.
He come at your pride. He told you you’re necessary.
That’s the hook, and it’s in you, and I’d rather you know it’s in you while you’re walking in there. ”
Hollis opened his truck door and stood in it a second.
“Course it is,” he said. “That’s how a good one always gets set. You don’t hide a hook. You put it in something a man’s already hungry for.” He got in. “That don’t make me less hungry, son. It just means I’ll be watching my own hands.”
He pulled out of the yard, and I stood there in the gravel by the scale and watched his taillights go down the grade toward the Gap and disappear behind the pines and come out again a half mile on, the way they do.
I had the exact feeling I had in a ditch on Route 11 in the middle of July. Not fear, quite. The feeling of a thing having already started, some while back, in a room nobody in this valley was standing in, and the rest of it being arithmetic.
I called Sienna from the gravel and told her all of it, every word, before Teal’s headlights ever came up the road, because I had learned that lesson on the fourteenth and I intended to learn it exactly once.
She was quiet when I finished.
“Cutter,” she said. “How old is his daughter?”
“Thirty-one, thirty-two.”
“And the house is in Fincastle.”
“Yeah.”
“Then somebody tell that girl to keep her doors locked,” Sienna said, “and don’t let it be one of you men, because you’ll scare her wrong. Have Grace do it. Grace can say a thing like that and make it sound like insurance.”
“That’s exactly right.”
“It’s the only useful thought I’ve had all day,” she said. “Go on. He’s coming.”
And Teal’s headlights came up the grade off the county road, and I put the phone in my pocket, and we went to work.