Chapter 4
Tank
Judge called on a Tuesday and said one word, which is his way.
"Table."
"When."
"Thursday. Seven." A pause with a lot of freight on it. "You've missed nine."
"I'm aware."
"So's everybody," he said, and hung up, because he's deaf in one ear and considers goodbyes to be primarily a hearing activity.
I sat with the phone in my hand for a while.
Nine church meetings. Nine. I had, apparently, developed a nine problem.
Here's the thing about the table. The clubhouse used to be a Pentecostal church, and when they took the cross off the front the shadow of it stayed in the brick, and you can still see it in the right light, which everybody has an opinion about.
Inside, they knocked out the pews and put in one long table under the transom, and when the afternoon sun comes through that red and gold glass it lays a stripe of color right down the middle of it.
My chair is fourth on the left. It has been fourth on the left for nineteen years.
The problem was never the meeting. The problem was that between the door and the fourth chair on the left there are eleven feet of open floor with nothing to put a hand on, in front of fourteen men who have known me since I could put a full keg on my shoulder and walk it up a flight of stairs.
I got there twenty minutes early like a coward and sat down before anybody could watch me cross.
They came in. Rev, first, at ten of, because he's constitutionally incapable of being anywhere at the correct time. Dutch. Otto, who is patched now and still walks into rooms like he's expecting to be asked for a receipt. Judge last, with his hat on, which means money's being discussed.
We did the runs. We did the insurance on the tow rig. We did twenty minutes on the propane contract, which is the kind of thing nobody outside a club believes we spend our evenings on.
Then Judge said, "Escort. Saturday the fourteenth. Elko out to the fairgrounds and back, four bikes." He looked down the table. "Tank, you're Sergeant-at-Arms. That's yours."
And there it was. The whole room, the stripe of red and gold light lying across the table between us, and every man in that building waiting on me the way you wait on weather.
I could have said a hundred things. I had a hundred things stacked and ready. Give it to Dutch. My schedule's a mess. I'll take the truck. All of them true enough to pass and every single one of them a door I'd have to keep shut for the rest of my life.
"I can't ride," I said.
It landed like a dropped tool.
"I can't ride," I said again, because the first one came out too quiet to count.
"Left leg won't hold the bike at a stop.
If I put it down on gravel with any lean on it, the leg goes, and then it's eight hundred pounds of Softail on top of me and one of you pulling it off in front of a crowd.
So. Not the fourteenth. Give it to Dutch. "
Nobody said anything for a second.
I have played that second back a lot. What I expected was pity. What I got was Judge taking his hat off and putting it on the table, which in nineteen years I have seen him do maybe four times.
"All right," he said.
"That's it?"
"What do you want, a hymn?" He put his glasses on to look at the calendar. "Dutch, the fourteenth. Tank, you'll run comms from the truck, and you'll tell Dutch where to put people, because Dutch couldn't organize a line at a funeral."
"That's true," Dutch said.
"It's the first thing you've said in this room in a year," Judge said, "and it's about yourself, and it's uncharitable."
And that was the whole event. Nineteen years of holding a thing shut and it took eleven seconds to say and the meeting simply continued around it, the way water does.
Rev caught me after, out by the boot sign, and did not offer to walk with me, and did not slow down, and just said, "Fourteenth's not the last Saturday there is."
"That's practically a speech, out of you."
"It was too long," he agreed, and went to his truck.
She came in on a Wednesday with a brace in a box.
I did not know she was coming. I would have arranged to be anywhere else in Nevada, and not because I was ashamed of her — because the clubhouse at four in the afternoon is Ramona Bright with nothing to do, and that is a weather system, not a room.
I was at the far end of the bar. Junie came through the door with the box under her arm, all five foot one of her, in a fleece with a clinic logo on it, and she stopped and looked around at the transom and the light and the beam ceiling like a woman pricing out a wedding venue.
"This was a church," she said.
"Pentecostal," said Ramona, materializing. "Ramona."
"Junie."
"I know." Ramona put both forearms on the bar, which is the posture. "Green Tacoma."
"That's me."
"One-forty to a quarter of four, Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays since October."
"That's right," Junie said pleasantly, and set the box down, and did not offer one single additional syllable.
I have watched men break under Ramona in under a minute. Grown men. There is a chair by the pool table that Otto calls the confession booth.
Ramona narrowed her eyes. "What's in the box?"
"A hip abduction brace."
"What's that."
"It's a brace," Junie said, "for the hip," and looked at her with total, uncomplicated helpfulness, and Ramona — I want this recorded somewhere permanent — Ramona blinked first.
"I like her," Ramona announced to the room.
"You've known her ninety seconds."
"That's how long it takes, Beckett."
Then Otto came over, and Otto had clearly spent some time getting ready for this.
He squared up. He set his shoulders. He put on the face — the one he practices, the one that says I am a patched member of the Copper Ridge Kings and you would do well to consider that — and he stood over her at his full and considerable height and said, in a voice like a closing door:
"You the nurse."
"I am."
"Right." A long, meaningful pause. "You want a juice box?"
Junie looked up at him.
"It's the good kind," Otto said, deflating at approximately the speed of a tire. "It's mango. There's like four left, I hid 'em behind the limes, because Dutch drinks 'em and he doesn't even like 'em, he just—"
"I'd love a mango juice box," Junie said.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"Okay," said Otto, and went behind the bar with the energy of a man who has been asked to be best man.
Here's what got me.
She sat there for forty minutes. Ramona tried her twice more and got nowhere and started liking her more each time.
Dutch showed her a phone picture of a transmission for reasons that were never established.
Judge came through, and Judge does not talk to people who aren't his, and he stopped and asked her about Okafor's retirement, and listened to the answer, with his hat off.
And she did not perform. She didn't get loud to match the room and she didn't get small to fit under it.
She sat on a stool with her boots hooked on the rung, drinking a mango juice box in a converted Pentecostal church full of bikers, and the room organized itself around her without ever once being asked to.
I'd spent two months telling myself a story about that porch step.
The story was that she was a small determined woman who'd wandered into something bigger than her, and that at some point I'd have to be careful with her, and that being careful with her would be my job, and it was a comfortable story because it put me on the strong end of it.
I sat at the end of the bar and watched her flatten Ramona Bright with the word brace and I understood that I had gotten it exactly backwards, and had been getting it backwards since one-forty in the afternoon on the first Monday in October.
She wasn't in my house because she was small enough to fit.
She was in my house because I couldn't get her out of it.
"You're staring," Ramona said, passing.
"I'm thinking."
"Mm." She kept walking. "Same thing, on you."