Chapter 7 Cora #3
"You're telling me not to mention it."
"I am telling you it is your call. I am telling you what the cohort would do. The cohort would not mention it. You are the lead. You make the call."
I looked at Renn.
I looked at the third truck across the lot.
Drew was already there. He was at the driver's-side door.
He was checking the side mirror with the methodical posture of a man who had taken the lesson from Renn, the post-engagement check, and was going to do the check the way the cohort did it.
He was not looking back at us. He would not look back at us until he was ready.
"I won't mention it."
"Good."
"Renn."
"Yes."
"Thank you."
"For what."
"For teaching him."
"He has been ready to be taught for nine months.
He has been waiting at the perimeter for a senior warrior to acknowledge him.
I am the senior warrior who acknowledged him.
The teaching is mine to do. I am not doing it for you.
I am doing it because the cohort does not leave a junior at the perimeter for nine months without acknowledgment, and the cohort failed Drew for nine months because the cohort was not here.
I am here now. I am repaying the cohort's debt to him. "
"Okay."
"Cora."
"Yes."
"You signed him on the team because the math was favorable. You did not sign him for the cohort. The cohort is happening anyway. The cohort would have happened on this trip whether or not you had signed the paper. You should know."
"I know."
"Good."
He went to do the body work with Cruz. Cruz had begun the dragging.
Pulling the bodies off the road into the ditch on the north side of the Dairy Queen lot.
Renn would do the Vampyren bodies because the Vampyren bodies got Vampyren courtesy and Vampyren courtesy was not something Cruz had been trained in.
Sylvia would clean the field kit. Drew would have his hour.
I went to the lead truck.
I sat in the cab.
The carving was on the dashboard. The Steinbeck was in the foot well. The Polaroid was in my chest pocket.
I waited.
* * *
Drew came back to the lead truck at exactly the hour.
He did not announce it. He just opened the passenger door, climbed in, set himself in the seat, and looked out the windshield at the road ahead. He did not look at me. He did not say anything.
I started the engine.
I drove.
We did not talk for fifty miles.
At mile fifty-one, he said:
"Cora."
"Yes."
"The carving is at the 7 still."
"Yes."
"I have not moved it."
"I know."
"I am going to read the Steinbeck tonight."
"Okay."
"Just the first chapter. Not the whole thing. I am going to read the first chapter tonight in the cab with you driving."
"Okay."
"You will hear me read it."
"Okay."
He looked at me.
"You do not have to listen."
"I will listen."
"Okay."
He picked up the book from the foot well. He sat with it on his lap. He did not open it yet. The sun was at six-thirty in the morning and the dawn light was on the windshield and the storm was eighteen hours out.
He opened the book.
He read the first chapter to me at fifty miles per hour through the Oklahoma corridor, his voice quiet, the American-Midwest cadence steady, the half-Vampyren clinical-observation register absent from the reading because the reading was not observation, the reading was the thing the reading was.
He read Ellen's first sentence, To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth, and he read it the way Ellen had read it to him in 2017, in a half-collapsed apartment in Phoenix, to a four-year-old half-Vampyren boy who would later sit beside a woman named Cora in a Ford truck driving east through Oklahoma at fifty miles per hour, twenty-one years later, on day seven of a road trip to bring six named people home, and would read the same sentence aloud to her in the cadence of his foster mother who had been dead for fourteen years.
He read for forty minutes.
He stopped at the end of the first chapter.
He closed the book.
He set it back in the foot well.
He did not say anything.
I drove.
After a while I said:
"Drew."
"Yes."
"Thank you for reading."
"You are welcome."
"You read it the way Ellen would have read it."
"I know."
"How do you know."
"Because I tried to. Ellen taught me to read aloud. She taught me by reading aloud. I did not know how to read aloud in a voice that was not hers. The voice I used was the voice she would have used. I do not have a different voice for reading aloud."
"Drew."
"Yes."
"That is a giving too. The voice."
"I know."
"You gave me Ellen's voice."
"I gave you the voice that Ellen gave me. The voice was Ellen's. The giving is the voice. The voice is now yours to hold. That is how I have started to think about giving. I have not finished thinking about it yet."
I did not say anything for a while.
I drove.
The road rolled.
The carving was on the dashboard.
The book was in the foot well.
The team was driving east.
The storm was eighteen hours out.
The count was holding.
I drove.