Secret Vows

Chapter 9: Nice Little Cabin

The SUV was built square and heavy, and it held eighty on the interstate without a shake in it. The air inside was cold and dry and moving. Out the windows the land went by in long green pieces — a field, another field, a stand of pines, a water tower with the paint coming off it — and nothing out there slowed the car down.

Nobody had said a word in a long time.

Dex had a window at his shoulder and had not used it. He didn't know how much of the state had already gone under the car — whether they'd crossed water, how many towns, whether the green out there had turned to pine or stayed in field. If somebody asked him about the drive later, he'd have had nothing to say about it. He knew the numbers on the dashboard and that was the whole of it. He sat with both hands flat on his thighs and his eyes on the road ahead of him and waited.

The man at the wheel wore a plain dark jacket and hadn't spoken since the last stop and wasn't going to. That was the arrangement. The arrangement worked.

It came from the back seat. "They know we've left?"

"Yes." He got the word out on the air he'd been holding since the last exit and let the rest of it go through his teeth. Answers were easy. The space on either side of an answer was the part that had to be handled.

"So they'll be dug in."

"Seems that way. Mr. Vance has been up to the capital twice already, from what I hear, and cornered twice."

"Did they get to him?"

"What I heard is he got tired of it." Dex half turned, which was what he did when he wanted whoever was behind him to know that the rest of the answer was being picked carefully. "He's gone to ground somewhere on the coast. The word that went out is that he's unwell and he isn't seeing anybody."

"He doesn't waste time."

"You know how he is." Dex heard the edge of something come up into his own voice and left it in there. "Since he stepped down, all he's wanted is a place nobody's going to come knocking on."

"He owes too many people."

Dex didn't answer that one.

Mr. Vance owed too many people and had owed them for years, and when a debt gets to be that size a man reaches around for whatever's standing nearest and puts that in front of it instead. The nearest thing to hand was the man in the back seat. That man was the plug in the hole.

There was also the other end of it. There was a way this subject finished, for people who kept pulling on it, and Dex had been riding in cars a long while and had a fair idea where his name would end up if he turned out to be one of them. The man behind him was not the sort who let a thing go past.

His forehead had gone damp. He didn't touch it. He sat up straighter, kept his eyes on the road, got his breathing down two counts, and the quiet came back down over the whole car, and the state went by.

Then, with nothing in front of it at all, from the back:

"That's a nice little cabin."

Dex blinked twice. Two seconds, that was all it took, and he had his face to the window for the first time since the last town, looking for it. Tin roof. Low porch. A dirt road leaving the blacktop and running back in between the trees.

His hand was on the driver's shoulder before the rest of the thought had finished forming, and he pointed.

The driver came off the interstate at the next exit without asking anything and without losing any speed doing it. That was the driver.

Dex put his hands back down on his thighs and sent his congratulations down the road behind them, to whoever had been keeping count of this car the whole way down the map. He meant it.

#

There was mud to Trey's elbows and a hand in the back of his collar.

His uncle had a fistful of his shirt and was walking him across the yard, and the reason for the walk was standing at the end of it with a new roof on it.

Trey had been on the fence line since before seven, digging post holes in ground that had more rock in it than dirt, and his shoulders had the deep ache in them that comes off a bar and a hole that won't take the bar. His hands were black to the wrist and the mud had dried in the creases and pulled when he opened them. He'd had a rhythm going. The rhythm was gone now.

The pond lay behind them, flat and brown, and the light off the water came up the bank and lay along the underside of the new boards. The old shack at the water had gone down on itself two winters back and wasn't fit to sleep in. The pond wasn't far from the house, but a building out here saved him the walk twice a day, and so he'd put one up. His uncle had come out for the framing and had come back for everything after it without being asked twice.

None of that was what Trey was thinking about. He was thinking about the posts. They weren't going to get in now, and that was the day gone.

"Go on," his uncle said. "Take a look at it."

Trey wiped his hands down the front of his pants, which moved the mud from one place to another and took none of it off, and then brought one of them down flat on his uncle's shoulder. Twice. The prints went on top of each other, gray over gray, and stayed.

"You built it," Trey said. "What am I going to find wrong with it?"

"Don't butter me up."

"Who's buttering you up?"

"You are." His uncle turned his head enough to give him the eye, and the eye had some distance to travel to reach Trey's face. "Now look at it properly. Anything's not right, we fix it today, because I'm not hauling these tools back out here next month."

"There's nothing going to be wrong with it."

"Look at it anyway."

"Uncle Wendell."

"Look at it anyway."

Trey laughed and went up the steps.

The steps were new and pale and they didn't give, and the door was hung so that it swung in and stayed where he put it, and the smell came out at him through the open doorway before he was inside. Pine and cut sawdust and air. He went in.

The light came through two windows set square to each other and hung the dust up in the middle of the room where you couldn't get around it. The floor had been swept. In the corner, somebody had stacked the scrap ends instead of dragging them out to the burn pile, and stacked them with the long ones on the bottom. Trey walked the length of the room and the floorboards didn't say anything back to him.

"Well?" his uncle said, from behind him, in a voice with some strut in it.

"It's good."

"It's a building. You can say more than that."

"It's good," Trey said. He put his elbow against the wall and leaned his weight onto it, and the wall took all of it and didn't move, and he nodded at the wall like it had answered a question.

"You're not going to knock it down," somebody said from the doorway.

Trey turned around. "Just checking, Uncle Ray."

Ray Whitcomb leaned in the frame with his arms crossed and his hat pushed back. He'd married in on the Calloway side, somewhere back in the branches Trey had never bothered to follow, and he built for a living — small jobs, his own truck, two or three men when the work was there — and when he heard what Trey was putting up out here, he'd come out without being asked and had never once said a word about money.

"Checking," Ray said, and looked at the wall, and then at the ceiling, and then went back to looking out the door.

Trey got the pack out of his jacket and shook one loose for Ray and one for his uncle, and he lit Ray's first and then his uncle's, with his hand cupped against the wind coming off the water. The three of them stood around inside the new building with the smoke going up into the rafters and not coming back down.

Ray had a story about a job in town where the man paying for it had changed his mind about one window three times and then changed it back, and Trey's uncle corrected two parts of the story and got one of them handed straight back to him, and Trey stood with his hands black to the wrist and let the two of them go at it.

"Hello? Is anybody in there?"

All three of them stopped at the same time.

Trey still had his elbow against the wall. Nobody moved toward the door.