Ridge Road, Chapter 8 · The Cedar Box

Hank slept until half past nine on Monday, which Sam hadn’t known he could do.

He had been up since six. He had made coffee in the kitchen under the new patch on the ceiling, eaten toast standing at the sink, and walked twice past the back bedroom door to look at the man in the bed, flat on his back with one arm flung over the empty left side where the dip was. Ten days of road had taken something out of Hank’s face. Sleep was putting some of it back.

At nine-thirty Sam carried in a cup and sat down on the edge of the mattress. Hank opened one eye.

“You’re staring.”

“I’m waiting. There’s a difference.”

“Is that coffee for me?”

“It’s coffee for whoever answers a question first.”

Hank pushed himself up against the headboard, took the cup, and drank half of it before he said anything. His beard was flat on one side from the pillow. His glasses were somewhere on the floor. “Walt told you to ask me something.”

“He said there’s a cedar box on the closet shelf. He said you’d tell me it’s nothing.”

“It’s nothing.”

“That’s what he said you’d say.”

Hank let out a short laugh through his nose and looked at the ceiling. “That man,” he said. “Twenty years of dispatching me and he still gets the last word.” He set the cup on the nightstand. “Bring me my glasses, sweetheart. They’re by the left boot.”

---

He took the box down himself. He didn’t need the step stool. He stood in the closet door in his undershirt with his arm up and his fingers feeling along the top shelf behind the folded sheets, and when he brought it down he held it against his belly with both hands, the way you’d carry a bird.

It was a small cedar cigar box, the kind with a paper label inside the lid, and the cedar had gone dark where thumbs had been. Hank sat on the edge of the bed and put it on his knees. Sam sat next to him in the dip. For a minute neither of them moved.

“I want to say first,” Hank said, “that I don’t know how to do this.”

“Then do it badly.”

“All right.” He lifted the lid.

On top lay a folded strip of grey-green canvas about the length of a forearm, with one ragged edge. Sam knew it before Hank said anything.

“The cot.”

“I cut it off the frame before I put the thing out on the curb.” Hank turned the strip over in his thick fingers. “I told Walt I was throwing everything away. I couldn’t throw away the part that ripped.”

“Because that’s when you said his name.”

“Because that’s when I quit being polite.” He laid it on the blanket between them. Under it was a pair of drugstore reading glasses, the cheap kind that come in a rack, with one arm held on by a twist of electrical tape. “He left these on the windowsill in the kitchen. I found them the morning after the bus. I’ve got a pair of my own and I never once wore them. I just kept finding them in my hand.”

Under the glasses was a photograph.

It was the size of a playing card, with a white border, and it had been taken at night from across a street. Two men sat on the front steps of this house under a yellow porch light. One was big and bearded, with a beer between his boots. The other was lean and bald and laughing at something outside the frame, his bad leg stuck out in front of him. They weren’t touching. On the step between them, in the shadow, their little fingers were.

“Who took it?”

“Mrs. Pruitt.” Hank cleared his throat. “She brought it over the week the bus left, folded in a dish towel with a plate of cornbread. She stood on the porch and she said, ‘I thought you should have this,’ and she went back across the street and she has never once mentioned it.”

Sam held the picture very carefully by the edge. “She knew.”

“She’s known since the second winter. She told me once, not unkindly, that she was old but she wasn’t blind.”

Under the photograph, standing on edge, held together with a rubber band that had gone brittle, was a thin stack of white envelopes. Sam counted nine. Every one had a single word on the front, in block capitals in blue ballpoint: BRENNICK.

He didn’t touch them. “What are these?”

“Letters.” Hank’s voice had gone rough and level. “One a year. The week the bus left, every year, I’d pull into a truck stop somewhere and write one on a legal pad, and I’d put it in an envelope and I’d tell myself I was mailing it Monday. None of them has a stamp.”

“What do they say?”

“You can read one.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m not sure of anything,” Hank said. “Read the first one.”

Sam slid the band off the stack and took the bottom envelope. It wasn’t sealed. The paper inside was soft with handling, a half sheet of yellow legal pad folded in thirds, and the capitals were the same careful ones that had written the date on the Greyhound timetable.

BRENNICK. THE PIPE UNDER THE KITCHEN SINK LET GO TUESDAY. I FIXED IT WRONG. MRS. PRUITT SAYS THE ROOF IS NEXT. THE YELLOW BULB IS STILL UP. I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT ELSE TO TELL YOU. ARE YOU EATING? DOYLE.

Sam read it twice. Then he put it back in its envelope carefully, because his hands wanted to shake.

“Are you eating,” he said.

“It was the only thing I could think of that I actually wanted to know.” Hank rubbed his beard. “That’s what they all are. Every one of them has a question in it. How’s the knee. Did you get the heater working in the duplex. Does anybody make you laugh at that yard. The fourth one asks if you’ve got somebody.” He looked at the stack. “The ninth, last fall, says the third co-driver quit, and that I was getting to be an old man who tests people. It says, ‘Was I any good at this, ever?'”

“Hank.”

“I never mailed one because he’d have called me. That’s the trouble. He’d have picked up the phone, and he’d have been kind, and I’d have had to say a thing out loud.” He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “He told you a key isn’t a question. He was right. I handed him a key because I could not hand him a question. I wrote them down instead, and they sat in a box.”

“Why did you keep it up there? Above the sheets?”

“I put it there the night I stripped the bed. Three years after, when Mrs. Pruitt said the room smelled shut up. I figured if I ever put sheets back on that mattress, I’d have to see the box to do it. I thought I’d be an old man by then.” He gave Sam a sideways look. “I thought I’d be sixty. I didn’t know I’d be fifty-one with a Camry in my driveway.”

“It’s a good Camry.”

“It’s a very good Camry.” Hank grinned, crooked. “You’ll note I did not put sheets on that bed until you stood in my kitchen and told me what you’d do to the roof.”

“I dusted around that box for ten days.”

“I know. I watched you do it.” He put the glasses back on. “Walt’s right about one thing. I’d have said it was nothing. It was everything I had.”

---

Sam sat holding the envelope for a long time.

Outside, a school bus ground by on Lewis. Somewhere in the kitchen the old refrigerator kicked on. Hank didn’t speak. He sat with the box on his knees and waited, with his big scarred hands lying open on the cedar.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“That’s what this is,” Hank said.

“If you could have asked him one. Out loud. In the lot at Salina. What would it have been?”

Hank was quiet for a good while.

“‘Can I come with you,'” he said. “That was the only real one. I’d have driven to Tulsa on my own and sat in a dispatch office and watched trucks go out. I didn’t think I could stand it. So I told myself he couldn’t stand me, and I stood in the lot with my own pride in my hands.” He shook his head. “Walt says he’d have said no. Maybe. He’d have meant it for about a week. I’ll never know, and that’s the thing in the box. That’s all of it.”

“So you tell people the bus goes at two-fifteen.”

“So I tell people the bus goes at two-fifteen, and I make them choose to stay, because I couldn’t do it myself.” He turned his head. “You asked me in the Sunflower. You said, ‘Do I have to get on the bus?’ I’d never been asked that. I’d never been the one with the answer.”

“You said no.”

“I said no. And I meant a different thing than I thought I meant.” He closed the lid on his knees, softly. “I’ve got a question for you, Sam. I want you to know it exists. I’m not asking it today. Your lease on Harvard is up at the end of the month, isn’t it?”

Sam’s pulse kicked hard. “It is.”

“I’d like you not to renew it. I’d like you to stay in this house, in that bed, through the winter. On the truck and off it. I’d like a key for you made at the Ace on Lewis, a new one, no string.” Hank made himself keep looking at him. “That’s the question. I’m fifty-one years old and I’ve waited nine years to learn how to ask it in a full sentence. You don’t have to say a thing.”

“Yes.”

“Sam, I said—”

“Yes.” Sam put the envelope down on top of the rest, and took the box off Hank’s knees, and set it on the nightstand, and turned around. “I heard the whole sentence. I’d like the key with no string.”

Hank’s mouth worked. He took off his glasses again and laid them on the blanket. “Come here.”

---

They did not undress each other slowly. Sam had a feeling they had both decided to skip that part.

Hank dragged the undershirt over his head. Sam shucked the flannel and the jeans and everything under them in one untidy heap on the floor, and Hank was on him before he was done, a big hot weight pushing him down into the dip on the left side of the bed with that rough mouth already on his throat. The late morning came through the blinds in stripes and lay across Hank’s back. His chest hair was grey and damp. He smelled like sleep and coffee, and when Sam got both hands onto his shoulders and felt him shaking, he said it without thinking.

“I’m here.”

“I know you are.” Hank’s hands moved down his ribs and stopped at his hips. “Tell me what you want first.”

“Sit up against the headboard.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to taste you, and I’d like to do it slowly, and I’ve been thinking about it since the shower in Hays.”

Hank stared at him. Then he gave a short disbelieving laugh, shifted back against the headboard with the pillow behind his shoulders, and let his thighs fall open. He was already hard, heavy and flushed against the grey of his belly, the foreskin drawn back from a wet dark head. Sam knelt between his knees, set both hands on those wide thighs, and bent his head.

He started at the base, with his tongue flat, and dragged it up the underside until Hank’s breath hissed out. The taste was salt and sleep. He took the head in his mouth, only that, and held it, rolling his tongue underneath where the skin was thinnest, and Hank’s belly jumped.

“Oh, hell,” Hank said. “Oh, sweetheart. Do that again.”

He did it again. He took more, a little at a time, until the head touched the back of his throat and he had to pull off and breathe, and Hank’s palm settled on his shoulder, shaking a little. “Take your time,” Hank said. “I’m not going anywhere.” Sam sank down again with spit running down the thick shaft into the grey hair at the base, and he worked his hand up and down where his mouth couldn’t reach, and listened to the sounds he was getting: a low steady groan, the creak of the headboard, a muttered “God, that mouth” that rose into something like a curse.

“You keep that up,” Hank said, “and I’m going to finish before I’ve got a hand on you.”

“Then finish.”

“Not in your mouth. Not today.” He drew Sam up by the shoulders, panting, with his face red above the beard. “Come up here.”

Sam came up. Hank kissed him hard, tasting himself, and then pushed up on his forearms and looked down at him, close enough that his beard brushed Sam’s chin. “I want to try something, and you can say no. I want you on your stomach. I want to lie on you, all of me, and stay there. Not fast. I want to feel you breathe under me.”

Sam felt that go straight to his cock. “All your weight?”

“Most of it. I’ll hold some on my arms. If it’s too much you say wait, and I’m off you before you’ve finished the word.”

“Wait,” Sam said, to see how it sounded. Hank immediately lifted a hand. “No, no, I’m testing. I’m good. I want it.”

“Then turn over.”

He turned. He pulled the pillow under his chest and one under his hips without being asked, because he’d learned that, and put his cheek on the cool case and heard the lid of the water-based tube pop. Cold gel touched him. Hank’s big hand spread over the small of his back, warm and heavy, and a thick finger went in, slow, then two. He had learned that, too. The stretch was a bright, easy burn, and he pushed back into it and said, “More,” and Hank said, “Already?” and he said, “Yes, God, Hank,” and the third finger came.

“You’re so ready.” Hank’s voice had dropped to the low flat tone he used on the CB at night. “Is this what you did while I was in Laredo?”

“Don’t.” Sam laughed into the pillow. “I counted mile markers instead.”

“I counted cars in the lot at every truck stop. Counted to a hundred and I still couldn’t sleep.” The fingers curled and found the place, and Sam’s whole back arched. “There. I’ll remember that when I’m sixty.”

He heard the foil, and the little grunt Hank made rolling the rubber on, and then the mattress dipped and tilted as all that weight shifted up the bed. Hank’s legs came down outside Sam’s. His forearms came down outside Sam’s shoulders. The great warm belly settled against Sam’s back, and then the whole chest, the hair rubbing him from his hips to his neck, and Hank’s beard dropped against the back of his shoulder.

“Breathe,” Hank said in his ear.

He breathed. It was hard. The weight pressed him into the pillow, a heavy, patient weight he had no way of shoving off, and Sam found he liked that more than he could say. His cock ground against the pillow under him and he groaned out loud.

“Good?”

“God, yes. Don’t move. Just—” And Hank’s cock slid down the cleft of his ass, blunt and slick, found the place, and pressed.

It went in a little at a time. Sam felt the thick length of it, and the weight on his back made him feel it harder, as if Hank were pushing the air out of him ahead of it. He heard a sound come out of himself that he’d never made. Hank answered with a low rolling groan against his ear, and said, “Easy. Easy, slow,” and pushed home. The big hips pressed flat against his ass. The belly lay on his spine.

“All the way,” Hank said. “Tell me.”

“All the way. Christ, I can’t move.”

“You don’t have to.” Hank kissed between his shoulder blades, then the top of his shoulder. “Let me.”

He began to rock. His hips barely lifted. He rolled forward deep and slow, the thick base of him pressed hard against Sam, so that with each stroke Sam’s whole body slid an inch up the mattress and the head of Hank’s cock dragged across the place that made his thighs jump. Sam grabbed the pillowcase in both fists. The old bed creaked in time with him.

“That’s it,” Hank said. “Right there, isn’t it. I can feel you tighten when I hit it.”

“Fuck. Yes. Right there. Don’t stop.”

“I’m not going to stop. I’ve got all day.” He said it into Sam’s ear in that gravel voice, nearly a whisper. “I’ve got a bed and a man in it and nowhere to be. I’m going to fuck you until you can’t remember what year it is, and then I’m going to do it again after lunch.”

“Say that again.”

“After lunch.”

Sam laughed and gasped at once, because Hank had picked up the pace, the slow rolling turning into long hard strokes, and the weight on his back came down with each one and drove him into the mattress. His voice went. He was babbling, he knew it, half of it Hank’s name, the rest filthy, how big it felt, how deep, how he was going to feel it in the cab on Thursday every time the Pete hit a seam in the road.

“Good,” Hank growled. “I want you to. Your ass is gripping me like it doesn’t want me to leave.” He eased his weight onto his knees for a second. “Lift for me. An inch.” Sam lifted his hips, and Hank slid a hand beneath his belly and tipped him, and then the next stroke went in at a new angle and Sam yelled into the pillow, loud enough that he heard Hank chuckle.

“Found it,” Hank said.

“Do that again.”

“I’ll do it all morning, if you tell me how you want it.” He laid his weight back down, slow, until Sam was pinned again and breathing in short hard pulls. “Tell me.”

“Harder,” Sam said, because it was the first word that came. “Fuck me, Hank, please, harder, I can take it. Don’t be careful with me. Use all that weight.”

“I know you can.” The pace broke and came back and broke. “Sam. Put your hand down. Take hold of yourself. I want to feel your arm move against me.”

Nobody had ever said anything dirtier to him. He worked his right hand under his belly, past the pillow, and wrapped his fingers around his own cock, and the first stroke nearly finished him. The elbow started to pump against Hank’s chest. He gave a ragged laugh, and pushed in harder, and said, “That’s it. Don’t stop. Show me.”

“Hank, I’m—”

“Go on. Let go. I’m right behind you.”

He came with his face in the pillow and the whole of Hank’s weight on his back, a long convulsive spill into his own fist and onto the sheet, shouting Hank’s name into the pillow. Hank groaned out loud, pinned him with both forearms, and drove into him four, five, six times, the whole bed walking an inch toward the wall, and then stopped dead, all the way in, trembling.

“Sam,” he said, just that. Sam felt him shudder through the whole of his weight, and felt the heat of him pulse deep inside, and a hand came slowly under Sam’s face to turn it, and Hank kissed him. It was clumsy and wet, and it went on.

---

Afterward they lay in the stripes of light. Hank had rolled off and onto his side, and had pulled Sam to him by the hip, so that Sam lay with his back against Hank’s chest in the dip, heavy and warm, with the sheet kicked down and the cedar box sitting innocently on the nightstand.

“We didn’t put it back,” Sam said.

“No.”

“Are you going to?”

Hank was quiet. His breath moved the hair at the back of Sam’s head. “I don’t know yet. I might leave it where I can see it a while.”

Sam’s phone buzzed on the floor, somewhere in the heap of his jeans. Then Hank’s buzzed on the nightstand beside the box. They both lay still. It buzzed again.

“That’s the same text,” Hank said. “He’s sent it to both of us.”

Sam reached down, fished the phone out of his pocket, and held it up where they could both read.

Next Sunday. Five o’clock. Chili at mine again, and this time both of you at my table, since I’ve heard a rumor that the two of you have found the bed. I have invited Eunice Pruitt. She says she’ll bring cornbread, and that she wants it on the record that she has known since the second winter. She also wants her dish back, in person, from me, in front of witnesses. Doyle: bring the box. Ortega: make him. W.

Hank read it over Sam’s shoulder. Then, to Sam’s surprise, he started to laugh. It began low and went all the way through him, and the bed shook with it, and he pressed his face into Sam’s hair and wheezed.

“He knew,” Hank said, when he could. “He knew I’d show you today. He picked Sunday so I’d have time to lose my nerve.”

“Will you lose it?”

Hank wiped his eyes with the back of his thumb, still wheezing. He looked at the nightstand. The late light lay on the cedar.

“I’ll need a clean shirt,” he said. “And a key made at the Ace on Lewis. No string.”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow.” He kissed Sam’s shoulder, right where the beard had left a mark. “And after lunch, sweetheart, I believe I said something.”

Sam shut his eyes and smiled into the pillow. Across the street, faintly, he heard a screen door bang, and a woman’s voice calling a dog in from the yard, and he thought she was probably watching their front porch right now, and he found he did not mind in the least.