Ridge Road, Chapter 17 · Two Doors

It sleeted all night, and on Christmas Eve morning the whole of Lewis had a skin of ice on it that shone like a wet plate. Sam came into the kitchen at seven in his socks and found coffee made and a skillet of biscuits keeping warm in the oven and no Hank.

The envelope was on the table by his cup.

It was a long white envelope, the legal kind, with SAM on the front in Hank’s block capitals, blue ballpoint, pressed so hard the pen had gone through the paper on the M. Beside it was a fuse, an old glass one with a burnt-out wire, like Hank had found it in the drawer and set it down and forgotten it.

Out the window over the sink Sam could see him. Hank was on the front steps in his Carhartt with a bag of rock salt, throwing it by the handful down the walk, slow and even, the way he did everything. Across the street Mrs. Pruitt’s porch light was on in broad daylight, as usual, and Mrs. Pruitt was in her front window in a red bathrobe, watching him.

Sam sat down. He drank half his coffee. Then he opened it.

There were two things inside. The first was eleven pages stapled at the corner, typed, on heavy paper with a lawyer’s name at the top, an office on Brookside. OPERATING AGREEMENT OF DOYLE & ORTEGA TRANSPORT, LLC. Sam read the first page twice before the words would hold still.

It said that Henry James Doyle, sole owner of Doyle Transport, would move the business into a new company. The truck went in, the 2016 Peterbilt 389, dark green, VIN written out in full. The authority went in. The trailer and the bank account on Sheridan went in too, and there was no debt on any of it. Two members. Fifty percent each. The second member was Samuel Ortega, and the price of his half was one dollar, “and other good and valuable consideration, namely miles driven.”

Hank had signed it on the last page. His signature was a mess, nothing like his block capitals. A notary’s stamp beside it said December 15. Under it there was a blank line with Sam’s name typed beneath, waiting.

Sam set the pages down very carefully, as if they might go off.

The second thing was a single sheet of yellow legal paper, folded in thirds. He knew that paper. He’d seen nine envelopes of it in a cedar box. He unfolded it.

SAM,

THIS ISN’T INSTEAD OF MARLENE. IF YOU BUY HER SHE CAN RUN UNDER THIS NAME OR UNDER YOURS. YOU PICK.

IF YOU SIGN THIS AND STILL WANT TO RUN ALONE SOME WEEKS, YOU CAN. IF YOU DON’T SIGN IT, THE KEY STAYS ON YOUR RING AND THE RIGHT SEAT STAYS YOURS FOR AS LONG AS YOU WANT IT. NOTHING ELSE CHANGES.

I HANDED WALT A KEY BECAUSE I COULDN’T HAND HIM A QUESTION. YOU ALREADY HAVE A KEY. SO THIS ONE’S A QUESTION.

WILL YOU BE MY PARTNER.

HANK

There was no question mark. Sam looked for it. Hank had never in his life put a question mark on anything.

He read it to the end, because he’d promised. Then he read it again. Then he sat with both pieces of paper flat under his hands on the kitchen table, next to the burnt dent shaped like Florida, and listened to the rock salt hitting the walk outside, a scatter and a pause, a scatter and a pause.

---

He went out on the porch in his socks. The cold came up through the boards and bit his feet.

Hank stopped with his hand in the salt bag and didn’t turn around.

“You read it,” Hank said.

“To the end.”

“Okay.” Hank threw one more handful. “You can talk now.”

Sam stood there. Mrs. Pruitt had come out onto her own porch in the red bathrobe and a pair of men’s galoshes and was pretending to look at her mailbox.

“You wrote me a question,” Sam said.

“I did.”

“You don’t write questions. You wrote nine letters to Walt and you never mailed one.”

“I know what I did.” Hank set the bag down on the step and turned around. His face was red from the cold and something else. “I had a lawyer on Brookside type eleven pages so I could write one line at the bottom. That’s how far I had to go around to get to it.”

“There’s no question mark.”

“There’s never a question mark. You know that.”

Sam laughed, and his breath went up white. Then he stopped laughing.

“I don’t have an answer,” Sam said. “I want to give you one standing here and I don’t have it. If I said yes right now I’d be saying it because you’re standing in the cold with a bag of salt and your ears are red.”

“Good,” Hank said. “Then don’t. Royce gets his answer New Year’s. So do I. Same day. That’s fair.”

“You’d do that? Wait on the same day as Royce?”

“I’m not going to be the reason you said no to a truck.” Hank picked the salt back up. “You go in. Your feet are blue. I’ll be in when I’ve done Eunice’s walk too, or she’ll stand out there in those galoshes till she breaks a hip.”

Across the street Mrs. Pruitt raised a hand. Sam raised one back.

---

He didn’t talk about it all morning, and Hank didn’t ask. They ate the biscuits. Hank fixed Mrs. Pruitt’s porch light timer, finally, with a new one from the Ace. Sam held the ladder. Mrs. Pruitt stood at the bottom of it in her galoshes and told Sam, low, that Hank had been out on those steps since a quarter to six, salting the same three feet over and over, and she’d counted. Then she raised her voice and said “Hank, I’ve gotten used to it on,” and he said “Then I’ll set it to on,” and did.

Sam sat at the kitchen table with the agreement in front of him and thought about the Broken Arrow exit sign, and the crossword books in Marlene’s door pocket done in ink, and Royce washing a frame every Saturday he was home for twelve years. He thought about his own name on a door in small gold letters. ORTEGA. It looked strange in his head. It looked good.

Then he took a pencil and a legal pad and did numbers. He figured Marlene at Royce’s price and Royce’s rate, with fuel and insurance on one truck under one name, and then he figured it again with two trucks under one name, and then he looked at the two columns for a long time.

Two trucks under one name was cheaper. A lot cheaper. One insurance policy and one set of books, and Walt dispatching both off the same board.

He sat back.

“Hank.”

Hank was at the sink scrubbing the skillet. “Yeah.”

“Did you do the numbers? On Marlene under your name?”

The scrubbing stopped.

“I did,” Hank said.

“Why didn’t you put them in the envelope?”

Hank rinsed the skillet and set it on the rack and dried his hands before he turned around. “Because then it’s me buying the truck out from under you. Then it’s my company with your truck in it, and that’s a nicer word for the same right seat. I wanted you to find the numbers yourself. If you found them yourself, they’d be yours.” He folded the towel over the oven handle. “If you want Marlene with your own name on the door and nobody’s but yours, that’s a good answer. I mean it. Your name alone on a door is worth more than what you save on insurance.”

“Is it?”

“It was to me. Twenty years ago.” Hank looked at him. “Nobody gave me that truck. That’s the thing I’d hate to take off you.”

Sam looked at the two columns a while longer. Then he flipped the legal pad shut over his columns, squared the eleven pages, and slid them back into the envelope with the yellow sheet. He put the envelope in the kitchen drawer with the fuses and shut it.

“That’s next week,” he said. “I’m not doing any more of it today. Not one more number.”

“Fair enough.”

Outside the sleet had started up again, rattling on the window over the sink. Sam stood by the drawer and listened to it, and to Hank breathing behind him, and the whole business went out of his shoulders.

“Come here,” he said.

Hank came. Sam stood up and put his arms around him and his face in Hank’s neck, which smelled like rock salt and coffee and flannel, and Hank stood with his wet hands held out to the sides for a second and then put them on Sam’s back anyway.

“I want to go to bed,” Sam said into his neck. “It’s eleven in the morning and it’s Christmas Eve and I want to go to bed with you. No paper. Just you.”

“Walt’s coming at six.”

“It’s eleven.”

Hank breathed out a laugh against his ear.

“Then yes,” Hank said. “Wait’s the word.”

“Wait’s the word. And I want to see your face. The whole time. I don’t want anything else today.”

Hank leaned back and looked at him.

“Face to face,” Hank said. “On the bed, like regular people. I can do that.”

---

The back bedroom was grey with sleet light. Ice tapped against the window glass, and the cedar box sat on the dresser with its lid shut beside the lamp, which Hank didn’t turn on. He wanted the daylight, he said. He wanted to see Sam in the daylight for once instead of a yellow bulb.

They undressed each other standing up, slow, no hurry anywhere in it. Sam unbuttoned Hank’s flannel and pushed it off his big shoulders and kissed his collarbone through the white tee, and then pulled the tee over his head and kissed the same place on the skin, grey hair rough on his lips. Hank undid Sam’s jeans and pushed them down and knelt, his right knee cracking loud in the quiet room, and pressed his face against Sam’s belly and held him there by the hips, not doing anything, just breathing against him, his beard scratching the soft skin under Sam’s navel.

“Hank.”

“Give me a minute. I’m saying something.”

“You’re not saying anything.”

“I know.” Hank stayed there. “That’s the most I’ve got right now.”

Sam put both hands in his grey hair and held his head against him until Hank was ready to get up.

When he got up Sam pushed him back a step until his calves hit the bed and he sat down on the edge of it, and Sam knelt on the braided rug between his knees. Hank’s cock stood up thick out of the grey hair at his groin, and Sam took it in his hand at the root and licked up the underside slow, from his balls to the head, and Hank’s breath rushed out of him.

“Sam.”

“Let me. Just for a minute.”

He took the head in his mouth and sucked, slow and wet, his tongue working the ridge, and then took more of him, as much as he could, until he had to breathe through his nose and Hank’s thighs went hard as wood on either side of him. Hank’s hand came down on his hair, not pushing, only resting there, his fingers moving.

“That’s enough,” Hank said after a while, rough. “That’s enough or I’m done before I’ve started, and when I go today it’s going to be in you, with your face in front of me.”

Sam let him go with a wet sound and grinned up at him.

On the bed Sam lay on his back in the dip on the left, on the green sheets, and Hank knelt over him and looked at him in the grey light for a long time. At his face. At his chest, where the Limon mark had faded to nothing months ago. At his cock, hard and lying up his belly. Then back at his face.

“Hey, you,” Hank said quietly.

“Hey yourself.”

Hank leaned down and kissed him. It went on a long time, slow and deep, Hank’s weight coming down onto his forearms on either side of Sam’s head, his belly settling warm on Sam’s, his cock hard and heavy against Sam’s hip. Sam wrapped his arms around his back and felt the muscle shift under the fur. He opened his legs, and Hank settled between them like he’d been coming home there for years, which he had, four months of years.

Hank reached for the nightstand: one rubber out of the Walmart box, and the Petro tube, water-based, a long cold line of it on his fingers, one plain thing after the other. He worked Sam open slow, two fingers, then three, watching Sam’s face the whole time instead of his hand, and every time Sam’s breath caught, Hank’s caught with it.

“I can see everything in this light,” Hank said. “You know that? I can see you go pink. Right here.” He touched Sam’s chest with his free hand, the flush that had spread down it. “Every time I crook my fingers you go pinker. And tighter.”

“Then crook them.”

Hank did, and Sam’s back came up off the sheet, and Hank made a pleased, low noise and did it again. He kept him there, fucking him slow with his fingers, until Sam was rocking down onto his hand and his cock was leaking a wet line onto his belly and he was saying Hank’s name every few seconds without meaning to.

“You’re so warm,” Hank said. “Christ. Every time. So slick for me.”

“Come on. I want you.”

“In a minute.”

“Hank. I don’t want to think about anything for a while. I want you in me.”

Hank’s jaw tightened. He pulled his fingers out and slicked himself and set the head of his cock against Sam’s hole, and held there, propped on one arm, his face a few inches over Sam’s.

“Stay with me,” Hank said. “Right here with me.”

Sam stayed. Hank pushed into him.

It was slow and thick and it filled him the way it always did, and Sam’s mouth opened on a long low sound, and Hank watched it come out of him. He didn’t stop until he was deep, his hips flush against Sam’s ass, and then he lowered himself down onto both forearms and stayed there, chest to chest, their faces so close Sam could feel Hank’s breath shaking.

“Okay?” Hank said.

“Okay. God. Okay.”

Sam wrapped his legs around Hank’s waist and crossed his ankles at the small of Hank’s back and pulled him in deeper, and Hank groaned straight into his mouth.

“Christ,” Hank said against his lips. “You lock your legs like that and I can’t think.”

“Don’t think. You’ve been thinking for a week. You salted the same three feet of walk since a quarter to six.”

Hank laughed, and the laugh went down through his body into Sam, and Sam gasped at the feel of it, and Hank stopped laughing and looked at him, very still.

“Do that again,” Sam said. “Whatever that was.”

“I laughed.”

“Then laugh in me again.”

“I can’t laugh on purpose, Sam.” But his mouth twitched, and he rolled his hips slow and deep instead, and Sam forgot what they’d been talking about.

They moved like that for a long time. Hank kissed him the whole first part of it, slow, his tongue in Sam’s mouth moving the way his hips moved, and Sam held on to the back of his shoulders and felt every stroke twice. Hank barely pulled out at all. He rocked into Sam in slow deep rolls, grinding at the end of each one, his forehead almost touching Sam’s, and Sam held his face in both hands and looked at him and didn’t look away. The bed creaked under them, steady. Sleet tapped the glass. Sam could see everything: the grey in Hank’s beard, the sweat starting at his hairline, the way his mouth went slack every time he sank in deep and Sam squeezed down on him.

“You like that,” Sam said. “When I do that. I can see it on you.”

“I feel it.” Hank’s voice had gone to gravel. “I feel it clear up my back, Sam. Do it again. Squeeze my cock like that.”

Sam did it again, and again, slow, timing it to the end of each roll, and Hank’s breath broke into short rough pieces against his mouth.

“Christ. You keep doing that and I’m gone.”

“Not yet.”

Hank’s eyes shut for one second and he forced them open.

“I’m not shutting them,” Hank said. “I said face to face. I meant it.”

“Then fuck me faster. Keep looking at me and fuck me faster.”

Hank did. Sam slid his hands down Hank’s back to his ass, the big furred cheeks working under his palms, and pulled him in on every stroke, and Hank grunted and gave him what he was pulling for. He came up a little on his hands and drove into him, faster and deeper, the slow rolls going to strokes, and the bed started knocking the wall, and Sam’s heels dug into the small of Hank’s back. Every stroke dragged over the place inside him and pushed a noise out of him, and Hank watched each one, swearing under his breath, “Fuck, Sam, fuck, you’re so good, you’re so good to me, so damn tight,” and Sam was too far gone to answer. The headboard was knocking the wall in time with him now, and under it was the wet slap of Hank’s hips, loud in the grey room.

“God, the sound we’re making,” Sam got out. “That’s you in me, making that.”

“Eunice is going to hear it clear across the street,” Hank said, and didn’t slow down one bit.

“Don’t stop,” Sam said. “Please don’t stop.”

“I’m not quitting on you. Not ever.”

“Hank. I want you to come first. In me. I want to feel you.”

Hank’s hips stuttered. “You sure?”

“I’m sure. Tell me when. Let me see your face when you do it, and then don’t stop, and I’ll come after. I want to come because you did.”

Hank made a sound like something giving way in his chest. He pushed himself up onto straight arms so he could see all of Sam at once, and Sam’s cock stood up between them, hard and wet, nothing touching it, and Hank fucked him hard and fast and deep, his face a foot above Sam’s, his eyes never leaving him.

“Sam. Now. I’m coming. Watch me.”

Sam looked. He watched Hank’s face open up, his mouth go wide and his brow pinch, and he felt it, deep inside him through the rubber, Hank’s cock jerking, pulse after pulse, Hank shoving in and holding there and shaking with it, groaning his name over and over in a voice Sam had only ever heard from him in the dark.

Feeling it and seeing it, Hank’s whole face given over to him, Sam went right up to the edge and hung there, his legs locked around Hank’s waist, his cock jumping against nothing.

“Now you,” Hank said, hoarse, still pulsing in him. “Your hand, Sam. Do it while I’m in you. I want to watch you.”

Sam got his hand around himself. It only took a few strokes, slick with what he’d been leaking all along, Hank’s eyes on his face the whole time and Hank’s cock still thick inside him. It pulled straight up through the middle of him and he came, spilling up his belly and chest, crying out with his eyes wide open, looking up at Hank looking down.

Hank stayed up on his arms through all of it. Then his arms gave and he came down onto Sam, slowly, heavy and wet, and pressed his face into Sam’s neck.

---

For a while neither of them said anything. Sleet tapped the window. Somewhere across the street Mrs. Pruitt’s radio was playing carols, faint.

“You never looked away,” Sam said.

“I said I would.”

“You looked like you were going to die.”

“I thought I might.” Hank lifted his head. His face was red to the ears. “That’s the first time I ever did that with somebody looking at me. In the daylight. With the shade up.”

“How was it?”

Hank thought about it a long time.

“Terrifying,” he said. “Do it again sometime.”

Sam laughed so hard Hank slipped out of him, and they both groaned, and Hank dealt with the rubber, and they lay in the dip in the grey light with the sheet kicked off and didn’t get up until it was almost dark.

---

Walt came at six with a towel-wrapped pan of tamales from a woman on the north side who made them every Christmas, and a red poinsettia in a pot for Mrs. Pruitt that he made Sam walk across the ice and deliver. Mrs. Pruitt came back with him for twenty minutes in her galoshes and had a cup of coffee and a tamale and told Walt that the timer on her porch light was set to on now, permanently, and that Hank had done it, and that she wanted witnesses.

When she’d gone, Walt sat down at the kitchen table and looked at the envelope, which Sam had taken back out of the drawer before supper and left there on purpose.

“Can I?” Walt said.

Sam looked at Hank. Hank nodded.

Walt didn’t read the agreement. He flipped through it, a lawyer’s pages, and set it aside. He read the yellow sheet. He read it once and put it face down on the table and put his hand flat on top of it and didn’t say anything for a long time.

“He wrote you a question,” Walt said finally.

“He did.”

“No question mark.”

“No.”

Walt laughed, a short rough sound. He looked across the table at Hank.

“You never wrote me one,” Walt said. He said it plain, with no edge on it.

“I wrote you nine,” Hank said. “You read three.”

“You never mailed one.”

“No,” Hank said. “I’m mailing this one. It just doesn’t need a stamp.”

Walt nodded slowly. He turned his coffee cup around on the table, once.

“Eleven pages,” he said. “Doyle, you used to make me read you the fuel receipts because you couldn’t stand paperwork.”

“I still can’t stand it.”

“And you sat in a lawyer’s office on Brookside.”

“Two hours,” Hank said. “She had a dish of those peppermints. I ate all of them.”

Walt laughed so hard he had to set the cup down.

“Royce came by the depot window yesterday,” Walt said to Sam. “Asked was there any news. I told him the man’s thinking, and when a man’s thinking you let him.” He looked at the yellow sheet under his hand. “I’ll tell you what I’d tell him, Ortega. Both of these are good. That’s the hard part. If one of them was bad you’d be done already.”

“I know,” Sam said.

“I’m not going to tell you which.”

“I know that too.”

“Good.” Walt stood up and got his cane. “Then let’s eat these tamales before they’re cold, and I’m going to sleep on my side of that bed tonight with my shoes off, if you’ll have me, and nobody’s going to decide anything till next week.”

That night Walt lay on the right in his shirt and slacks, and Hank lay in the middle, and Sam in the dip. Walt reached across and held Sam’s hand on Hank’s chest, the way he had that first Saturday. Then he leaned over and kissed Hank, short, and said “Merry Christmas, Doyle,” and Hank said “Merry Christmas, Brennick,” and that was all. Nobody took anything off.

Sam lay awake. Past one o’clock, Christmas morning, with Hank snoring and Walt breathing slow on the far side, he slid his hand out of Walt’s and found his phone on the nightstand and typed a text to Royce Tibbs.

Merry Christmas. Can you be at the yard New Year’s morning at nine? I’ll have an answer. I’d like Walt and Hank there when I give it.

He thought the old man would be asleep. The answer came in under a minute.

Merry Christmas. I’ll bring the thermos. Marlene and I will be there at nine.

Sam put the phone face down. He lay looking at the dark shape of the cedar box on the dresser, and Hank turned over in his sleep and put a heavy arm across him without waking, and said something into the pillow that might have been “sweetheart” and might have been nothing at all.