Chapter 6: Billboards

The man with the tattooed arm put his hand up.

Wes saw the hand before the question: flat on the table, forearm down, the ink running out from under the rolled cuff. Below it, at the wrist, the veins showed through the skin. Then the voice, on top of it.

“Hey. Ref.”

The Ram turned his head.

“Say a guy uses one name for work and another one on paper.” The tattooed man tipped his chin toward Bonnie without looking at her. “Where’s that land?”

The Ram let it sit. Somebody’s pen rolled a quarter turn against the tabletop and stopped.

“I won’t be part of it,” the Ram said. “Any of it. You’ll write the names the way the nine of you decide to write them, and I won’t be asked to help you decide.” He folded his hands. “Take the time you need. I’m in no hurry. Only understand this much. The rules are absolute. And when it’s finished, I’ll deal with the loser myself.”

Bonnie opened her mouth and closed it. The woman in the work shirt looked back down at the table. Behind Wes a chair creaked, one short sound.

“Then it’s proved,” Bonnie said. “Isn’t it. I’m still sitting here. If I’d made the whole thing up it would have shown by now, and it hasn’t.” She got her hand flat on the table, fingers spread, as if she were steadying it. “And Bonnie’s what everybody calls me. It’s what I answer to. Ask anybody where I work — ask them who does the technical work down there, they’ll say Bonnie.”

She looked for somebody to meet her eyes. The man in the black tee turned his card over with one finger and turned it back. The old man against the wall hadn’t moved. She kept her hand flat a while longer than there was any reason to, then took it back into her lap.

“All right.” The tattooed man sat back. “Then it’s my turn. And if hers passed, mine passes twice.” He raised his voice — not much. “Ref. You hearing this? Hers passed.”

The Ram didn’t move. The bulb was directly over him, and it put a shine on the mask’s cheekbone where somebody had handled it.

“Fine,” the tattooed man said. “Then I’ll say it to the room.”

He turned around.

“Tommy Vasquez. East side of Cleveland. I don’t have a job you’d write on a form.”

He talked fast, each word starting before the last one finished. The woman in the gray suit leaned in to get it. Wes leaned in too. Tommy’s eyes came to her and then to him, and for half a sentence he slowed down. Then he was off again at the same speed.

“What I do is collect. A man’s got money coming and it’s not coming, I’m the one who goes and stands on the porch. People are funny about it. When they want the money they’ll promise you anything at all. When it’s time to hand it back, all of a sudden they’re a victim.”

He put one finger on the table and left it there.

“Then they start in on what I am. A devil. A bloodsucker. That’s the word they like.” He looked around. “You know what none of them ever say? That he came to me. He went to every bank in the county first. Every one of them had a sign in the window and a kid behind the glass who told him no. There wasn’t one institution in this country that would lend him a dollar. I did. So when he’s at the bottom of the worst week of his life, I’m not the devil standing over him. I’m the man who saved him.” He stopped, and looked for a word, and set it down. “I was his savior.”

The man in the black tee made a small sound and covered it with a cough.

“How’d he pay me back? He goes around the block telling everybody how hard he’s got it. Telling them he got taken for two hundred grand. Telling them the man who lent it to him is a monster, and if everybody feels bad enough about him, maybe the whole thing goes away and he doesn’t have to pay it. That’s the play. Sympathy.”

“Two hundred thousand,” the woman in the gray suit said.

“Two hundred grand. He signed it. He knew the number before he put his name on the paper, and the number was the number.”

“So what did you do?” the gray suit said.

“Last night I went to see him. Not to put a hand on him. To teach him something.” Tommy flattened his palm on the table. “I took him up on the roof of his building, so we could talk where he’d stand still and listen.”

He stopped.

“Then the ground moved.”

He said it in a different voice. Lower, and with nothing behind it.

“I’m not going to leave out the part that makes me look bad. I went up there to scare him. That’s what I was doing.” He shrugged one shoulder. “Roof went sideways. Gravel coming up off it, going sideways too, like somebody kicked the whole thing. And he pulls a knife out of his jacket and comes at me with it.”

The woman in the work shirt said, “A knife.”

“Out of his jacket. It’s in his hand. I got one hand on his wrist and one hand on the rail and the building’s moving under both of us, and he’s not a big guy, but scared is strong. He got me over.” Tommy held up his free hand, showing the height of a rail above a table. “I went off the roof. Then I hit a sign. One of the big ones, up on a frame on top of the next building, all lit. Then nothing. That’s the last I’ve got. A lot of light and nothing behind it.”

Nobody said anything. Wes counted the seconds of it.

“Say that again,” Bonnie said.

“Say what again?”

“You’re in Ohio.” She was leaning forward now, both hands on the table, and her voice had gone up and stayed up. “I’m in Arizona. And you had an earthquake, and I had an earthquake. You fell off a roof and hit a billboard. Something came down on me and mine was a billboard.” She turned her head, taking the table in. “Do you hear it? That’s not two stories. That’s one story with the name changed. And you’re the one who stood up in this room and told everybody my name was made up.”

“Go back to your own story,” Tommy said.

“I’m in Arizona. You’re in Ohio, and the same thing happened to both of us down to the sign.” Bonnie pointed at him. “That’s a lie. That’s what a lie looks like.”

“Where you were doesn’t change where I went.”

“It does when it’s the same story twice.”

“There’s more than one billboard in the world.” Tommy said it slowly, as if he were doing her a kindness by explaining it. “Man on my roof, knife in his hand, roof moving under both of us. I don’t have to know where you were.”

“You’re a liar,” Bonnie said. “And that’s the least of it. You do a thing for a living that only bad men do. Lying’s the smallest part of that.”

Tommy looked at her for a second. Then he laughed. It came out short and flat and there wasn’t anything funny in it.

“Jesus. What’s your line of work, sweetheart? Technical, right.” He spread his hands. “Go on. Say it out loud. Let the room hear it.”

Bonnie looked down at her hands. Down the table the old man closed his eyes and opened them again.

Wes had kept his hand on his card the whole time. Now he flattened it, squared it to the edge of the table, and let his eyes go where they liked.

It wasn’t a question of who was lying. He’d had the arithmetic since the Ram folded his hands: one false story in nine, one Liar, and the card face down under his own two fingers.

And the tattooed man had just done the cleanest thing anybody could do in this room. He had put the worst of it in their hands and stood there while it landed. A man who has built a story keeps his hands on it. He doesn’t give away the part that hangs him and wait to see what the room does with it.

So it wasn’t him. And it wasn’t Bonnie. Two clean.

Arizona, then. Ohio. He set the two of them down side by side, and then the third one stood up in him so fast his hand closed on the card.

Oregon.

He hadn’t said it and he wasn’t going to. Whatever it was, it had happened to him there too. Three states now. Arizona, Ohio, and his own.

Ohio, he thought, and the floor went out of it. Ohio was spoken for. He’d spent the last half hour building a man named Mark Ellery in Ohio, and Tommy Vasquez had walked into it and sat down at the table. He’d have to find another state. One nobody here had a story in. The pool was getting smaller by the minute.

He put that in the back with the rest of it.

One false story, and it was under his hand. So every word out of the other eight mouths was true. So three states had gone down in one night, the same way, in the same hour.

“That’s enough.” The big man had his head up and his voice in the room before anyone had given him the right to use it. Nobody took it back. “Both of you. Hold it.” He nodded once at the gray suit, once at Tommy, and neither of them said another word. “A name goes down after everybody’s spoken. Not before.” He said that to the table. “We guess now, we’re guessing at whoever talked loudest.”

He turned his head.

“You.”

The woman in the work shirt had her knuckles white on the edge of her card under the table. She brought her hands up into her lap and set them on her knees.

“Okay,” she said. Her voice was small and it shook. She said it again, slower, and it came out flatter the second time. “I’m Bree Hollis. I teach. Preschool. The four-year-olds.”

She looked at her own hands.

“Before I came here I was at work, and there was a boy still there. His mom used to come get him at five and she was never once late. Then she got sick. They found something in her head and she had to have it operated on, so now it’s his dad, and his dad forgets.” She stopped. “That’s not — I’m not saying anything about his dad. He works. He’s got a lot on him.”

“Go on,” the big man said.

“It was past six.” She said it fast, as if to get it over with. “We close at five-thirty. The boy was on the bench by the door with his coat on and his bag, and I was calling his father, and it rang, and it rang, and nobody picked up.” She breathed. “I don’t have his address on me. That’s the thing nobody at the school understands. The forms are in the office, and the office is locked at five-thirty. So I couldn’t put him in my car. I didn’t have anywhere to take him. I sat on the bench with him a while, and then we went out to the corner and waited under the light, where he could see the cars go past.”

“Was anybody else there?” the gray suit said.

“Everybody else was gone. That’s why it was me.” Bree’s jaw worked. “And I had somewhere to be. I had a seven o’clock with a counselor, because I’ve been thinking I don’t want to do this anymore. Not the kids. The job. I wanted somebody to tell me what else I could do with myself.”

She looked up.

“Then the ground started moving. And it doesn’t jump. That’s what I thought it would do. It went side to side, like — you know when a table’s got one leg short and somebody sits there jiggling their knee, and everything on the table starts working its way to the edge. It was like that. Like the whole ground was the table.” She stopped and started again. “Down the street from us there’s an old church with three towers on it. All three of them cracked. There was a sign across the street, lit up, and it lit the whole front of the church. All three, right up the front.”

“Where?” the gray suit said.

“St. Augustine.”

“Florida,” the gray suit said.

Four. Wes ran the count again and it came out four. At the middle of the table the clock stood at twelve, where it had stood since he opened his eyes.

“A car came at us.” Bree’s voice climbed and she pulled it back down. “It came off the road sideways, straight at the corner, and the driver had both hands up off the wheel. I remember that. Both hands in the air, like he was — “ She stopped. “I picked the boy up and I ran. But you can’t run. Every step, the ground isn’t where you left it. I fell. I think I fell three times and the third time I hit my head on something. The curb, maybe. Then I was here.”

“Nobody’s going to know where he is.” Bree’s voice had gone thin. “Sorry. I know that’s not what this is. It’s just — it’s been in my head the whole time. Whether somebody came and got him.”

The gray suit said something to her, low, and Bree nodded at it without seeming to hear it.

“All right.” The big man turned as far as his chair let him. “You. White coat.”

Down the table the dead man lay where he’d been left. Nobody looked at him.

The white coat cleared his throat.