Luis Ortega passed the Oklahoma Motor Vehicle Commission salesperson examination on the morning of May nineteenth with a score of ninety-four percent. He found out at eleven-forty, sitting in his car in the parking lot of the state office building in Oklahoma City, refreshing the results page on his phone over and over with his thumb. When the number came up, he sat very still for a long moment. Then he called his mother, who cried. Then he called Dale Harmon, who said, "Well, hell, son, I knew you would," and then, after a pause, in a slightly different voice, "Hold on, somebody wants to talk to you."
There was a rustling, and then a low, rough, deep voice said, "Ninety-four."
"Yes, sir."
"What'd you miss?"
Luis laughed out loud in the empty car. "Financing disclosure stuff, mostly. Some of the title rules."
"Well," said Amos Whitcomb, "you can learn that. The rest of it you already had." A pause. "Next Saturday. Nine o'clock. Wear something you don't mind getting dusty."
* * *
They left Ridgeline at seven in the morning on the last Saturday in May.
There were twenty of them, in a line, on the frontage road. Twenty black Escalades, washed and waxed and gleaming, nose to tail, with their headlights on in the early sun. Eleven had come off the Ridgeline lot. The other nine had come, over three weeks, from Tulsa and Oklahoma City and Wichita and Lubbock and Amarillo and one, improbably, from a dealership in Joplin, Missouri, which had driven it down on a flatbed for nothing after Tyler explained on the phone what it was for. Every one of them was the full-size model. Every one was the color the manufacturer called Black Raven. Each one had a small white card taped to the inside of the windshield, typed on Dale Harmon's office printer, with a name on it.
It had taken Dale most of a week to find twenty people to drive them. In the end, it was nearly the whole dealership. Dale himself, in the lead car. Craig Pruett, who had been very quiet for a month and who had volunteered before anyone asked. The three technicians from the service bay, still in their gray coveralls. Marcus the detailer. The receptionist, Darlene, who had never driven anything bigger than a Camry and was visibly terrified. Brent and Josh, who had been told, not asked. Luis, in a new white shirt with a tie he kept touching to make sure it was still there. Nora Whitcomb, Amos's granddaughter, a brisk dark-haired woman of thirty-one with June's sigh and Amos's eyes, who had driven down from Enid the night before and spent the evening walking the line of cars with a clipboard, checking every name card twice. And Tyler Brooks, in the eighteenth car, in a pair of jeans and boots and a plain blue work shirt, with a pair of old leather gloves on the seat beside him.
Amos rode in the very first car, with Dale. He sat in the passenger seat with his cap on and the manila envelope on his knees, and he did not say much on the drive.
They went north and east through the wheat, which was tall now and going gold at the tips, rolling in long waves under the wind on both sides of the highway. The sky was enormous and clear. Twenty black cars in a line, their windows tinted, their chrome flashing in the sun one after another as they came over each rise, so that from a distance they looked like a single long black thing, a train, a river, moving across the open plains. People pulled off onto the shoulder to watch them go by. A farmer on a tractor in a field near Okeene stopped in the middle of a row and stood up in his seat and took his hat off. In Fairview, a gas-station attendant came out from behind the counter and stood on the curb with her phone held up, filming, as the whole line rolled slowly through the town's one stoplight, and a little boy beside her waved, and somewhere in the middle of the line somebody — Tyler always suspected it was Darlene — waved back.
* * *
The First National Bank of Enid had not been the First National Bank of Enid for nineteen years.
It had been bought by a bigger bank in 2007, and that bank had been bought by a bigger one, and in 2016 the branch had closed. The building was still there on the corner of Grand and Broadway, two stories of pale limestone with tall arched windows and the words FIRST NATIONAL BANK still carved over the doors, though somebody had hung a FOR LEASE banner beneath them that had faded in the sun to the color of weak tea. The windows were dark. There was a crack running up one of the front steps.
CHAPTER 24
But the parking spaces were still there. Six of them, angled, along the curb in front of the doors. And the one nearest the entrance still had a faded blue handicapped symbol painted on the asphalt, and a sign on a metal post, bent a little now, as if something had backed into it years ago.
There were people on the sidewalk.
Nora had told them ten o'clock. It was nine fifty-two when the first black Escalade turned the corner onto Grand, and they were all already there, and had been, some of them, since eight. They stood or sat along the sidewalk in front of the old bank in a ragged line, the way the twenty had stood in front of the freight terminal in the photograph. Some of them were old — very old — in their eighties, one in her nineties, in wheelchairs, on canes, in their church clothes or their work clothes. Some of them were middle-aged, sons and daughters, holding the arms of their parents or standing alone with their hands in their pockets looking uncertain, as if they were not quite sure they were supposed to be there. There was a young man of about twenty-five in a National Guard uniform. There were grandchildren running up and down the sidewalk. There were people who had just come to watch, a crowd of them, forty or fifty, from the stores along Grand and the houses on the side streets, because word had gotten around Enid over the last three weeks, the way word does in a town that size, and half the town seemed to remember Whitcomb Freight, and a good part of the other half had had a father or an uncle or a neighbor who drove for it.
The line of black cars came slowly down Grand Avenue and pulled in, one after another, along the curb in front of the bank, and up the block, and around the corner onto Broadway, until they filled every space on both streets for a block and a half. One by one the engines went quiet. One by one the doors opened and the drivers got out — technicians in coveralls and a receptionist in a sundress and salesmen in shirtsleeves — and stood beside the cars, not knowing quite what to do with themselves.
And Amos Whitcomb got out of the first car, slowly, with one hand on the door frame, and stood on the sidewalk in front of the First National Bank of Enid in his vest and his feed-store cap, and looked at the people waiting for him.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Then an old man near the front of the line — tall, stooped, bald, in a western shirt with pearl snaps, leaning on a cane — called out, in a cracked, carrying voice, "Took you long enough, Amos."
And the whole sidewalk laughed. It broke over the crowd like a wave, and the old people were laughing, and some of them were crying while they laughed, and the grandchildren stopped running and stared at the grown-ups in confusion. Amos laughed too, his head going back, that big rough rolling laugh, and he walked straight down the sidewalk to the old man with the cane and put his arms around him, and the two of them stood there holding on to each other in front of the bank while the crowd laughed and clapped.
"Dewey," Amos said into the man's shoulder. "Dewey Lambert. You old goat."
"Thirty-eight years," Dewey said. "Thirty-eight years I been carrying this thing around." He let go of Amos with one arm and fumbled in the pocket of his western shirt and brought out a small, soft, yellowed rectangle of paper — the back of a fuel receipt from a Phillips 66 in Shamrock, Texas, dated December 1986, with the ink on the front long since faded to nothing. On the back, in pencil, square and blunt and forward-leaning: OWED: One (1) black Cadillac. When we make it. — A. Whitcomb. "My wife told me to throw it out in 1990. I told her, Mavis, that man has never broke his word to me yet. She said, Dewey, he is never going to buy you a Cadillac." His voice cracked. "She passed in '21. I wish she was here so I could tell her she was wrong."
"Tell her anyway," Amos said. "She'll hear you."
* * *
Nora had brought a card table. She set it up on the sidewalk in front of the bank doors and put a white tablecloth on it, and on the tablecloth she laid out twenty sets of keys, each one with a paper tag on it bearing a name. And beside the keys, she laid a pen.
It was a fountain pen, black, old, with a gold band around the cap. It had been June's. She had used it to write checks and letters and grocery lists and Christmas cards for fifty years, and she had used it, on the back of the photograph of the twenty, to write God help us.
CHAPTER 25