CHAPTER 3
He checked his phone. Five-nineteen.
Two units. Fifty-four hours and forty-one minutes.
* * *
The rest of the dealership went on around him.
Inside the service bay at the north end of the building, three technicians in gray coveralls were working on a customer's CT5 that had come in with a transmission warning, and the sound of an impact wrench came in short bursts through the open bay door, brrrrap, brrrrap, and then a radio playing old country, Merle Haggard, half-drowned by the wind. A detailer named Marcus was on his knees at the edge of the deck with a rag and a spray bottle, working on the chrome of a wheel that already shone like a mirror. Two salesmen Tyler did not like very much — Brent and Josh, who sat at the desks on either side of his and talked about fantasy football all day — were standing in the shade by the showroom door, drinking coffee and watching a young couple with a baby stroller walk the used lot.
"Lookers," Brent said, as Tyler came past.
"Could be buyers."
"Stroller's from Walmart," Josh said. "Diaper bag's from Walmart. Shoes are Skechers. They're looking at the 2019 XT5 with ninety thousand miles. They're gonna ask what the monthly is, you're gonna tell 'em, they're gonna say they need to think about it, and you're never gonna see them again." He sipped his coffee. "You want 'em, they're yours."
Tyler looked at the young couple. The man was in a sweat-stained ball cap and work boots. The woman was holding the baby on her hip and pointing at the car's back seat, measuring something with her hand. Josh was right. Tyler could see it from here. You learned to see it. It was the first thing you learned. You learned to read the shoes and the watch and the phone and the keys and the way they walked onto the lot — whether they walked like they had a right to be there or like they were afraid somebody was going to tell them to leave — and you learned it so well that after a while you did not even know you were doing it. It was like reading. You could not look at a word and not read it. You could not look at a customer and not price them.
"Pass," Tyler said.
"Smart man." Brent raised his cup. "Kessling at six-thirty?"
"How do you know about Kessling?"
"Craig's been talking about Kessling since Tuesday. Craig thinks Kessling is the second coming. Craig's going to be very disappointed if Kessling turns out to be some guy who drives a Prius and wants to know about the gas mileage."
"Nobody's asking about gas mileage," Tyler said, and went inside to check his email again.
* * *
At six forty-four, he came back out onto the deck.
The wind had picked up. It was blowing harder now, in long gusts that made the feather banners along the frontage road bend almost double and come snapping back. The great flag on its pole was standing straight out from the halyard, rippling end to end, whump, whump, whump. Dust ran across the lot in low red streamers. The sun had moved around to the west and was lower now, coming in hard and bright and slanting across the deck, so that when Tyler looked toward the steps he had to narrow his eyes against it. The light made every edge of every car glow. It made the planks of the deck look like they were on fire.
He went down the row of Escalades with a microfiber cloth, touching up the hoods. He was halfway down when he heard the sound of an engine he did not recognize.
It was not a sound you heard often on the lot at Ridgeline. It was a rough, deep, old-fashioned sound, a big V8 with a lifter ticking somewhere inside it and a muffler that was not quite doing its job, and it came up the frontage road and turned in at the entrance and rolled slowly across the lot, and when Tyler looked up, shading his eyes against the sun, he saw a pickup truck.
It was a Ford. An F-250, he thought, from somewhere back in the nineties, two-tone, tan over brown, though it was hard to tell where the paint ended and the dust began. The bed had a dented toolbox bolted across it and a coil of baling wire and what looked like a saddle blanket. There was a gun rack in the back window with no gun in it, just an umbrella and a fly swatter. The tailgate was held shut with a bungee cord. And the whole thing was coated, every inch of it, in the fine red dust of the plains, so thickly that it looked less like a truck than like something that had been sculpted out of the ground.
CHAPTER 4
It came across the lot at about five miles an hour and parked, crookedly, across two spaces in the customer section near the foot of the deck steps.
Tyler watched it the way you watch a cloud coming. He did not decide anything yet. Not consciously. He just watched.
The engine shut off. It ran on for a second after the key was turned, coughing, and then died. The driver's door creaked open. And an old man got out.
---
He had been up since four.
That was not unusual. Amos Whitcomb had been up at four o'clock in the morning for most of the seventy-six years he had been alive, first because cows do not care what time you went to bed, then because trucks do not care either, and finally, in the last few years, because his body had simply forgotten how to do anything else. He lay in the dark for a while in the big bed in the house on the ridge above the Cimarron, listening to the wind start up in the cottonwoods, and then he got up and made coffee in the percolator June had bought in 1971 and drank it standing at the kitchen window, watching the sky go from black to gray to the color of a peach.
On the kitchen table, under the salt shaker, there was a manila envelope. It was thick. It was so thick, in fact, that the clasp would not quite close, and he had wrapped a rubber band around it twice to keep it shut.
He did not open it. He did not need to. He had been over what was inside it so many times in the last three weeks that he could have recited it with his eyes closed. But he looked at it for a long time while he drank his coffee, and once, when the wind banged a shutter somewhere on the side of the house, he reached out without thinking and put his hand flat on top of it, the way you put a hand on a dog that has startled in its sleep.
* * *
At five-thirty, he was in the truck.
The truck was a 1996 Ford F-250 that he had bought new and had driven, by the odometer, just under six hundred thousand miles, though the odometer had broken twice and he privately suspected the true number was closer to seven. It had been tan and brown once. Now it was mostly the color of Oklahoma. His granddaughter, Nora, had been after him for years to replace it, and had once, memorably, left a stack of brochures for new trucks on the passenger seat with sticky notes on the pages that said things like GRANDPA. AIR CONDITIONING THAT WORKS. and THIS ONE HAS A SEAT THAT DOESN'T HAVE A SPRING STICKING OUT OF IT. He had read them all, carefully, and then put them in the glove compartment, where they still were.
He drove to Woodward in the dawn with the window down and the radio off. The cattle auction opened at seven. He had forty-one head in the pens there, the last of the Whitcomb herd, black baldies and a few red ones, and he intended to watch them sell.
He did not have to be there. Nora had told him that, too. "The auction house will handle it, Grandpa. They'll wire the money. You don't need to sit there all day in that sale barn breathing dust." But he had wanted to. He had been raising cattle on that land since 1968, when he and June had put a down payment on the first hundred and sixty acres with money they had saved for six years in a coffee can, and he was not going to let the last of them go through a ring without at least one person in the stands who knew their names.
He sat on the hard wooden bleachers of the sale barn for three hours in the smell of manure and sawdust and diesel, his feed-store cap pulled low, his arms folded across the front of his quilted canvas vest. He watched every lot. He did not bid on anything and he did not talk to anybody. When the last of his calves went through — a long-legged red heifer that June would have called Dolly, because June had called every red heifer Dolly for forty years — he stood up, nodded once to the auctioneer, who nodded back, and walked out into the wind.
His boots were caked in the sale-barn dirt. There was a smear of something on the knee of his jeans. His vest, which he had owned for longer than Nora had been alive, had a tear at one pocket that June had mended with green thread, the only green thread in the house, and a pale salt line across the back from forty summers of sweat. He looked down at himself in the gravel lot of the sale barn, in the wind, and brushed some of the dust off the front of the vest with the back of his hand, and then gave up.