June had died the next year. And in the long quiet afterward, alone in the house above the Cimarron, he had found himself thinking about that piece of cardboard more and more, until he could not think about anything else.
When the Dallas company made their offer, he had taken it the same afternoon. Nora had thought he was crazy. She was his accountant as well as his granddaughter, and she had wanted him to wait, negotiate, get another bid. He had told her he was seventy-six years old and he did not have time to wait. Then he had told her about the IOUs. She had sat across the kitchen table from him and listened to the whole thing without saying a word, and when he was done, she had gotten up and gone out to her car and come back with a legal pad, and started making a list.
It had taken her three weeks to find them. Eleven of the twenty were still alive. For the other nine, she had found widows, children, in one case a grandson. Seventeen of them still had the IOU. Some had kept it in Bibles, some in tackle boxes, some framed on a wall. One, Ida Pruitt, who was ninety now and lived in a care home in Guymon, had kept hers in her purse, every day, for thirty-eight years. When Nora had explained why she was calling, the old woman had been quiet for a long time on the phone, and then she had said, "Tell Amos I want mine with a tape deck."
They did not make cars with tape decks anymore. Nora had told her that. Ida had said, "Then tell him he'd better find me a cassette player I can plug in, or I'm not getting in it."
* * *
He put the photograph back in the envelope. He put the IOUs back under it, and the list, and the cashier's check on top, and he wrapped the rubber band around it twice and laid it on the passenger seat and started the truck.
Nora had wanted him to go to the big Cadillac dealership in Oklahoma City. They had more inventory, she said. They would have twenty black Escalades on the lot, or close to it. They could do it in a day.
He had said no. He had said Ridgeline.
He had not told her why. He had not told anybody why. But in the spring of 1971, when Amos Whitcomb was twenty-two years old and had a wife and a baby on the way and a hundred and sixty acres of land that the bank owned more of than he did, he had gone to every bank in four counties to try to borrow money for a used cattle truck so he could haul his neighbors' stock to market, and every bank in four counties had looked at his boots and his hands and his clothes and told him no. And then he had gone, out of nothing but desperation, to a small used-car lot on the edge of a little town on Route 62, where a heavyset man with a toothpick in his mouth and a name tag that said VERNON had walked out across the gravel to meet him.
Vernon Harmon had listened to him for ten minutes. Then he had sold him a 1964 International cattle truck with a cracked windshield for four hundred dollars, on a handshake, payments whenever he could make them, no paperwork at all.
"Why would you do that?" Amos had asked him. "You don't know me from Adam."
"I know your hands," Vernon Harmon had said. "Those are hands that pay their debts. I've been doing this twenty years, son. I don't look at a man's clothes. I look at his hands."
Amos had paid him off in eleven months. Two years later, he had bought his second truck from Vernon. Then his third. Vernon Harmon had sold him every truck he bought for the first nine years of Whitcomb Freight, and when he died in 1998, Amos had been a pallbearer. The little used-car lot on Route 62 was long gone. Vernon's son Dale had turned it, over thirty years, into the biggest Cadillac dealership between Oklahoma City and Amarillo, with glass walls and a coffee bar and a wooden deck you could see from the highway.
Amos had not been back since the funeral. He was not sure that Dale Harmon would remember him. He did not much care if he did. It was not about that.
It was about the debt. Every debt he had ever owed had started on that gravel lot. He thought it was right that the last one should end there.
CHAPTER 8
He did not drive straight there. He went east first, to Enid, to the cemetery on the hill behind the Methodist church, and stood for a while at June's stone with his cap in his hands, telling her what he was about to do, though she knew. Then he drove to the little cemetery outside Ridgeline and found Vernon Harmon's grave, which had a granite marker with a small carved truck on it that Amos had paid for and never told anyone about, and stood there a while too. Then he went to the old freight yard in Enid, which the Dallas people had not yet painted over, and sat in the truck in the empty lot where the garage had been, and ate a gas-station sandwich, and did not think about anything at all for almost an hour.
By the time he turned onto Route 62 the sun had swung low into the west, and the light had gone long and gold across the fields.
He drove south through the wheat with the windows down and the red dust blowing in, and he did not change his shirt.
---
The first thing Amos noticed about Ridgeline Cadillac was the flags.
He stood beside his truck in the wind with one hand on the hot dusty fender and looked at them. There were a great many of them. They were all moving at once, cracking and snapping and rippling, white and red and blue, and the big one at the corner of the lot was making a sound like somebody beating a rug. It seemed to him a great deal of noise for a place that sold cars. Vernon's lot had had one flag, on a pole made out of a length of drill pipe, and a hand-painted sign that said HARMON'S — GOOD USED CARS — FAIR DEALS, and that was all the advertising Vernon had ever done.
The second thing he noticed was the deck.
It ran along the side of the big glass building, raised up off the ground, with a wide set of wooden steps leading up from the lot. And on it, in a long straight row, were seven black Escalades.
He looked at them for a long time.
They were enormous. Bigger than he had expected. He had seen pictures, of course — Nora had shown him the website on her laptop at the kitchen table, scrolling through colors and trims and options with her reading glasses on, saying things like Grandpa, this one has massaging seats, and Grandpa, this one has a refrigerator in the console, until he had put his hand over the screen and said, "Black. That's all they asked for. Black." But the pictures had not prepared him for the size of the things, or for the color. The black did not look like paint. It looked like deep water at night. The late sun ran along their flanks and pooled in their chrome and could not find a single flaw anywhere to stop on.
He thought about the bank president's car. That black Sedan de Ville, 1985, parked crooked in the handicapped space in front of the First National Bank of Enid every Monday morning. It had seemed to him then like the most beautiful and most hateful thing he had ever seen. These made it look like a toy.
He thought: Hank would have liked these. Hank would have walked right up and kicked the tires.
He brushed the front of his vest again, uselessly, and started across the lot.
* * *
He was perhaps halfway to the deck steps when a young man came around the corner of the building with a glass bottle of water in each hand and nearly walked into him.
"Oh — sorry, sir. Sorry. I didn't see you."
"No harm done."
The young man was slim and dark-haired, in a navy polo shirt with the dealership's name on it, and he had stopped short with the bottles held out at his sides like a waiter. They were fancy bottles, tall and clear, with blue labels in a language Amos did not recognize. One of them was beaded with cold.
"You looking for somebody, sir? Service is around the other side, if you've got an appointment. The entrance is by the big bay door."
"I'm not here for service."
"Oh." The young man looked at him — a quick look, up and down, the work boots and the jeans and the sale-barn dust and the mended vest and the cap — and Amos waited for the thing that usually happened next, the little flicker behind the eyes, the decision. He had been watching for that flicker his whole life. He could see it in a person's face a full second before they knew it was there themselves.
It did not come. The young man just nodded and said, "Okay. Well, it's hot out here, and that wind's no joke. You want some water?"
He held out one of the fancy bottles. Then he seemed to remember something, and hesitated, and pulled it back. "Actually, hang on, not this one. This is for a customer. Let me —" He set both glass bottles carefully down on the hood of a nearby used Escalade, ducked around a corner, and came back a few seconds later with a plain plastic bottle from a cooler, sweating with ice-melt. "Here you go. This one's better anyway. That other stuff tastes like it came out of a rock."