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.
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