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.
Nora had told him to change before he went to the dealership. " You're going to walk into a Cadillac store," she had said on the phone last night, "and spend more money than most people in this county will see in their lives. Wear the blue shirt. Wear the boots I got you for Christmas. Wear anything that doesn't have cow on it. Or at least call ahead. Call Mr. Harmon and tell him you're coming. Let them get ready. " " Why would I call ahead? " " So they know who you are! " " Why does it matter who I am? I'm a man who wants to buy some cars. " " Grandpa. " She had sighed in that way she had, which was exactly June's sigh, so exactly that it still sometimes caught him under the ribs. " You know what I mean. You know how people are. You walk in there looking like you just came from the sale barn —" " I will have just come from the sale barn. " "— and they're going to look at you and decide you're nobody. And then you're going to get that look on your face. And then something's going to happen. " " Nothing's going to happen. " " Something always happens when you get that look. " He had not answered that, because she was right.
He drove south from Woodward with the envelope on the passenger seat beside him. Somewhere around Mooreland he pulled off onto the shoulder of the two-lane highway, in the middle of nothing, in the middle of the wheat, and turned the engine off and sat there with the wind rocking the truck on its springs. Then he picked up the envelope and took the rubber band off and opened it. On top, in a plain white bank envelope of its own, there was a cashier's check drawn on the First National Bank of Woodward, made out to Ridgeline Cadillac, in an amount that he had written down on a piece of paper and checked with Nora three times, because he did not altogether trust himself with numbers that had that many zeroes in them. Under it was a typed list of twenty names and twenty addresses. Under that was a photograph. The photograph was old, square, with a white border, the colors gone soft and orange the way colors in old photographs go. It showed twenty-one people standing in a ragged line in front of a long metal building with a sign on the roof that said WHITCOMB FREIGHT LINES — ENID, OKLA. Behind them, a row of tractor-trailers, eighteen-wheelers, their cabs painted a deep green with a white W on the door. The people were men, mostly, with two women at the end of the row, all of them in jeans and work shirts and boots, squinting into the sun. A few were smiling. Most were not. They had the faces of people who had not slept much in a while. In the middle of the row, a little taller than the men on either side of him, there was a black-haired man of about forty in a quilted canvas vest, with his thumbs hooked in his belt, not smiling at all. On the back, in June's handwriting: The Twenty. Christmas 1986. God help us. And under the photograph, held together with a binder clip, there was a stack of small, ragged, odd-sized pieces of paper. Some of them were index cards. Some were the backs of fuel receipts. One was a page torn out of a pocket logbook, and one was a paper napkin from a Waffle House, and one was the cardboard flap off a box of Remington shotgun shells. They were all different shapes and sizes and in various stages of disintegration, yellowed, softened, creased, stained with coffee and grease and in one case what looked very much like blood. And every one of them had the same thing written on it, in the same blunt, square, forward-leaning hand, in pencil or ballpoint or, on the napkin, in what appeared to be a carpenter's marker:OWED: One (1) black Cadillac. When we make it. — A. WhitcombHe had written twenty of them. Nora had found seventeen.