Craig's smile flickered. "Dale? You mean — Mr. Harmon?"
"Dale Harmon. Vernon's boy."
"Mr. Harmon's in his office, sir. He's — I can certainly let him know you're — may I ask your name, sir?"
"Whitcomb," the old man said. "Amos Whitcomb."
Craig had lived in western Oklahoma for twenty-two years. He did not have to look up the name. He went a shade paler under his sunburn and said, "Of — Whitcomb Freight?"
"Used to be."
"Yes, sir. Yes, sir, of course. I'll get him. I'll get him right now. Please — please, don't — could I get you anything? A coffee? A water? We have — we have some very nice bottled water —"
"Already had some," Amos said. "The young fella down there got it for me." He nodded toward the bottom of the steps, where Luis was still standing with his bottles. "Luis. He's the only one who's offered me anything since I got here. He gave me the cheap kind out of the cooler. It was very good."
Craig turned and stared at Luis as if he had never seen him before in his life. Then he turned back. "I'll get Mr. Harmon," he said, and went, almost running, back along the deck and in through the side door.
* * *
Dale Harmon came out three minutes later.
He was a big, soft-spoken man of about sixty, with a gray crew cut and reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and a pair of cowboy boots under his suit trousers that had cost more than most of the used inventory. He came through the side door onto the deck and stopped, and looked down the row of Escalades at the old man standing at the far end, and Tyler, who had still not moved from where he stood beside the Platinum, saw something extraordinary happen to the owner's face.
It went young.
That was the only way Tyler could ever describe it afterward. Dale Harmon was sixty years old and owned the largest Cadillac dealership between Oklahoma City and Amarillo, and for one moment, standing on his own deck in the sunset, he looked about twelve.
"Mr. Whitcomb?"
"Dale."
Dale walked down the deck. He did not hurry. He walked the way you walk toward something you are not sure is really there, and when he got to the end of the row, he stood in front of the old man and looked at him for a long time without saying anything. Then he held out his hand, and Amos took it, and they shook, and then Dale did something Tyler had never seen him do with anyone in three years: he put his other hand on top of the old man's hand, and held it.
"You carried my daddy," Dale said.
"I did."
"I was twenty-nine. I was at the front of the church, on the left. I remember you. You had on a green tie."
"June made me wear it. She said Vernon liked green."
"He did." Dale's voice was thick. "He did. He had that green truck. The International." He let go of Amos's hand at last and stepped back and wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist, unashamed. "I've thought about calling you a hundred times. After Mama died, I found a box of his papers. There was a ledger in there from the seventies. He'd written your name in it. Every payment. Every one. And at the bottom of the page, after the last payment, he'd written, Paid in full. Told you so." He laughed, shakily. "I never knew what he meant by that."
"I knew," Amos said quietly.
They stood together at the rail for a moment, the two of them, in the red light. Down on the lot, the flags had begun to settle as the wind dropped with the sun. A meadowlark was singing somewhere in the field beyond the frontage road.
"Craig tells me," Dale said, finally, "that you want twenty Escalades."
"That's right."
"Black."
"Black."
"May I ask what for?"
Amos looked at him. Then he looked past Dale, down the length of the deck, at the young salesman standing beside the ESV Platinum with a key fob hanging from his finger and his papers scattered at his feet. He looked at him for a long time. Tyler felt it. He felt it like heat on the side of his face.
"I'll tell you," Amos said. "I'll tell all of you. But let's go inside. My knees aren't what they were, and it's going to be dark soon, and there's something I want to show you." He paused. "And bring the young fella from the parking lot. Luis. I want him to hear it."
"Luis?" Dale looked puzzled. "Our porter?"
"He's the only man on this lot who looked at my face before he looked at my boots," Amos said. "I want him in the room."
* * *
They went into Dale Harmon's office. It was a big corner room at the back of the showroom, paneled in pale wood, with a wall of windows that looked out over the deck and the plains, and a desk the size of a small boat, and on the wall behind the desk, among the plaques and the framed awards and the photographs of Dale shaking hands with men in suits, there was one small, faded, black-and-white snapshot in a cheap dime-store frame. It showed a heavyset man in a short-sleeved shirt with a toothpick in his mouth, standing on a gravel lot in front of a hand-painted sign that said HARMON'S — GOOD USED CARS — FAIR DEALS, with one hand resting on the fender of an old green International cattle truck.
Amos stopped in front of it for a while when he came in. He did not say anything. Then he sat down in the leather chair across from Dale's desk with a small grunt, and took off his cap and put it on his knee, and took out the manila envelope and laid it on the desk.
Dale sat behind the desk. Craig stood beside the door, smiling his anxious smile. Luis had come in last, very quietly, still holding the two glass bottles of water because he had forgotten he was holding them, and was standing against the wall by the windows as if he were trying to take up as little room as possible. And Tyler — Tyler had not been invited. Nobody had said a word to him. But nobody had told him to stay away, either, and when the others went inside, he had picked up his clipboard, and a few of his papers, and followed, and now he was standing in the open doorway behind Craig, half in the room and half out of it, holding the clipboard against his chest like a shield.
Amos saw him. He did not say anything about it.
He took the rubber bands off the envelope. He took out the white bank envelope with the cashier's check in it and laid it on the desk in front of Dale, unopened. He took out the typed list of names and laid it beside the check. Then he took out the old square photograph — twenty-one people in front of a metal building, green trucks behind them, The Twenty, Christmas 1986, God help us — and laid it down too, face up, and turned it so Dale could see.
And then, last, he took out the stack of ragged papers in their binder clip, and unclipped them, and began to lay them out on the desk, one by one, side by side, in rows.
Index cards. Fuel receipts. A page from a logbook. A Waffle House napkin. The cardboard flap of a shotgun-shell box, worn soft as cloth.
OWED: One (1) black Cadillac. When we make it. — A. Whitcomb
OWED: One (1) black Cadillac. When we make it. — A. Whitcomb
OWED: One (1) black Cadillac. When we make it. — A. Whitcomb
Seventeen times.
Nobody in the room said anything while he did it. He did it slowly, carefully, smoothing each one flat with the side of his big scarred hand before he laid down the next. When he was done, they covered most of the desk. In the window light, in the last of the sunset, they looked like a strange old map, or a hand of cards in some game nobody in the room knew how to play.
Then Amos Whitcomb sat back in the chair and told them about the winter of 1986.
He told it plainly. He did not dress it up. He told them about the oil bust and the farm crisis and the bank in Enid calling his loans. He told them about the meeting in the cold garage on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and the kerosene heater, and standing on the running board of a truck. He told them about the bank president's black Sedan de Ville parked in the handicapped spot every Monday morning. He told them about Hank Doyle's pencil. He told them about the six men who left and the twenty who stayed, and the ice storms on I-40, and the diesel jelling in the tanks in February, and Ida Pruitt and Rosalie Vance running a double route for six weeks while Rosalie's husband lay in a hospital bed in Amarillo. He told them about Clyde Mercer's wedding ring and Hank Doyle's bass boat. He told them about the grain co-op in Kansas that finally paid in April, and payroll in June.
Then he told them about the thirty-eight years after that. About every year he had meant to and had not. About Hank's funeral, and Clyde's, and Rosalie's daughter in the church parking lot holding a piece of cardboard torn off a shell box. About June.
"I made a lot of promises in my life," he said. "In business you make them every day. I kept most of 'em. I'm proud of that. But this one —" He touched the napkin, very lightly, with the tip of one finger. "This is the one I made first. And it's the one I kept the longest without keeping it. These people trusted me with their whole lives, that winter. Their houses, their kids' shoes, everything. On nothing but my word and a scrap of paper. And I let them carry that scrap of paper around for thirty-eight years. Some of them carried it into the ground." He looked up at Dale. "I sold the company three weeks ago. My granddaughter found them all. Eleven are still living. For the other nine there's a wife, or a son, or a daughter, or a grandson. I want twenty black Cadillacs. The big ones. The best you've got. One for each name on that list." He tapped the typed sheet. "And I want to drive them to Enid, all twenty, in a line, and park them in front of what used to be the First National Bank. And I want to stand on the sidewalk and hand every one of those people their keys and take that piece of paper back off 'em and write PAID on it."
He sat back.
"That's what for," he said.
The office was very quiet. Out on the deck, beyond the windows, the sun had gone down. The sky over the plains was a deep burning orange at the bottom and a cool dark violet at the top, and the long row of black Escalades on the deck had gone dim and shadowy, catching only a faint red glow along their roofs.
Dale Harmon took off his reading glasses and set them on the desk. He picked up the photograph of the twenty, and looked at it for a long time, and set it down again.
"I don't have twenty on the lot," he said. "I have seven on the deck and four more in the back. I'll get the rest. I'll get them from Tulsa, from OKC, from Lubbock, from Wichita — I'll call every Cadillac store in five states tonight if I have to. It'll take two weeks. Maybe three."
"I've waited thirty-eight years. I can wait three weeks."
"And I'm not making a dime on them," Dale said.
Craig made a small strangled noise by the door. Dale did not look at him.
"Dale —" Amos began.
"No, sir. You're going to pay what they cost me, and not one penny more. That's not charity. That's my daddy's ledger. I'm just writing the last line." He picked up a pen. "Now. Who's the salesman of record?"
There was a pause.
Craig, by the door, cleared his throat. "Well — technically, I suppose — Tyler was the first one to make contact with Mr. Whitcomb on the lot, so by house rules —"
"House rules," Amos said, "can go hang."
Everybody looked at him.
He turned in his chair, slowly, and looked at the wall by the window, where Luis Ortega was standing pressed against the paneling with a glass bottle of water in each hand and an expression on his face like a man watching a car crash in slow motion.
"Luis."
"Sir?"
"How long till you take that test?"
Luis swallowed. "Three weeks, sir. May nineteenth."
"You going to pass?"
There was a beat. Luis looked at Dale. He looked at Craig. He looked, for a moment, at Tyler, standing in the doorway with his clipboard. Then he looked back at the old man, and something in his face steadied.
"Yes, sir. I'm going to pass."
"Then that's the date." Amos turned back to Dale. "These cars get delivered the week after that young man gets his license. And his name goes on every one of those twenty buyer's orders as the salesman. Every one. Whatever the commission comes to on twenty Cadillacs at cost, I don't care. You pay it to him. If it comes to nothing, I'll make up the difference out of my own pocket."
"Sir," Luis said. "Sir, I can't — I didn't do anything. I gave you a bottle of water."
"You gave me a bottle of water," Amos said, "and asked my name, and shook my hand, and told me the truth, and tried to warn me that I might get treated bad. You did all that before you had any idea who I was or what I wanted. That's not nothing, son. That's the whole job. Ask Dale's daddy." He nodded at the photograph on the wall. "He'd have hired you on the spot."
Dale Harmon looked at Luis for a long moment. Then he wrote something on the pad in front of him, and underlined it twice.