The road out of Alden ran the way all roads in that part of Texas ran, which
was straight until it had a reason not to be, and County Road 12 had exactly
one reason, three miles east of town, where the limestone shoulder gave out
and the road bent around a stand of live oaks in a curve the old men at the
co-op called the Elbow. There was no guardrail at the Elbow. There had been
talk of a guardrail, the way there was talk of rain in a dry year, regular and
hopeful and amounting to nothing, and so the curve stayed the way it had
always been: gravel at the edges, a ditch full of Johnson grass and beer cans,
and a cedar post at the apex with a cross wired to it that somebody's mother
had painted white and somebody else kept repainting, because in Alden a
thing that got painted got painted forever.
Owen Tate walked that road the way other boys walked to a fishing hole,
which was slowly, and with equipment. His equipment was a pocket
notebook with a marbled cover gone soft at the corners, a pencil worn down
to the length of his thumb, and a second pencil in his back pocket in case the
first one failed him, because a pencil that failed at the wrong moment was
not a small thing. A thing seen and not written was a thing that could be
argued with later, by adults, in kitchens, in the tone adults used when they
were deciding what a ten-year-old had really seen. A thing written down,
with the date and the time and the plate number in his careful hand, stayed
where he put it.
Paper stays, his father used to say. Paper stays when memory won't.
He walked the shoulder facing traffic, the way his mother had taught him,
which meant he walked it backward from the direction his father used to ride,
and every vehicle that came around the Elbow toward him came the way the
last one had come. He told himself he walked it for the quiet, and his mother,
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who was nobody's fool and a nurse besides, who could read a chart the way
other people read a face, knew the real reason and let the quiet stand in front
of it.
The reason was in the notebook, in columns.
He logged what did not belong. That was the rule he had made for himself in
the spring after the funeral, when the notebook was new and his hand still
shook on the first page. Cars that belonged on County Road 12 were cars he
knew: Mr. Abernathy's feed truck with the busted mudflap, the mail jeep, the
school bus, the co-op's white pickups, the ranch trucks with their beds full of
gates and wire and one dog each. Cars that did not belong got a line. Color
first, because color was what you saw first and what a liar would change last.
Then the make, if he knew it, and he knew more makes at ten than most men
in Alden knew at forty, because he had been raised in a garage the way other
boys were raised in a church, absorbing it through the skin. Then the plate,
letter by letter, said aloud under his breath so the sound of it would hold still
while his pencil caught up. Then the time, off the watch his father had left on
the dresser and that his mother had let him start wearing in August, when the
band finally fit the last hole. Then the direction: toward town, or away.
On the last Monday of September, the notebook had forty-one pages filled,
and none of them had ever once been the page he was walking for. He
understood that. He was ten, not stupid. His mother called the notebook his
weather, and there was kindness in it and worry in it both, the way there was
in everything she said about the road. "How's the weather?" she would ask at
supper, not looking up from whatever she was cutting, and he would tell her:
two strangers, one from Uvalde with a ladder rack, one with paper tags still
in the plastic. And she would nod like a woman being told it was fair and
dry, and sometimes — not often, only when the double shifts had worn her
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down to the place where the truth sat closest to the skin — she would say,
"Baby, weather's just weather. It isn't a promise." He knew that too. He
logged it anyway.
The Elbow itself he never hurried. The other boys from school, the ones
whose mothers let them ride that far, took the curve standing on their pedals,
leaning, showing off for the oak trees. Owen walked it at half his ordinary
pace with his notebook already open in his hand and his pencil out. At the
apex, where the white cross stood, he always stopped. Not long. Long
enough to touch the cedar post with two fingers, the way his father used to
touch the top of the door frame going out of the house, a habit so old it had
stopped being a habit and become part of the architecture. Long enough to
look at the ditch, which the county mowed twice a year and which held, even
now, if a person knew how to look, a long faint scar in the gravel where the
grass had never quite come back right.
His father had been a diesel mechanic at the county co-op garage out on the