filing belongs to a white pickup that was totaled in Amarillo three years ago
55
and crushed in Amarillo three years ago. The vehicle in Prescott's yard is
wearing that dead truck's identity like a coat. That's title washing, and it's a
felony, and Leland Prescott's signature is on the filing, and on a normal
month that would be enough to ruin him." He turned his coffee cup a quarter
turn and did not drink. "But a charge is a piece of paper, and paper — forgive
me, Owen — paper moves at the speed of courts. If all I have on Friday is a
title-wash charge, Prescott's lawyer files an answer, a judge sets a hearing for
November, and on Friday the hauler comes and the truck rolls out of that
yard legally, because nothing has ordered it not to. It goes to Tulsa. It goes
into a shredder the size of a house. And the one object in this world that can
testify about the night your father died becomes confetti and rebar."
"Then arrest him before Friday," Paula said.
"For what, that holds?" Chen said, not unkindly. "Title washing is paper.
Paper lets a man make bond by supper. And once he's arrested, Mrs. Tate,
the hauler still comes Friday, because the contract is with the salvage
company, not with him. I don't need Leland Prescott in a cell this week. I
need that vehicle where it sits, or I need the man who logged it in." He let
that land. "The vehicle itself, with its true VIN plate readable and its right
taillight cracked like a fork — put a state seal on it and it cannot move, and
everything follows from it. Or the man. The gate man. When that SUV came
into the yard after the crash — and it came in hurt, in the middle of the night,
and it was washed — somebody opened the gate for it. Somebody wrote it
down or somebody didn't. If he wrote it down, his book is a chain that ties
the yard to the Elbow on County Road 12 at the hour your husband died. If
he talks, Friday doesn't matter, because a shredder can't eat a witness."
The room was quiet. The mower had gone off. Owen was looking at the
notebook under his hand, at the cover worn soft as cloth, and he was thinking
56
about the word Chen had used twice now, the way it had stood up in the
sentences both times, the way certain words did when they were
load-bearing.
Ledger, he thought. Nobody had said the word yet. But a gate man's book
had a name, and the name was ledger, and Owen had known it was coming
the way you know weather is coming, by the smell of the air off the fields.
It had started, really, the day before Chen came — though Owen did not
know it was a start, because starts never announced themselves. The day
before was Sunday, and Sunday after church was pie at Ruth's café, which
was not a custom anybody had ever voted on and was stronger than most
laws. Ruth kept the café on Main with the bell over the door, and on Sundays
she put out the pies her sister baked in Lubbock — coconut cream, chess,
apple with a crust like shingles — and the riders came with their helmets in
their hands like men carrying their hats into church, and the whole front of
the place filled with the smell of coffee and sugar and leather.
Owen had a slice of chess pie and a glass of milk at the little table by the
window where he could see the street. Doyle Ketchum was at the big table
with two of the others, saying nothing much, being the wall he was. Owen
was working on the crossword in the Sunday paper that Ruth saved for him,
writing the answers in pencil in his small square hand, when the bell over the
door went and Cora Sikes came in.
Everybody knew Cora. She had run the school cafeteria when Paula was a
girl and she carried herself like a woman still in charge of a line of children.
But that Sunday she came in slow, and her face was the face of a person
carrying something in both hands that must not be spilled, and Ruth went to
her the way Ruth went to anyone in trouble and set her at the counter with
coffee, and the two women talked low, facing forward, watching the room in
57
the mirror behind the shelves.
Owen was not listening — not the way a person at the next table is not
listening, which meant he heard everything and could have stopped any time
and didn't.
"— Friday," Cora said. "Thirty-one years, Ruth. He come home Friday with
his thermos and his lunch tin in a grocery sack. No watch, no dinner, no
thank-you. A boy from the office walked him to the gate. To the gate, Ruth.
Emmett Sikes opened that gate for thirty-one years and they walked him to it
like a thief."
"Cora," Ruth said.
"He's drinking. He's sleeping in the truck some nights. Out at the Motor Inn,
in the lot, where the long-haul boys park. He says the house is too quiet and I
say the house is quiet because he's in a parking lot being proud in the dark,
and neither of us is wrong, and that's the hell of it."
Ruth poured more coffee into a cup that didn't need it. "Did they give him a
why?"