Road 12 the night Hollis Tate died: a black SUV coming fast around the
Elbow with something wrong with its front end and a cracked right taillight,
fork-shaped crack, and three letters read off a plate in the dark before it was
gone. Partial plate: 7K. The clipping from the Alden Gazette was taped to a
page near the front of the notebook, gone yellow at the edges, the print small
and gray. Owen flipped to it with fingers that had dust under every nail and
held it up beside nothing, because you could not hold a newspaper up to a
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pair of binoculars, and then he looked again through the glasses at the real
thing, two hundred yards of fence and caliche away, and the crack was the
crack. The river forked the same way. He wrote it down so hard the pencil
tore the page a little: TAILLIGHT SAME. FORK CRACK RIGHT SIDE.
SAME.
Then the plate. As the SUV turned for the barn, slow, the rear plate swung
into the light and held there while the walking man said something and the
driver waited, and Owen read it the way he'd been taught to read everything
— character by character, out loud under his breath, writing each one before
trusting the next. The front of the plate was lost in shadow. The back half
was plain as print. It ended: 7K4.
He wrote it three times. Ending 7K4. Ending 7K4. Ending 7K4. Because
people forgot, and paper stayed, and a boy who had waited two years for
three characters off a license plate was not going to lose them to a smudge or
a doubt. He stayed on the hill until the barn door came down again at 4:52
and the yard went back to looking like a yard, and then he lay there a while
longer with the binoculars on his chest and the sky getting big and pale above
him, and he thought about his father saying the thing about paper, and about
how the men below had washed the SUV the way you washed a truck you
meant to sell, and about how a partial plate was a door that only opened one
way, and that he had just put his hand on it.
On Friday, the man with the camera came. Owen logged him the way he
logged everything, without knowing yet why it mattered: 3:58. Gray pickup,
no company letters. Man, fifties, cap, carrying a case. The yard man with the
clipboard met him at the gate like he was expected, and the two of them went
to the wash barn, and the door went up, and this time the SUV did not come
out. The man with the case went in. Through the binoculars Owen could see
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the flash go off inside the barn's shade — pop, and a pause, and pop again —
the way people photographed things for the insurance, or for the want ads.
He counted eleven flashes. He wrote: Photographing it. Inside barn. For a
listing? and then he underlined listing twice, because by then the washing
had started to make a picture in his mind, and the picture was this: you
washed a thing and photographed a thing when you were getting ready to
move it along. You did not wash and photograph a thing you meant to keep
in a barn forever.
He thought about that all weekend, riding the long way home Friday with the
notebook heavy in his pocket. At school on Monday, Mrs. Delaney had them
read their tree observations aloud, and Owen read his chinaberry entry in a
flat voice — Leaves yellowing at the edges. Berries hard, green to gold.
Crow present, third day running — and sat down to other children's
rosebushes while his real observation sat in his back pocket like a coal.
Observe. Record. Do not conclude before the evidence concludes. The
evidence was concluding. He could feel it the way you felt weather coming
over the hill before the wind arrived, and it frightened him and steadied him
in equal parts, because a thing that was concluding could be concluded
wrong if you hurried it, and hurrying was the one sin his father's notebook
religion did not forgive.
R.J. Sorn found the bike tracks on Tuesday of the second week.
Owen never saw him do it. That was the worst part, later, when he
reconstructed it: there was no moment, no shout from the fence line, no
chase. He arrived at the hill at 3:39 by the long way, through the arroyo
behind the gin foundation, the way he always came, and he settled into the
oak's shade with the binoculars, and the yard below was ordinary — gate
closed, barn down, clipboard man crossing to the trailer — and then, at 3:47,
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the trailer door opened and a man came out and stood for a moment looking
up at the hill.
Not at the yard. Not at the road. At the hill, and at the part of the hill where
the scrub oak was, and his hand came up and shielded his eyes against the
sun in a way that had nothing to do with the sun's position, because the sun
was behind him. Owen went absolutely still. The binoculars were at his eyes
— that was the catastrophe, arriving quietly, the way catastrophes in his
experience generally did. The lenses were up and catching light, and the man
on the trailer steps stood looking directly into them, and Owen understood,
with a clarity that went through him like cold water, that from below, a pair