The truck would not start on the morning she was needed most, and she
chose the hour, as old machines seem to, when the most people would be
there to hear her refuse. It was a quarter past seven on the last Friday of
September, the light just coming up hard and white over the gravel of
Haskett Diesel & Recovery, and the air already carried the day's heat
inside it like a coal in a pocket. Vernon Haskett stood on the running
board of the big green wrecker with one hand on the door frame and the
other wrapped around the key, and he turned it the way a man turns a key
in his own house, without doubt, because in forty-six years that key had
never once needed his doubt. The starter took hold the way it always took
hold, deep and certain, and the big Detroit rolled over twice, three times,
caught at something that was almost a promise, and let it go. A breath of
gray came out of the stacks and thinned and was gone. The engine settled
back into the silence it had come from, and the starter ground on a
moment longer than it should have, because Vern's hand had forgotten,
for that moment, how to believe what it was hearing.
He let go of the key. He stood a while with his forehead nearly
touching the door glass, listening to the ticks and settles a cooling engine
makes, except that this engine was not cooling, because it had never been
warm. It had been warm at nine o'clock the night before, when Bobby
had backed it into the wash bay and washed the fair dust off the booms
and shut it down with the air brake sighing, same as always. It had been
warm every working day since 1975. Now it sat in the wash bay doorway
with its hood already open - Bobby had opened it at six, out of a worry he
had not said aloud - and it would not start, and by eight o'clock there
would be eleven men standing around it, and by nine there would be
thirty, and the whole of Cade's Hollow would know before lunch that
Lorene was dead in Vern Haskett's yard with the county fair opening at
noon.
Her name was painted on both doors in cream script that a sign man
from Abilene had laid on in a single sitting in the spring of 1975 and that
Vern had had touched up, never repainted, every decade since: LORENE,
and under it in smaller letters, HASKETT DIESEL & RECOVERY -
CADE'S HOLLOW, TEXAS. She was a 1975 Peterbilt 359, long-nosed
and high-cabbed, deep green gone the color of bottle glass in the sun,
with a Holmes 750 twin-boom wrecker body behind the cab that could
lift the front of a loaded grain truck off a soft shoulder and hold it there
while a lesser truck wept hydraulic fluid into the dirt. Her engine was a
Detroit Diesel 8V-92, a two-stroke V8 of the old religion, silver-headed
and loud in her prime in a way that modern engines, with their manners
and their computers, had forgotten how to be. She had no computer. She
had no data port, no fault codes, no opinion of herself that could be read
off a screen. She had a governor, a blower, eight unit injectors married to
a single steel rack, and a million one hundred thousand miles, and
everything she had ever had to say about her own condition she said in
sound, to anyone who had learned how to listen.
Vern climbed down off the running board slowly, on account of the
knee. He was sixty-eight years old and looked like a man the years had
used hard and not wasted: thick through the chest, thicker through the
hands, his hair cut short as a brush and gone iron white, his glasses on a
braided cord against his shirt. He had buried his wife four years come
November. He had buried his father in the drought year and his younger
brother in the oilfield year, and he had put his name on bank paper in
three different decades and paid every note off except the one currently
folded in the top drawer of the office desk, and through all of it the green
truck had been the fixed point, the first asset and the last argument. Men
in the county measured their own histories against her without knowing
they were doing it. Lorene had pulled the school bus out of the creek
crossing in the flood of '89 with the water at her hubs. Lorene had carried
the Methodist church's steeple, lowered by crane onto her bed like a
bride, four blocks to its new foundation. Lorene had towed the governor's
own campaign bus eleven miles in the dark in 2004, and the photograph
of it, Vern young and grinning in the headlights with his arm along the
fender, hung in the office where everybody who ever owed him money
had to sit and look at it while he figured their bill.
Bobby Haskett came out of the shop with two mugs of coffee and the
expression of a man bringing one of them as a peace offering to a truck.