into the part of the story where Vern Haskett went a little mad for one
morning in fair week, which is how the town would choose to remember
it, kindly and forever, and the truck would go to Dallas as a static
acquisition, and the house on Mill Road would go on the courthouse steps
on the first Tuesday of November to a man from Lubbock, and the gap at
the back of the left bank would keep its silence all the way down
Interstate 20 in the hold of everything else that had not been said in time.
Jonah stepped forward.
He did not make an entrance, because he had discarded all the
entrances on the run down Mill Road, and what was left when a Lowry
discarded the entrances was just a boy walking out of the edge of a crowd
with a red toolbox in one hand, which he set down - carefully, the way
Pap had taught him tools were set down, like sleeping animals - in the
gravel at the front of the green truck, where the whole yard could see it
and him. He was not tall for seventeen and the morning had put the dust
of three streets on his shoes, and his shirt was Samir's spare with
PATEL'S PARTS over the pocket where his own name had never been.
Forty people looked at him. He felt the looking the way a man feels
weather change in a bad knee, all at once and in the joints, and he
understood that there would be laughter if he gave it a single inch of
purchase, and that the laughter would be the end of the one chance, and
that his hand, when he raised it, would have to be as steady as the hand
Pap had closed over his in the kitchen over the toolbox, in the winter, on
the last of the lessons.
So he raised it steady. Up beside his head, open, the way a man flags
down a load on the highway, the way a student - God help him, like a
student - asks to be called on in a class he is failing: Jonah Lowry's right
hand went up into the fair-week morning with the ground-thin wrench
gripped in it, blade of altered steel catching the sun, his grandfather's
initials riding his palm, and his voice came out of him at a volume that
startled the pigeons off the wash bay roof and carried, as yard voices do
when they are not performing, to the gate.
"Mr. Haskett."
Vern stopped with one hand on the office door. The yard stopped with
him. Bobby stopped with the barring bar still across his shoulders like a
yoke. Dale Proctor, halfway to his truck with the bore scope in his hand,
stopped and turned with the expression of a man who has heard a new
instrument enter an orchestra he believed he had already reviewed in full.
"I'd like to try for the money," Jonah said. The words sounded plain in
his own ears, plainer than he had hoped, and he made himself keep going
before plain could curdle into small. "I know I'm nobody you sent for. I
sweep at Patel's. But I've been standing yonder since eight o'clock
listening to her, and when Bobby barred her over just now I counted her
twice, and she's only answering seven." He swallowed. "There's an
injector at the back of the left bank that's not answering, sir. Under the
Jake. If it's stuck down it'll hold the whole rack in no-fuel and she'll crank
till Christmas with perfect pressure, which is what she's been doing. I
can't prove it from out here. But I know the sound of it the way I know
my own name, and I brought the wrench that can reach the cover bolts
without pulling the housing" - he turned the wrench once in his raised
hand, so the thin ground neck showed, a small bright heresy of a tool -
"because my grandfather made it for exactly that gap, on Detroits, in
nineteen sixty-nine. I'd ask ten minutes with it before you call Dallas. If
I'm wrong, I'm wrong in front of the whole town and you haven't lost a
thing but ten minutes of a morning that's already gone. If I'm right-" He
stopped there, because the rest of the sentence was the money on the
fender and the house on Mill Road and his mother's cookie tin and his
sister's folded thundercloud, and not one word of it belonged to Vernon
Haskett, and a Lowry did not spend his family's private arithmetic in
another man's yard.
The silence that followed was not the silence of the dead engine, and it
was not the lid-silence after the last cranking. It was the silence of forty
people recalculating a boy at the same time. Somewhere at the back, a
man - it was never afterward established who, and the town, to its credit,
mostly declined to try - let out one short bark of a laugh, and it died in the
air, unjoined, because Marcus Yee had turned his head toward the sound
with the slow majesty of an old battleship bringing its guns around, and
because Vern Haskett, at the office door, had taken his hand off the
handle and was looking at the boy, and at the wrench in the boy's hand,