Bobby took up the barring bar again. He did it slowly, and Jonah
would remember afterward that Bobby's hands, settling into the work,
were not steady, though whether that was the morning's exertion or
August moving in them no one in the yard could yet have said. "Slow,"
Jonah said, and heard his own voice come out thinner than he wanted,
and said it again, because Pap had taught him that an instruction about
speed was not an instruction until it had been understood in the hands.
"Slower than that. One tooth at a time. She can't talk at cranking speed.
She can only talk like this." Bobby looked at Vern. Vern nodded once, the
nod of a man authorizing weather. The bar came around.
Jonah stepped in close to the left side of the engine, closer than any
bystander had stood all morning, into the heatless shadow of the open
hood, and he laid the long screwdriver from his toolbox flat against the
valve cover the way Pap had taught him, blade to the metal, handle to the
bone below his ear, so that the cover became a drum skin and his own
skull became the hall it drummed in. It was an undignified posture. He
knew how it looked. A boy with a screwdriver pressed to his head like a
dowser with a forked stick, in front of forty people, with five thousand
dollars shining on a fender ten feet away. Tommy Ruiz made a sound in
his throat that he was careful to keep below the level of a word. Jonah let
the sound go past him the way Pap had taught him to let weather go past
a fence post. The bar came around. The engine turned, tooth by tooth,
sighing through its blower, and under the screwdriver the small
machinery of the left bank began, faintly and in order, to speak.
"There," Jonah said quietly. "One." The bar moved. "Two." Each
injector, driven through its cycle as the cam came around, gave off its
small hard tick through the cover — not loud, not even, strictly, a sound a
man heard with his ears alone, but a click with a body to it, a period at the
end of a short sentence. "Three. Four." He counted the right bank first in
his head and the left bank aloud, the way Pap had drilled him, front to
back, because a count you only do in your head is a count you can cheat
on when you get scared. "Five. Six. Seven." The bar came around. The
space where the eighth tick belonged arrived, and occupied itself with
nothing, and went by. It was not a quiet like other quiets. It had edges. It
was a silence with the exact shape of the thing that should have filled it,
and standing in it, Jonah felt the old familiar doubling of relief and terror
that comes when the world agrees with you in public. "Again," he said.
"Please. Same speed."
Bobby barred her around a second time, and the count went again, one
through seven, tick, tick, tick, in order down the bank, and then the
shaped silence at the back, where the rear injector sat under the Jake
housing in the place no gauge had ever been asked to look. This time
Jonah was not the only one who marked it. He heard Marcus Yee exhale,
a small sound, almost private. He heard Vern say nothing in a way that
had more attention in it than most men's shouting. And Dale Proctor, who
had begun the morning by looking for a place to plug in his machine,
said, very softly, "Wait. Do that again," in the tone of a man who has
heard his name called in a house he thought was empty.
"The kid's counting his own heartbeat," Tommy Ruiz said, because it
was the kind of moment in which Tommy's kind of man cannot afford to
be quiet and cannot afford to be convinced, and both facts came out of
him at once as scorn. "Forty people standing here listening to a boy hold
a screwdriver to his head like a seashell. You can hear the ocean in it too,
if the money's right." Nobody laughed. It was the first time all morning
that Tommy had offered the yard a laugh and been refused delivery, and
the refusal rearranged his face in a way he had to work to cover. "Then
you count it," Vern said mildly, without turning around. "You've got ears,
Ruiz. You've been telling the yard all morning what this engine is. Come
count what it does." Tommy did not move. The sun stood on the gravel.
The money on the fender lifted and settled. "That's what I thought the
bidding was," Vern said, to no one in particular, and turned back to the
truck.
Marcus Yee came forward then, out of the crowd, with the slow care
of a man approaching an altar rail or a loaded weapon, and he held out
his hand — not for the wrench, which stayed in Jonah's fist, but for the
screwdriver. Jonah gave it to him. It seemed important, afterward, to
everyone who told the story, that the boy gave up the instrument without
hesitation and without a speech, because a boy performing a trick guards