his props, and a boy reporting a fact hands them over. Marcus set the
blade to the cover and the handle to the bone below his own ear, a posture
he had not assumed in perhaps thirty years and which his bad shoulder
made an act of visible will, and he nodded at Bobby, and Bobby, who had
begun to understand that he was no longer operating a tool but testifying,
barred the engine around a third time. The old man's face did the
counting where everyone could watch it. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
Six. Seven. His eyes, which had been narrowed against the light, opened.
The bar completed its travel through the place where the eighth answer
should have been, and Marcus Yee stood still a moment longer than the
silence required, as if he owed it a courtesy, and then he straightened,
slowly, shoulder and all, and handed the screwdriver back to Jonah
handle-first.
"I certified mechanics on this engine," Marcus said, "when this boy's
mother was in grade school. I wrote letters to the factory about this
engine. There is a page missing out of the book I have carried for forty-
two years, and the page is the one where it says to stand still and count
who answers." He looked at Vern. "It's bound, Vernon. Whatever it is, it's
bound at the back of the left bank, and the rack is listening to it and not to
the governor. That's why your pressures are pretty. The fuel is coming to
a door that's nailed shut from inside." Vern's jaw moved once. "In my
own yard," he said. "At barring speed. In front of the county." He said it
not as complaint but as inventory, the way a man reads damage off a list,
and then he looked at Jonah for a long moment, and what he said next he
said at the volume of ordinary conversation, which in that yard, at that
hour, carried like a shout. "Ten minutes, you said." "Ten minutes to prove
it, sir," Jonah said. "Not to fix it. To prove it. The cover has to come up at
the back, just the back, enough to see the rack and the last injector. If the
rack moves free, I'm wrong and I'll say so right here. If it doesn't —" "If
it doesn't," Vern said, "we'll know what the next conversation is." He
turned his head. "Bobby. Kill the batteries. Both switches. I don't want a
hero today, I want a witness protection program for fingers." Bobby went
to do it with the alacrity of a man given an order that lets him move, and
the crowd, which had been a crowd, rearranged itself into something
older and more deliberate: a gallery, a congregation, the front rank of a
thing the town would be telling at supper.
The valve cover of an 8V-92 is a long aluminum casting, and the Jake
brake housings sit over the rear of it like a roof over a porch, and the rear
cover bolts live in the shadow between the two, in a gap that Detroit's
engineers had dimensioned for the hands of men who, presumably, kept
smaller tools or larger faith. Dale Proctor offered his own kit first, partly
out of professional reflex and partly, Jonah understood even then, out of a
genuine wish to be useful in a language he was only just learning he did
not speak. Dale's thin-wall socket would not seat. His low-profile ratchet
seated and could not swing. Marcus produced a wrench out of his canvas
tote that had survived the factory years, ground down by some forgotten
technician in some forgotten shop, and it went in bravely and bound at
the second flat, a sixteenth of an inch too proud, and Marcus withdrew it
and looked at it with an expression that was almost tender, the way a man
looks at a key that opens every door in a house except the one that is
locked tonight. Vern himself tried the last of it, a stubby wrench of his
own, with the ruined knee folded under him on a creeper pad and his
reading glasses riding low, and the stubby wrench turned the bolt perhaps
a degree and a half and then politely refused the world, and Vern lay there
a moment in the gravel dust with his hand still in the gap.
"That's the gap," Jonah said. He had not planned to speak. The words
came out of the arithmetic the morning had been doing in him since eight
o'clock. "That's the whole thing, right there. Every tool in this yard is the
right tool for an engine that was drawn for it. Pap said Detroit drew that
gap for a man they never met, and the man they never met had to draw
his own tool." He held out the ground-thin wrench, not to Vern — Vern
was still on his back in the dust, looking up — but into the space between
them, where it could be examined like evidence. The neck of it had been
ground to half its forged thickness and bent eleven degrees, work done in
1969 by a twenty-two-year-old in a motor pool who had needed, in a