He was thirty-nine, Vern's brother's boy, the yard's lead tech, and he had
been dreading this morning since about midnight, when the worry had
finally stood up in his chest and walked him out to the wash bay in his
socks to try the key himself, telling himself he was checking the batteries.
The batteries were fine. The batteries had been fine at midnight and they
were fine now, and Bobby had known at midnight, standing in the dark
with the cold concrete coming up through his socks, that fine batteries
were exactly the problem, because fine batteries and a strong starter and
good fuel pressure were all the easy answers, and Lorene had refused
every easy answer she had ever been offered in her life.
"She turned over good," Bobby said. "She just won't catch."
"I was standing here," Vern said. "I heard her not catch." He took the
coffee anyway. "You run the primer?"
"Primed it till it cried. Pressure's right at the port, I put the gauge on it.
Filters are August, both of them, I did them myself."
"August," Vern repeated, in the tone of a man filing a word away in a
drawer he intends to open later, and Bobby felt the drawer close on his
fingers. In August Bobby had serviced the truck top to bottom for the fair
season, and he had signed the green card that hung on the office wall, and
there was a thing about August that Bobby had carried for six weeks now
the way a man carries a stone in his shoe on a long walk, and this was not
the morning it was coming out, not before coffee, not in front of the
truck. He drank his own coffee and said nothing, and the stone stayed
where it was.
By seven-thirty the first of the fair traffic was rolling past on Route 9,
pickups with stock trailers, a float built on a hay wagon with the high
school band's tuba standing up in the middle of it like a periscope, and
every third driver slowed at the Haskett gate, because the sight of the
green truck sitting in the wash bay with her hood up at seven-thirty on
fair Friday was wrong in the way a flag at half-mast is wrong, a piece of
the town's furniture out of place. Drivers waved. Vern waved back with
the hand that wasn't holding coffee, the same wave he had given the
county for forty years, and each wave cost him something he did not
intend to itemize.
Deacon Farrow arrived at eight o'clock sharp in a white fair-board
pickup with the magnetic sign still crooked on the door, and he did not
need to be told anything, because a man does not chair the Cade's Hollow
County Fair for nineteen years without learning to read a yard the way
other men read a sky. He was seventy-four, tall and stooped, with the
careful kindness of a person who has delivered bad news professionally
at funerals for most of his life, and he walked around the green truck
once, slowly, not touching anything, and came back to Vern and said,
"Morning, Vernon," in the voice a man uses at a hospital corridor.
"Deacon."
"She going to be particular today?"
"She's being particular now," Vern said. "I expect she'll come around."
Deacon nodded as if this were weather, which between the two of
them was a way of saying it was not weather at all. The arrangement
between the fair board, the county, and Haskett Diesel was four pages
long and had been renewed so many times that the original was soft as
cloth, but it came down to one paragraph that mattered: during fair
weekend, when forty thousand people and eleven thousand vehicles
poured through a town built for a tenth of that, the county required a
heavy wrecker on call inside the fairgrounds fence from Friday noon until
Sunday midnight, able to move anything that died, rolled, jackknifed, or
caught fire in the choke points where the stock road met Route 9. The
county's own new rotator, a machine the commissioners had bought in the
spring for more money than the courthouse roof, was sitting in Amarillo
with its hydraulic pump on a bench, waiting on a seal kit from a
warehouse in another country. Which left Lorene. It had always, in the
end, left Lorene, and the contract had a demonstration clause older than
the rotator: the wrecker of record presented herself running, under her
own power, at the fairgrounds inspection at noon on Friday, or the
contract - and the sixty-one thousand dollars a year it paid, and the
county towing that came with it - passed to whoever could.
"Whoever could," in Cade's Hollow, meant Tommy Ruiz. Tommy had
a performance diesel shop on the Odessa highway with a dyno and a
waiting list and a smile like a billboard, and he had a new rotator of his
own, bought in June, parked most days where the road could see it. He
had no use for the county contract's money particularly. He had use for
what it said. It said that the age of Vern Haskett was over, and Tommy
had been saying that at the parts counter for two years, in the tone of a