walked her around twice, listening, with his palm laid flat in turn on each
fender the way Deacon Farrow had laid his at eight o'clock in another
world, the clock over the office door stood at eight minutes to noon, and
the fairgrounds lay eleven minutes away at a speed that respected the
stock traffic, and the demonstration clause did not care about stock
traffic. "Mount up," Vern said. "Bobby, follow in the service truck with
the tools and the old injector boxed — the old one, Bobby, in the pan,
tagged, nothing thrown away today, nothing. Dale, Marcus, you're with
me as witnesses that she presented under her own power, and if the
commissioners want experts they'll get the two sorriest experts in Texas,
present company included. Lowry." Jonah looked up. "You ride the
doghouse," Vern said — the padded engine cover between the seats, the
apprentice's seat, the seat from which a boy could hear the engine through
his own spine — "and you keep your hand off everything and your ears
on everything, and if she so much as clears her throat wrong between
here and that gate, you say so and I stop her if it costs the contract, the
note, and my name in this county. Understood?" "Understood, sir," Jonah
said, and climbed up into the cab of the green truck through the door with
her name on it, and the name went past his face at a distance of inches,
cream script, LORENE, laid on in one sitting in 1975, and he understood
that he would remember the smell of that cab — hot vinyl, coffee, a
decade of Vern's aftershave worked into the headliner — on his deathbed,
if he had any say in the matter.
She pulled out of the wash bay doorway into the full fair-week sun
with the money gone from her fender at last — Vern had swept the stack
and the brass padlock into the office safe in one motion on his way to the
cab, a postponement, not a settlement — and the yard parted for her the
way it had parted for nothing all day, and the men at the gate took their
caps off as she passed, not as theater but as reflex, the way men do for a
hearse or a bride. Route 9 was a river of fair traffic, stock trailers and
flatbeds and a float with the band's tuba standing up like a periscope, and
Lorene entered it at a working pace and held her lane and her temperature
and her eight voices, mile by mile, while Jonah sat the doghouse with her
heartbeat coming up through the seat of his jeans and counted, out of a
habit that had stopped being a technique somewhere around the second
mile and become a form of prayer, who answered. All of them answered.
Every time around, all of them answered. At the fairgrounds gate, where
Deacon Farrow stood with the inspection form on a clipboard and a face
arranged for delivering condolences, the big green wrecker came down
the stock road under her own power with her stacks talking, and Deacon's
face rearranged itself in stages that Jonah would treasure long after he
had forgotten the amounts of money involved, and the fair board
president took off his own cap, and wrote on the form, in a hand that did
not hurry, PRESENTED RUNNING, UNDER OWN POWER, 11:57
A.M., and signed it, and the Ferris wheel at that moment began its first
turn of the fair with its lights lit against the daylight, which everyone
present agreed later was a coincidence, and nobody believed.
It was on the fairgrounds apron, with the form signed and Lorene
ticking over at her lope while the heat came off her in waves, that Tommy
Ruiz made his last attempt, and it should be recorded in fairness that he
made it like a professional: not at Vern, who was beyond him now, but at
the moment itself, at the possibility that a running truck might still be for
sale to a man quick enough to price her before the emotion hardened.
Tommy had followed the little convoy out in his white truck with the
orange letters, because a man like Tommy does not surrender a front-row
seat at a market event, and now he came up along Lorene's fender — the
fender where the money had sat all morning, the fender that had held his
own offer's dignity and its doom — and he laid his hand flat on the green
paint, feeling her run through it, and he said, "Well. She's a runner again.
I said twenty as she sat, and I'll stand behind the spirit of it — Vern, I'll
make it twenty-five, runner's premium, and my rotator covers your
weekend while the commissioners chew, and you retire a legend instead
of a—" "As she sits," Vern said. He had come around the nose of the
truck with the inspection form still in his hand, and he was not angry; that
was the remarkable thing, the thing that made the moment fatal to the
offer rather than merely rude. Vern was almost gentle. "That was the bid,
Ruiz. Twenty thousand, as she sits. Cash by Monday. I remember it word
for word, because a man remembers the price put on his life in his own