It's a two-sided card. That was the entire design," and the truck rode on
through the harvest traffic, past the gin, past Mill Road, where a
cinderblock house stood in the sun with its taxes paid and its porch bulb
new, holding its ordinary shape like a promise kept at barring speed.
Friday was the bank, and Friday had been on the calendar longer than
the fair had. The operating note — the June renewal, the going-forward
meeting, the delicate questions about the age profile of the yard's
equipment — had not been a single sum sitting still and waiting to be
paid like a fence bill. It was a working line, drawn on and paid down
across the year the way a ranch draws on a feed account, and what came
due on Friday was the renewal review itself: the bank's annual right to
look at the whole of Haskett Diesel at once, balance, collateral, contract,
and men, and decide whether the line continued, and on what terms, and
against what pledge. The figure the whole review turned on was forty-one
thousand dollars and some hundreds — the balance outstanding on the
line as of the first of the month, a number Vern had carried in his head all
autumn the way a man carries a stone in a boot, aware of it with every
step and mentioning it to no one. The county contract, renewed Tuesday,
was the line's best argument and everybody in the transaction knew it,
which was why Merritt had sat in the back of the commissioners' room
with his pad, being describable as merely present. Sixty-one thousand a
year, three years, county paper. Against that, the bank could do a great
deal of delicate-question-asking and still arrive, smiling, at yes. But there
was one more number in the top drawer, and it was printed on cream
paper, and it expired on the fifteenth, and Vern had understood since
Friday-the-truck-died that the bank would not have to ask about it,
because by Friday-the-bank, the whole town had had a week to do the
bank's arithmetic for it, at every parts counter and cafe table in Cade's
Hollow: a man could sell one truck, running and documented, for a
hundred sixty-five thousand dollars, retire his line four times over, put his
nephew right, put his knee up, and never bar an engine over in the cold
again. All he had to do was let a name off a door.
Vern prepared for the bank the way he had prepared for the
commissioners, which was to refuse, in advance and on principle, to
prepare a version. On Thursday evening he called the yard into the office
— not a meeting, because Haskett Diesel did not hold meetings; a
gathering produced by Vern standing in the bay door and saying, "Office.
Five minutes. Bring your coffee, leave your opinions in your lockers until
I've had my say, which you will observe is not the usual order and is not
permanent" — and he laid the money question open on the desk in front
of the men who drew their wages out of it. Bobby. The two yard drivers,
Ray Cutter and young Felix Armas, who ran the medium wreckers and
the rollback. Samir, who was not on the payroll and was present anyway,
because Vern had telephoned him and said, "You're the merchants of Mill
Road's witness on my debts lately; come and witness the whole of it, so
the version that gets to the counters is the true one." And Jonah, after
hours, with the logbook, because the logbook was now part of the yard's
papers, and its keeper came with it. Carla had driven him and waited in
the yard with June asleep against her shoulder in the truck, which Vern
had seen through the office window and said nothing about, except to
send Felix out with a blanket off the rollback's cab and instructions to
offer the lady the office's better chair and to accept the refusal he was
about to receive with grace.
"Here's the whole of it," Vern said, "because a yard that only hears its
money discussed in a bank has already been sold; it just hasn't been told
the date." He told it in order, the way he had read the card on Tuesday,
and Jonah, listening, understood that this was Vern's real liturgy, older
than the wrench and deeper than pride: a man reads his numbers aloud in
front of witnesses or the numbers own him in the dark. The line: fortyone thousand and change, review Friday, renewal expected on the
strength of the county paper and not guaranteed until the bank's
committee had its say Monday. The yard's cash: fair weekend receivables,
the county's first payment not due until November, parts accounts current
— current, he said, looking at Samir, because Samir Patel got paid on the
first and the fifteenth like a religion, and woe to the religion that lapsed.
Wages: not in question, not this week, not any week the doors were open;
he wanted it heard in the room that no man's pay was waiting on a
banker's committee, because it wasn't, and if it ever was, the man who'd
hear it first would be Vern himself, out of his own pocket, before the bank