over two hard years, not to look up too fast at other people's machinery
trouble; it was read, in a town this size, as appetite, and appetite in a
broke kid was read as something worse. But his pencil stopped. Through
the window he could see the top of the Haskett yard's light poles above
the feed store roof, three blocks down Mill Road, and he had a sudden,
complete memory, the kind that arrives without knocking: his
grandfather's hand over his own on a barring bar, in the salvage yard
behind the county barn, and the old man's voice saying, not fast, Jonah.
Never fast. An engine at cranking speed is a liar with its mouth full. You
want the truth, you walk it around slow, one tooth at a time, and you
count who answers.
"What did it do?" Jonah asked, in what he hoped was the voice of a
person making conversation.
"Do?" Samir said. "Bobby called for filters at six-fifteen, which he
does not need, as he fitted filters in August, which means he is doing the
things a man does with his hands while his mind is somewhere else. Then
he called for a starter relay, which he also does not need, as I sold him
one in the spring and it is on the shelf in his own shop, I have seen it.
Then Vernon called me himself." Samir said this with the gravity of a
man reporting a change in the tides. "Vernon has not telephoned this store
in nine years. Vernon sends Bobby, or Vernon comes in person and argues
about the price of batteries for twenty minutes, which is a form of
friendship. This morning Vernon telephoned and asked me, very quiet,
whether I had a man in Amarillo who could be here by ten with a Detroit
computer." He turned from the window. "Jonah. A 1975 Detroit has no
computer. Vernon knows this the way he knows his own name. That is a
man telephoning the darkness."
Jonah finished the row of filters he was counting, wrote the number
down twice the way Samir had taught him, and asked for the rest of the
morning off in the way he had asked for nothing in two years, which was
directly, standing up, with the clipboard against his chest like a shield.
Samir looked at him for a long moment over the glasses he wore for
invoices. Samir Patel had come to Cade's Hollow in 1994 with a
pharmacist's degree that Texas did not recognize and a brother-in-law's
loan, and he had built the parts store by extending credit on handshakes
to men the banks had finished with, and he kept, in a black notebook
under the counter, a private ledger of who in the county was truly in
trouble, written in a hand so small it could not be read over his shoulder.
He did not ask Jonah why. He took the clipboard, said, "The bicycle
chain is oiled, it will not disgrace you," and waved him toward the back
door, and Jonah understood that the eleven dollars was lost and did not
care, and also understood that Samir knew he did not care, and that this,
too, would go in no ledger that anyone would ever be shown.
His toolbox was in the lean-to at home, because he had rebuilt Mrs.
Alvaro's tiller the night before by porch light and been too tired to carry it
back to the store. It was not far: out the back of Patel's, across the alley
where the dumpsters leaned, and down Mill Road six houses to the
cinderblock house his grandfather had built in 1968 out of block and
salvaged brick, with a roof his grandfather had re-laid three times and a
porch his grandfather had screened against the mosquitoes of a wetter
era. The house sat low and square and stubborn behind a yard of packed
dirt and one mesquite, and it was, that Friday morning, eleven days from
being somebody else's, unless four thousand seven hundred thirty-two
dollars arrived at the county tax office by nine o'clock Monday morning.
Jonah knew the figure the way he knew the firing order of the engine
he was walking toward: precisely, involuntarily, and at hours when he
would have preferred to know anything else. Rosa Jimenez at the tax
office had given it to him on a Tuesday in August, off the record and in a
whisper, because she had gone to school with his mother and because the
official letter, when it came, would go to the house and his mother would
carry it alone for as long as she could, which was her way. Four thousand
seven hundred thirty-two dollars: two years of county taxes that Pap had
stopped paying in the last year of his life, when the illness had made him
strange about paper and proud about help, plus penalties, plus interest,
plus the filing costs of the sale itself, the county charging the house for
the rope. If the money was not in the tax office's hands - not promised,
not mailed, in hand - by nine on Monday, the house went on the
courthouse steps on the first Tuesday of November, and a man from
Lubbock who bought tax properties the way other men bought cattle