money had once sat, and said to Vern, in the hearing of the road, "Full
rate. Invoiced to my shop. I won't insult either of us with the friend price,
because I've finally figured out your prices are the friendship, and the rest
is just me talking."
"Invoice'll read recovery assist," Vern said, "because that's what it was.
Your pump man'll have you running by Friday." "He will," Tommy said.
"Warranty. Data port and all." A beat of the old smile crossed his face and
was gone, replaced by something less photogenic and considerably more
durable. "Vern. What I said in the commissioners' room. I meant the
numbers part when I walked in. By the time I sat down I meant the other
part. Don't make a speech about it; I've got a reputation in three counties
as a man who doesn't learn things in public, and I'd like to keep the
learning private and the results visible." "Results is all I ever invoiced,"
Vern said. He held out his hand. The handshake, on the shoulder of Route
9, with the harvest dust settling over both trucks impartially, lasted
exactly as long as it needed to, and the trooper, writing up his report in
the cruiser, entered it in the unofficial record of the county as the
afternoon the age of Vern Haskett declined, for the second time that
month, to be over. Tommy's check arrived at the yard on Thursday, in an
envelope with no note, for the full invoiced amount plus a line at the
bottom of the stub, in Tommy's hand: OVERFLOW REFERRALS TO
HASKETT UNTIL MY PUMP'S GRANDCHILDREN ARE PAID OFF
— T.R., which Samir, shown the stub because Vern showed Samir
everything that mattered that month on principle, read twice and declared
to be the most honest document Odessa had ever produced, and said he
would deny saying so in Odessa.
Marcus Yee conducted the thirty-day re-inspection on the Saturday
before the fifteenth, with Dale and Jonah working and Vern — by
Marcus's flat decree — standing at the fender with his hands visible and
his advice rationed to when it was asked for, a discipline Vern bore with
the martyred good humor of a man being taught his own liturgy by its
high priest. They barred her over cold, first, because Marcus insisted the
record show the count taken the way the count had first been taken: eight,
in order, the eighth no longer a shaped silence but a voice like the others,
a little brighter, Jonah said, than its neighbors, the way a new tooth in a
familiar smile is brighter, and Marcus said that was the reman unit's
youth and not poetry and that the boy was to write voice nominal, eight
of eight in the book and save the dentistry for his diary. They ran her
under load on the grade with the medium wrecker chained behind as a
brake. They pulled the hose clamps and inspected the new suction hose
fitting by fitting and entered its age in the book as a puppy's age is
entered, in weeks, with the replacement date already written beside it in
advance — spring, two years hence, regardless of what any gauge said, a
sentence Marcus composed on the spot and Vern signed without a
murmur, because it was his own spring deferral, converted into a standing
order against himself. The book went to the county on Monday with
Dale's countersignature and Marcus's report, and Commissioner Boyd
telephoned the yard personally — a thing without recent precedent — to
say that the annual review's paper problem had been answered by the best
set of papers the county had ever been given by a man it paid, and that he
had filed them, himself, in the front of the contract folder, ahead of the
bid. The county's copy of the August card was in that folder too. The
front of the folder, by October, was getting crowded with the whole
record, which had been Sandoval's design and was now simply the
county's habit.
It was after the re-inspection, with Lorene cooling in her bay and the
light going harvest-gold across the gravel, that Marcus produced his own
closing entry. From the canvas bag he took not the factory manual but a
letter, factory letterhead, the reply to the letter he had told the
commissioners about — and he read it to the yard the way Vern read
numbers, aloud and in order, though it was short: the factory thanked a
retired service representative for a field report of unusual clarity; the
seized-unit failure mode, fuel starvation scoring consequent on suctionside restriction undetectable at cranking pressure, would enter the service
literature with the acoustic verification step; and the factory wished to
know whether the non-dealership technician mentioned in the report
might, in due course, be interested in a factory-sponsored training
scholarship, when he was of age, the representative to advise. Marcus
folded the letter with great precision and put it not in the bag but in
Jonah's hand. "It doesn't say your name," he said. "It says the thing you
did, which will outlast your name if you let it. When you're eighteen and
the algebra's passed, Lowry, there will be a letter with your name spelled
on it, and I will write the advising part of it myself, and it will say that the