Amarillo-based, a field technician for the dealer group that had eaten
three smaller dealerships in the panhandle, and he was not a fool; men
who are fools do not get sent alone to fair-weekend emergencies. He was
something more dangerous to an old truck than a fool, which was a
specialist: twenty years on machines that thought, and thought
comprehensively, and reported their troubles in numbered sentences, and
he had come to believe, down in the marrow of his professional self, that
an engine which could not report its trouble did not, in any meaningful
sense, have one - it merely had an owner with feelings. He shook Vern's
hand with correct sympathy. He looked at the Peterbilt the way a
translator looks at a letter in a language he has decided is dead. "Now,
Mr. Haskett," he said, "let's see what she's trying to tell us," and he set the
laptop on the fender of a machine built nine years before the first laptop,
and opened it, and the screen woke up bright and blue and entirely
without a place to plug in.
The search for the data port took eleven minutes, though it will not be
recorded anywhere as eleven minutes, because Dale conducted it as a
tour: under the dash with a flashlight in his teeth, behind the glove box,
along the harness at the firewall, narrating as he went in the voice of a
man accustomed to being the most current person in any room. "Some of
these old girls, they've been repowered, you get a harness swap, there's an
adapter, a J1939 pigtail tucked somewhere..." His voice got smaller as his
flashlight went deeper. Bobby stood by with his arms crossed, saying
nothing, in the manner of a man watching a doctor search a piano for a
pulse. It was Vern who ended it, not unkindly, which was somehow the
worst of it. "Son," he said, "I bought her new in the spring of seventyfive. She's had two in-frames and both of them mine, and if there was a
computer on that truck I'd have taken it off with a torch in 1987 out of
self-respect." A sound went through the gathered men that was not
laughter, because nobody there wanted to be the first to laugh at anything
that morning, but it loosened the air, and Dale closed the laptop with the
dignity of a man who has decided that the absence of a port is itself a
finding. "Well," he said. "That limits us to legacy diagnostics." He said
legacy the way other men say antique, and he fetched from his truck a
breakout box, a pressure transducer, a bore scope coiled like a pet snake,
and a thermal camera, and got to work in earnest, and the worst of it - and
Jonah, at the tires, understood this before some of the men at the fender
did - was that everything Dale measured was true. Fuel pressure at the
test port: true, and correct. Batteries under load: true. Starter draw: true.
Crank signal, air supply, shutdown solenoid bridged and clicking like a
metronome: true, true, true. The thermal camera found the block
uniformly cold, which was the whole of the news. Dale's instruments
described a healthy truck the way a thermometer describes a man in a
coma as having an excellent temperature, and by ten o'clock he was
reduced to the last page of his own method, which was telephoning
Amarillo on speaker so the yard could hear a supervisor say the words
parts cannon in a tone that suggested he did not know he was on speaker,
and Dale, to his credit, winced, and said, "I can have an ECM-" and then
stopped, remembering, in front of witnesses, that there was no ECM, had
never been an ECM, and that he had just tried to order a brain for a truck
whose whole philosophy was that brains were a failure of maintenance.
Marcus Yee came at ten-fifteen on purpose, having been telephoned at
seven and having declined, on principle, to arrive while a dealer man was
still performing. Marcus was seventy-one, retired off the factory service
line with a pension and a bad shoulder, and he carried the Detroit shop
manual for the 92 series in a canvas tote that had once held duck decoys,
the manual's spine broken at the fuel section since the administration of
Ronald Reagan. He and Vern had known each other since a training
school in Detroit in the winter of 1983, where they had shared a motel
room, a bottle, and a final examination that Marcus had topped and Vern
had passed, a distribution of honors that forty-two years of friendship had
not quite metabolized. Marcus greased his own hands before he greeted
anyone, which the yard understood as liturgy. He worked the manual the
way its writers had intended, in order, without skipping: the flowchart for
CRANKS, WILL NOT START began at a diamond that asked about fuel
in the tank, which caused Bobby to say, in a strangled voice, "There's fuel
in the tank, Marcus," and Marcus to reply, "Then the diamond will be
pleased," and proceed. Tank: full, as it happened, of fair-weekend diesel
bought Tuesday. Vent: clear. Primary filter: August, cut open on the bench