at Marcus's order, and clean as a whistle, which made Bobby's jaw do
something complicated. Lines: blown through. Pump: priming, drawing,
delivering at the specks the book called for, the gauge needle standing up
in the green like it was proud of itself. Marcus read every number aloud
as he took it, the way a clerk reads a will, and each number was right, and
each right number moved the yard's mood one degree from worry toward
something with a worse smell, because there are only so many right
numbers a dead engine can produce before the listeners understand that
the trouble lives somewhere the numbers were never designed to go. At
the end of the fuel flowchart the manual offered its final counsel in italic
type, which Marcus read aloud before he could stop himself: If all values
are within specification and the engine will not start, the difficulty is not
in the fuel system. He closed the book. "Well," he said to the page, as if it
had spoken out of turn. "That's the book's opinion."
"The book," said Vern, "has never met her."
"The book has met ten thousand of her sisters, Vernon."
"And she's killed it anyway." Vern said it without heat, which was how
the yard knew the heat was in him, banked and rising. "You certified me
on this engine in nineteen eighty-three, Marcus. In a motel room in
Detroit with the heat broke. Do you recollect what you told the examiner
when he asked you what a man does when the book runs out?"
"I told him the book doesn't run out," Marcus said.
"You told him a man listens to the engine and then he lies to the book
afterward so the paperwork comes out even." The gathered men made
their not-laughing sound again, but thinner this time, because the joke
had a body in it. Marcus stood with the manual against his chest like a
hymnal and looked at the green truck for a long time, and what he said
next he said more quietly, to Vern and not to the yard, though the yard
heard it anyway, yards being built for carrying the voice of a man who is
not performing. "I've been retired six years, Vernon. Six years of my
granddaughter's engine - it's an electric, it makes no sound at all, it just
goes or it doesn't and a man in California knows before I do. I came
down here this morning prepared to save this truck with that book,
because the book is what's left of me in this trade." He put his hand on
the valve cover, gently, a man touching the shoulder of a person he is
apologizing to. "She cranks strong and breathes free and the fuel's there
like money in the bank. And she won't fire. If she's got a reason, she's
keeping it in a room the book doesn't have." He stepped back and wiped
his hands on a rag that had no clean left in it, and ceded the fender, and
the second of the county's experts was beaten, and everybody standing in
the gravel knew it, and the knowing went around the lot the way a cold
front goes through a field of wheat, visible only by what it bends.
Tommy Ruiz had not, strictly, been invited, and had therefore arrived
earliest of all, at a little before eight, in a white truck lettered in orange
with his shop's name and the silhouette of a turbocharger, and he had
spent the morning in the posture he had perfected for other men's
emergencies, which was leaning on things he did not own with a cup of
coffee he had not been offered, being helpful about tools and generous
with diagnoses that all, by a coincidence he deplored aloud, led downhill
to the same address: the engine was a museum piece, the platform was
done, a modern common-rail repower could be in and running by
Thanksgiving with a warranty and a data port and payments Tommy
could arrange through a man he knew, and as for the Peterbilt herself,
well, Tommy would take her off Vern's hands as she sat, for a figure he
framed as friendship, and save everybody the embarrassment of the noon
inspection. He said all of this in pieces, across two hours, never quite
when Vern was looking at him. It was when Marcus stepped back from
the fender that Tommy chose, the way his kind always chooses, the
moment of maximum quiet to make his offer whole. "Vern," he said, "I
hate to see a legend end on a hook. I'll go twenty thousand, as she sits,
cash by Monday, and you can tell the fair board you've got my rotator
under contract by noon and save the-" He did not finish, because Vern
had turned around at last, all the way around, slow as a gate, and looked
at him with an expression that several men in the yard would describe
later, none of them agreeing on the words and all of them agreeing on the
temperature.
"Tommy," Vern said, "there is a man in Dallas with cream-colored
stationery who's offered me eighteen for her dead. You're standing in my
yard drinking my nephew's coffee bidding two thousand over a corpse