The Dealer Who Made It Right

What Deputy Voss Told Me

I called the sheriff’s office that night, mostly because I did not know what else a man is supposed to do.

Deputy Voss came out himself, a big, careful man I’d known since he was a boy delivering the county paper on a bicycle. He sat with me at the same kitchen table, took notes, asked good questions, and then had to tell me something that took the wind clean out of me a second time that day.

“I looked up the title before I drove over,” he said. “Your son’s name is on it, same as yours. Joint ownership, filed at the courthouse, three years back.”

“I know. I put it there myself.”

“Then legally, sir, he had every right to sign that vehicle over. This isn’t theft. There’s no forgery here, no fraud I can find. This is a family matter, not a criminal one. I wish I could tell you different.”

A family matter.

I have heard that phrase used to excuse a lot of small cruelties over the years, but I had never once expected to hear it applied to my own dream, sold out from under me by my own blood, with the law’s full blessing standing right behind it.

Deputy Voss stayed another twenty minutes anyway, not because there was a report left to file, but because he could see a man sitting alone in a kitchen that had gotten too quiet, and some part of him did not want to leave until he was sure I was not going to do anything foolish about it. I was not. I did not have it in me that night to be angry in any direction that mattered. I just felt old, and robbed, in the one way the law could not touch.

The Drive to Fort Madison

Three mornings later, I drove out to Renner’s River Road RV and Marine, a lot strung along Highway 61 between Keokuk and Fort Madison that I had passed a thousand times without ever once stopping. I was not going there to make trouble. Deputy Voss had already made it plain there was no trouble to be made. I only wanted to see her one more time, in daylight, before some stranger drove her off toward a life I would never get to know anything about.

The lot was busy that morning, rows of campers and pontoon boats gleaming under a bright, ordinary Iowa sky. I found her near the back, still wearing three years of my hands on her, that little ceramic hummingbird still wired above the windshield where I’d left it.

I did not expect the owner to already be walking toward me across the gravel.

He introduced himself as Renner, a broad, sun weathered man in his fifties who ran the place with his brother and had, I would learn, bought it from his own father twenty years back. He had a way of looking at a man that made you feel like he was actually doing it, not just glancing past you toward the next customer.

“You’re Horace,” he said, before I’d told him my name. “The fellow who built this one.”

“How’d you know that.”

“Because my night mechanic hasn’t stopped talking about it since Tuesday,” Renner said. “Come on inside. There’s something you need to see before I say another word to you.”