The Yellow Stripe on the Bolt

“Marlene,” Roy said, with his hand on my shoulder, “I’ve got a scrap bin the size of a Buick. Everything goes in it the day it comes off. I’ll show you whatever you want to see.”

I did not ask him to show me. That is what I have to live with. He was Emil’s boy and I was sixty-eight and tired, and the truck was ready on Thursday with a clean invoice and a receipt stamped paid.

I sat in Hurley’s folding chair with Cody’s box on my lap and let all that run through me. When I was done, I asked him a practical question.

“If I told the sheriff, what would happen?”

“I don’t know,” Cody said. “I’ve never done that.”

“Neither have I. So I’m going to find out.”

I called Deputy Nate Wollman on the cell phone Vern bought me, which I have never figured out beyond the green button. He came out to the farm that evening in his county pickup, took his hat off in the kitchen, and listened to the whole thing with a notepad he never wrote in.

“Mrs. Fiedler, I believe every word,” Nate said when I was finished. “I want you to hear me say that first.”

“But?”

“But it’s a civil matter. That’s what the county attorney will say. You paid for a service, and you say it wasn’t done, and Roy says it was. He’s got a signed work order and an invoice and a mechanic’s initials.”

“Whose initials?”

“I don’t know yet. That’s the trouble.” He turned his hat in his hands. “You could file in small claims over in Huron. But you’d be standing in front of a judge with a box of old rotors, and Roy would be standing next to a lawyer who happens to be his cousin. And the jury pool for anything bigger is every person whose oil Emil ever changed.”

I stood at the sink after he left with Vern’s coffee mug in my hand. I had no interest in a year of driving to Huron. What I wanted was smaller and bigger than my eighteen hundred dollars. I wanted to know how many others.

I did not sleep much that night. At three in the morning I got up and went out to Vern’s shop, which I had not entered since the spring, and turned on the light over the workbench.

His things were all where he left them. The coffee can of mismatched bolts. The radio with the cracked dial. And in the top drawer, a yellow paint pen, dried out, with the cap still on and his thumbprint in the grime of the barrel.

I stood there holding it for a long time. Vern taught me what that stripe was for the first year we were married, when I asked why every bolt on the tractor wore a little yellow hat.

“So the next man knows what’s been done,” he said. “And so I’ll know if anybody’s been in my work.”

I put the pen in my coat pocket, and I decided I would not go to the courthouse. I would go to the people.

The next morning I drove back to Wessel and found Ted Hurley under a Ford with his boots sticking out. He is a short, bald, careful man in his sixties, and when I told him what I wanted, he rolled out and sat up on the creeper.