The Nine Thousand Dollar Phone Call

Grandpa Asks for the Phone

Corliss had already picked up her desk phone. She was not calling the emergency line. She was calling the deputy who covers our end of the county, Lorna Vickers, on a number written on a sticky note taped to her monitor.

Deputy Vickers arrived in six minutes. She is forty, with a braid and a quiet manner, and she came in the back door with her hat in her hand, careful not to look like trouble in front of an old man.

“Mr. Brungardt,” she said. “I’m Lorna. I used to ride the bus that stopped at your Section Line Road.”

“The Vickers girl,” Grandpa said. “You were always barefoot.”

She listened to the whole story without interrupting, and without once saying the word scam. When he finished, she turned a page in her notebook and said, “Mr. Brungardt, you did exactly right to come in here. Most people don’t.”

“I didn’t do right. I almost sent the money.”

“You came to a bank where your granddaughter works and let her take your arm. That is what the right thing looks like. They count on you doing the wrong one in private.”

Then she told us what she knew. In the sheriff’s office they called it the bail call. It had come through the county eleven times that autumn. Different names, different stories, a wreck, a drug charge, a stolen gun. The same professional voice on the second phone. The same company in Houston.

“I have never caught the voice,” she said. “They call from numbers that don’t exist, and the money goes to accounts that empty in an hour. What I’ve never had is a face. Not one. And I would love one.”

At that moment, on the corner of Corliss’s desk, my grandfather’s flip phone began to buzz. The number on the screen began with a Texas area code.

Nobody breathed. I reached for the phone, because I wanted to throw it through the window. My grandfather’s hand came down over mine and lifted it away.

“Let me,” he said.

“Grandpa, you don’t have to.”

“I know I don’t.” He sat up straight for the first time since he had walked in, and I saw the grader operator come back into his face, a man who could back a forty-ton machine down a washboard grade without touching a mirror. “That man made me cry in my own kitchen. He used my grandson. I have a few things I’d like to say to him.”

“Mr. Brungardt,” she said. “If you talk to him, I want you to say something very particular. Can you do that?”

“I’ve talked a lot of commissioners into a lot of gravel,” my grandfather said. “I expect I can manage.”

She leaned in and whispered. I watched his mouth twitch. Then he flipped the phone open with his thumb and put it to his ear.

“Mr. Pell,” said my grandfather, in a voice I would not have known, thin and tired and frightened, a perfect copy of the old man he had been an hour ago. “I’m sorry. I’m at the bank. They are being difficult.”