The Nine Thousand Dollar Phone Call

What a Grader Operator Knows About a Long Road

For thirty-one minutes my grandfather kept a professional con man on the telephone.

Mr. Pell was patient, then smooth, then insistent. The bank was obstructing the wire, Grandpa said. Corliss had placed a hold on it. It could be twenty-four hours. Mr. Pell said Jonah would spend the night in county jail, and he used the word infection, about the nose. I stood against the wall with my fingernails in my palms and watched my grandfather’s face stay perfectly, gently scared.

“Isn’t there another way?” he asked. “I have cash at home, Mr. Pell. In a coffee can. I could put it in an envelope.”

A pause on the other end. Deputy Vickers wrote one word on her notepad and underlined it twice. Cash.

I learned later what she was after. A wire has an account number, and an account number is a closed door. But cash has to be picked up by a human being with a face, standing on a real doorstep.

Mr. Pell said that in a case like this the firm could send a representative, a courier from the bail office, who would come to the house, collect a sealed envelope, and deliver it directly to the court. Three-thirty that afternoon. He said, “Mr. Brungardt, you must not tell anyone. If the sheriff’s department learns of this, your grandson’s bond will be revoked.”

“I’m eighty-two years old,” my grandfather said, “and I haven’t told the sheriff anything since 1974.”

I put my fist against my mouth. Deputy Vickers shut her eyes. And on the phone, Mr. Pell, who had been warned about every kind of old man but this kind, said, “Good, good,” with relief in his voice, and hung up.

My grandfather snapped the phone shut. For a long moment no one spoke. Then he folded his hands and said, in his own voice, “Did I do all right?”

Deputy Vickers laughed out loud, a big, helpless laugh. Corliss started laughing, and Imelda in the doorway with her plate of rolls, and then I was laughing and crying both, and the little office filled with it.

“Mr. Brungardt,” the deputy said, wiping her eyes, “that was the best thirty-one minutes of work I have seen in nine years on this job.”

The Bank Makes a Telephone Call

A small town is not a place where nothing happens. It is a place where, when something happens, everyone knows by lunch. For years I thought that was a curse. That Thursday it was our best defense.

Corliss made the first call, to the county road and bridge shop, where Emil Brungardt had worked for thirty-eight years. She asked for the foreman, a big, soft-spoken man named Burl Tuttle, who learned the blade under my grandfather. She told him what was needed, and Burl said four words.

“What time and where?”

Corliss called the Prairie Rose Cafe next. Vesta Lindqvist has owned it thirty years. By ten fifteen Vesta had told the retired wheat farmers they call the Liars’ Bench, and by ten thirty the prayer chain from the Lutheran church.

My husband Wyatt, who works for the county road and bridge, was pulled off a gravel job on Highway 24 and told by Burl to bring a maintenance truck to County Road 18 and ask no questions until he got there.

Wyatt does not ask questions. He is six foot three, with hands like shovels. I called him from the bank parking lot.

“Burl says your grandpa’s got some trouble,” he said.

“Somebody’s been calling him. It’s the bail thing.”

A long, dangerous silence. “Where do you want me?”

“Where Burl tells you.”

“Then that’s where I’ll be.” And then, in a lower voice: “Tess. Is he okay?”

“He’s better than any of us.”

“Yeah,” said my husband. “He would be.”

Half the east end of Lincoln County found a reason to be on County Road 18 that afternoon. Nobody organized it. A town of people told, in a few words in a few kitchens, that Emil Brungardt had been lied to looked at the clock and decided their cattle needed checking out that way.