The Road to Emil’s Place
My grandfather’s farmhouse sits at the end of County Road 18, three miles of gravel off the highway, past two cattle guards and a stand of cottonwoods my grandmother planted as switches the year they married.
By two in the afternoon I had never seen so many trucks on that road doing so many different kinds of nothing.
Luis Quintana, who hauls hay for half the county, had parked his flatbed in a field approach past the second cattle guard with a round bale on it, and was eating a sandwich. Two of the Kessler boys sat in their pickup at the edge of the stubble with the hood up, peering at an engine I am certain was running fine.
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Four men from the Liars’ Bench, aged seventy-one to eighty-eight, had decided it was a good afternoon to drive out and look at the fall wheat. They lined their Fords and Chevys along the north fence, each with a thermos.
Vesta Lindqvist had boxed a pie and sat down on my grandfather’s porch steps beside his old dog Pilot.
And Burl Tuttle had driven the county’s big yellow motor grader out to County Road 18 and parked it at the edge of the gravel before the second cattle guard, blade raised, with an orange road work sign set out in a place where nobody had ever needed one.
Deputy Vickers had parked her patrol car out of sight behind the machine shed. She wore a flannel shirt and jeans, her badge in her pocket. Just two women and an old man on a porch, with a pie and a dog.
She had made the envelope herself, at Corliss’s desk, that morning. Plain paper cut to the size of dollar bills, wrapped tight with a rubber band and a real twenty on the outside. My grandfather held it against his coat as though it were his savings.
At twenty past three his phone buzzed once in his shirt pocket. He held it at arm’s length, refusing his reading glasses, and read the text aloud.
“Representative en route. Do not speak to anyone but him. Do not mention bail.”
Wyatt’s truck sat behind the second row of cottonwoods, engine off.
Then a cloud of dust rose out on the highway.