The Nine Wrecks on a Rented Rack

Three o’clock

The customers started coming in at a quarter to three. Some came with spouses, some with kids, the dairy hand with his foreman. The mail carrier brought a pan of brownies in a foil pan.

I was still at the rack, unchaining the pickup, when I looked out the door and saw Orval’s truck.

He had pulled in across the lot, by the fence, and he was just sitting there with the engine off.

I do not know who told him to come. Maybe nobody. Maybe he had driven by every day that week and just finally pulled in.

Then I heard something behind me that I had not heard at that shop in six weeks. The tap of a cane on gravel. A slow, uneven step, then another one.

I turned around. Lu was coming across the lot from the road.

Dorsey had driven him and let him out by the mailbox, and he was walking on his cane, one careful step at a time, toward the open bay.

He had not been to the shop since the surgery. He was not supposed to be on his feet that long. I started toward him and he held up his hand.

“Let me,” he said. “I want to walk it.”

He walked it. It took him almost three minutes. Every customer on that lot stopped what they were doing and watched him. Nobody said anything. The dairy hand took off his cap.

When Lu got to the door of the bay he stopped and leaned on the frame and looked at the rented rack, and the red pickup, and the chains I had just let off. Then he looked at me.

“You pulled that one by yourself,” he said.

“Wes pumped,” I said. “I pulled.”

“I can see that,” Lu said. His eyes were wet. “I can see it from here. That’s a straight truck.”

He reached out and put his hand on my face, his big scarred hand, and held it there a second.

I am not ashamed to say I cried. Twenty-two years, and I do not think he had ever looked at me quite like that.

The checks

The pickup owner was a retired lineman with a white mustache and a checkbook already out. He had been standing by the office door watching the whole thing.

He clicked his pen and looked across the lot at Orval in his truck. Everybody in Chillicothe knows Orval Teague, and they know he owns half that building.

Then he looked back at me.

“Who do I make this out to?” he asked. “I want to get it right.”

“Teague Collision,” I said. “Same as always.”

He wrote it out and handed it to me, not to Lu, not to anybody else. I put it in the envelope with the others.

The next man in line was the farm wife’s husband. He did the same thing.

He looked at Orval across the lot, then he looked at me, and he asked me who to make the check out to, and he handed it to me.

Nobody said a word against Orval. Nobody had to. They had all heard what happened. In a town like ours, everybody hears everything by Tuesday.