Who Was Listening
I did not know then that Tyler had heard every word. He told me later, standing in our yard. I will tell it the way he told it.
He had been driving back from looking at a house down in Leavenworth County. He had the scanner on in his truck, the way he always did, mostly for the sheriff’s channel. At five minutes to two, out of a habit he had never broken, he switched it over to the Sunday frequency.
He said he did it every Sunday. He said he had done it for nineteen years. He said he never told anybody, because it was embarrassing, a grown man listening to his stepdad and five old sailors talk about the weather.
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He said he switched it over that Sunday just to hear the silence. To know it was done. And then he heard Dad’s voice.
He said he pulled over on the shoulder of the highway and sat there with the engine running for the whole hour. He heard Orrin ask who took the tower down. He heard Dad say it did not matter.
“He didn’t say my name,” Tyler told me. “He could have said my name to all five of them. He didn’t.”
Monday
Tyler came out to our place on Monday, at about five in the afternoon. The sun was still high. Reinhold had just gotten home and was still in his work clothes, and the two men from the crew had stopped by to see the tower one more time, so all three of them were standing in the yard with their arms crossed, looking up at it.
Dad was there too. He had driven out after lunch to adjust the rotor, he said, which did not need adjusting.
Tyler parked at the end of the drive and walked over slowly. He stopped at the edge of the grass, where everybody could see him.
Nobody said hello. The two linemen did not move. Reinhold did not uncross his arms. Tyler looked at the tower. Then he looked at Dad.
“I heard you,” he said. “Yesterday. On the scanner.”
Dad looked at him for a long moment. “You still have that thing?”
“In the truck. You put the frequency in yourself. I never took it out.”
I watched my father’s face. I watched him understand it. Tyler reached into his jacket and took out an envelope. He held it out to Reinhold, not to me, not to Dad.