Chapter 3 #2
That's it. That's the whole thing. You spend eight years making jokes into a room where the jokes are evidence — where a wisecrack is unfriendliness, and unfriendliness costs the shop money, and costing the shop money is added to a number — and you don't stop making them, because you can't, because they're the only weapon you've got and it's welded to your hand.
You just stop getting anything back. You make a joke and it goes out and dies in the air and you go back to work.
And then a man in a folding chair says "ninety-four dollars" under his breath at exactly the right moment eleven days running and you find out that you are not, in fact, an unfriendly person.
You're a funny one. Nobody had told me.
"Say the thing about the wasp again," he'd say.
"I'm not a jukebox."
"You said it was doing a very good job."
"It was doing a very good job. It was the only component in that entire fuel system operating at a hundred percent capacity. I want to be that wasp. I want to be dead in a vent line succeeding completely."
"That's the darkest thing you've said."
"It's Tuesday."
On day nine Thorne came out.
He'd been building to it. You can feel it. It's like a low-pressure system.
"Mr. Marsh."
"Mr. Thorne."
"You've been spending a good deal of time in my shop."
"I have."
"Can I ask what for?"
And Gideon, who had a contract on his knee and a coffee going cold on the floor beside the chair, looked up with a face of such flat unbothered courtesy that I had to put my head inside the frame of a Sportster.
"I'm waiting for my bikes," he said.
"They're not your bikes. Three of them are Miss Vasquez's current project, and one of them belongs to a man named Dutch, and none of the paperwork on any of them has my signature on it." Head tilt. "Which is interesting."
"Is it?"
"It's unusual." Thorne smiled. "Work coming into a shop without going through the office. That's the kind of thing that could look like theft, in a certain light."
The building got very quiet. I stayed inside the Sportster frame with my hand around a rocker box and my heart going like a lawn mower.
"It could," Gideon agreed. "Let's do the light properly, then.
The parts came in on the county, paid by us.
The labor's being done outside your posted hours by a woman you don't pay wages to.
You've got no invoice, no liability, no exposure and no cost. And when it's done, four men who each know about forty other men will ride out of here telling everybody in the southwest that the best mechanic between Flagstaff and the state line works out of Vasquez's on the 40.
" He turned a page. "You're getting the single most valuable thing a highway garage can get, for free, and you came out here to see if you could get more. "
Thorne's smile did not move. Not by a millimeter. That's the thing about him — the face is a fixture, it's plumbed in.
"You've got a mouth on you for a guest," he said.
"I've got a mouth on me for a president," said Gideon. "I keep it in the toolbox with the invoices."
Thorne stood there another moment.
Then: "Elodie. The stove's smoking."
"The flue's cold."
"Then don't let it get—"
"—cold," I said, from inside the frame. "Yes."
The green door. Soft.
Gideon didn't say anything for about four minutes. He read his contract. Or held it, anyway, in the position of reading.
I came out from under the Sportster eventually because my hand had cramped.
"The stove doesn't smoke," I said.
"I know."
"It's a perfectly good stove, it's a hundred years old, it draws like a—" My voice did something I didn't authorize. I stopped and breathed and started again. "It's a perfectly good stove."
"I know," he said again.
"He says it every time. It's — that's his — it's not about the stove."
"It's a reminder that you sleep next to it," said Gideon, "and he doesn't."
"You got that in eleven days."
"I got that in eleven minutes, on night one, standing in the lot looking at a stove pipe somebody cut through a wall with a saw." He set the contract down on the floor. "I've been sitting in a chair for eleven days because I couldn't work out what to do with it."
"There's nothing to do with it."
"There's always something to do with it. That's the job. You find the thing and then you find what it costs and then you decide." He rubbed his eyes. "The problem is I keep getting to the second part and the number's obscene."
"You did the numbers?"
"I did the numbers on night three."
"You've been sitting in a folding chair in my bay doing my numbers?"
"I've been sitting in a folding chair in your bay finding out whether you'd want me to," said Gideon.
And I sat down on the creeper trolley, right there in the middle of my bay at four in the afternoon on the ninth day, and it rolled six inches the way it always does, and I let it.
"You can't fix it," I said. "So don't start doing that face."
"I'm not doing a face."
"You're doing an entire administration of a face."
"Elodie." He leaned forward, elbows on knees, contract forgotten.
"There's a thing next Saturday. The Rust Run.
It's a charity ride out of Ash Fork — hundred and ten miles, ends up at the fairground, there's a band, there's food, there's about four hundred people and a raffle where somebody wins a saddlebag full of jerky. "
"Jerky."
"There's a lot of jerky."
"Say the part about the food."
"There's a woman who does a pit. Whole hog, in the ground since Thursday. There's about nine kinds of beans, and a man named Sal who brings a cooler of tamales as an act of open aggression toward the beans."
"Real tamales."
"From a kitchen."
"That's cheating."
"I'll use whatever works," said Gideon. "I've got the jerky and I've got Sal and I'm holding one more thing in reserve."
"What's the one in reserve?"
"Odile Kade's flying out for it," he said, "and she's seventy-nine, and she has opinions about a 1962 Panhead that I have personally watched clear a room."
"Why are you telling me this."
"Because I want you to come," he said, "and because I've spent eleven days trying to work out a way to ask you that doesn't sound like a favor, and I've failed, so I'm just going to ask badly.
Come to the Rust Run. Come and eat something that isn't a gas station tamale and hear four hundred people who've never met you talk about a wasp. "
I looked at the office window.
"He locks the pumps at seven," I said. "And then he goes to Kingman on Saturdays for the wholesalers' thing and he gets back around one."
"That's not a yes."
"It's a schedule, Gideon." I stood up off the creeper and picked up my wrench. "You said you read contracts. Read that one."