5. Tangled Truths
TANGLED TRUTHS
COLE
Ed calls Thursday morning. The part that came up from Casper is the wrong one.
The right one's backordered a week. Next Friday, he says.
Monday after if it ships slow. Which leaves me a man with nothing to carry and nowhere to be, in a town the size of a parade ground, and I have never once in my life been any good at that.
I'd be on the mountain by now — two days up, by the route Holt drew with his finger in the dust of a rooftop a long way from here.
Instead I've got empty hands and a whole day and no mission to put in it.
The teams taught me a hundred ways to wait.
In the dark. In the cold. In the back of a bird with my heartbeat slowed down on purpose.
Not one of them was how to wait with nothing coming.
And a man with nothing to do thinks. Thinking is the one duty I'd pay good money to be relieved of.
So I go where there's work.
Ed's bay door is up, a Bronco on the lift with its guts hanging, Ed somewhere underneath it telling it things that would make a chaplain wince. A radio plays a country station off a shelf, low — on so long nobody hears it anymore.
"You need a hand," I say, "or an audience."
He doesn't come out. "What I need is a '78 harness that wasn't spliced by a blind man in the dark. What I've got is you. Coffee's on the bench."
There are two cups on the bench. One's his. The other's clean, set out, waiting. He put it there before I came down the street. I look at it a second and say nothing, because a man like Ed doesn't set a thing like that out to be thanked for it.
I pour into the cup he left, drink it down standing, and get under the Bronco with him.
A shop like Ed's is never one thing for long.
We're ten minutes into the harness when a ranch truck noses into the lot riding on a soft tire, and Ed slides out, looks at it through the bay door, says, "Yours.
" So I pull the wheel, find the nail, plug it, set it back — and the whole time the rancher, a big quiet man Ed calls Hollis, leans in the doorway talking calving weather like I'm not there, which is about the friendliest thing this town can do to a stranger.
He pays in cash and a complaint about the price and lifts two fingers off the wheel at me on his way out. I lift two back.
We go back under the Bronco. Ed's the kind of company I can stand, which is the kind that doesn't need filling. He hands me a light before I ask for it; I find a short before he does and don't make noise about it. He grunts — the Ed sound that means he noticed.
"Where'd you learn wiring," he says.
"Engines that had to run or men died. You learn fast, that arrangement."
"Huh." He pulls a connector, holds it to the light, swears at it gently. "Navy, Walt said."
"Walt said right."
"Walt always says right. Man's a damn almanac." He drops the dead connector in my palm. "Box of pulls on the back shelf, blue bin. Might be one off a Ford that'll serve."
There's one that'll serve. When I bring it back he's watching me cross the bay, something measuring in the look, not unkind.
"You're quick. And you don't talk while you work. I could get used to that. Last fella I had in here ran his mouth like a radio nobody could find the off switch on."
"What happened to him?"
"Quit. Found work that actually paid." He takes the connector. "Smart man. Don't tell him I said so."
The morning goes the way a working morning goes.
A woman drops a Subaru for an oil change and Ed jerks his chin at me — "you're already filthy" — so I do it while he's on the phone telling somebody their transmission isn't worth what a new one costs and they ought to drive it till it tells them otherwise.
The parts kid out of Lander comes through with a box of filters and a young man's hurry, clocks me, asks Ed if he finally hired help.
"Borrowed it," Ed says, and it gets a short laugh out of me I didn't plan on.
Around noon a kid runs a paper sack down from Rena's — two burgers, because Rena saw the bay lights and figured Ed would forget to eat and the new man with him. We eat at the bench with the radio going and don't say much. Ed banks his wrapper off the wall into the barrel.
The drop-ins thin out the way they do past one, and then it's just the two of us under the Bronco again, the bay quiet but for the radio and the tick of the work light, when he says it without looking up — the way men say the true things.
"You're not doing this for me."
"No?"
"Man helps for fun, he's slow about it. Stops for coffee. Tells stories." He seats a wire. "You work like this bench is the only thing holding you to the ground."
I don't answer. There's no answer that isn't yes.
"I had a year like that," he says. "After my Carol went.
Couldn't sit in my own house. Couldn't sleep in the bed.
So I came down here at four in the morning and fixed every truck in three counties whether it was broke or not.
" He wipes his hands on a rag doing nothing.
"Didn't fix the year. Fixed a lot of trucks. "
The bay's quiet but for the radio.
"How long," I say.
He knows what I'm asking. "Six years this fall." A beat. "Gets so you can be in the house again. Doesn't get so the house is full. You learn the difference, you're all right."
I think of an urn wrapped in a blanket on a borrowed floor two streets over. I don't say it. But Ed Larsen looked at a stranger fixing his Bronco and read the whole shape of it off me — the way Walt read me off a handshake, the way this town seems to read a man whether he means to be read or not.
"Six years," I say. "Good to know it's got a number."
"Everything's got a number." He slides back under. "Most of 'em are bigger than you'd want."
We get the Bronco's nerves talking to each other again by the middle of the afternoon — a harness that would've cost Ed two days alone and cost the two of us most of a morning, worked between a flat, an oil change, and a man who wanted to argue about a transmission.
Ed fires it up, listens to it idle clean, and kills it with the grunt of a man who's beaten a thing that meant to beat him.
By the time we've buttoned it up and chased the last drop-in out, the light's gone long and amber down Main and my hands are black to the wrist. Ed wipes a wrench he cleaned ten minutes ago, looking at it instead of me.
"Walt and me play cards down at the Daughter most nights. Cooper's got the amber on, and the prime rib if you beat the Coopers to it." He hangs the wrench. "You play?"
"Some."
"Then you'll donate to Walt's retirement like the rest of us. Man counts cards and lies about it." Now he looks at me. "Go on. Eat. You've got the look of a man who forgets to, and I've buried enough people who forgot the small things."
I tell him maybe.
I mean no.
I walk back to Eleanor's turning the no over like a part I'm checking for cracks, and it holds.
I've got a town to be gone from the hour that truck turns over.
A mountain three days off with a man's last ask waiting at the top of it.
A promise made on a rooftop with the sun going down behind the wire — Holt's voice saying do the trip for both of us, me telling him to shut the fuck up, him making me swear it anyway.
That's the list. There's no line on it that reads sit in a loud bar and watch a woman who looked at you once and won't again.
And there's the other thing. Her own father drove me past that bar the first hour I knew him and told me whatever I thought I saw, I didn't. A man doesn't say that to a stranger about his daughter unless he means hands off. I heard him. I'm not a man who needs telling twice.
So it's settled. I wash the grease out of the creases of my knuckles in Eleanor's little bathroom, and I sit down on the edge of that absurd soft bed to pull my boots off and turn in like a man with sense.
I don't pull the boots off.
I sit there with my hands hanging between my knees, and I think about a streak of turquoise above one ear.
The way she held my eyes over a glass and didn't blink.
The half second when I looked down first — me, who hasn't looked down first since I was sixteen years old — and the way she took it without a word and went back to her bottles like she'd known I would.
This is not a thing I do.
Women come to me. They have my whole life — stand a half-step too close, laugh a beat too early, tilt so the light finds them, and a man does nothing at all but hold still and get admired for it.
I quit being flattered before I was thirty.
I have never once been the one to cross a cold street toward a lit door with no reason I'd say out loud and no plan for what happens when I get there.
I'm on the sidewalk before I've decided to be. Boots still on. Four blocks of dark Main between me and a hand-lettered sign, and my feet took the vote before the rest of me was asked.
I let them.
The Devil's Daughter is warm and loud and full when I push through, and the bell over the door turns exactly one head.
Hers. Door first, me second — the way she takes every door, the way I take every door, the one reflex we've got in common and the only one I can read from here.