A small Tupperware bowl that sat by the office was slap overrun with keys come Thursday morning when I showed up at the shop. Big sales somewhere off the mountain meant Daddy had to keep the work orders piled high if he ever wanted to shimmy that cash into respectable places. So, that’s what he did.
Daddy kept a long line of easy fixes—oil changes, turning rotors, and such—so I could help him move small chunks of change into the bank. But the bigger fixes, heavily overpriced work like transmission replacements that really padded the deposits with zeros, had to be done by him until he could find good enough mechanics to do the work and keep their mouths sealed. Sinking those Cabe brothers down into Lake Glenville had really thrown a monkey wrench into the whole operation. But dead men tell no tales, as Daddy said, and I guess he figured he could suck it up till then.
Those bologna sandwiches were surely ripe in Daddy’s lunch bucket by the time he realized we’d worked straight through lunch. It was mid-afternoon, and aside from him telling me what to work on first that morning, we hadn’t shared a word. A light drizzle had sprinkled all day, never did turn to nothing more than a piss trickle, just that hazy kind of misty rain. I was thankful for it nonetheless, as it kept the early-summer heat from melting us, made the job a little more bearable.
A loud buzzing came over the garage, a shrill mechanical buzzing that sounded like an amplified tattoo gun. The buzzer served as a doorbell by the office, so folks working in the garage would know when someone was amongst them.
“Jacob!” Daddy hollered from the next bay over. His head never popped out from under the hood of an old, ragged Cutlass. “Go see who that is!”
The oil was draining out of the ride I had on the lift and there wasn’t anything left to do till the draining petered off, so I wiped my hands on a rag draped across a mechanic’s chair and headed toward the noise. Standing by the office door was that wide-bodied deputy from a few days before, the one with salt-and-pepper hair who’d taken the missing-persons reports, the one who’d been almost close enough to hear me breathe when I lay flat on my back in the Cabe brothers’ trailer. Being this close to him again brought that rabbit feeling back, my hands jittery, my legs just a thought from running. He had his back to me. His shoulders shrugged up around his neck and his head was cocked back like he was trying to stretch some sort of stiffness brought on by catnaps in patrol cars.
“Can I help you?”
The deputy turned around, no sunglasses today, just those creepy-ass blue eyes. “Josh, ain’t it?”
“No. Jacob.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Jacob.” The deputy began spreading his mustache with his fingers. “Got a nephew named Jacob. That should’ve been easy enough to remember.”
“Well, what do you want?”
“No reason to be short.” The rain had his speckled gray hair slicked along the sides, kind of hid that gray amidst the hairs that still held color.
“We’re swamped today. That’s all. So, I don’t have a lot of free time.”
“I needed to have a sit-down with your father, if that’s all right with you. He around?”
“Yeah, he’s over there.”
“You reckon I might have a word with him?”
Rather than offer an answer to another half-assed question, I just hollered for Daddy.
“What is it?” Daddy yelled from across the garage.
“That deputy’s back. Says he needs to have a word with you.”
“Give me a minute.” You could hear the irritation in Daddy’s voice, hear him cussing under his breath, but in my mind he’d brought that irritation on himself with the tales he told. I heard the hood slam on the Cutlass and could make out Daddy shuffling across Oil-Dri. “Take him in the office and get him some coffee.”
I opened the office door and led the deputy inside. A twelve-cup coffeemaker still held half the pot from that morning, the coffee brewed down thick as stew now. I still poured a cup for myself, needing something to take the edge off, and offered a cup to the bull.
“I’m fine,” the deputy said as he walked a circle around the small office and shuffled through piles of paperwork with his eyes. The .38 revolver Daddy’d loaned me the night all went to hell was sitting on top of a stack of work-order receipts on the desk. The deputy eyed that gun for a minute, then took a seat in Daddy’s chair, a tall, leather spinning chair, the only one worth sitting on in the whole room. The bull toed the chair across the laminate and bellied up to the desk. He grabbed the revolver handle between two fingers like he was picking up evidence, turned it in the light to check all sides. “Nice gun.”
“That’s just an old beater Daddy keeps around.” I walked over and stood directly behind the deputy as he held the gun I’d waved that night. I took a sip of coffee, that thick burnt taste holding to my tongue. “Has to keep a gun around. You know how people are.”
The deputy swung open the cylinder and shook out the shells into his palm. He set the empty revolver on his lap and picked up one of the bullets, turned it and looked at it head-on. I stared at that bullet and thought how the slit hollow point could mushroom out inside of his brain. He set the bullet back down in his palm with the others and looked up at me with those blue eyes. “Yeah, I know how people are.” Daddy walked in just as the deputy dropped the last bullet back into the cylinder and slapped it closed. The deputy slid the revolver back on top of the stack of papers and turned to my father. “I was just telling your boy, that’s a pretty nice gun.”
“Can’t beat those old Smiths,” Daddy said. “A lot of those new autos, well, like that one on your belt for instance, will hang up when it gets to rolling. But those old revolvers, those old revolvers’ll fire come hell or high water.”
The deputy didn’t answer.
Daddy walked over to the coffeepot and poured himself a cup of thick brew. The pot stunk of burnt coffee, but he never was one for wasting. “My boy offer you a cup of coffee?”
“Yeah, he offered.”
Daddy sat down in a stiff chair next to the desk. He made it seem like it was all right, but I could tell that it was eating at him that the deputy had taken his seat. He could keep it hidden, but the fact that he gave up any bit of power to that son of a bitch was flat out eating him alive. He scooted the chair, and it grunted against the laminate, skirted against the floor, and left a black mark scribbled like crayon. “Leave us be, Jacob.”
“Sure you don’t need me for nothing?” I wanted desperately to stay, to hear the next line of lies he’d tell, but he wouldn’t have it.
“What did I say, Jacob?” Daddy scowled. “Just fucking listen. Finish up what you’re working on and get the hell out of here, all right?”
“All right.”
The deputy turned and looked at me, squinted those pale blue eyes the same way he’d done days before, and I nodded to him. He didn’t nod back, didn’t even twitch his mustache, just kept his eyes drilling into the back of my skull till I was all the way out of the room. I shut the door behind me and heard music start playing inside as Daddy cranked the knob on a little radio. Like always, he didn’t want outsiders listening in, and this time, it just so happened that I was the one on the outside.