Secret Vows

Chapter 7: Two Dollars

Two Dollars

Years later Trey could still do that stretch of his life in his head without looking anything up.

The settlement money went the way he'd known it would, and when it was gone what he had left was a hundred and fifty dollars. He did the arithmetic on the back of a receipt in the lot behind the store, under the dock light, so he could see what he was writing. A hundred and fifty dollars was twenty-three days. Twenty-three days if nothing happened, if he bought the right things and didn't buy anything else, if he didn't get sick.

He bought the right things.

Ramen bricks, four for a dollar, stacked in the cabinet over the sink where nobody else could see them, on account of there being nobody else. A five-pound bag of rice, cooked a cup at a time in the break room microwave and eaten with pickles out of the cheapest jar on the shelf, whichever one that was that week. Canned beans when he couldn't look at the ramen anymore.

He went twenty days on it. Somewhere in the second week he stopped getting hungry in the middle of the day, and he decided to take that as a good sign. He kept the receipt in his wallet and crossed the days off on the back of it, and he came in on schedule.

The job, in those weeks, was nights on the floor. Counting the same fifty microwaves onto the same pallets and counting them off again, and by four in the morning the numbers went soft in his head and he'd have to start the row over. It paid by the week.

On the twentieth day it was Friday. Friday meant the brown envelopes came out of the drawer in the back office with the amounts written on the front in the manager's handwriting, and the line for them went out the door and down the aisle past the washing machines.

He counted his out on the counter by the register. Paid what he owed. Bought what he had to buy. And when it was all spoken for, there were two dollars left that hadn't been promised to anything.

He walked home down the same three blocks, past the gas station with the lottery machine just inside the door. He went in and put the two dollars on the counter and bought one ticket and folded it into his jacket pocket and didn't think about it again.

The news came Monday.

Somebody had it from somebody, and by noon everybody had it. The little office with the door that was always shut, the man who kept the books, the owner's brother-in-law — he'd taken the cash out of it and left. Two hundred thousand was the number that went around the break room. One of the guys said three. Nobody had heard a word out of him since Thursday.

The owner came in that afternoon and stood by the register with his hands in his pockets and looked at the tile and didn't say anything to anybody, and then went into the office and shut the door.

The pay envelopes didn't come out that Friday.

It turned cold that week. Trey went into the jacket pocket for his gloves and found a folded piece of paper in there instead.

He took it to the gas station on his way in and had the guy behind the counter run it. The guy ran it and looked at the screen and then at him and then back at the screen.

Ten thousand dollars.

Trey stood at that counter for ten minutes. He didn't say anything for most of it. The kid asked him if he was all right and he said yeah. The kid asked him again a minute later and he said yeah again. The arithmetic he was doing had one number in it and the number didn't move. Ten thousand. Ten thousand minus nothing. All of it his.

That was the piece he kept. Years on, he could lose the number of hungry days and the name of the street and most of what happened out at the yard, and he never lost the ten minutes at that counter — two dollars turning into ten thousand on the week he had nothing. He liked that part best of all. He never got tired of telling it.

The store didn't make the month. He walked past it two weeks later and there was a sheet of paper taped up inside the glass, and a couple of weeks after that there wasn't even the paper.

He looked for work for ten days. Nobody was hiring, or nobody was hiring him, which came to the same thing.

His parents hadn't called since that night, and he hadn't called them. His mother would come around; she always did. His father would take longer. Trey told himself he liked the quiet.

The only place that called him back was a fenced lot on the north end of town, out past the last traffic light, with DRAPER EQUIPMENT painted on the side of a shipping container by the gate.

Vern Draper didn't hire operators. He hired men who wanted to be operators.

He'd take a green hand and put him with one of the regular guys for a week or two — which was about all it took to run an excavator, that being the entire point of an excavator, per Vern — and then the green hand was out in the dirt working for a third of what the regular guy made. Day rate. No machine moving that day, no money that day. The men on the flatbed said Vern could stand at the office window with his coffee and tell you from across the lot which machine had run that morning and which hadn't. They said he'd never once been wrong about it.

The first couple of weeks Trey swept the shop and stacked filters and changed the oil in the flatbed and watched. He was cheap and he came early and he didn't complain, and after a while Vern put him on a machine with Rudy Vance.

Rudy was the senior hand, the only one Vern couldn't afford to let walk. He got paid whether the machines moved or not. Trey got paid for the days he stood in the dirt and watched the boom swing.

The yard ran four machines and about a dozen men in and out, and when nothing had been bid the men sat on the flatbed and smoked and argued about nothing, and Trey sat with them.

The work, when there was work, was ditches and footings and culverts and clearing. Trey learned to grease the machine and walk it and read the ground ahead of the bucket. Rudy would ride the seat and talk while Trey did it, and Rudy's way of teaching was to let him make the mistake and then say what the mistake had been.

He'd been on the yard a few weeks when he got tired of the sitting. He rapped his knuckles on the steel side of the machine. It rang, hollow, like a drum with the head too tight on it.

A head came up over the edge of the cab.

"Rudy. Brought you a smoke."

"Well, look at you. Learning how this works."

"You're teaching me. I better be learning."

Rudy laughed, mostly through his nose, and climbed down and put his back against the rear tire and lit it, and a free cigarette never lasted long with Rudy.

"How many days is this now?" Trey said.

"You're not enjoying the vacation?"

"I don't get paid for the vacation."

"Mm." Rudy turned his head and spit. "I do."

"I know you do. That's not the same thing as me sitting here."

"It's not my problem to have," Rudy said. "It's Vern's problem to have."

"Something's coming, though. You know something."

Rudy looked at the gate, the office, the road.

"You keep poking at me, kid."

"I do."

Then he got an arm around Trey's neck and pulled him in and said it into his ear, which was a lot of theater for a man with a lit cigarette in his other hand.

"You hear this from me, you take it to your grave."

"Okay."

"Who does Vern tell? Who does he tell everything to?"

Trey waited.

"They're running the interstate through. Bell Harbor out to Merriton."

Trey's eyes came up off the dirt.

"You're kidding."

"I'm not kidding."

"There's nothing out there to run an interstate to."

"There's about to be."

"An interstate." Trey turned it over. "They don't hand that to a yard. There's bids. There's engineers. There's a whole—"

"Somebody knows somebody." Rudy took a long drag and let it out slow. "Always somebody."

"Where?"

"He didn't say, and I didn't ask, and you're not going to either." Rudy ground the cigarette out on the tire. "Two years of work. That's what he said. Two years."

"How many people know this?"

"You're looking at everybody."

Trey stood in the dirt.

He asked around the yard over the next few days and got the same thing in different words. Somebody's cousin had heard it. A guy who'd worked for Vern two summers back said he'd heard it back then. Nobody knew anything.

The idea wasn't new. He'd been carrying it the way a man carries something he can't afford to take out and look at — ground out past the county line that nobody wanted. Rock, cutover, three bad fields that drained wrong. Cheap enough that a man with a loan might stretch to it. Nothing made it worth anything. A road would.

He'd never said it out loud to anybody, because out loud it sounded like a joke.

Rudy climbed back up into the cab. Trey walked the long way back to the gate, past the machine he'd been learning on, and by the time he got there he had the whole thing worked out except for the money.

The money was always the problem.

He turned the wrong way out of the lot and then fixed it. He wasn't going home. There was one man he could ask, and he already knew what the answer was going to be.

He'd have to go and ask anyway.