Tyler
TYLER LOCKED THE BONE lab behind him and hustled out the stadium’s lower door. He’d parked his truck right by the door—a prime spot, except for the fact that it was illegal. Just for two minutes, he’d told himself; just long enough to drop off the strip-mine girl’s bones, which he’d carefully boxed after photographing and measuring them. But the two minutes had turned to ten, then thirty. He scanned the windshield, didn’t see a ticket. Whew, he thought. That’s lucky. Then he saw the figure on the far side of the truck. It was a man, standing on the running board, cupping his hands against the driver’s window so he could peer inside. “Hey!” Tyler yelled reflexively, wondering whether he was about to plead with a traffic cop or punch out a thief. The man straightened; the man was . . . his boss. “Hey,” he repeated, still feeling trespassed against; puzzled, too. “Uh, what’s up, Dr. B?”
“I was just looking to see how many miles you’ve got on this thing.”
“Last time I looked, the odometer was showing ninety-nine thousand eight hundred and change,” Tyler said. Dr. B lifted one eyebrow—his trademark expression of skepticism. The man was no fool. “I thought you had a meeting with the dean today,” Tyler went on, uneasy about Brockton’s interest in the truck—interest that seemed not just intense, but somehow invested. “You said you were gonna ask him for some land closer to campus.”
“I do, but he was running late. I’m headed there now.”
Tyler pointed at the glossy dress shoes trespassing on his running board. “You should be wearing yesterday’s boots to the meeting,” he said, “not that fancy footwear. Grind a little pig shit into the dean’s carpet, so he knows what it’s like for us out here.”
“Good idea, Tyler. Antagonize the boss—always a great strategy when you’re asking for a raise or a favor. You’re wasting your gifts in anthropology. You’d make a hell of an ambassador.” Dr. B stepped down from the running board but lingered by the truck, looking thoughtful. “Automatic or stick?”
“Stick, course. Three on the tree.” The term was archaic—slang for a three-speed gearshift on the steering column, the prehistoric predecessor to four-on-the-floor and five-speed manual transmissions—but Brockton was plenty old enough to know what it meant. “You couldn’t pay me to drive an automatic.”
“See, that’s what I’m talking about,” said Dr. B.
“Huh?”
“Oh, nothing. I’m just having an argument with Kathleen and Jeff.”
“Your son?”
“He just got his driver’s license, and he’s badgered us into helping him buy a car. Me, I didn’t have a car till I was out of college, but that’s a different argument, and I’ve already lost. Anyhow, Jeff and Kathleen are dead set on an automatic. But I say he needs to know how to drive a stick shift. What if he needs to drive somebody else’s car in an emergency, and the car’s a stick shift?”
“Uh, right,” said Tyler. “Or what if a meteorite shower wipes out every automatic-transmission factory on the entire planet?” Brockton frowned, unhappy to have his point undercut, and Tyler figured he’d better throw his boss a conciliatory bone. “But it is a useful skill. Especially if he’s gonna travel overseas—hard to rent anything but a stick, most places. Just the opposite of how it is here.” Dr. B nodded. “Main thing, though—and maybe he’d listen to this—is that you’ve got so much more control with a manual. I want to be the one that decides when to shift. Automatics drive me crazy, especially on hills.”
“Exactly,” said Brockton. “All that downshifting and upshifting, every five seconds? Don’t get me started.” He ran his eyes over the truck again. “Tell me, what year is this?”
“Unless I’m mistaken, this is 1992.”
“Ha ha. Not the calendar, smart-ass—the truck. What year is the truck?”
“It’s a 1950.”
“Amazing. You’d never know. How long you had it?”
“Me, only a couple years. But it’s been in the family from the get-go.”
“No kidding? Since 1950?”
“October ’49, actually. My granddaddy walked into the showroom, pocketful of cash from his corn crop, and drove it home. Drove it for the next twenty years, then gave it to my dad. Dad had it for twenty, too, but some of those, it gathered dust in a shed behind the house.”
Dr. B appraised the truck again. “How many miles you say it’s got?”
“I didn’t. I said it shows ninety-nine thousand and some. True, far as it goes.” He hoped the conversation was over, but his boss waited expectantly. “The whole truth would take another digit—another one on the left side of those numbers.”
“A hundred ninety-nine thousand?”