Chapter 3 - The Highway to Spokane
The highway between Chelan and Coulee City is two lanes of asphalt that cut through the basalt coulees and the vast, dry wheat benches of the Columbia Basin. At night, after the fruit trucks have finished their runs from the packing sheds in Wenatchee, there is nothing out there but the sound of the wind through the sagebrush and the occasional green eyes of a mule deer caught in the high beams.
The heater in the old Ford had a loose blower bearing that squeaked every fourth rotation—chirp, chirp, chirp—a sound that had been the background music of our lives for two hundred thousand miles.
Elaine had her head resting against the glass of the passenger window. She hadn't washed her face. A smudge of dark peat still clung to her right cheekbone, and her stockings lay in a wet ball on the rubber floor mat between her bare feet.
"Your knee hurts," I said, not taking my eyes off the asphalt.
"A little," she said. Her voice was faint, dry as old corn. "It'll be stiff tomorrow. I'll need some of that horse liniment from the shop."
"We can stop at the clinic in Wilbur. Have the on-call doctor take an X-ray to make sure the cap didn't crack."
"No," she said, her fingers tightening on the edge of the wool blanket. "I don't want any doctors tonight, Artie. I just want to get across the river."
We drove thirty miles in silence.
The dashboard lights cast a faint green glow across the cabin, reflecting off the chrome rim of the speedometer and the gold band on Elaine’s left hand. Her ring was a simple four-millimeter band of yellow gold, worn thin at the edges where thirty-five years of handling steel sheets and hot canning jars had buffed the metal down to a knife-edge.
My phone began to ring from the console between us.
It was an old flip phone—a heavy, rubberized thing I kept in an iron holster on my work belt. It didn't have an internet connection; it didn't receive photographs of flower arrangements or digital floor plans. It had twelve buttons and a screen the size of a postage stamp.
The screen lit up with Daniel’s mobile number.
I didn't touch it.
It rang five times, went to the automated voicemail greeting, and then the screen went dark.
Three minutes later, it rang again.
This time the screen read: UNKNOWN CALLER.
I clicked the side button to open the speaker.
"Miller," I said.
"Arthur?"
The voice was thin, high, and carried the sound of an engine running at high speed in the background. It was Henderson—the senior partner from the firm who had set his wineglass down when I was speaking from the riser.
"Yes, Mr. Henderson," I said.
A pause hummed on the line, accompanied by the muffled thwack-thwack of windshield wipers against glass.
"Arthur, I’m driving back to Seattle with my wife," Henderson said. He didn't sound angry; he sounded like a man who was trying to calculate the depreciation on a bad acquisition before the morning market opened. "Richard Montgomery is currently at the Chelan County Sheriff’s substation trying to find a magistrate who will issue an emergency injunction against the venue manager for breach of peace."
"He won't find one," I said. "Judge Holst lives three doors down from my brother in Wenatchee. He plays poker with the sheriff on Saturday nights. If Richard Montgomery wakes him up before nine tomorrow morning, he’ll spend the rest of the weekend in a holding cell for contempt."
Henderson let out a short, dry sound that might have been a laugh if there had been any blood in it.
"I imagine he will," Henderson said. He was silent for five miles of dark road. "Arthur... your son has twenty-eight clients whose logistics portfolios are being reviewed by the executive committee on Tuesday morning."
"I don't manage his logistics portfolios, Mr. Henderson."
"No," Henderson said. "You don't. But Daniel told the committee three months ago that his family’s manufacturing facilities in Spokane were being restructured to provide the collateral basis for his partnership buy-in. He submitted an asset declaration that included the deed to four acres on the Spokane rail spur and a commercial credit line of four hundred thousand dollars."
I took my foot off the accelerator slightly, letting the truck drop from sixty to fifty-two miles an hour.
The wheat fields on either side of the highway looked like black water under the moonless sky.
"He told you my shop belonged to him?" I asked.
"He submitted a notarized power of attorney," Henderson said. The words came out slowly, carefully, the way a lawyer speaks when he knows the call is being recorded, even though he knew I didn't have the technology to record a grocery list. "It was signed in May. It gave him signatory authority over the Miller Machine & Tool commercial real estate assets."
Beside me, Elaine’s head moved. She didn't look at me; she looked down at her bare feet, her hands motionless in her lap.
"My son does not have power of attorney," I said.
"The notary was a girl named Chloe," Henderson said. "Vanessa Montgomery’s second cousin. The one who works in Richard’s office in Bellevue."
"Then Richard Montgomery has a felony in his filing cabinet," I said. "And you have a junior associate who belongs in the county jail."
Henderson breathed out—a long, cold whistle through his teeth.
"Arthur," he said, and his tone shifted into something that sounded remarkably like respect—or at least the fear that passes for respect among men who live on commissions. "If I bring this to the managing partners on Monday, the boy is finished. He won't just be out of the firm; the bar association will have him before the ethics panel for commercial fraud before the month is out. Richard Montgomery will drop him like an infected tooth to protect his own license."
"Why are you calling me, Henderson?"
"Because I watched your wife stand up out of that mud," Henderson said. "And because my father was a toolmaker in Cleveland for forty years before the plant went to Mexico. I know what an anvil sounds like when it hits the floor."
"Then you know what happens to the scrap," I said.
"Do you want me to bury it?" Henderson asked. "If you wire the venue balance to Richard’s trust account by noon tomorrow, he can settle with the winery quietly. We can handle the partnership buy-in internally as an administrative error. Daniel can keep his desk."
I looked at Elaine.
She was staring out the windshield at the white line dividing the two lanes of asphalt. The yellow headlights caught the weathered green sign that marked the county line: LINCOLN COUNTY — ELEVATION 2,140 FEET.
"Henderson," I said.
"Yes, Arthur?"
"Thirty years ago, I had a lathe operator named Peters," I said, my voice dropping into that quiet, flat rhythm I use when I’m explaining a micrometer reading to an apprentice. "Peters was fast. He was smart. He could turn seventy brass bushings an hour without breaking a cutter. But every third Friday, he’d take an eighth of an inch off the safety stops on the carriage because he thought it saved him four seconds on the return stroke."
"Arthur, I don't see—"
"One afternoon in November," I said, "the carriage hit the headstock at twelve hundred revolutions a minute. A four-inch piece of cold-rolled steel came through his cheek and took out his jawbone. He lived. But he never ate solid food again, and he spent the rest of his life whistling every time he tried to say the letter S."
I took a deep breath. The smell of the cold wheat came through the heater vents, clean, dry, and bitter.
"You don't fix a machine that’s missing its stops, Henderson," I said. "You take the belt off the motor, you unbolt the base from the concrete, and you sell the casting to the foundry for two cents a pound before it kills the man standing next to it."
I clicked the side button on the phone.
The screen died.
I set the black plastic box back on the rubber tray between the seats.
Elaine reached across the vinyl. Her hand was cold, but her fingers found mine, sliding between my knuckles with that old, familiar grip that had held me through the strike in eighty-two, through the winter the pipes froze in the shop, and through the three months we lived on fried potatoes and cabbage while Daniel learned to walk again.
"He signed your name, Artie?" she whispered.
"He tried to," I said.
"What are we going to do with the four acres?"
I looked at the road ahead. The grade was rising now, climbing toward the high basalt plateau where the wind turbines stood against the stars, their red warning lights blinking in unison like a row of silent sentinels across twenty miles of wheat.
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"We’re going to build the cabin, Ellie," I said. "We’re going to buy the cedar logs from Henry’s brother in Sandpoint, we’re going to hire the boy with the backhoe to dig the footings, and we’re going to put the porch on the south side so you can see the river when the sun comes up."
She didn't answer with words. She just leaned her head against my right shoulder, her gray hair catching the faint green light from the dials, and closed her eyes as the old Ford carried us home through the dark.
