The car doors of Colton slammed in the garage, and I stood in my kitchen with the leather ledger open on the table and a telephone in my hand. I am Wanda Pettigrew, seventy six years old, a widow of Sturgis, and I did the thing that Dale had asked me to do on the last page, in his square carpenter handwriting. I dialed the number of Agent Burke. A voice answered on the fourth ring, slow, tired and amused. “This is Burke,” he said. “Is this Wanda? Dale said you might call someday. I am retired, but I never retired from him.”
He told me everything in eleven minutes, calmly, as a man tells a story he has carried for decades and finally been given leave to set down, while the man from Nebraska, whose name was Hank, stood in my kitchen with his cap in his hands. In 1985, Dale had been a young welder with a wife and a mortgage and a friend who ran guns out of the back of a bar called the Full Throttle. The man in the suit in the Polaroid was the supplier. Dale had been caught with a small debt, and the agents had offered him a choice. He had turned the supplier, quietly, over two years, and the man had been taken in 1986.
“He never took a dime of the government money,” said Burke. “He told us to hold it in trust for you. That brass key is for a safe deposit box at the Black Hills Bank. There is three hundred and ten thousand dollars in it. Dale said you were never to know where it came from, unless something happened to him, or unless somebody found the ledger.” He paused. “I am forty minutes away, and I am bringing a deputy. Keep the kitchen door locked, Wanda. Do not let the boy near the book until I arrive. And whatever he says, remember that he is still the grandson of Dale.”
A leather ledger found inside a gas tank gave one widow the afternoon to bring her grandson home to the garage in Sturgis.
I gave my terms to Colton the moment the door from the garage swung open and my grandson, twenty four years old and thin as a rail, stepped into the kitchen smelling of smoke. “Colton,” I said, “sit down. I am not going to scream. I am going to say this once. Your grandfather left a box for me, and there will be money in it. None of it goes to your dealer. All of it goes toward a thirty day program in Rapid City, and a year of follow up. If you go, I will sit by your bed. If you refuse, I will lock the door, and I will not unlock it.”
The lip of Colton quivered. He stared at the ledger on the table, at the Polaroid, at the black plastic bag. “Grandma,” he whispered, “I sold the bike because they said they would hurt me. They showed me a picture of this house. I did not know what else to do.” He swayed. “I am so tired. I have not slept in four days.” I got up and put my arms around the bony, shaking frame of him, and held on. It was like holding a wet bird. Outside, the August thunder rolled over the Black Hills, and the first fat drops began to hit the roof of the garage, loud as nails.
Then the old fear took over. He wrenched free, snatched the leather ledger from the table, and bolted back toward the garage, thinking, God help him, that it was a map to money he could sell. He flung the door open and ran smack into the wide chest of Hank, the Nebraska mechanic, who had slipped around through the side door without a sound. Colton bounced, and spun, and tried the front hall. The front door opened from the outside, and there stood a lean white haired man in a leather jacket, flashing a badge.
“Colton Pettigrew,” said Agent Burke, quite gently, “your grandfather and I were friends. Give me the book.” Colton looked from the mechanic to the old agent, and then, slowly, as if the strings had been cut from his arms, he held out the ledger. Burke took it, thumbed to the last page, and tucked it under his arm. A deputy in a tan uniform appeared behind him. Colton sat down on the hall bench and put his face in his hands, and the deputy, bless him, sat down beside him instead of reaching for his belt.
The money consequences came in the following week. The box at the Black Hills Bank held three hundred and ten thousand dollars in neat bundles, along with a letter from Dale I have not yet been able to read aloud. The dealer in Rapid City, thanks to a quiet word from Burke, was arrested for a different matter, and the threats ended. Colton entered a program in Rapid City, and I paid the whole of it from the box, and drove up every Sunday with a thermos and a deck of cards, and we played gin rummy in the visiting room until the nurse flicked the lights.
In the name of my husband Dale, who passed in February, I started the Dale Pettigrew Fund. It pays for treatment for young people caught in drug use and for repair of motorcycles for veterans who cannot afford to fix them, in Meade, Lawrence and Pennington counties. In the first year we placed thirty three young people in treatment and repaired nineteen bikes. One was a boy from Belle Fourche who had been sleeping in his car, and who now works the counter at a motorcycle shop in Sturgis.
This past August, half a million bikers roared into Sturgis, and on the first morning Colton, ten months well, rolled the black Shovelhead out of my garage, which Hank had found for sale in Nebraska and bought back and brought home. It gleamed, chrome and black, in the sun. Colton wiped the tank with a rag, and from the porch I watched him swing a leg over the seat. “Grandma,” he called, grinning, “where do you want to go?” I put on my helmet. “Main Street,” I said.
