Part 3 — Mile Marker Seventy Seven
“A steel footlocker,” the agent said. “Army surplus, painted green, buried three feet down in a dry wash at mile marker 77. The lock took our team four minutes to cut.” Lyle made a small sound, and his hand went to his mouth. “That is the footlocker of my father,” he said. “I gave it to Darren when he turned twenty-one.”
Inside were bundles of cash in bank straps, $212,000 in all, and a black ledger with names, dates, and amounts owed, in the slanting handwriting of Darren. No bodies, no weapons, nothing out of a nightmare. It was paper and money, the dull plain evidence of an illegal sports betting ring run from the back room of a tire shop and a kitchen table. I let out a breath that I think I had been holding since June.
The agent laid it out for the crowd at the ribbon cutting, standing next to the broken scissors. The tire shop of Darren was a front. Customers paid their betting debts in cash at the counter, and every Tuesday at one in the morning Darren drove my Buick down Highway 285 with a bag of cash, buried part of it in the wash, and carried the rest across the state line. He chose my car because nobody stops a gray-haired retired letter carrier. “He counted on you thinking you were losing your mind,” the agent said.
My spiral notebook did the rest. The woman with the laptop had the map of the tracker, but a defense lawyer could say anybody was driving. My photographs of the odometer, taken every night and printed at Walgreens, proved that 212 miles appeared on my car while I was asleep in my own bed. The agent held up one of the pictures to the sunlight. “This is the best evidence I have seen in nine years,” he said. An odometer can lie to a woman only as long as she stops writing the numbers down.
Lyle sat down on the curb in his good Sunday jacket and looked at his hands. “Roz, he told me you needed to see somebody,” he said. “I believed him.” I sat beside him on the hot asphalt. “Lyle, you believed him because you wanted a good son,” I said. He nodded, and he cried the way a seventy-year-old man cries, with his shoulders and no sound at all. I held his arm and said nothing, and the Chamber ladies politely turned their backs.
Darren tried to make a break for the exit, and found two federal cars parked across it. He was arrested under his own red banner, with the giant scissors lying on the pavement. The charges were operating an illegal gambling business, laundering money, and moving gambling proceeds across state lines. He pleaded guilty in the winter and was sentenced to six years in federal prison.
The court seized the shop, the equipment, and the $212,000. Within the year the judge ordered my $36,200 returned to me from the forfeited funds, to the dollar, with a letter from the United States Attorney thanking me for my help. I read the letter on the porch with a glass of iced tea. I framed it, and then I took it out of the frame, because I did not want it to look like a trophy.
Lyle moved into the guest room for a month. Then one morning he knocked on the door with a bunch of grocery store flowers and said he was ready to hear everything he had refused to hear. We talked at the kitchen table until the coffee went cold. He visits Darren in the federal facility on the first Saturday of every month. I do not go. I send him a short card at Christmas with nothing in it but the word hope.
The agent let me keep the little black tracker. It sits in my old mail satchel, in the bottom of the chest freezer, under the elk steaks, where I used to hide the photographs. I take it out sometimes and hold it. It weighs about as much as a deck of cards, and it nearly took everything from me.
A county crew filled the hole in the dry wash the following week. I drove out to mile marker 77 on a Tuesday, in the middle of the afternoon, and stood at the side of the highway with the wind blowing sand across my shoes. A hawk circled. I said a short prayer for all the people who had lost money in that ledger, and for a young man I once taught to ride a bicycle.
I changed the locks on the Buick and put in a little sticker that says RETIRED CARRIER, STILL WATCHING. On weekday mornings I drive to the post office to mail postcards to my old customers out past Dexter. They write back. One of them, a ninety-year-old woman named Elva, sends me a jar of green chile every Christmas.
At the end of the summer, Lyle and I planted a cottonwood sapling in the yard, on the side where the sun comes up. We watered it every evening. It is taller than I am now, and the leaves make a sound like soft applause when the wind comes through, and I sit under it in the evenings with a spiral notebook, writing down the good days.
