The young man on the porch turned to look at me, and for one second his smile stayed in place as if it had been glued there. I knew that look. I had seen it on men in the jungle who were deciding whether to run. “Son,” I repeated, loud enough for the widow in the doorway to hear, “does this nice lady know about the fourteen thousand two hundred dollars you took from me in March?” He tried a laugh. It came out thin. “Sir, I think you have me confused with somebody else.” I held up my phone with the photograph I had taken of his white truck and the dented tailgate.
The widow stood frozen with one hand on the screen door. Her name was Mrs. Alvarez, and she was seventy six, with silver hair pinned in a bun and an apron dusted with flour. She looked at the young man, then at me, then at the clipboard in his hand with its neat column of numbers. “Mijo,” she said slowly, “you told me you needed a deposit of nine thousand dollars to order the shingles.” He started to back down the steps. I took one pace to the side and let him pass, because I had already parked my truck in a way that blocked his driveway.
He reached the sidewalk and saw it. My old Ford sat nose to nose with the white truck, bumper against bumper, with the engine off and the keys in my pocket. There was no room to turn. He stood there with his clipboard hanging from his hand, breathing through his mouth, and I walked down the steps behind him, taking my time, with my cane in one hand and my phone in the other. Mrs. Alvarez had already gone back inside. Through the screen I could hear her dialing, and her voice, steady and clear, saying, “Sheriff, please send someone quickly.”
An old soldier who has learned to be patient can outwait any liar, and out drive him too.
The deputy who arrived was a heavyset man named Garcia with a mustache like a push broom. He listened to me for four minutes with his thumbs in his belt. Then he looked at the young man, who was sitting on the curb with his head on his knees, and asked for identification. The name on the driver license was Colby Strand. The name on the business card in his pocket was Dustin Rye. The name on the registration of the truck was a third one entirely. Deputy Garcia shook his head slowly. “Mr. Bisbee,” he said, “I have been looking for this truck since July.”
It turned out there were seven victims in three states. A widower in Casper, a retired schoolteacher in Scottsbluff, a couple in Fort Collins, and me. The total came to a little over sixty thousand dollars. In the toolbox of the white truck, under a layer of rags and paint cans, the deputies found a bank envelope with nine thousand dollars in cash and a ledger in which the young man had written the names of his victims in a column, with a little star next to the ones who lived alone. I found it hard to look at that ledger. I looked anyway.
I went down to the courthouse in Cheyenne for the arraignment. Colby Strand stood in an orange jumpsuit and entered a plea of not guilty, and then, after a long whispered conference with his lawyer, changed it to guilty on the second day. He was sentenced to six years in state prison with restitution ordered to every victim. Nine thousand dollars of mine came back within a month, from the toolbox. The rest, said the judge, would be deducted from his earnings for as long as it took. Mrs. Alvarez got her deposit back in full. She hugged me on the courthouse steps and called me her guardian angel.
I wish I could say that was the end. In October a man I had never met called me from the American Legion post and said, “Mr. Bisbee, we heard about your roof.” I said I had hired a new roofer, a reputable one, and that it was fine. He said, “No, sir. We want to do it.” On the first Saturday in November, eleven men from Post 6 showed up in the driveway with ladders, nail guns, tarps, and coffee. They were all old, all veterans, and not one of them could be talked out of it. By four in the afternoon the roof of my house was done.
June had been gone for two years, and I had left her sewing room untouched, with her pattern books on the shelf and a half finished quilt over the chair. When the leak was fixed, I went inside and stood in the doorway for a long time. Then I took the quilt and shook it out, folded it over my arm, and carried it to Mrs. Alvarez on the next street. She was nearly in tears. She sat at her own kitchen table with her hands on the quilt and said, “Your wife was a woman with good taste.” I said, “She would have liked you.”
In January the senior center in Cheyenne invited me to speak. I am not a speaker. I stood at the front of a room full of folding chairs with my hat in my hands and told them the story straight, the way I would tell it to a friend. I told them about the check, and the wait, and the ten days on the road. Afterward a woman came up and said she had been about to hand a stranger a deposit for a driveway. Another man said he had been about to buy a water filter from a salesman who had been calling for a week. Both of them changed their minds.
On most mornings now I drive out to a different neighborhood with a thermos and a folding chair and sit across the street from a house with scaffolding. If I see a stranger with a clipboard, I walk over and ask for his license and his references, in my best sergeant voice. Most of the time they are honest men. Sometimes they are not, and sometimes the neighbors gather. In the evening I go home to a dry house, a roof that holds, and a quilt I made with my own two clumsy hands, and I sleep like a man who has won a small war.
