Ted Hornacek read the page standing next to the grill, with a bratwurst going cold on a paper plate in his other hand. He is a dentist, a neat, pink faced man of sixty nine with a Penn State visor and a laugh that fills a parking lot, and the laugh was gone. “Fourteen million, two hundred thousand dollars,” he said. He looked at me. “Stan, that is your name on the bottom. That is the name of the brother of my wife.” I said it was. I said I had sold the company in March, and all one hundred and thirty men had kept their jobs. Around us, two hundred people in blue and white had stopped talking.
Jason did not run. I will give the boy that. He stood by the open back of Unit 17 with his arms hanging, a thick shouldered young man in a clean work shirt with the name of his new company stitched over the pocket. “Uncle Stan,” he said, “I can explain.” I said I hoped so. I said the hydro vac truck behind him was on the schedule the buyer had paid for, and so was Unit 22, and so was the jetter trailer. Frank had called me from the yard on Thursday morning and said three units were gone. “I told him to wait,” I said. “I wanted to see what you would do with Saturday.”
Ted put down his plate. “Jason,” he said. “What is he talking about?” The face of my nephew went the color of the paper in my hand. He said that he had lost the job in January, the one with the pipeline contractor, and had not told anyone. He said he had a bank loan of eighty one thousand dollars on the truck he drove, and a second loan from a man in Altoona, and that every month he paid one with the other. “I thought I could run the hydro vac trucks for a year,” he said. “Just a year. Then I would buy them back. Nobody would ever know.”
An ice bucket and a trash bag were handed across a stadium parking lot and gave one steel town man the afternoon to bring his nephew back to the yard.
Donna came across the grass. She is my wife, and she has a way of walking toward trouble that I have loved for forty one years. She did not look at her nephew. She looked at her brother. “Ted,” she said, “you told me last Christmas that Stan had a little service company that was barely hanging on. You said we should be kind to him. You said we should invite him to things so he would not feel left out.” The dentist opened his mouth. “And you handed him a bag of ice,” she said, “and a trash bag, and twenty dollars. At our own tailgate. In front of everybody.”
Ted took off his visor. He turned it around in his hands, and I saw that the pink had gone from his face. “Donna,” he said, “I thought I was helping.” “Helping who?” “Stan.” He swallowed. “I thought if I gave him something to do, he would feel like a part of it.” He shook his head slowly. “I have been looking at the man for forty one years, and I decided what he was before he opened his mouth. I never once asked him a single question about his own work.” He looked at me with real shame. “Stan, I am sorry. I do not think that covers it.”
I told him it covered a good deal. Then I turned to my nephew, and I did not enjoy it. Jason would bring the three units back to the yard on Highway 56 by Monday morning, with a driver, and Frank would sign for each one. He would tell the whole truth to the bank in Altoona, with me beside him, and I would pay the man who held the second loan, in full, through a lawyer, on one condition. “Then you go to work,” I said. “In the yard. At the bottom. You wash trucks until Frank says you can drive one, and Frank is not an easy man.”
Jason cried then, standing in the grass, the way a boy cries who has been carrying a boulder up a hill. He is thirty four years old. I put my hand on the back of his neck, as I used to when he was small and had fallen off a bike. “You did a stupid thing,” I said, “and you were not a thief. You were scared. I know the difference because I have been scared myself. In 1987 I owed a man four thousand dollars and I did not sleep for a month.” He wiped his face on his sleeve. “Did he get paid?” he asked. “Every cent,” I said.
The rest of the tailgate was not a good party. People drifted to their cars. But Ted stayed. He folded the big blue tablecloth with his own hands, and carried the cooler to my truck, and when he came back from the second trip he was breathing hard. “Stan,” he said, “let me pay for the dinner on Sunday.”
“There is no dinner on Sunday.” “Then I will make one.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I will call my own patients and tell them to stop being impressed by dentists. I will tell them you can fix anything. Because it is true.” I told him I would bring the rolls.
Jason washed trucks for eleven months. Frank worked him like a mule, and the boy never once complained. On the first of last September, I walked into the yard and found Unit 17 parked by the shop with its door open, and on the seat was a fresh set of keys on a ring. Frank was leaning on a fender with his arms crossed. “Boss,” he said, “the kid can drive.” Jason came out of the shop wiping his hands on a rag. I held up the keys. He took them as if they were something alive. “Uncle Stan,” he said. And I said, “Go dig a hole.”
