The Last Honest Horse Thief

by Michael Koryta

  “It’s nothing but rusting metal,” the rancher said.

  “Doesn’t run?”

  “Not even a little bit.”

  Markus nodded and stared out at the vanishing mountains as the shadows overtook them. He’d find a way. It would take some time, but he would find a way.

  Three weeks passed with surprising speed. In the days he worked, and in the evenings they all sat together and talked in soft voices and then they went to bed early. The routine varied only on Sundays, when they went to church an hour east and would eat lunch at a restaurant in town, the only meal of the week that wasn’t taken in the kitchen. They had a dining room with seating for ten, but they never used it.

  It wasn’t a bad life. They were not bad people. The home was the nicest he’d ever known, the bed the softest, the food the best, and most consistently delivered. He’d also never hated anyplace more. Not even the winter he was ten, when they’d lived out of the truck for five weeks.

  He understood what the warrants meant, and he understood what the world thought of his family, a point made even more clear by sending him here to live with these kind, quiet people, but…

  They weren’t his family. And he didn’t belong.

  He was on the porch with the rancher one night, staring at distant peaks as the sun sank behind them, when the rancher said, “Could be more than sixty days.”

  Mark turned and stared at him. “What? Why?”

  “I don’t make the decision. You know that. It’s people with the state, people whose job it is to see that you’re in…the best situation possible. They make that choice.”

  “Does that mean my mother is in jail longer?” He hadn’t written or asked to visit. The way he looked at it, they’d both been sentenced to sixty days. His location nicer than hers, that was all.

  “I’m really not sure. They’ll send someone out here and we’ll all talk things over. That nice woman who was here the day you came. But you don’t have to worry about relocating or anything. It’ll be stable. Consistent.”

  “If she has to stay in longer, I should go to my uncles.”

  The rancher worked that one over in his mind for a long time before he spoke. When he did, his voice was soft, almost sad.

  “That’s not a legal option. At least not right now.”

  “Are they in jail, too?”

  “Not yet.”

  Not yet. That meant they hadn’t been caught. The news made him strangely proud, and he felt his chest swell.

  “We’ll make sure things go well for you, Mark.”

  Markus, he thought, but he’d never corrected him before and he didn’t now. The old man slipped some chewing tobacco between his jaw and lip. This meant that his wife was already in for the night; he never used tobacco in front of her.

  “I ’spect you’re used to more kids around. Beth and me aren’t exactly playmates, I know.”

  Markus, always an outsider in every new school—or, far worse, the returnee a year or later, when everyone else had already forgotten his existence—didn’t bother to dispute this notion.

  “I like the quiet fine,” he said.

  The rancher nodded, his lip bulging at he worked at the tobacco. “Might be you need a project?”

  “I think there’s plenty of work,” Markus said cautiously, and the old man laughed. He didn’t laugh much, but that one got him going for some reason.

  “There always is,” he said. “That’s just the problem, Mark. Come on with me, now.” He got to his feet. During the days of hard work he didn’t betray any pain, but Markus had noticed that by evening even simple acts seemed laborious to him, and once he closed his bedroom door the smell of muscle liniment hung in the air every night.

  He walked slowly to the pole barn and Markus followed. They went inside and the rancher tugged the tarp off the old car.

  “Hard to believe,” he said, “but that was a beautiful car once.”

  “I can tell,” Markus said, and he meant it. The body was rusted and dented but the lines were still clear, and it was a fine-looking car. “It’s just awfully old, that’s all. Was it always yours?”

  “Yes and no. It was my first car, first that I bought with my own money, leastwise. My father told me it was foolish, and the first winter proved him right. This is truck country.” He worked at the tobacco, spat into a cup, and nodded. “Truck country,” he repeated. “But back in those days, I wanted something a little different. So I bought that ’55 Chevy. A Chevy, that turned my father’s stomach even worse, what with him having been a Ford man all his life. But that honey had a small-block V8 under the hood, and the body, when you waxed it right, put this deep shine in all that blue…I’ll tell you, Mark, it turned heads back then. It turned some heads.” He smiled wistfully.

  “So you just let it rust?” Markus asked.

  “No, no. I sold it and bought a Ford truck.” He laughed again. “Then I got married. We had kids. And the oldest was five and the youngest not even a year when I got word that the ’55 was for sale at a used-car lot up in Sheridan. I went to have a look, that was all. Just a look. Because it reminded me of…well, a different time, a different kind of living.” His eyes narrowed and his voice sharpened. “Not that those were better days or living. Different, sure. Better, no. You clear on that?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded, and the barest hint of a smile creased his stern face. “The day I drove that car up here was the maddest I’ve ever seen Beth. She’s all soft edges with you, boy, but…” He smiled a little wider and shook his head. “You’d be well-advised to tread lightly.”

  “She thought it was a bad winter car, too, like your dad did?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You never drove it?”

  “Not much. Head gasket went not six months after I bought it. Had that fixed, but then the transmission went, and…well, eventually it got so there was more to be done on it than there was time to do it. Not without making a trade, at least. You understand me, Mark? So many hours in the day, days in the week, weeks in the year, years in the life. You gotta make trades. That’s all there is to it. Your life, son, is going to be all about making trades. You’ll learn that soon enough. Choices and trades.”

  “But you kept the car.”

  “I did do that.”

  “Why?”

  The rancher spat tobacco juice and shook his head. “There was a time it meant something to me just having it in the corner of my eye. Like a reminder of what I’d been once. Not that I wanted to be that again. I just liked to see it there in the corner of my eye, and know that it had been real once.”

  Markus didn’t follow that, but he didn’t say anything.

  “What I’ve considered, time to time, is getting her back in action. One last ride. I’ve watched you work, know you’re mechanically inclined. You know a bit about your tools.”

  “A bit.” Markus didn’t mention that some of the lessons he’d learned had come while helping his uncles repair a stolen car in a blizzard outside of Cheyenne. There were some things best left unsaid.

  “Follow me,” the rancher said, and then they went into the workshop at the back of the barn, which was Markus’s favorite place on the entire property. The tools were ancient but each one was clean and worked, and it was the best-organized workshop Markus had ever seen. There were pencil-traced outlines on the pegboard walls so that even a stranger wouldn’t have trouble remembering where to hang the tools.

  The rancher reached up on one of the high shelves and retrieved a thick paperback volume with yellowed pages, which he handed to Markus.

  1955 Chevrolet passenger car shop manual.

  It was the only book Markus had seen in the house that wasn’t a Bible. At least until he’d brought in the westerns, with their sex and shooting.

  “You seemed curious about the car, Mark. Consider it yours. If
that car can be fixed, that book’ll say how. Engines back then were nothing like they are now. Everything’s in plain sight. Those engines, they’re more honest than the new ones.”

  Consider it yours.

  It wouldn’t be stealing, then. It wouldn’t be anything like taking the rancher’s truck. This was more like catching a fish—it needed to earned.

  Markus thumbed the book open. It was more than five hundred pages, and the one he landed on was for brake repair.

  #39: Insert six screws. Tighten screws sufficiently to prevent vacuum leakage.

  “It does seem straight-forward,” he acknowledged.

  “Oh, it absolutely does. Right until you’ve got a wrench in hand. Then it’ll shift on you.” The rancher chuckled a little. “You got any interest in seeing what you can do, I’ll give you the starting point. I know what the problem is, generally.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Electrical.”

  “The electrical in what part?”

  The rancher smiled. “That’s why I gave the book to you, Mark.”

  Markus look at him and smiled a little, and thought that the old man had no idea what he’d just offered up. This wasn’t a distraction; it was escape.

  He took to working on the car in the evenings. Working was a generous term at first. In the beginning, it was simply a matter of getting familiar with it. He cleaned the exterior of the car first, and checked the tires. All of them were flat and only two held air. A can of fix-a-flat corrected one, but not the other. He found the spare, wrestled the bad tire off and put the old spare on, and sure enough, it filled and held. The car now sat on four solid, if old, tires. All it needed was a working engine. He’d spent long enough with the book to feel confident by the time he put the hood up. Once the hood was up, though…

  He left the barn and returned to get the book.

  The first night, he just located parts, calling them out aloud even though he was alone with the car, and then going back to the book to double check. Sometimes it was more than double-checking. When he got to the point that he thought he understood where all of the major components were located, and only then, did he allow himself to turn to Section 6, which was labeled Engine Electrical.

  There were 53 portions to Section 6.

  He removed the battery, which weighed so much he wasn’t sure he’d be able to wrestle it free himself, and attached it to a voltage meter. Dead as a doornail. There was a battery charger near the tractors, and he was surprised to find the old Delco would still hold a charge.

  Can’t be that easy, he thought, but the only way to know was to test it. The next night, he reinstalled the fully charged battery. He turned on the headlights, and they tossed a clean white glow on the far wall, drawing current from the battery with no difficulty.

  Turned the key.

  Click.

  No, it wasn’t going to be that easy.

  But he knew he had voltage now, and you had to start with a power source. He went back to the book. The first suggested problem was the regulator.

  Measure the voltage of the regulator at idle speed and medium engine speed. The voltage should be higher at medium engine speed than it is at idle speed.

  Mark sat in the driver’s seat with the shop lamp illuminating him and said, “Now how in the hell do you compare two engine speeds if there is no engine?”

  He sat and brooded on that for a while, turning the key and listening to the dead click, knowing that the big old Delco had voltage and was ready to distribute it, but the engine wouldn’t crank yet. Why not?

  “Ignition,” he muttered, and read further. He didn’t want to wait another day to get started, but he’d gone late already, and was afraid of missing the sunset. He wanted to watch it fade behind the mountains where, somewhere northwest, Silver Gate and his uncles and his dog waited. By the time he got out of the barn, though, it was already full dark.

  That was the first time he’d missed a sunset.

  He had trouble sleeping that night, and at breakfast, when the rancher asked him how things were coming with the car, he was noncommittal. He saw the trap now. The project in the barn wasn’t designed to keep him interested or occupied. It was designed to make him forget. This was how sixty days turned into seventy, eighty, a hundred.

  A year.

  They were running a con on him, plain and simple. Redirecting his attention from where it belonged—getting back to his family—and putting it someplace on the ranch. Keep him focused on the ranch long enough and the old would be forgotten, and the new would become old. He saw it clear now and, while it angered him, he didn’t feel defeated by it. Just because you realized someone was dealing you bad cards didn’t mean you couldn’t still win with them. His Uncle Ronny had taught him that. It was riskier to bluff with a bad hand, maybe, but it wasn’t impossible. Markus already understood how to beat this sleight of hand move. He’d stay just as distracted by the old car as they wanted him to be. Only he’d be better with it than they expected he could be. He would fix it. And then, once it was running, he’d drive it right off the ranch and point it northwest, toward Silver Gate, where his family waited.

  Consider it yours, the rancher had said, and that was good enough. They’d used the car to redirect his attention, just like the way his mother handled change, talking all the while, dropping the bills, picking them up in a clutter. You distracted people until they forgot what they wanted. Then you could take almost anything from them.

  He wasn’t going to forget, though.

  If you can start it, he promised himself, then you’re taking it.

  The electrical problem was not the ignition. He’d disassembled it, tested, reassembled, and turned the key.

  There was the faintest of hums, and the headlights dimmed. The change excited him—anything beyond that dead click was progress. He turned the key again, and again, and again. Hum, dim. Hum, dim. Hum, dim. The engine never tried to turn over.

  That was the first time his anger had risen because of the car, as he sat there in the driver’s seat smelling the musty interior and turning the useless key. He swore and punched the steering wheel and there was a dull cracking noise from somewhere in the dashboard and immediately he felt bad, like he’d kicked a dog for no reason but his own frustration. He took a shop rag and wiped the dash clean, spending extra time on the steering wheel, as if tending to a wound. Then he returned to the book. The humming and the dimming lights were a change, and that meant he’d made progress with the ignition. He’d fixed something; he just hadn’t fixed enough. The rest was clear enough: keep trying, or quit.

  He picked up the wrench and fixed the shop lamp to the bottom of the hood once more.

  Two nights later, he was ready to run the book’s prescribed series of generator tests. He’d read enough at night—after watching the sunset; he hadn’t missed a second one—to determine that if there was current draw (check) that didn’t attain cranking speed (check) then he was most likely facing a problem with the starter or the armature. Possible issues included worn bearings, dirty bushings, or an electrical short. Other possibilities were grimmer. If one of the components needed to be replaced, Mark wasn’t sure how to proceed. He had no spending money, no way to get to town, and even if he did, he doubted that you’d just walk into the nearest NAPA and find the armature for a 1955 Chevy small-block V8. It would have to be a special-ordered, custom item, and how much that would cost and how long it might take…

  He wasn’t ready to consider those options. Not before running the tests. He didn’t think he’d even have that chance because the book instructed the use of something called a growler, and that stumped him. For the first time, he turned to the rancher for help.

  “Is it an old term for something else, or is it something I don’t have? Only growler I’ve ever heard of was for beer.”

  The rancher’s face soured at that admission but he said, �
��Yes, it’s an old term, but you do have one. Probably aren’t many people left who do, but I’ve never been one to throw out a tool if it still worked.”

  He came out to the workshop and found it within five minutes. It was small but heavy, like a metal brick, with a coil of wire wrapped around an iron core, outfitted with a standard electrical plug.

  “You’ve dug deeper on this old girl than I’d have figured,” the rancher said, looking at the book, seeing Markus’s notations in pencil, check marks for the tests he’d already done. “You have a special mechanical inclination, Mark. You won’t be hurting for steady work in your life, not if you keep that up.”

  No one in Markus’s family had ever held a job longer than six months. The very prospect of desiring such a thing seemed strange, although he knew that it shouldn’t. He didn’t want to talk about work with the rancher, or his mechanical skills, or for him to study the amount of work Markus had already done. If the car actually started, Markus would need to be alone when it happened.

  “Let’s watch the sun go down before we test anything,” Markus said, and they left the barn just as Beth returned.

  “Look who’s back. Go give her a hand, Mark. She’s got some things for you.”

  “What do you mean, some things?”

  “Could be you should go see them with your own eyes, maybe. And say thank you.”

  The last words contained a warning. Markus nodded and left the barn and went back to the house. Beth had been gone all day, and he and the rancher had eaten fried egg sandwiches alone. Now she was back, loaded with shopping bags. Markus helped carry them inside. Some groceries, but also bags from a department store.

  “For school,” she told him, and she had a smile that was both genuine and uncertain, as if she was afraid that he’d break it.

  There was a new backpack with three clean notebooks, pens, and a pack of mechanical pencils. A calculator. And clothes. Lots of clothes. All of them new. Jeans and shirts, boots and tennis shoes.

  “I made some guesses,” she said, and there was the uncertainty again. She was afraid of displeasing him, Markus realized, and the thought was so jarring he didn’t know what to say for a moment. Then he saw her face begin to change, taking his silence as confirmation that he didn’t like the clothes.