The man in the bolo tie was Walter Haskell, and he stepped across my lot with a cane and a canvas satchel, looking not at Dwight but at the bays of my shop. I had known Walt Haskell for fifty years. He owned the biggest horse barn at Oaklawn and had bought tires from me every spring since 1974. He took off his white hat and shook my hand with both of his. “Clifton,” he said, “I heard you were selling. I could not let a stranger buy the place where I learned what honest work smells like.” Dwight stood with his mouth open and his keys in his hand.
Walt opened the satchel and set a folded paper on the hood of my truck. It was a pledge, typed and signed, in which Dwight had put up the shop on Albert Pike Road as collateral for a hundred and twenty thousand dollars of markers. He had signed it as the owner. Walt had accepted it, he said, because Dwight had told him the old man was senile and the shop was about to pass to his wife. “I do not take the word of a gambler on a thing like that,” said Walt. “So I called your broker. He told me the truth. The shop is yours. The pledge is no good.” He tore it neatly in half.
Walt then did a thing I will remember until I am gone. He took out a second paper, a bill of sale, and wrote across the top of it, in his own hand, the word void. “Clifton,” he said, “I came to buy the shop so that nobody could take it from you. If you want to sell it, I will pay you a fair price. If you want to keep it, I will go home and say nothing. But I wanted you to know that there is a man at Oaklawn who thinks you are the best tire man in Arkansas, and that he has seen what your son in law has been doing, and he is ashamed to have been a part of it.”
A shop sale gave one widower the morning to bring his family back to the garage in Hot Springs.
I gave my terms standing on the oil stained floor of my own shop, with the dial gauge of the first balancer in my shirt pocket. “Walt, I am not selling. Dwight, you will take your things out of my house tonight, and you will not come back until you have been in a program for six months. Cheryl, you may stay with the children if you want to, and I will help you. I will not sleep in the tool room again, and neither will anyone else. And I will hand this shop to the people who have swept its floor. Booker, forty one years, you will own a third of it, starting Monday.”
Cheryl had driven up in her Honda behind the Cadillac, called by Booker, still in her scrubs. She stood by the air compressor with her hand over her mouth. “Daddy,” she said, “I let him put you in that closet. I told myself it was only until the kids were grown. I saw the charges on your card and I said nothing. I was ashamed of him, and I was ashamed of me, and the only way I could survive it was to look away.” She crossed the shop and put her face into the front of my coveralls. “I smell like a tire shop,” I said. “I know,” she said. “It smells like you.”
That was when Dwight, who had been pale and still, made his move. He snatched the torn halves of the pledge from the hood of the truck, jammed them in his pocket, and ran for his pickup, shouting that the whole thing was a conspiracy. He got four steps. Booker, seventy two years old and fifty years of tires, swung the big rolling jack from the second bay across the doorway with a bang and set the brake. Dwight hit it with both hands, and it did not move. Booker stood behind it with his arms folded and said, mildly, “Mr. Dwight, that is a three ton jack, and I do not believe you want to argue with it.”
After a minute, Dwight stopped pushing. He slid down the jack until he was sitting on the concrete, and he said nothing for a long time. Cheryl went to him and knelt down, her scrubs wet with the oil of the floor, and said in a low voice that she would drive him to the program in Little Rock herself. She was not forgiving him. She was only telling him where the road was. Walt Haskell put his hat back on, tipped it to us, and walked out into the October light with his cane. I swept the doorway once, out of habit.
The money consequences were clean. The pledge was torn and the false bill of sale voided, and Oaklawn banned Dwight from the track. The charges on my cards were reversed by the bank when I showed the tickets with my numbers. I never sold the shop, and the seven million, eight hundred thousand dollars from the tire company stayed under my name. I put a third of the shop in a trust for Booker and a third for the grandchildren, and I kept the last third until the day they could use it. The first thing I bought with the money was an air conditioner for the tool room.
In the name of Nadine, who passed in 2021, I started the Nadine Moody Fund. It pays for tools, shop apprenticeships and gambling counseling for families in Garland, Hot Spring and Saline counties. In the first year we placed twenty two young people with local mechanics and tire shops. One was a boy of seventeen from Malvern who had been sleeping in his car after his father lost the house at the track. He learned to balance a wheel with my first gauge, and when it spun true, he whooped so loudly that Booker dropped his coffee.
Dwight came home from Little Rock after seven months, thin and quiet, and stood in the door of the tire shop on a Saturday morning with his hat in his hands. He asked if there was work. I handed him a broom. He swept the floor from one end to the other, and then he mopped it, and then he asked for a rag. By noon he was changing a flat tire on the Buick of a lady from church, with Booker standing at his elbow. At closing, the door of the tool room was open, and the window air conditioner hummed.