Special Agent Coles looked at me, then down at her file. “Mr. Pettibone, the man in our Atlanta office is named Wendell Hobbs. He says he served with you at Camp Evans. Does that name mean anything to you?” My broom slid out of my hand and clattered across the concrete. Wendell Hobbs was my crew chief on the Huey line in nineteen sixty seven. He sang Sam Cooke while he safety wired bolts. I had not heard from him since a reunion card in two thousand eleven. “Wendell is alive?” I whispered. “He sat in my office for three hours yesterday,” she said, “and he cried through most of it.” Derrick said, “Agent, this is nonsense,” and she held up one finger without turning her head.
She told it plainly, standing in the middle of the shop with customers frozen at the counter. Two years ago Derrick found Wendell in the old reunion roster in my Bible. Wendell was living in a rented room in Decatur, Georgia, three months behind on rent. Derrick called him and said, “Daddy is sick and I need a favor to protect his money from the nursing home.” For four hundred dollars a month in money orders, Wendell walked into a bank on Peachtree Street carrying a Tennessee license with my name and his photograph and opened an account. “Then a change request hit the VA,” Coles said, “and a clerical error created a second claim record. For nineteen months the VA paid both. Fifty eight thousand nine hundred dollars landed in the Atlanta account, and every Friday your son moved it out with an app on his phone.”
I looked at Derrick. He did not look at me. “Mr. Wendell Hobbs never saw a dime of that,” Coles went on. “Last month he asked to speak to you, and your son told him to keep quiet or go to prison for identity theft. So Mr. Hobbs put on his old patch, walked into our office, and announced that he was the real Lamar Pettibone. He told us it was the only sentence he could think of that would make a federal agent listen.” The young fella who wanted the selfie had gone pale. “Add it up,” Coles said. “Two years of your checks, seventy four thousand four hundred dollars, plus the duplicate payments. One hundred thirty three thousand, three hundred dollars.”
An eighty two year old veteran swept the floor of his own son shop until a second Lamar Pettibone turned out to be an old crew mate, and a federal agent made it right.
“Daddy, tell her it was for the business,” Derrick begged. I laid my broom against the bay door. “Son, I never signed one paper in this shop.” Two Hamilton County deputies walked in from the lot, because Coles had parked them behind the building, and one of them said, “Derrick Pettibone, turn around.” Mrs. Ellery had filed her report the same hour she hung up that call. Derrick was cuffed beside the brake pad shelf where I had slept.
As they led him out, he twisted around. “You are going to let them do this to your own son?” “Derrick, when a part is cracked, you do not keep bolting it back on and hoping. I did that with you for fifty three years. I am done.” Shonda came running across the lot from the house with a banker box in her arms. She had not known about Atlanta, she said, but she knew about the cot. She handed Coles the shop ledger and a thumb drive of bank statements. “Mr. Lamar, I am so sorry,” she said, and I believe she was.
Coles put me in a Comfort Inn on Lee Highway that night with a VA social worker named Pamela Tran. At eight the next morning somebody knocked, and there stood Wendell Hobbs with a cane, a gap in his teeth, and his First Cavalry patch on a worn jacket. He did not say hello. He said, “Lamar, I swear before God I thought I was helping a sick man.” Then we were two old crew mates holding each other in a motel doorway, and I felt more like myself than I had in two years.
Derrick pleaded guilty in federal court in Chattanooga in February to theft of government funds and exploitation of an elderly veteran. Judge Margaret Hollis sentenced him to forty six months and ordered full restitution. Pettibone Auto was sold at auction for two hundred twelve thousand dollars, and every cent owed, the full one hundred thirty three thousand, three hundred, went back to me and to the VA. The United States Attorney declined to charge Wendell, who testified for two hours and never once looked away from Derrick. When the judge asked if I wished to speak, I said only, “I raised him to fix things. I wish he had learned to fix himself.”
Pamela Tran found us a two bedroom duplex on Brainerd Road, four blocks from the old dealership, with a kitchen window that gets morning sun. Wendell took the second bedroom, and he pays half the rent from his pension. He sings Sam Cooke in the shower, loud and flat. I opened a credit union account with one name on it, mine, and a teller named Tasha taught me my phone.
Mrs. Ellery drove up in March with a pound cake and said, “Mr. Pettibone, I almost let that call go.” I told her she was the reason I could hear a mockingbird in my own yard again. Now the old Ford dealership has me teaching teenagers at the vocational school every Saturday how to hear a bad wheel bearing from across a parking lot. A girl named Imani hears it faster than any of the boys.
Last week I woke up warm, in a real bed, to the smell of Wendell burning the bacon. I stood at the window in my own robe, drank my coffee hot, and watched the mailman walk up the street. Nobody called me a rag. I rolled my sleeves clear up past the elbow, just because I could, and the sun fell on that old healed arm. I raised my cup to the window. “Odessa,” I said, “I finally got somebody to take care of me.”