He never quite managed it. So, he packed Emma into the truck at 4:00 in the morning, drove north through the dark desert with the stars enormous overhead, and arrived at the Harmon Salvage and Fleet Auction Yard outside of Reno at 9:30 with $1,000 in his checking account and nothing in reserve. Emma woke up when he pulled into the parking lot. Are we there? She pushed her hair out of her face and looked around at the rows of damaged vehicles baking in the early morning sun.
We're there. It smells. Salvage yard smell. Like what? Like burned stuff and hydraulic fluid.
Emma considered this for a moment. Why do we need a burned car? We don't need a burned car. I need to look at something. What something?
Something on a car. That's circular logic, Emma said very seriously, because she'd learned the phrase circular logic from her third grade teacher 2 weeks ago and had been deploying it ever since. You're not wrong, Cole said. Stay close. And don't touch anything.
She climbed out of the truck and immediately touched the chain-link fence. Cole let it go. What? The viewing period ran from 9:00 to 11:00 before the auction started. Cole had 2 hours to walk the lots and he moved through the first 46 entries quickly, not seeing them.
Flood-damaged pickup trucks, a wrecked delivery van, a repoed Cadillac with the interior stripped, the usual inventory of things that had gone wrong for somebody somewhere. He found lot 47 in the back corner of the far yard, half in the shade of a corrugated metal overhang that did nothing to cut the heat. The photograph had been accurate in a flat documentary kind of way. The way a driver's license photograph is accurate but fails completely to capture the person. The damage was real.
The car was bad. The fire had started somewhere in the engine compartment and traveled forward along the driver's side, taking the door, blistering the roof lining visible through the shattered window aperture, and scorching the front quarter panels down to the base carbon. The windscreen frame was intact but the glass had gone cloudy and then cracked from heat stress. The rear clamshell had warped along the trailing edge, lifting maybe 2 inches off its proper seating. Emma stood beside him and looked at it with her hands clasped behind her back.
That's a really bad car, she said. Yeah. Are you going to buy it? " "Maybe. " "With the college money? " Cole looked down at her. "What college money? " "The jar on the shelf, the one you put the 20s in. " He hadn't known she'd noticed that jar. He'd been putting 20s in it since she was five, whenever he had a spare 20, which wasn't often.