Done in Fifteen Years novel · Chapter 6 of 32

Chapter 6: Brisket Till It's Gone

Deke didn't answer the lawyer.

He put the phone face down on the counter.

"Real County's this county," he said. "He's within thirty miles of us."

"Then we go," I said. "Tonight. West."

"In a white truck with KILGORE'S BAR-B-Q on both doors?"

I'd stopped seeing the doors years ago.

"Every gas station between here and El Paso has a camera," Deke said. "You run, he finds the truck. You sit still, he has to find you."

Vernie set down her dish rag.

"Barn," she said.

The barn was behind the dance hall, half full of folding chairs and a tractor older than Vernie.

I backed the truck in between the tractor and a stack of hay bales.

Deke and Macey threw a blue tarp over it and weighted the corners with cinder blocks.

Macey stood back and admired it.

"It looks like a truck under a tarp," she said.

"Every barn in Texas has a truck under a tarp," Deke said. "That's the beauty of it."

That afternoon Vernie stood on a stepstool in front of the old chalkboard by the door.

She wiped off a menu from some year when coffee cost a quarter.

In big careful letters she wrote: BRISKET. TILL IT'S GONE.

"Vernie," I said, "I can't cook for the public. I'm hiding."

"You're hiding in the back," she said. "The pit's in the back. Seems handy."

"I don't have any meat."

Vernie climbed down, went to the cash register and opened a drawer underneath it.

She pulled out an envelope that said FLOWERS on it in old blue ink.

"My husband's funeral flowers. The church paid for them, so I never spent it." She held it out. "Eleven years I've been saving it for something."

"Vernie, I can't."

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