A small laminated sign wired to the fence said the row was being sold as a single lot. *Sold as is, where is. No warranties. Buyer responsible for removal within fourteen days.*
Earl stood there a while. Then he did something nobody else at that auction had done all morning.
He walked to the first tractor in the row, crouched beside the frame, wiped a patch of grime away with his thumb, and read the identification plate.
---
Every tractor has one. It is a small metal plate, usually riveted somewhere on the frame or the transmission housing or beneath the operator's platform, and it carries the information that tells you what the machine really is. Not what it looks like. Not what color it is or how bad the tires are. What it is. The model number. The serial number. The production year, sometimes coded, sometimes not. On some machines there were more plates: one for the engine, stamped with its own code; one for the hydraulic system, with a part identification number; one for the transmission. To most people they were just bits of dirty metal. To Earl they were birth certificates.
He took out the notebook, licked the tip of the pencil the way his father used to, and wrote.
Model number. Serial. Year. Engine code.
He moved to the next tractor and did the same. And the next. He got down on one knee for the ones with low frames. He reached under the platform of one machine, feeling blind for the plate he knew was there, and came back with his fingers black and the numbers memorized. On another he had to scrape away a layer of dried mud with a pocketknife before he could read anything. He found a hydraulic identification tag on the side of a pump housing and copied every digit. He opened the side panels that would open and looked at the engines that were still there and wrote down what he saw.
He did not hurry. Earl had never hurried a day in his life when there was something worth seeing.
By the time he reached the twentieth tractor, people had begun to notice.
---
"Lose something, old-timer?"
The voice came from behind him, friendly enough on the surface, with something sharper underneath. Earl finished the number he was writing before he looked up.
The man standing over him was in his fifties, tall and broad through the middle, wearing a quilted vest over a pressed button-down shirt with a dealership logo stitched on the chest. His boots were clean. His hands were clean. He held a clipboard and a travel mug of coffee that had not come from the concession trailer.
"Just reading," Earl said.
"Reading." The man smiled. "I'm Gordon Hale. I run the dealership over in the county seat. You might know it."
Earl knew it. Everybody knew it. Hale Equipment had been the biggest dealer in the region for fifteen years, ever since Gordon had bought out his two smaller competitors and folded their service departments into his own. Earl had worked for one of those smaller competitors once, long ago, for three years in his thirties. He did not mention this.