On a January morning in 1989, with the temperature sitting below zero and a hard Iowa wind driving loose snow across the gravel, fifteen-year-old Jonah Kessler climbed into the bed of his father's pickup and pulled a chain around a cracked tractor engine block.
The casting was almost too heavy for the little hoist Big Earl Voss kept beside the salvage yard's loading shed, and its broken edge looked like a jagged seam in a piece of black stone.
Three farmers stood near the office door, warming their hands around paper cups of coffee and laughing as Jonah checked the chain a second time. He heard one of them say that the Kessler boy had finally decided to get into the garbage business.
Jonah did not answer. He guided the block across the tailgate, settled it onto two pieces of timber so it would not slide, and tightened the chain until the links stopped rattling. His gloves were stiff with cold, and a fine line of dirty water had frozen along the bottom of his coat. He looked toward the far fence, where a dozen more abandoned castings lay beneath a crust of snow, and called to Earl, "You mind if I take one of those transmission housings too?"
Big Earl came out of the office with his shoulders hunched inside an old brown jacket. He was a broad, red-faced man who had spent thirty years looking at broken machinery and deciding what it was worth by the pound, and there was nothing about Jonah's request that made sense to him. "Son, you already got enough dead iron to sink your daddy's truck," he said. One of the farmers laughed and asked whether Jonah intended to build a whole tractor by bolting the broken pieces together.
"No, sir," Jonah said, and nothing more. That answer irritated the men almost as much as a long explanation would have, because they had been teasing him for weeks and still had not discovered the secret they assumed he was hiding. Earl shook his head, waved toward the fence, and told him to take what he could safely carry. By the time Jonah drove away, the pickup rode a little lower in the rear and the men had another story to tell over coffee.
The salvage yard was outside Eldora, behind an old grain elevator whose sheet-metal walls rattled whenever the wind came out of the northwest. Retired combines stood in rows with their windows missing, tractor frames lay on wooden blocks, and parts that