Johnny Horton Martin hopped out of the pickup with the energy of a teenager. 

I stepped out to greet him, the big chalky sky of late November embracing me with a chilly promise.

Johnny narrowed his eyes and offered me a disarming grin. “You come up with a better deal for me, son?” 

I offered a hand, suddenly aware of the uncleaned grime from the Datsun. 

He grasped it without hesitation. 

The hum of nerves jumbled my thoughts, and Renée’s missing child bobbed to the surface. I smiled harder. 

A captain of business who’d built a ranching empire on shrewd negotiations, Johnny was a force to be reckoned with. We’d faced off over the batch of Toyota Tundras, and it seemed I was gaining ground. While Johnny surveyed the pickup trucks the previous Wednesday, I’d noticed a shimmer in his wife’s eye over a sparkling 2001 Lexus LS430 in Blue Onyx Pearl. 

An idea was born. Johnny needed to refresh the armada of work trucks used to manage his one-hundred thousand acres of ranch land. Closing the deal on a gift for his wife would damn near guarantee Pierce Toyota a piece of that pie. 

Now that he stood here in front of me, another job 600 miles away occupied my mind. Not ideal. The heel to toe motion grounded me as we walked toward the Lexus. “Let’s talk about that.”

He whistled. “Seventy grand, Connor, son-of-Dixon?” Johnny’s well-worn overalls and tattered denim coat gave the false impression of a simple farmer. “For a Japanese car? Not sure even your daddy could sell me that much rice.” 

Nervous electricity charged my limbs. “She’s worth every dime, Johnny. You knew Dixon. Proper salesman. Honest over the barrelhead.”

“Reckon so.” He caressed her pearly canopy with work-hardened fingers. “Gotta keep America alive, though, boy.” The twinkle in his eye suggested my father had tried, and failed, to overcome Johnny’s nationalist pride. “This beauty challenges my loyalties.”

A glint of General Motors’ silver flashed in my periphery, and the frosty morning breeze it rode in on ruffled my feathers. 

Mother. With uncanny and atrocious timing. 

I talked faster. Nationalism was a hard battle to win in Montana. “J.D. Power loves these cars, sir.”  Johnny was a military vet from a family of war veterans. Tactics had to rely on numbers and Johnny’s innate business acumen. “Double-wishbone tuned suspension at all four wheels.”

Frosted gravel crunched under the weight of Mother’s archaic Chrysler New Yorker. Bitter cold crept beneath the hem of my coat. My shoulders bristled. The woman could sniff out a bountiful harvest and set it ablaze quicker than a greenhorn camper at Yellowstone Park in July.

I kept Johnny pointed at the Lexus, exercising the finer points of salesmanship. “Newly designed electronic control unit adjusts the throttle based on torque, speed, and revs per minute. Hell, Johnny, even the position of the accelerator pedal is calculated into the drive train.”

He chuckled. “Them’s a passel of fancy computer computations. Your daddy, Dixon, mighta had trouble even pronouncing most, young Pierce.” He tipped his cap back and raised an eyebrow. “They worth a seven and four zeros?”

Johnny knew me as a boy sitting on our front porch. He and my father, Dixon, swapped stories about good deals and bad company while I listened at their feet. That image was a lot to overcome. Johnny’s grimy John Deere ball cap camouflaged a razor-honed business mind. He’d used the thirty years since taking over his father’s hundred-acre plot and parlayed it into a hundred and twenty-five thousand acres of the most well-managed wheat-ranch in all of Custer County and most of Montana. It rattled my confidence. I was the kid who’d climbed the beanstalk to convince a giant I had a better idea.

“Two hundred ninety mustangs in that V8, Johnny,” I replied.

“That’s a language makes sense to me.”

“Five-speed automatic. Zero to sixty in 6.3 seconds.”

“You’re holding my interest, son.”

Mother’s door latch popped. Johnny’s head ratcheted a notch.

I glided between them to open the LS430’s driver door. “Get a feel for the leather, Johnny. Be mesmerized by that dashboard.”

He obliged. “She’s a beaut,” he crooned as he melted into the driver’s seat.

“A review in Acorn Automotive,” I bent forward, simultaneously blocking his view of Mother while creating an intimate interval. “That character says he keeps the owner’s manual tucked in the door pocket.” My hand dipped inside the space. “I know how you are, Johnny. Simple don’t suit you.”

His hearty laugh warmed my fearful heart. “You’d make your daddy proud, son.” Nobody appreciated Dixon’s moxie for starting a Japanese car dealership in the heart of cow country, slap in the glorious reign of Henry Ford’s 1975, more than Johnny Horton Martin.

“Dual lumbar controls at your fingertips.” I pressed the button. “For when you get a couple of days older.”

“That’s a truth we don’t need to mention,” he said with a raspy chuckle. Leathered hands gripping the steering wheel, a comfortable smile around his weathered eyes, Johnny Horton Martin looked like the win I needed to keep the dealership alive one more year.

“I come in here to jaw about them Tundras, boy. Now you got my pulse up for my girl, Irene. She’d sing like a bluebird behind the wheel of this beauty.”

“Now you mention, Johnny, the numbers get a might sweeter with that package we’re pulling together on the Tundras. I’m thinking cost plus five.”

His eyebrows rose into the brim of that John Deere cap.

Mother called out.

I hunched my upper body into a protective shield, pointing a finger at the dash. “Climate control system delivers additional cooling if sunlight overheats one side of the car. You and Miss Irene would ride in individualized comfort out to see your son and grandkids in Duluth.”

“Wooo-eee!” He puffed up, a glowing shine on his cheeks. “Them Japs knows how to pour molasses on a bowl of rice.”

The derogatory term hammered a ding into my conscience. My eyes glanced toward the shop, worried my collusion would betray Akira’s trust interminably. 

“That’s one way to put it,” I said, allowing the prejudice. Johnny had lost an uncle at Iwo Jima and a brother in Korea. I wasn’t going to change his bias today. But driving a Toyota might.  

“That there’s the kind of innovation that’d make a man rethink his loyalties for durn sure, son.” His calloused hands fondled the dashboard, and he giggled like a schoolboy. “I’m on the edge of it, young Pierce. I got to say, you definitely have my attention.”

A rush of heat surged into my chest, heart pounding like a war drum. Sweat coated my forehead, despite the chilly temperature, testifying to the exhilaration coursing through me.

In defiance of my excitement, Mother’s voice found purchase in Johnny’s ear. I automatically turned to see her through the half-open door of the Chrysler, one foot planted in the sales lot.

“You best attend to your mamma, son.” His owl-grey eyes peeked up and quickened my shame. “We can get back to this another day.”

“Pretty sure it’s her dementia kicking up dust.”

He pushed me back a foot as he stepped out of the Lexus. “Watch your tongue, boy.” The grey irises turned steely. “Don’t gamble my dollar on disrespect for your mother. Won’t matter a wit to me how ornery she gets.”

My heart thumped out of rhythm. A misstep poorly placed. The kind that broke the legs of horses so they had to be put down. Johnny was sure to run into George Shumaker between now and our next meeting. George held the advantage of Johnny’s thirty years of loyalty to Henry Ford. A few more turns on the screw right here, right now, might bolster Johnny’s belief in President Gerald Ford’s newfound internationalism. Settle things in my favor. 

I could read the situation, though, and that risk was too high.

“You’re right, Johnny. Sometimes I let frustration with my mother’s methods get the better of me.”

Johnny waved at Mother, his gaze lingering in her direction. “She still driving that Chrysler?”

“Just her way of hanging onto the past.”

“Irene had the same automobile for years. Loved it.” He returned attention to me and slapped the roof of the LS430. “I’ll leave you to her. Chores don’t wait on want.”

“Take a minute to close the deal and you can drive her home,” I told him in a last-ditch push. 

He nodded, a glint of delight shining out of the half smile. “Your daddy’d beam like a poacher’s spotlight, son.”

A dust-devil stirred in my brainstem, urging that final pitch. I clamped my jaw. Johnny had a standard. No way I could argue against a mother’s intrusion with an old farm boy.

The incognito land baron gave my shoulder a pat. “Hand to the plow, boy. Hand to the plow.” He strode to the F-250. Done for the day is done.

The crunch of frozen gravel under his boots sounded like breaking glass. I’d heard it before, at the impact of a misguided baseball. Second grade. A summer sweeping Dad’s shop was the consequence of that mistake. Only now, at thirty-seven years old, a nasty foul ball could shatter my entire future.