That night he had been at a bar in Ely, the Silver Spur, which is gone now, celebrating a job he had just gotten back at the reopened mine. He had driven his pickup, not his bike, because it had been snowing on and off and he had thought that was the responsible choice. He remembered thinking that. He remembered feeling responsible. He left the bar at a quarter to midnight and headed north on 93 toward the place he was renting out past McGill, and somewhere around the Duck Creek turnoff he drifted across the center line on a long gentle curve, and a 1986 Chevy Celebrity coming south took him nearly head-on.
The man in the Celebrity was named Sullivan Ketterman. He was thirty-one. He was a lineman for Mt. Wheeler Power, and he had been out on a call, a downed line near Cherry Creek, and he was driving home to his wife and his two-year-old daughter. He died at the scene. Bonner Wenzel broke his collarbone, three ribs, and his left wrist, and lived.
That was the whole story. People sometimes wanted more to it. They wanted ice on the road, or a deer, or a blown tire, or for the other man to have been speeding. There was a little ice. Sullivan Ketterman had not been speeding. Bonner Wenzel's blood alcohol was 0.14. He pleaded guilty to vehicular homicide, which he insisted on over the objections of a public defender who thought he could get the charge reduced. He was sentenced to eight years and served six of them at the state prison eleven miles south of the hospital where he was now sitting on a curb.
He had gotten sober in prison, the first time and the only time, in a program run by an old Shoshone counselor named Marv Lightfeather who had told him on the first day, "You don't get to feel better. That's not what this is for. You get to be useful." Bonner had held on to that sentence like a rope.
When he got out in 1999, he moved to Winnemucca, as far as he could get from Ely while staying in the state where his parole officer was, and he opened a small-engine repair shop in a metal building off Bridge Street, lawnmowers and chainsaws and snowblowers and dirt bikes and the occasional Harley, and he lived above it. He was good at the work. He was quiet, and fair, and he did not overcharge, and he fixed old women's mowers for nothing if they looked like they needed it. He did not date. He did not drink. He went to meetings three times a week for thirty-two years.
And every month, on the first, he went to the post office and bought a money order.
It had started while he was still inside. He had written to the court, asking how he could pay restitution beyond what was ordered, and the victim's advocate had written back that Mrs. Ondine Ketterman had declined all contact and that there was no legal mechanism for voluntary payment. So he had found her address on his own, which was not hard in a town the size of Ely, and from prison he had sent her twenty dollars, which was nearly everything he made in a month at the prison laundry. He had sent it with a letter that he rewrote thirty-one times. He knew because he had counted. The letter said:
Mrs. Ketterman,
I am the man who killed your husband. I have no right to write to you and I will understand if you throw this away. I am not asking you for anything. I am going to send money every month for the rest of my life. It is not enough and it will never be enough and I know that. It is not to make anything right. It is because your daughter should have had her father's paycheck and she does not, and that is my doing.
Bonner Wenzel
The money order was never returned. Neither was the letter. No reply came. The next month he sent another, and the month after that, and when he got out and opened the shop the twenty became fifty and then, when the shop was steady, a hundred, and in the hard winter of 2009 it went back down to sixty for four months and he wrote and apologized for it. Each money order went with a short letter. Not long. He had learned early that long letters were for himself. He wrote her what he had done that month, the useful things. That he had rebuilt a tiller for a widow named Ines who was trying to keep her garden going. That he had taught a boy from the high school how to rebuild a carburetor. That he had stood up at a meeting and taken a twenty-two-year-old's phone number and called him every day for a month. That he had planted a crabapple behind the shop. He never asked how she was. He thought it was not his to ask.
He did the arithmetic once, in 2015, on a yellow legal pad at his kitchen table, and he was so ashamed of the impulse that he burned the paper in the sink afterward. But he remembered the number. Including that year, it was a little over thirty-one thousand dollars. He was proud of it and ashamed of being proud of it, both at once, every single month, for three hundred and seventy-some months.
And in all that time she never once wrote back, until five weeks ago, when an envelope came to the shop addressed in that same slanted, looped, shaky hand he had just read on the notebook paper. Inside was a single index card.